Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason H.I.V. has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans…
Even some Zambian volunteers who work to curb the spread of AIDS are reluctant to disavow the tradition. Paulina Bubala, a leader of a group of H.I.V.-positive residents near Monze, counsels schoolchildren on the dangers of AIDS. But in an interview, she said she was ambivalent about whether new widows should purify themselves by having sex with male relatives.
Her husband died of what appeared to be AIDS-related symptoms in 1996. Soon after the funeral, both Ms. Bubala and her husband’s second wife covered themselves in mud for three days. Then they each bathed, stripped naked with their dead husband’s nephew and rubbed their bodies against his.
Weeks later, she said, the village headman told them this cleansing ritual would not suffice. Even the stools they sat on would be considered unclean, he warned, unless they had sex with the nephew.
“We felt humiliated,” Ms. Bubala said, “but there was nothing we could do to resist, because we wanted to be clean in the land of the headman.”
The nephew died last year. Ms. Bubala said the cause was hunger, not AIDS. Her husband’s second wife now suffers symptoms of AIDS and rarely leaves her hut. Ms. Bubala herself discovered she was infected in 2000…
“There is no way we are going to stop this practice,” she said, “because we have seen a lot of men and women who have gone mad” after spouses died….
Evance Joseph Fundi, Ndanga’s 40-year-old headman, is courteous, quiet-spoken and a firm believer in upholding the tradition. While some widows sleep with male relatives, he said, others ask him to summon one of the several appointed village cleansers. In the native language of Chewa, those men are known as fisis or hyenas because they are supposed to operate in stealth and at night.
Mr. Fundi said one of them died recently, probably of AIDS. Still, he said with a charming smile, “We can not abandon this because it has been for generations.”…
He and the headman like to joke about the sexual demands placed upon a cleanser like Mr. Schisoni, who already has three wives. He said tradition dictates that he sleep with the widow, then with each of his own wives, and then again with the widow, all in one night. Mr. Schisoni said that the previous headman chose him for his sexual prowess after he had impregnated three wives in quick succession…
“If we don’t do it, the widow will develop the swelling syndrome, get diarrhea and die and her children will get sick and die,” he said, sitting under an awning of drying tobacco leaves. “The women who do this do not die.”
His wives support his work, he said, because they like the income: a chicken for each cleansing session. He insisted that he cannot wear a condom because “this will provoke some other unknown spirit.” He is equally adamant in refusing an H.I.V. test. “I have never done it and I don’t intend to do it,” he said.
To protect himself, he said, he avoids widows who are clearly quite sick . Told that even widows who look perfectly healthy can transmit the virus, Mr. Schisoni shook his head. “I don’t believe this,” he said. link
The depopulation of Africa is making extraordinary progress. Savvy investors take note. Without western post-colonial strategies such as careful prioritizing IMF and World Bank projects, it is unlikely that such terrific strides would have been made, nor nearly as many superhighways and similar structures built, all of which will be a great convenience to western business interests for years to come.
I was stunned to see that story in the NYT. Glad you quoted it.
Do you really believe what you’re implying in the last paragraph?
Colonization itself was a choice. It ended not because of sudden enlightenment on the part of the colonizers, but because the module was becoming unprofitable.
As different methodoloogies developed, it was found that they in fact generated more revenues than the classic model, and frequently provided plausible deniability, or something close enough to it, to counteract any possible impeding effects of developing technologies that impacted social attitudes and cultural changes that viewed colonialism as a principle less favorably. This phenomenon is largely confined to the Majority World, for example, it is more difficult today to find Africans who view Europeans as semi-deities than it was a century and a half ago, on a conscious or subconsious level.
It is not however, difficult to find Europeans whose views have not undergone such a drastic change, especially when there is a great deal of money to be made.
An educated population is not in the best interest of rich men who want more money. Not in Africa, not in the Middle East, not anywhere.
This principle is not even a western invention. It is a true classic, embraced by the west as soon as it developed written language, and still cherished.
The moneys spent on convincing African nations to become indebted for mega-highways could have been spent on schools, but where would be the profit in that?
The next generation would be even less likely to sign up for a mega-highway, or make really sweet oil deals.
Thank you, Ductape, for posting this interesting story about the dilemna created by ‘traditional practices’ which offend our concepts of human rights and basic health precautions.
I have to confess that over many years I have worried about the question of where to draw the line between values which we hold important in the Western world and ‘traditional’ or religious practices in other parts of the world. Examples include polygamous marriages (which can be seen as exploiting/subjugating women), various practices under Sharia law such as stonings of adulterers, chopping off hands of thieves etc, and now that I have learnt about it, ‘widow cleansing’.
I guess that I have come down on the side of thinking that there are absolute human rights, and that the practices I just listed are wrong. But I’m still willing to listen to an argument that this is a culturally determined set of values.
draw the line regarding your cultural practices that violate their sense of absolute human rights and common decency?
Also see my reply to Susan above.
Don’t mean to be rude, but it’s very easy for you to say that without giving any examples of my cultural practices (you were personalising this a bit! 🙂 ) which Africans might find offended their sense of absolute human rights.
What I was driving at is that I’ve worried about whether stoning people to death and chopping off their hands is only objectionable to me due to my cultural positioning. And I’ve decided (possibly wrongly!) that these are issues of absolute and universal human rights. Just as practices which are more within our Western cultural tradition such as executing people by lethal injection, electrocution and hanging (in the US and elsewhere) are also wrong, and the use of flogging (in Singapore) is wrong.
cultural practices may or may not be. I think that would be rude!
But for the purposes of the question, it doesn’t matter.
Just pick any of your cultural practices and suppose that it goes against an African person’s concept of basic and absolute human rights, and decide where you would wish that person to draw the line.
I can readily see an African finding ‘my’ (Western traditional) cultural practices as offensive to absolute human rights or values: as I suggested above, I would possibly agree with them.
Cutting to the chase: do you consider ‘widow cleansing’ is not a violation of the widow’s human rights because it is ‘traditional practice’ and her ‘rights’ are a Western liberal construct which we have no right to impose?
manifestation of the popular and universal tradition of women as property.
If I can refer you again to my reply to Susan in this same thread, an educated populace is not in the best interests of lords, war or feudal.
And the greatest single make or breaker in an educated populace is the status of women.
As you saw in the original article, there are local and indigenous efforts to modify the practice to preserve culture without endangering life, and sneaking in through the back door, a lessening of the women as property element.
There have been some anecdotal success stories of this type in various places, for example, in some communities in Latin America, the custom of giving a girl’s parents a year’s salary for the hand of a daughter in marriage – some people have persuaded a couple of villages to make a small alteration: the prospective groom must give the family a gift of value that he has made with his own hands. This has cut down considerably on the selling of little girls to men from outside the village who have a lot of money.