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Culture and HIV - the story of Seke rural community
Fungai Machirori, Southern Africa AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS)
June 21, 2007

One thought-provoking saying reads, "Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree." What this means is that while a tree might seem shackled to the ground by its root connections - and therefore imprisoned by the earth - uprooting it from the soil will not liberate it, but rather ironically, kill it.

And as with the tree and the soil, there exist many symbiotic relationships, which at times are restrictive, yet remain life-giving. The relationship between a culture and its people is one such. To its adherents, culture offers life-sustaining and defining elements - a sense of identity; belonging; a common and collective understanding of values and traditions; a history, a present, and, of course, a future. And though there are always contentious matters to be dealt with within different cultural groupings, 'uprooting' people from their cultures often renders them lost, and therefore dead.

Recently, the Southern Africa HIV and AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) in collaboration with the Seke Rural Home Based Care (SRHBC) Project, engaged the inhabitants of Seke - a rural Shona community 45 km south-east of Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare - in a dialogue project to discuss how culture and gender relations were helping to perpetuate the spread of HIV and AIDS in that area.

Rather than try to provide solutions to the rate of HIV spread in the area to the exclusion of culture and cultural practices, the project was carried out as a way of trying to discover how emancipation from certain gender-biased cultural norms could help to make this community's culture more accommodative and adaptable to all its people. This, it was hoped, would provide concrete solutions to curbing the spread of HIV and AIDS within Seke rural community.

The meetings, held in two phases between November 2006 and March 2007, were structured in a way that ensured that both men and women were able to air their opinions in a free and conducive environment, by holding separate discussions for each of the gender groups. At the end of each phase, a report back meeting was held in order to review the suggestions and comments made in the gender-specific discussions.

The results of the discussions were telling. The men, who were generally conservative in their thinking, advocated a complete return to what they termed, "our culture", to overcome HIV and AIDS, while the women felt strongly that their marginalised status would change and HIV infection rates decline through a departure from certain cultural practices.

Among the over sixty male participants, there was a widely held perception that the law was a western imposition and an obstacle to people fully practising their culture.

"Laws don't mean anything because the government doesn't understand our culture," declared one of the participants. The culture that the men referred to incorporates practices such as wife inheritance, appeasement of spirits through the pledging of young girls, female virginity testing and polygamy - most of which are outlawed by Zimbabwe's formal legal system.

And for good reasons are these practices illegal. Not only do they have a severe bearing on the ability of women to enjoy equal status within their communities and societies, but they also rob them of the ability to ensure their security from abuse - physical, and psychological - and exposure to the risk of HIV infection.

Take, for instance, the practice known in Shona as kuripira ngozi - appeasement of angered spirits through the offering of a young virgin girl to the aggrieved's family as compensation. In the Shona culture, an angry spirit is not easily appeased. The 'unsettled' spirit of a man or woman (murdered, or ill-treated in life), may return to claim the lives of the transgressor, or the transgressor's family members. Fearing such consequences, the wrongdoer might offer a virgin girl as a wife for the deceased's family. Girls as young as ten years old have been used for this custom.

The trauma of being permanently removed from her family and the shock of her new sexual responsibilities combine to make this practice insensitive and completely gender-biased. Not only is it a total denial of the rights of the girl child, but it exposes innocent girls to the risk of HIV infection, for it is not a common practice for the sexual partner to whom the young girl is being pledged to undergo HIV testing prior to engaging in sexual relations with her. The same usually holds true in the practice of wife inheritance. If a woman is widowed and offered to her deceased husband's male relative as a wife, she is often not afforded the right to demand to know this relative's HIV status. In such cases, the role of lobola - bride price - in conveying ownership of a woman by the male's family often puts paid to this, as she cannot make nay decisions contrary to those that have been made on her behalf.

One male participant offered his view of the current status of women pushing for equal rights with more than a hint of sarcasm.

"At one time, many women held a global conference in Beijing to declare their independence from men. Why can't we have our own conference as men and declare a return to culture. Let us stop this nonsense!"

With such staunch male attitudes on the role that culture should play, it was a complete turn of opinion to hear the women speak. While they understood the importance of culture, they also showed an understanding of its practices that were subordinating women.

"Traditional healers teach people that if you have sex with a young girl, you will be cured of AIDS," said one woman. "Unfortunately, when a girl is raped, she will in turn infect her future partner." Implicit in this observation is that the cultural practice of having sex with a virgin to cure HIV does not work, and is instead helping to fuel the spread of HIV.

In this safe atmosphere where there was no fear of rebuke, the women aired their sentiments freely, advocating more access to HIV testing and freer channels of communication between themselves and their men to broach such subjects. One participant stated how dangerous it was to negotiate for safer sex with a husband. "You can talk about everything else except bedroom issues," she noted. "You can't talk sex - you just have sex as he wishes every time." To this, the over eighty participants offered a deafening round of applause.

Further to this, the women also noted that culture discourages them from seeking protective measures from such abusive subordination. They noted that divorce was not often a plausible solution to their problem because as one participant noted, "Your husband will tell you that you can't refuse to have sex because he paid lobola for you."

This group of women reflected a yearning for equality as well as an understanding of a loss of control over their sexual and reproductive health rights - a problem exacerbated by their lack of social and economic leverage.

In general however, these women were not seeking total abandonment of the culture that they have been reared in, but rather a way of incorporating progressive policies and legislation into culture in order to truly make cultural practices reflective and accommodative of all. With a tree that finds itself in soils that are too acidic, the solution is not to pull its roots out of the earth, but rather to correct the soil's balance through the addition of corrective nutrients. The same principle applied to the Seke rural community's report back meeting where it was finally agreed that compromises needed to be made in terms of countering certain inhibitive cultural practices.

Testing was to be encouraged prior to wife inheritance and husbands and wives were encouraged to be more open with each other on sexual issues. Also it was agreed among the men and women that pledging very young girls for appeasement should be avoided.

Condom use in marriages was reluctantly accepted by the men.

"How can I use condoms on my own wife?" one man admonished. "I will not use condoms because we trust each other." At this, a roar of approval erupted from a number of men in the audience, while the women remained silent, but visibly concerned.

For the residents of Seke, particularly the women, it seems that a modification of culture and the emancipation from the bondage of certain gender-biased practices is a necessity for building an AIDS-free community - otherwise, they will continue to suffer under the yoke of discriminatory views and opinions.

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