An ounce of prevention
Black activists step up HIV/AIDS outreach
BY Wendy Glauser
Photography by John Scully
Enlisting black barbers to hand out condoms. Talking to strangers about the AIDS epidemic in reggae and jazz record stores. Asking gay men to lecture to their African- and Caribbean-born elders. Across the country, black-led AIDS prevention groups are stepping up their outreach campaigns, making them more targeted and in-your- face.
“The black community is in trouble when it comes to HIV/AIDS. Innovative responses are required,” says Shannon Ryan, executive director of the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention. In Ontario and Quebec, almost 20 percent of new HIV infections are among black people, despite their accounting for only four percent and two percent of the respective provincial populations.
New immigrants tend to think HIV isn’t a problem in Canada, and that HIV-positive blacks contracted the disease before they arrived, according to Mwansa Njelesani, a black AIDS activist who grew up in Zambia. But that’s not the case. In nearly half of HIV/AIDS cases among black people living in Ontario, transmission occurred in Canada, according to University of Toronto professor Robert Remis.
A plethora of factors predispose black Canadians to HIV. The tendency of Africanand Caribbean-born parents to avoid frank discussions about sex is one, according to Melinda Zakye, a Ugandan-born Canadian who speaks to youth in schools about HIV/AIDS. The conservative attitudes of parents especially hurt gay men, who tend to seek out isolated sexual encounters that their family and friends won’t find out about. As Zakye explains: “My mom has lived here for a long time but there’s still things you can’t talk about, including homosexuality.”
Meanwhile, gender inequality in relationships is more common among those who come from patriarchal societies, and women, especially married women, don’t always have enough power to insist on condom use. And poverty exacerbates the situation.
Black leaders are fed up with the silence surrounding HIV in their communities, and they’re working hard to counter it. “In Zambia, I know a lot of people who are living with HIV/AIDS, I know a lot of people dying, and then I come here and it’s not really spoken about, but I know it’s an issue here too,” says Njelesani.
