Boys to men in the shadow of AIDS : masculinities and HIV risk in Zambia

245 Pages·2009·1.734 MB·English

by  Simpson, Anthony John

Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS
Boys to Men in
the Shadow of AIDS
Masculinities and
HIV Risk in Zambia
Anthony Simpson
BOYS TO MEN IN THE SHADOW OF AIDS
Copyright © Anthony Simpson, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61391-1
All rights reserved.
Portions of this work have been previously published.
Chapter 2 is a revised version of “Sons and Fathers/Boys to Men in the
Time of AIDS: Learning Masculinity in Zambia.” Journal of Southern African
Studies 31 (3): 569–586. Taylor and Francis. 2005.
Chapter 3 is an expanded version of “Learning Sex and Gender in Zambia:
Masculinities and HIV/AIDS Risk.” Sexualities 10 (2): 173–188.
Sage Publications. 2007.
Some extracts are taken from “Courage, Conquest and Condoms.” In
“AIDS, Culture and Africa,” ed. Douglas A. Feldman. University of
Florida Press. 2008.
Permission to publish this material here is gratefully acknowledged.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-37835-7 ISBN 978-0-230-62071-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230620711
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First edition: May 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction 1
2. Fathers and Sons: The Measure of a Man 19
3. Learning Sex In and Out of School 37
4. Sexual Lives after School 61
5. Married Life 91
6. Sexuality as a Site of Difference 115
7. “Has God Come in Another Way?” 145
8. Responses to Campaigns 171
9. Conclusion 193
Notes 205
References 221
Index 235
Acknowledgments
M
any people have assisted me in the long process of writing this
book. I am grateful to Ronnie Frankenberg for his encouragement at
the outset of the project. Friends and colleagues read my work as it
progressed. Some commented on the whole manuscript, while others
read chapters of earlier versions. I am grateful to Elizabeth Colson,
Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, Harri Englund, James Ferguson,
Suzette Heald, Paul Henley, David Mills, Robert Morrell, Judith
Okely, Lyn Schumaker, Tom Yarrow, and Soumhya Venkatesan for
their helpful comments and advice. I would also like to thank heads
of the department of Social Anthropology at Manchester University,
John Gledhill at the project’s inception, and Sarah Green at its con-
clusion for their help and encouragement. I am also indebted to
Austin Cheyeka in Zambia and to my nephew Paul in England, and
to Marie Rostron and Lynn Dignan at Manchester University for
their generous practical assistance. Luba Ostashevsky, Colleen Lawrie,
and Allison McElgunn at Palgrave have shepherded the book through
its various stages with kindness and expertise. Maran Elancheran has
provided excellent copyediting.
Members of my family, my mother Lois, my sisters Susan, Maureen,
and Catherine and their partners George, Bill, and Alex have given
constant encouragement and support. Most of all I am indebted to
the Zambian men and women who agreed to take part in this research.
They allowed me access to some of the intimate spaces of their lives.
They trusted that I would use the information I learned in a respon-
sible manner. I have tried my best to honor that trust.
1
Introduction
S
ampa and Promise, Paul and Kangwa, Darius, Henry, and their
classmates were students together at a Zambian boys’ Catholic mis-
sion boarding school in the early 1980s. These are not their real
names. I have used pseudonyms and at times altered superficial details
about them to protect their anonymity in this account of their lives,
lived in the shadow of HIV/AIDS. My research focuses on a number
of questions; among them: How did they learn to be men? How did
they come to know themselves as engendered sexual beings? How
have they conducted their sexual lives in the face of the pandemic?
I taught these men in the junior and senior secondary stages of
their education, at the school that I call St. Antony’s, where I was a
teacher through much of the 1970s, 1980s, and the early and mid
1990s. They belonged to the “fortunate few” Zambians “lucky”
enough to win places at one of the best schools in the country. They
formed part of an elite in terms of educational opportunity, though
this did not necessarily ensure elite membership twenty years later.
They came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Many
were the children of subsistence farmers and manual laborers. Others
came from wealthier households with fathers in professional work or
in the higher echelons of the ruling political party, the United
National Independence Party (UNIP). Several were the sons of pri-
mary school teachers. I watched them grow from shy newcomers in
their early and mid-teens—kwiyos in student talk1—to confident
school-leavers. Many were impatient to fulfil their dreams of what
they imagined education would deliver—to become doctors, lawyers,
engineers, teachers—and to achieve the status of adult men by marry-
ing and having children. Some did indeed achieve their aims, though
others faced lives of poverty and unemployment and some lives were
cut short by AIDS.
When I first recorded their life histories in 1983 and 1984, around
the time they finished school, my interest was to explore the impact
2 Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS
of Catholic mission education. They were then mainly in their late
teens or early twenties.2 Interviews covered a wide range of topics.
Students recalled their childhood; they spoke about their religious
beliefs and their hopes and fears for the future. They candidly
described their childhood and adolescent sexual activity. In our early
conversations the topic of HIV/AIDS did not figure. It was not yet
on their horizon.
However, in 1983, less than 100 miles away at the University
Teaching Hospital in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, Dr. Anne Bayley, pro-
fessor of surgery, was confronted with an unusual number of patients
suffering from aggressive Kaposi’s sarcoma (a type of cancer) and who
did not respond to routine therapy (Bayley 1984; Bayley et al. 1985;
Bayley 1996). When these patients were tested in 1984, 91 percent of
them proved to be HIV-positive. Bayley later concluded that HIV
had probably arrived in Zambia in the mid-1970s.3 During the 1980s,
news of AIDS slowly began to filter through to young Zambians.
Early designations of AIDS as a “gay plague” persuaded former stu-
dents of St. Antony’s, like many young men throughout Zambia, to
conclude that AIDS posed no threat to them. “It’s you Europeans
who are all homosexuals,” they regularly assured me. “We Africans,
we like our women!” When they came to understand that AIDS in
Africa was spread predominantly through heterosexual sex, many
young men were convinced that they could tell simply by looking
whether a girl had the HIV virus. In the face of my repeated protests
that it was not possible to identify those who were HIV-positive by
looking at them, successive cohorts of students said they understood
that it took “a long time” to die from AIDS, and that death in another
form might well find them before they succumbed to the disease. As
campaigns went on to target “risk groups”—prostitutes and long-
distance truck drivers—none of us anticipated the way in which AIDS
would come to dominate everyday life in Zambia.4
Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) is one of the countries most
severely affected by HIV/AIDS in the sub-Saharan region where the
pandemic has taken the most terrible toll to date, with 2 percent of the
world’s population and by 2004 nearly 30 percent of its HIV cases
(Iliffe 2006: 33). The 2007 UNAIDS epidemic update notes that,
while there is little sign of decline in the HIV prevalence of 17 percent
at the national level in Zambia, there was some decline in some parts
of the country (UNAIDS 2007: 17).5 Between 1994 and 2004 the
overall HIV prevalence remained relatively stable at 19–20 percent
among pregnant women aged fifteen to thirty-nine years (UNAIDS
Update 2006). The 2006 update further observed, “At current levels
Introduction 3
of HIV prevalence, young persons in Zambia face a 50% life-time risk
of dying of AIDS, in the absence of treatment (Ministry of Health
Zambia 2005).” Of almost 1 million adults (15–49) and children
(0–14 years) in Zambia estimated to be living with HIV in 2003
(UNICEF 2006), over 85,000 were children, while an estimated
1.1 million children (0–18) had been orphaned, mostly due to HIV/
AIDS (UNICEF 2007). The early spread and impact of the pandemic
was exacerbated by Zambia’s economic decline, increasing indebted-
ness, and World Bank programs that caused health services to intro-
duce user fees that resulted in an 80 percent drop in utilization of
urban health centers.6 Parker notes that the same World Bank later
became the main funder of HIV/AIDS prevention work in the devel-
oping world, “leading the global fight against an epidemic that its
own previous policies did much to structure” (Parker 2000: 44).
I had initially interviewed a cohort of twenty-four students in 1983
and 1984. I reinterviewed twelve of the survivors of the original
cohort almost twenty years later in 2002. I again collected life histories
and discussed their sexual activity. Few men were in regular contact
with any of their former classmates though they might know where
some of them were living and what occupations they had. Still, they
remained proud of their shared identity as “old boys” of St. Antony’s.
One former student, Demba, declined to be reinterviewed. Though
happy to meet socially, he explained that he felt his life had been so
unhappy that he had no desire to recall, and, in a sense, to “relive” it.
By 2002, eight of the original group had died, as had five of their
wives, most of them, their friends and relatives assumed, from AIDS-
related conditions. I was unable to locate the other three. I contacted
a further eighteen former students, school contemporaries of the
original cohort. They were interviewed, as were twelve former stu-
dents’ wives, one widow, and other male and female household mem-
bers.7 During twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork I lived in the
homes of some of the former students and participated in their every-
day lives. My account is informed by this experience, as I draw upon
my observations and on the many casual conversations that contrib-
uted to our shared sociality. I had further contact with many of the
men and their families during brief research trips to Zambia each year
from 2004 to 2007.
In 2002 the age range of the former students in this study was
between thirty-five and the early forties. They belonged to a number
of ethnic groups, primarily Bemba and Tonga, but also included Lala,
Ila, Chikunda, Lamba, and Lozi.8 Though very few men, unlike their
wives, regularly attended church, all claimed a Christian identity, as
4 Boys to Men in the Shadow of AIDS
they had done at secondary school, the majority of them Catholic—
though religious affiliations also included Seventh Day Adventist,
United Church of Zambia, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Assemblies of God,
and various Pentecostal churches. About 25 percent of the Zambian
population is estimated to be Catholic in this predominantly Christian
country. The Catholic Church in Zambia has played, and continues
to play, a significant role in the provision of secondary education as it
does in the care of those suffering from AIDS and in its opposition
to condoms as a method of HIV prevention. There was a wide range
of income within the group of former students, some men earning
as much as 7 million kwacha (about U.S. $1,550) a month and some
as little as 100, 000 kwacha (about U.S. $22) a month or less.9
Occupations included the following: doctors, lawyers, managers, lec-
turers, teachers, engineers, petrol pump attendants, security guards,
and “businessmen”—the latter generally were involved in informal
trading. Several respondents were unemployed. All thirty were resi-
dent in urban areas or provincial centers. All except two were mar-
ried, and many of the marriages were interethnic. Some wives were in
professional employment; some were marketers and traders. Others
were housewives with no employment beyond the household.
Several former students I contacted were in poor health. While
men often portrayed themselves as “survivors”—of Zambia’s severe
economic decline and of the decimation of their generation by
AIDS—the pandemic threw its shadow over many of our encounters.
All the men in this study had lost family members, friends, and work
colleagues to AIDS. Many of them suspected that they were HIV-
positive. At times, grief and depression threatened to overwhelm
them. Several had been entrusted with the support of their siblings’
orphaned children. All the men had the information and the means
at their disposal to protect themselves and their sexual partners from
the risk of exposure to the HIV virus. This ethnography is about why,
in striving to appear “real” men, many at times chose not to do so.
I conducted fieldwork among a small group of men who coinci-
dentally happened to be drawn to St. Antony’s during the time I was
teaching there. I was able to establish sufficient rapport for them to
share with me intimate details of their lives both in youth and adult-
hood. Anthropologists have often chosen to work on a “small” scale
in order to gain in-depth understandings of the complex lives of oth-
ers by detailed qualitative exploration of the contexts of such lives and
by revealing the meanings people attach to their embodied experi-
ence. Ethnographies can provide “textured firsthand accounts”
(Schoepf 1992: 260) that may lead to vital insights inaccessible to