If anything can stop the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, it will have to be the teenagers. But what South Africa calls the ABC message — Abstain/Be Faithful/Condomize — arrived long after the epidemic had taken hold, and is now likened to the safety lecture on airplanes: everyone has heard it so often, they hardly listen. New education initiatives, like the Love Life education outreach and the Soul City soap opera, are trying to find livelier ways to deliver the message.
Younger teens are the crucial target audience. With little hope of getting proper drugs, H.I.V.-infected babies die quickly, leaving each generation virtually AIDS-free until puberty, when the numbers begin to climb. Girls are infected younger, experts say, by a ratio of 6 girls to 1 boy in their early teens. Some are the victims of rape or incest; many get into sugar daddy relationships for money or food. Open discussion of sex has had only a short history in South Africa. The religiously conservative pre- 1990 apartheid government did not talk openly about AIDS and condoms, and when President Nelson Mandela broached the topic of safe sex in a 1990 school speech, parents responded that he would give children bad ideas, so he stopped discussing AIDS for years, he said.
Even now, uneasiness is widespread. A poll by Love Life, a private group supported by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that 70 percent of teenagers wished they had learned about sex from their parents, but only 22 percent did. The poll found that they learned more from their peers, their schools and the news media, in that order. Learning from peers has obvious hazards, and schools need to make big changes, said Dr. David Harrison, Love Life's chief executive officer. More troubling, he said, is the frequency of teacher-student relationships. There are other obstacles. In the rural areas where millions of students live, poverty and bad roads make it hard to get books and videotapes, while superstitions must also be overcome.
The soap opera Soul City, broadcast from Johannesburg, reaches a large audience — 25 percent of the national population. Based in a black township's clinic, it is urban and sophisticated, but like the play it works to explode myths that may seem naïve to Americans. The show was created by Dr. Garth Japhet, a pediatrician who worked in the grim Alexandra township and wrote a health column for The Sowetan, a daily newspaper with a large black readership. Now, with backing from the European Union, and grants from Britain, Ireland, British Petroleum, the MTN phone company and the government, 13 new episodes a year are shown, plus reruns, and each new series starts with a million comic books inserted in daily newspapers with health-related stories. For rural audiences, Soul City is rewritten for radio in nine languages. The stars make appearances. (Source: New York Times, 3 February 2002)