Description
Book SynopsisThis book addresses two of the most important questions in modern African history: the causes of rapid population growth, and the origins of the HIV pandemic. It examines three societies on the Uganda-Tanzania border whose distinctive histories shed new light on both of these phenomena. This was the region where HIV in Africa first became a mass rural epidemic, and also where HIV infection rates first began to decline significantly.Before HIV argues that only by analysing the long history of changes in sexual behaviour and attitudes can the shape of Africa''s regional epidemics be fully understood. It traces the emergence of the sexual culture which permitted HIV to spread so quickly during the late 1970s and 1980s back to the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period when new patterns of socialization and sexual networking became established. The case studies examined in this book also provide new insights into the relationship between economic and social development and trend
Trade ReviewDoyle shows that it is only by analysing the history of changes in sexual behaviour and attitudes that the shape of Africa's regional HIV/AIDS epidemics can be fully understood. Doyle's book is an impressive attempt to tell a detailed story of changing sexual culture * Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, The Lancet *
Without question Before HIV is an extremely erudite book full of rich empirical detail woven together with care to construct original and generally convincing challenges to some of the prevailing wisdom on demographic change and the differential epidemiology of HIV. * Marc Epprecht, American Historical Review *
a wealth of testimony, gathered through years of painstaking archival and oral historical scholarship ... The result is a rich exploration of sexuality in three twentieth-century societies in the Lake Victoria region ... This is a hugely complex and detailed work. * Sarah Walters, Population Studies: A Journal of Demography *
a well-researched, solidly documented study ... Highly recommended. * B.M. du Toit, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. Sexuality and fertility in the pre-colonial period ; 2. Disease and mortality, 1860-1925 ; 3. Early colonial sexuality and fertility ; 4. Marriage and sexuality in Buganda, 1925-69 ; 5. Prostitution in Buhaya, 1925-1969 ; 6. Ankole: marriage and the ethnicity of sex, 1925-69 ; 7. Fertility in Ankole, Buganda and Buhaya, 1925-6 ; 8. Disease and death, 1925-196 ; 9. Sexuality, mortality, disease and fertility in the 1970S ; Conclusion And Epilogue: AIDS and demographic change in historical context
