Had two fascinating conversations yesterday on the plane with the two gentlemen I was sitting next to.
The first man, an Indian who has lived in South Africa for twenty years, introduced himself by asking me if I’m French. I told him, “Non.”
“Funny,” he said, “you look French.”
His name is Varkey George and he’s the director of the Student Health and Welfare Centres Organisation. He hosts student groups that come to Cape Town to do charity work. I told him about the book I was writing, and he thought it odd that I define healing so broadly.
“Well, why not?” I asked. “People seek healing from all kinds of practitioners and I’m not sure there’s a logical correspondence between the type of illness they’re experiencing and the type of healing they’re seeking. I think people have different ideas of what healing is, so they don’t necessarily feel healed by a medical doctor even if their body is in good shape after seeing one.”
He could understand that. The question, he said, is this: “What is the wound?”
A good question to ask. What IS the wound? Even if you are physically ill, that may not be the wound you’re seeking to cure even when trying to cure your body.
I also sat next to Barnard Gardiner, who works for the Red Cross as the Manager of the HIV Global Programme, Health and Care Department. We had a long and involved conversation about AIDS, especially AIDS in South Africa, and he asked several provocative questions about how we could stop the epidemic in Africa.
First, he asked me if I knew about the theory that HIV is spread when people are engaged in simultaneous relationships, not necessarily promiscuously but one man has two relationships and both his girlfriends also have two relationships, and so on and so forth, until it creates a network where HIV is easily transmitted. Of course I was so he continued. He said that gay men were able to stop the transmission of HIV because, without coordination, they somehow figured this out and realized that they didn’t need to use condoms all the time, but they should use condoms outside of their primary relationship. So they didn’t use condoms with their primary relationship but when they slept with other people, they did.
He suggested that there are two ways to stop the epidemic—either be monogamous or use condoms all the time, something that no group has been able to do. He said that nobody realized that Africans had concurrent relationships—women as well as men—until the epidemic, so he said, “We’re asking Africans to either use condoms all the time (something nobody has been able to do) or to stop being African.”
I thought this was a disturbing way to put it. Is it African to have concurrent relationships all the time? Polygamy, yes, but to my knowledge, there is not a long history of African *women* also being involved in more than one relationship at a time. I pointed out that there was no evidence from archival materials and early European recordings of African behavior that would suggest this was a common part of African culture. And Europeans were certainly happy to exaggerate any behavior they found odd!
“It may be a common part of African culture today,” I said, “but I struggle to believe that it’s a long-standing feature of African culture, that it’s been around for centuries, because there’s no evidence of it in the record. Maybe it could have gone by unnoticed for so long but…”
It disturbed me to think that the reason the epidemic has spread in Africa is intrinsically related to something that is fundamentally African. Maybe that’s true and I just have sickly-sweet, politically correct, academic-trained-by-the-book knee-jerk reactions that are misplaced and misguided. But still…
Then I remembered a few things: thigh sex and Facing Mt. Kenya. I told him that there are African practices that indicate that women did have multiple partners when they were young, but they didn’t engage in penetrative sex. I told him how Jomo Kenyatta outlined practices that the Gikuyu engaged in, that young people were encouraged to indulge in sexual play with multiple partners as long as they didn’t go all the way. And the Zulu trained women how to have “thigh sex,” that is, how to get a man to come by rubbing his penis together with their thighs.
He got kind of excited when I mentioned that and said that this might be the answer—if Africans could re-learn some of these traditional behaviors, then maybe it could stop the epidemic.
Like any good academically-trained historian, I have knee-jerk reactions to the concept of “tradition” as well. There are always people that believe if we go back to some idyllic past, to practices that they believe have been corrupted or have disappeared from society, that we will eliminate or reduce some problem that has cropped up in modern life. But many times, our idea of what is “traditional” is based more in nostalgia and romance than in reality. And furthermore, I’m not sure it’s ever possible to resurrect old practices that way without enormous controversy.
Both interesting conversations on my way to South Africa to explore this topic!
