Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope by Uzodinma Iweala

you’ll end up doing it.”
    Only 2 percent of Nigerian females report having multiple partners, which reflects the fact that Nigeria is still quite a conservative country when it comes to female sexual behavior. Unfortunately—as is the case in most of the rest of the world—a woman who does not conform to the societal ideal of proper female behavior is quickly and negatively labeled. Thus this statistic is somewhat misleading, for it captures only women who actively seek multiple partners. In reality, many women involved with men who are in multiple partnerships are also in concurrent relationships. Therefore it is probably safe to say that the percentage of women in concurrent relationships—even if not by choice; for example, to avoid extreme poverty—may be close to the percentage of men.
    “I’ve had multiple—if you would call two multiple—partners. That’s the most I’ve had,” she continued. “I was single, and then my ex-boyfriend decided to come back. He was like, ‘OK. I’m back. I’m serious now. I’ve got my life straight. Let’s do this. Let’s get married.’ I was there because I thought this guy was serious about me and I don’t have anyone, so why not? Let me give it a try and see what will come out of it. And I actually liked him before, so I thought, OK, maybe I’ll feel something for him. The other guy—it was just a very rare thing. I met him and we started talking, chatting, meeting. We became very close. We’re still very close. So one thing led to another and we had sex and we just liked it. We just enjoyed it. But then the guy is from Imo State, and he’s obviously a Christian. He could not take me home, and I could not take him home. It could not happen. His parents are very strong Catholics. My parents are Muslims. I’m Hausa. He’s Igbo. He’s from the south. I’m from the north. We knew it was not going to go anywhere, but we really liked each other. We enjoyed sex. We enjoyed talking. We were good friends.”
    Fatimah’s views reflect a newer, more cosmopolitan philosophy of sexual interaction in which, according to Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye and Richmond Tiemoko, in their introduction to the book Human Sexuality in Africa , “‘shared pleasure’ has gained prominence over ‘life creation’ as amply demonstrated by worldwide declines in fertility and a growing youth culture.” HIV/AIDS plays a complicated role in understandings of this new and emerging sexual behavior. On one hand, for those in Nigeria who believe such new attitudes to be wrong, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS demonstrates a pervasive social corruption and thus necessitates a return to traditional ways of sanctioned sexual interaction as delineated by religion or local cultures. For the more progressive, HIV/AIDS has made clear to Nigerians that a world in which everyone waits until marriage to have sex, and once married, has sex only with his or her spouse, is fantasy. It has forced a discussion that reveals we are all having more of the “wrong kind” of sex than we would have initially wanted to admit and therefore are all more exposed to the virus. At the same time, it requires that we modify our notions of sexual morality. The newer HIV/AIDS awareness programs acknowledge this much. No longer can people legitimately preach that we should simply return to abstaining from sex, as our religious deities and cultural norms demand, in order to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, because it is becoming more apparent that such abstinence never really existed. To do so would be to deny the evidence and the truism that “body no be wood.” In a nod to the fact that many people are clearly having sex, we now have public health recommendations like the ABCs of Sex, first pioneered in Uganda: Abstain, Be mutually faithful to one partner, and use Condoms if you can’t do the first two. The last directive represents a monumental shift in the way we in Nigeria, with all of our religious predilections, think.