AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	15. Reconfiguring the Religion-HIV/AIDS connection: challenges and opportunities
Paper ID	758
Author(s)	Gusman, Alessandro
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Uganda is well-known because of the good results it obtained in the struggle against the Hiv/Aids epidemic, which has been declining for the last 15 years, due to some social and political actions. Whatever the reasons of these results, what is certain is the fact that the social perception of the disease has been strongly modified. If in the late 80s and early 90s Hiv/Aids seemed to be as a 'monster that spells imminent death', today that same monster is less frightening, even if still present in the everyday life and experience of most people and of the community as a whole. The decreasing of the Hiv/Aids rate, and the contemporary overcoming of the threshold of the new millennium, caused an important theological refocus in a part of Ugandan Pentecostalism: from an 'other worldly' to a 'this worldly' attitude; from the urgency of saving as many souls as possible before the end of times, to long-time programs, with the stress on the future of the Country (more than on the individual one) and especially on the need to rise a new generation of 'saved' (in a spiritual and physical sense) people. These facts generated an intense rhetoric about the so called Joseph Generation, the generation of young people who is in charge of building a new Uganda for the future. Some of my young interlocutors referred, in opposition to this rising generation, to the previous one as the 'lost generation', an expression used by Brian Curse O'Brien in the 90s to indicate the unpromising situation of the marginalized youth of postcolonial Africa, marked by a difficult socialization after the collapse of 'traditional' societies. The question I discuss in this paper is therefore: 'Which is the lost generation?' Keeping in mind that the situation described by Curse O'Brien is still very common in many parts of Africa, and even in Uganda, the young, educated Pentecostals living in Kampala are trying to picture themselves in a different shape, referring the expression 'lost generation' to their fathers' generation, when people died of Aids 'like fishes in a fishing net'. What is urgent for them today is to carry on a moral revolution, in order to create the conditions to wipe out the epidemic from the Country. The 'abstinence campaign', for many of the young Pentecostals I met, is an important part of this revolution. On the other side, and from the point of view of an observer, the lack of heredity (both material, spiritual, and cultural) from the previous generation, which is evident especially in town, makes this generation often disoriented and confused, without solid references (a situation we can call, drawing a parallel with the condition of the roads in town, 'potholes of cultures'). In a slightly different sense, therefore, one can also refer to these young people as 'lost', meaning that many of them don't know where they come from, cause they voluntarily or not cut the link with their cultural roots.

Joseph Generation or Lost Generation?