The women of this village call Francise Akacha "the terrorist." His breath stinks with the local alcoholic brew. Greasy food droppings hang off his mustache and stain his oily pants and torn shirt.

He's always the first one in line for the village feast, tucking into a buffet carefully prepared by the women of the village as though he's diving into the ocean--no restraint. He's skinny and has, the women point out, terrible taste in clothes.

But for all of his undesirable traits, Akacha has a surprisingly desirable job: He's paid to have sexual relations with the widows and unmarried women of this village. He's known as "the cleanser," one of hundreds of thousands of men in rural villages across Africa who have sex with women after their husbands die to dispel what villagers believe are evil spirits.

As tradition holds, they must have sex with the cleanser to be allowed to attend their husbands' funerals or be inherited by their husbands' brothers or relatives, another controversial custom that aid workers said is causing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Unmarried women who lose a parent or child also must have sex with the ritual cleanser.

Custom always unpopular

The custom always has been unpopular among women. But amid an AIDS pandemic, which has led to the deaths of 19.6 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, it has become more than just a painful ritual. Cleansers are spreading HIV at explosive rates in such villages as Gangre, where one in every three people is infected.

Areas still practicing the tradition have the highest infection rates, and health workers say the custom must be stopped. It's a striking example of how HIV and AIDS are forcing Africans to question and change traditions.

"We don't want it, and we won't accept it anymore," chanted Margaret Auma Odhiambo, as women ululated in agreement in her village, a lush rural farming community about a nine-hour drive northwest of the capital, Nairobi. "I refused it once and I will keep refusing it."

Twenty years ago, women--even when they formed social clubs that frequently started projects to sell goods--often couldn't question customs such as cleansing, for fear of being beaten or seeing their property stolen.

But as AIDS started killing men in greater numbers, these women's groups, which were mainly social alliances and a way to earn extra money, began to turn into powerful and political widows' groups. As their husbands died, the widows were largely left to make money for the village and help care for the swelling number of orphans left without food or financial support.

In Odhiambo's village, the women said about 30 percent of them are telling the cleanser to go away. They have formed a group called Standing Idle Does Not Pay, or Chungni Kimiyi in Swahili, a phrase that has become a mantra among women in the surrounding villages. They want the cleanser to go.

Job seen as low class

A cleanser is typically the village drunkard or someone considered not very bright. The job is seen as low class but essential, and is paid in cows, crops and cash. Village elders say the custom must be carried out or the entire community will be cursed with bad crops.

Odhiambo, a woman with curly black hair, recently stood with her group discussing the issue as the warm odors of a feast of fish, vegetables and maize meal they had made wafted through the village.

As predictable as the rising sun, the cleanser popped by, a bottle of local brew in hand.

Odhiambo watched as Akacha served himself some of the food. Then she started talking to him about finding another job.

"How many women have you slept with?" she asked, smiling and trying to prod the information out of him.

"I can't know," he sniffed. "I don't want to know."

"Do you know your HIV status?" she asked.

"That one I don't want to know," he said.

"Today, you sleep with this one, the next day another, the next day someone else," Odhiambo said, sitting next to him and trying to convince him of the danger. "Do you use a condom?"

"Never," he responded. "They won't be really cleansed if the condom was there."

Akacha said he believes he provides a valuable service.

"It's not bad for me since I get to be with the beautiful ladies," he said, chuckling.

Village elders are debating the custom. Meanwhile, health-care workers and human-rights agencies argue that such services aren't needed in the world of HIV.

"Condoms are never used; they say it has to be skin-to-skin to work," noted Janet Walsh, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, which released a report on the issue in March. "It's a custom that must be stopped,"

In Africa, women are six times as likely to contract HIV as men, mostly because of rape and customs such as cleansing, in which one man can spread the disease to hundreds of women.

Cleansers can be found in some rural parts of Uganda and Tanzania as well as Congo, where traditional religions exist next to fluid versions of Christianity and Islam. They also are a staple in Angola and in villages across West Africa, specifically in Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, according to African aid workers who have been trying to talk to people in these countries about the HIV risk that cleansers present.

The tradition dates back centuries and is rooted in a belief that a woman is haunted by spirits after her husband dies. She is also thought to be unholy and "disturbed" if she is unmarried and abstains from sex. She must be cleansed, therefore, to attend funerals or to remarry.

"The older generations need to change," said Nancy Oundda, a nurse with the African Medical Research Foundation, which works with the widows' groups and children orphaned by AIDS. "Their attitude will change with education, and if they realize what this tradition is doing."

The foundation has donated a donkey, tools, a cart and materials to the women so they can transport their goods to market and earn money to support themselves, a key to being able to refuse the cleanser and also avoid being inherited, along with their property. The group provides seminars on HIV to the widows and village elders and prods leaders to abandon traditions such as cleansing. It also pays school fees for 300 orphans to take the burden off the widows.

So far, the widows said, the education is working, and they report being less worried just knowing they can say no.