KAMPALA (dpa) – “Let’s talk about sex,” yells presenter Sanyu Nkinzi into the microphone of East Africa’s first Talk Radio station in Kampala.
North of the Ugandan capital, in the village of Kaabong, a young girl sneaks around the back of her family’s mud hut, a transistor radio glued to her ear.Turning around to make sure that her parents are not looking, 16-year-old Olivia listens intently to what Sanyu and other young people tuning in to her programme have to say on the subject of sex.Like thousands of other adolescents in Uganda, Olivia is no longer prepared to avoid the topic the way her mother did.Straight Talk is the name of the popular programme that was launched two years ago with financial assistance from the European Union and the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF.It operates on the principle that education is the most effective weapon in a country where teaching children about sex was taboo until recently.“The subject today is virginity,” Sanyu tells her listeners. “You know that not only girls, but boys also can keep it until they feel the time is right,” she says.On another topic, Robert, 17, tells the programme that harassment is an issue that affects both sexes.“After a party at school my friends locked me in a classroom with two girls,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a spoilsport, so I did what was expected of me. I didn’t use a condom, and now I am afraid of AIDS.”Robert’s village in the northwest of Uganda has neither electricity nor telephone. Reporters from the radio station travelled there from Kampala so that Robert could tell others of his concerns.Every week the Straight Talkers carry their cassette recorders around the country, giving young people a chance to relate their experiences or ask questions on the air.“Back in Kampala, we sort through the questions asked by our listeners and, if necessary, call in experts to help answer them,” says Anne Akia Fiedler, the director of Straight Talk.The 25-minute programme is aired once a week, reaching a young audience in the remotest corners of a country where 820,000 people are infected with the virus that causes AIDS.Such a programme would be unthinkable in Uganda’s prudish neighbours Kenya and Tanzania, where sex education in schools was a punishable offence until recently.But Straight Talk fits in nicely with the anti-AIDS programme of the Ugandan government. The landlocked country, which used to have one of the highest rates of AIDS infection in sub-Saharan Africa, has scored a major success in combatting the disease.Thanks to an aggressive sexual education policy, the rate of HIV infection among 15- to 30-year-olds has declined by 20 per cent in the past five years, health authorities say.“Most of the young people who became infected beforehand did so because they knew nothing about condoms or other preventive measures,” says Fielder.“The best method of protection for a woman is to say ‘no’ if she wants to do so,” the programme director adds.“Making people aware of freedom of choice is one of our greatest concerns. Girls are 15 on average when they have their first sexual contact. Traditionally, the decision is not left to the woman, but to the man.”Fielder says that only 20 per cent of the programme’s listeners are females, a fact she attributes to the dominant role of the male in Ugandan society.“Most young people can only hear us on their father’s transistor radio. A son usually has first choice when it comes to borrowing the radio. After all, a boy can work and pay for new batteries,” she says.For those without access to a radio, the Straight Talk team regularly publishes a newsletter in which young people are able to read everything that was said on the programme.The newsletter is distributed to schools across the country, a policy which is already paying dividends, according to Sanyu.“Here’s a good tip from the Straight Talk fan club at the girls school in Lira,” she announced on one of her more recent programmes. “Don’t rip open condom wrappers with your teeth. You might bite a hole in them.”
