All of the men were HIV negative when they started in the study. Half of these men, selected through a lottery process, were circumcised immediately, the other half were asked to wait at least two years. Forty-seven of the men who were not immediately circumcised became HIV infected by the end of the study, compared to only 21 of the men who had been selected for immediate circumcision.

This outcome, combined with the results of similar studies carried out in South Africa and in Uganda, led the scientific community to conclude that being circumcised halves the chance of a man becoming infected with HIV through sexual intercourse with an infected woman.

In a continent where AIDS has exacted a heavy toll, and which cannot afford antiretroviral treatment for all the millions of the people infected with the disease, this seemed like incredibly good news.

All of a sudden a quick and cheap solution to reducing the ravages of AIDS seemed at hand; line up all males, nip off their foreskins, and voila, you have reduced the possibilities of future HIV infections by half!

Among the few voices that expressed caution was that of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, who said he didn’t think it was that simple. Museveni should know. Uganda, after all, has Africa’s -- and one of the developing world’s -- best record in reducing HIV infections. In the 1990s, Uganda had among the highest infection rates in Africa of well over 30 percent. In the last eight or so years, it has sliced that down to just under 6 per cent. The awards Museveni has received for this achievement can fill the State House garage.

I don’t know anything about the science of this study to fault or laud it. But its politics are very troubling.

The success of Uganda’s AIDS campaign is attributed to the so-called “ABC” strategy: Abstain, Be faithful, and use Condoms. This has been carried out with an aggressive public information campaign.

In recent years, under the influence of Republican and Evangelical groups, the Bush administration has invested a lot of money and created huge incentives for poor countries to push abstinence.

The ABC, abstinence, and circumcision approaches all have one thing in common: They put a lot of currency on change in behaviour as the best weapon to deal with AIDS. A lot of research is going into establishing scientific facts that support the case for behavioral change. Thus, you can’t keep your foreskin. Circumcise, and salvation might be yours.

Africa is poor, and where it has its own money, governments have made the policy choice not to invest it in researching and developing a cure for AIDS. They rather look up to the international community to do that.

Perhaps as a result of the focus on behaviour, an awful lot of the scientific work on AIDS in Africa isn’t concentrated on finding cures.

One gets the impression that there is a widespread belief out there that AIDS in Africa cannot be primarily solved by medicine, perhaps because the African is “untreatable”. Therefore the answer is to put a lock on the African peoples’ zippers and knickers, because their promiscuity and diseased nature makes a curative approach ineffective.

In that sense, even those who mean well and are spending a lot of money fighting AIDS on the continent are unwittingly give credence to the image of African peoples as noble savages, like the anthropologists of years gone by.

They are able to save lives, but their obsession with caging people has limited their horizons and the possibilities of achieving some truly great breakthroughs against AIDS.