Traditional views of the AIDS epidemic in Africa have tended to link the rampant existence of the disease to a high level of uncontrolled sexual activity in African societies. This view is not surprising when considering the stereotypes that have historically been used to label Africa. African societies have indeed been seen, above all in the colonial period and subsequently thereafter, as characterized by sexual promiscuity, female power and lust. Such a view has inevitably negatively influenced, and sometimes guided, scientific approaches to disease in Africa, especially when it comes to highly contagious and deadly diseases such as AIDS and Ebola, among others. I wish to argue here that, in order to understand why diseases such as AIDS have grown so exponentially in Africa, to the point of reaching pandemic proportions, one needs to move beyond the stereotype of sexual promiscuity and look at how Africans, culturally, deal with disease. I will attempt to show that the African mind constructs the notions of contagion and containment in a way that is radically different from the way such notions are constructed in other cultures. Because African cultures are inherently and fundamentally communal, inclusive and socially promiscuous, notions of contagion and containment do not necessarily go together. In other words, where, for instance, Western societies, which are inherently individualistic and nuclear, would react to contagion with acts and processes of containment and exclusion, African societies, which are inherently communal, would tend to respond with acts and processes of empathy. This is because acts of containment tend to be seen in African cultures as acts of exclusion, which in turn are perceived as highly cruel, inhuman and immoral, therefore unthinkable. Thus, when integrating the cultural factor into the understanding of how Africans construct notions of contagion and containment, one quickly realizes that such notions are highly antinomic in the African context. This is, in fact, a cultural universe in which, ANY contagious disease, not just AIDS, would tend to take pandemic proportions, simply because the cultures of Africa tend to react to disease as a manifestation of social misery, and as such, becomes a burden that must be shared by the community at large.