ABSTRACT
AIDS is the leading cause of death among sexually active youth and adults in a number of African countries. As elsewhere in the Third World, the majority become infected through sexual relations unprotected by condoms. Considered ‘normal and natural,’ heterosexual penetrative sex with ejaculation is invested with cosmological significance, strongly valued by many as the essence of life, crucial to the health, beauty, and survival of individual, family, and community. Thus freighted with extraordinary symbolic power, AIDS may be more damaging to society than other fatal afflictions often attributed to sorcery-a potent metaphor for human relations gone awry (Schoepf 1990a).1
