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Arts and culture ministry to tackle Aids issues
Reuters
2004-05-07

The arts and culture ministry would do its bit to tackle the African cultural and general religious and gender barriers which stood in the way of addressing the HIV-Aids pandemic.

The arts and culture ministry would do its bit to tackle the African cultural and general religious and gender barriers which stood in the way of addressing the HIV-Aids pandemic.

But the media should in turn avoid the temptation of turning the issue into a political football, Pallo Jordan, the incoming minister, said in Johannesburg last night.

Tough measures that's what's needed in South African society now a collective effort and a collective commitment to address the cultural barriers in our country, he told a meeting of local and visiting foreign media editors convened by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

These are big issues and I don't have all the answers, but the arts and culture ministry can begin to do some of this. But we (do) need a non-hysterical, discerning approach we should avoid the temptation to turn this into a political football.

Jordan, a former minister of post and telecommunications in the Mandela government up to 1999, was relegated to the parliamentary back benches in Thabo Mbeki's first five-year term but reinstated to the cabinet last week as minister of arts and culture.

Tradition of sexuality

Renowned for his outspokenness as an ordinary MP, the new minister quipped he now had to watch what he said because of something called collective cabinet responsibility. He proceeded to speak bluntly and frankly about the sexual taboos and culture of silence among African males and how their tradition of sexuality was derived from peers rather than elders or those really in the know.

Those who go through the traditional initiation lodges the process to manhood will know that when they come out, those who have been before them will say: 'now's the time get out there lads and get laid!' Jordan said he was sure most of the African males in his audience would confirm this. Imagine the wealth of dis- and misinformation knowing what the lads are like every type of myth imaginable.

The question was how issues like the HIV-Aids pandemic was handled against this background and the media had a critical role to play. We need cold, clean, demythologising information about sexuality, he said. Jordan said there were also other non-African sexuality barriers to tackling HIV-Aids, such as some Christian religions, for example, which refused to encourage the use of condoms on the grounds that sex is for procreation only and not for fun. (Source: Reuters 04 May 2004).

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