Archaeologists in Britain and California have found that the Neolithic people
who lived 9000 years ago in Çatalhöyük on Turkey’s Anatolian plains
produced some of the most disturbing and violent art seen in the ancient world.
Çatalhöyük is one of the first known cities, and the archaeologists
believe the frescoes and sculptures uncovered at the site were a “safety valve”
that allowed the people to release the novel tensions of urban living.

The sprawling 13-hectare Çatalhöyük site contains the remains of
hundreds of mud-brick dwellings built cheek by jowl. Discoveries at the site
include the earliest known pottery containers and the earliest textiles.

Ian Hodder of the University of Cambridge, who leads the international team
that has been excavating the site over the past three years, was shocked by the
violent imagery in the frescoes and sculptures uncovered at
Çatalhöyük. Around 90 per cent of the sculptures feature decapitated
people, while a fresco uncovered during an earlier dig in the 1960s depicts a
vulture picking at the flesh of headless corpses. Piles of skulls have also been
found, and detailed analysis of cutmarks on the bones suggests that the heads
were removed from the bodies in rituals after death.

Many walls at Çatalhöyük are also adorned with clay mouldings of
women’s breasts, some of them decorated with fox teeth, weasel skulls, boar
tusks and vulture beaks.

To help make sense of these finds, Hodder called in Linda Donley-Reid, a San
Francisco-based specialist in interpreting the meaning of ancient artefacts.
After comparing the art and the context in which it was found with findings at
other sites, Donley-Reid came to the conclusion that the people of
Çatalhöyük used artworks and the rituals associated with death to
relieve the tensions of urban life. “I believe they were used to vent the
frustration of living at close quarters through symbolic ritual killings,” says
Donley-Reid, who presented her ideas last month in Liverpool at a meeting held
to discuss interpretations of the Çatalhöyük remains.

“It’s very plausible,” says Ruth Tringham, an anthropologist at the
University of California at Berkeley, “but we will never be able to arrive at a
definitive interpretation.”

The lighthearted joke marks the end of the class in how to cope with
AIDS. But for the group of women, the subject is no laughing matter. Each
one knows that she could become infected with HIV, the virus that causes
the disease. Each one fears that she may already be infected.

The women sitting and standing in their sparsely furnished sitting room
are in their teens, twenties and older. In the evenings this breeze-block
house in La Gokunga, the red light district of Bangui, capital of the Central
African Republic, is put to a different use. But every Thursday afternoon,
while children play in the dimly lit cubicles that lead off the corridors,
they address an issue that for too long has been ignored by most African
governments.

The women insist they are not prostitutes but femmes libres who make
love with ‘friends’ in return for small gifts or money to buy food. Whatever
the name, they face an exceptionally high risk of infection with HIV. Among
the prostitutes in this capital, three-quarters could be seropositive, according
to the tests carried out by the Paris-based Pasteur Institute.

The Central Africam Republic has long been recognised as having one
of the highest rates of AIDS in the world. Between 1985 and 1987 the number
of people who tested positive for abtibodies to HIV in Bangui almost doubled
each year, from 2.5 per cent to 7.8 per cent, but the virus was almost nonexistent
in the rural areas.

By last year, up to 12 per cent of the sexually active population had
contracted HIV according to Pierre Somsie, head of the country’s national
AIDS Programme. And the prevalence in rural areas was on the increase. But
an unusually frank programme of AIDS education, begun three years ago, has
provided a beacon of hope. Preliminary results indicate that the rate of
HIV infection in Bangui has begun to level off. If this is so, it almost
certainly results from greater public awareness. Doctors will not yet draw
conclusions, and warn that the plateau may be temporary.

The Central African Republic is one of the poorest, countries in the
world, and has virtually no health service. There is a message here for
orher countries. If you can do it in the Central African Republic, you can
do it anywhere.

Traditionally, the republic’s urban elite has enjoyed an ubridled promiscuity
that has become part of the local culture. The socially acceptable habit
of maintaining several mistresses, known as ‘the second office’, has contributed
to the rapid spread of HIV. Many men also have a score or more occasional
partners each year. Their wives are equally active.

Among educated adults, sex is common currency. Young girls are supplied
to ease the path of a commercial deal as lightly as business lunches are
offered elsewhere. It would be considered rude if the host did not provide
the travelling businessman with a ‘blanket’ for the night.

‘It’s wide open for adultery here. There’s a stigma attached to incest,
but that’s about it in terms of extramarital relationships,’ explains a
worker in the National AIDS Programme.

‘It was a sexual life without problems. Then suddenly AIDS came along,
Wham! But everyone had all these relationships and they couldn’t just abandon
them. It takes time to change behaviour,’ says Somsie.

Against this background, in October 1987, health officials launched
the National AIDS Programme. It is one of the most sensitive and enlightened
education programmes on the continent, disseminating information through
radio, television and posters. It has gained the support of the support
of the WHO and UNICEF, as well as Africare, a non-governmental American
organisation. USAID has delivered 3 million condoms for distribution through
public health centres and schools, and to prostitutes and the military.
Notably absent from the list of the programmes’s supporters is France, a
former colonial master which still underwrites most of the national budget.

Classes are given to those thought to be at risk, including schoolchildren
and prostitutes. They receive explicit instructions on how to avoid AIDS
and advice on how to care for loved ones who are dying. The attempt to demystify
the desease is unusual in Africa where some governments still mask the doomsday
proportions of the epidemic.

Ironically, it is the civil servant and professionals who sanctioned
the education campaign who until recently refused to acknowledge that they
were at high risk of infection. Only 1.4 per cent of the population has
received a higher education. Now this irreplaceable elite is dying. They
include judges, police chiefs and highly placed civil servants. The frequent
and high-profile funeral processions have probably done as much to change
attitudes as anything else.

But for the femmes libres, the high prevalence of seropositivity has
prompted a swift change in behaviour. The existence of hundreds of prostitutes
in Bangui is dictated by the pressures of the economy. With jobs unattainable,
sex is cheaper than a bottle of imported Evian water.

‘These girls have to feed their children so the choice is die of hunger
now or to die later of AIDS,’ explains Neil Boyer, an American aid worker
involved in the republic’s National AIDS Programme.

Each session begins with a detailed but simple explanation of HIV, how
it is spread and its sociological implications. The women take it in turns
to lead the classes, illustrating their talk with a flip chart that graphically
illustrates every aspect of AIDS. It ends with a discussion that inevitably
turns into a group support and counselling session. Today it is the turn
of Natalie, a 27-year-old with a 10-year-old son.

For the women, many of whom are school dropouts, the pathology of AIDS
is difficult to comprehend. They listen intently as Natalie explains the
first page.

The left-hand panel shows a mud hut that gradually falls into disrepair
to become an uninhabitable ruin. The right-hand panel depicts a man’s decline
from health through sickness to death.

‘The idea of a virus that destroys the immune system and allows other
diseases to attack the body is a very new one. We try to explain that the
man’s body is like a house where rain and snakes and animals can come in
because the door is broken and the roof leaks,’ says Andy Richardson, a
Peace Corps volunteer who works with the country’s National AIDS Programme
and helped to visualise the story board.

This is followed by page after page of sexually explicit explanations
tempered with compassionate and practical advice. How do you prevent AIDS
from spreading? Spread the word about fidelity and condoms for sex.

Natalie flips over to scenes of conjugal irreproachability. Here is
a man with his wife and children. Here is another man with his wives and
their children. ‘A family where all the partners are faithful won’t get
AIDS. The parents must set an example for their children,’ says Natalie.

How do you treat people who are sick with AIDS? ‘We care for them physically
and spiritually. They are like other sick people. They need our love,’ she
recites.

The panel that is the most disturbing for the women shows a mother with
a sick child. ‘At first we didn’t know we could give it to our children.
When they understand, they get very frightened because they don’t know if
their babies are going to live or die,’Natalie told me.

‘The girls understand everything very quickly. After that they always
use condoms. They really want to make sure they don’t get AIDS. We tell
them to throw the guy out if he won’t wear one. I distribute condoms to
the girls. Now men are coming to me and asking for them too.’

Asked if she had had an AIDS test, Natalie’s direct approach wavered.
She shook her head.

Somsie said, ‘I refused to test them because they all said they would
commit suicide if they tested positive. I told them to keep on distributing
condoms and teaching the others. That way they are making the most of their
lives. But a lot of them are feeling guilty and anxious.

Mary Anne Fitzgerland is a freelance journalist who lived in Africa
until recently.