ABUJA, Dec 9 (AFP) - At a keynote African conference this week on how best to control the devastating spread of AIDS, one issue that sparked rare discord was the value of saying no to sex, health experts said Friday.
Delegates to the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) being held in Abuja disagreed strongly about the value of promoting sexual abstinence among populations at risk.
Although most AIDS activists, including some religious leaders, see such an "abstinence only" approach as unrealistic, the policy has its supporters and the dispute led to the only note of friction.
The most outspoken proponent of abstinence was Winnie Madizikela-Mandela, the ex-wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela and a heroine of South Africas fight against apartheid.
"We are starting to say, as mothers in Africa 'There is a remedy for AIDS after all.' We must simply tell our children to abstain. It is the means by which we will succeed in preventing AIDS, as mothers, on the continent," she told a round-table debate.
Mandela's comments raised eyebrows among officials and unconcealed outrage in the conference room.
Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka disagreed with Mandela, calling sex "one of the things that makes the world spin".
"We must try not to be hypocritical ... human nature is sometimes very difficult to restrain," the playwright said, going on to mock the "approach that if everyone kept his thing inside his trousers the problem wouldnt happen."
As the conference drew to a close on Friday, four women did the rounds of the centre wearing sandwich boards proclaiming "Abstinence is the answer, not condoms".
At the other end of the spectrum, an NGO called the Condom Project went around pinning attractively packaged prophylactics to the shirts of conference delegates, one of whom attended the opening ceremony with an inflated condom attached to his hat.
One group of NGOs protested what it said were moves on the part of the US administration to attach ideological strings to money for fighting HIV/AIDS.
The United States has pledged 15 billion dollars over five years to fight the disease, most of it channeled through the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Jodi Jacobson, of the US-based NGO Centre for Health and Gender Equality, slammed what she said was "the larger and larger share of PEPFAR funding going to faith-based organizations which have no track history of preventive activity."
The abstinence issue was the only subject on the agenda to cause raised voices.
A delegate who identified himself as programme manager for a faith-based NGO sat through an hour-long graphic presentation of the female condom and then told the floor it was better to encourage masturbation than condom use because "masturbation doesnt cost money and allows the person who practices it to go to hell alone without taking another person with him".
Most religious leaders attending the conference were more moderate. The Mauritanian Muslim leader Baba Mata said that, even if Islam frowned on sex outside marriage, it was better to use a condom than to risk infecting one's partner.
His position was echoed by Father Michael Kelly, a Jesuit priest based in Zambia who submitted a statement to the conference.
Kelly explained that it was a lesser sin to have pre- or extra-marital sex whilst taking measures to protect one's partner than to engage in unprotected sex in such circumstances.
He also stressed the need to promote "responsible choice that allows each individual to adopt lowest risk behaviour."
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