This 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...