African families and AIDS: context, reactions and potential interventions

This paper reviews publications and research reports on how sub-Saharan African families have been affected by, and reacted to, the AIDS epidemic. The nature of the African family and its variation across the regions is shown to be basic to both an understanding of how the epidemic spread and of its impact. The volume of good social science research undertaken until now on the disease in Africa is shown to be extremely small relative to the need. The African AIDS epidemic may well be regarded in retrospect as the major event of our time. Almost two-thirds of all HIV-positive persons in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, the home of only nine per cent of the world’s population. Indeed, most African AIDS sufferers are found in a range of countries from Uganda southward which contain no more than three per cent of the world’s population. Sub-Saharan Africa may well lose as many people to AIDS over the next half century as the Black Death killed in fourteenth-century Europe, although without resulting in the population decline that characterized the earlier epidemic. The African AIDS epidemic differs from that of industrialized countries in that it is very largely heterosexually transmitted. Thus there are at least as many female as male victims in Africa. It is likel