Vanilla, liquorice and chocolate — will these flavours entice South Africa’s notoriously resistant men into wearing condoms? Last week, an Aids media project announced it would be distributing hundreds of thousands of free, vanilla-flavoured condoms to lure men into having safer sex.
The ice-cream flavoured rubbers are part of a million-condom donation given to Steps for the Future, a project that travels across Southern Africa showing documentaries as a springboard for discussion about HIV. The donation comes from the annual Africa Festival in Wurzburg, Germany.
Steps director Don Edkins said the festival had shown Steps documentaries and had supported the production of an award-winning Steps CD. Now it wanted to take its commitment further with the donation.
Edkins said South Africa suffered from a shortage of condoms. ”One of our films mentions that there are 20-million condoms currently available and four million sexually active men. That means only five condoms per man.”
This year, the festival gave two facilitators for Steps, Moalosi Thabane and Thabiso Motsusi, special awards, acknowledging their role in fostering HIV awareness in communities.
Festival director Stefan Oschmann attended this week’s handing over of the million condoms with co-sponsors Daimler-Chrysler and Condomi, Germany’s largest condom manufacturer. Other sponsors include the popular German fashion label S Oliver and a host of German radio stations and television channels.
The donation includes black and transparent condoms. But it is the vanilla-flavoured condoms activists claim are most in demand. What is next on the menu? Champagne and caviar-flavoured condoms for the northern suburbs?