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Issues & Actions Changing cultural practices a challenge
Issues & Actions Changing cultural practices a challenge | Changing cultural practices a challenge |
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| Written by Michael Swan | |
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This is bad news for Ogware in her job. She works for the Medical Missionaries of Mary as a behaviour change specialist. She and a cadre of bright, young people troll the alleys of Kibera, the second biggest slum in Africa, educating people about ways they can avoid HIV, encouraging them to be tested for the virus. Embedded in Luo culture is a certain, spectacular machismo. Even in the slums where the men are mostly unemployed, Luo men dress well and put whatever money they can earn into electronics, carpets and consumer goods. The investment in stylish clothes, haircuts, radios, etc. is intended to attract a wife, a second wife, even a third wife. A Luo man doesn’t reveal too much of himself to a woman. He particularly doesn’t want his wife to see he has any flaw or weakness. Therefore, if a Luo man thinks he should be tested for HIV he will go to a different part of the city, enrol in an antiretroviral drug program far from home, take his meals away from the family and continue to have unprotected sex with his wife. “It’s because men don’t care,” said Ogware. “If the man dies, at least the children will be taken care of. If the woman dies first, then the man doesn’t care. It’s the woman who takes full responsibility.” Ogware’s scathing assessment of Luo men draws no protest from Felisto Odero. Unlike Ogware, Odero is Luo herself. Her husband left her six months ago, denying he was HIV positive and refusing to be tested despite a history of typical opportunistic infections creeping up on him. Odero caught herpes zoster while caring for her sick husband in 2003, prompting her to be tested for HIV. She’s certain she got the HIV virus from her husband, who was frequently away from home on construction jobs. When Odero tried to persuade her husband to be tested he would either deny he had the disease or blame her for bringing HIV into the house — but most frequently he would say nothing at all. The lofty pride of Luo men is mirrored in the silence of Luo women when men are present. For a Luo man like Joseph, this is just the way things are meant to be. “Even in the Bible it is said that a man is the head of the house,” he said. “So I don’t see why she should be above the husband. For a lady, decisions have to be made and she still has to listen to a superior voice.” Joseph refuses to be tested for HIV though he is sick much of the time. He has sent his wife, who is in advanced stages of AIDS, up country to his village. She had been suffering dementia and embarrassing the family by walking about the slum naked. His daughter Divina has landed a place in the very competitive St. Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary School in Kibera — a school which will give her the chance to attend university and live a completely different life from her parents. Joseph is happy to contemplate a future for his daughter earning good money in a good job, and he’s proud of her. But he sees no reason she should ever make decisions or discuss things as an equal with her husband when she marries. Fifteen-year-old Divina looks uncomfortable with her father’s pronouncements on her future, but she won’t disagree with him in front of strangers. Perhaps even more deeply rooted in Luo culture than a profound division between men and women is a tendency toward fatalism. In the slum, many Luo don’t really believe in HIV as a biochemical phenomenon. AIDS is often diagnosed as chira. Chira is a curse that God puts on anyone who wittingly or unwittingly breaks a taboo or offends the customs of their ancestors. Someone who has chira is supposed to experience mysterious illnesses, weight loss, weakness and eventual death. In other words, chira and AIDS look the same, so they must be the same. There’s nothing you can do about chira. If God is going to curse you, that’s your fate. No medicine, no prayers, no ritual will make any difference. Revivalist preachers stalk the streets of Kibera. There are free Bibles in people’s homes. There are house churches, small Christian communities and missionaries everywhere. But the catechism most poor Luo have received has never liberated them from deeply ingrained fatalism. Nor is fatalism unique to the Luo, the second largest ethnic group in Kenya. “Most of them (poor Africans) don’t see the need (to be tested),” said HIV counsellor and nurse Lucy Mutindi. “They say, ‘If I go to the clinic and I’m told I’m positive, what does that mean? I’m dying. Why should I sit and wait?’ ” Africans have always suffered. Africans learn to accept fate on its terms. Which makes it difficult to challenge practices such as tero, or wife inheritance, among the Luo and other ethnic groups. At one time the idea a widow would automatically become the wife of one of her dead husband’s brothers was a way to ensure the woman and her children were cared for and to keep whatever wealth the man had accumulated during his life within the family. Now it means women who have been infected by their dead husbands will infect a new husband. Or an HIV-negative widow will be forced to marry a brother whose HIV status she cannot know. Among the Chichewa speakers of Malawi, both Christian and Muslim, wife inheritance (chokolo in Chichewa) is common. But it isn’t the only cultural practice contributing to the disease. Traditional rites of passage for pubescent boys and girls have their dangers. Boys are taken into the forest for an intense experience of learning what it means to be a man. Then they are circumcised — traditionally, all with the same knife. The health care workers at Dignitas International in Zomba have had some success in persuading elders to use a supply of sterile razor blades, but traditions don’t change easily. The boys are then told they have to “remove the dust,” or kuchotsa fumbi, to prevent bad omens from visiting their family. Kuchotsa fumbi or kudzola mafuta (rubbing the oil) require the boys to have sex. Girls are educated about sex by older women in their village or clan. At the end of this education the older women choose an afisi (the word means hyena) who will initiate her with her first experience of sex. There is also the practice of “death cleansing” or kupita kufa in which a man lives with a new widow as her husband for a month following the husband’s death. In parts of rural Malawi prenatal clinics have found that as many as 30 per cent of expectant mothers are HIV positive. Western visitors who drop into Malawi and pass easy judgment on village culture, or foreign non-governmental organizations that make glib statements about culture change, make Jesuit Wilfred Sumani more than a little uncomfortable. As a Chichewa-speaking Malawian, he doesn’t think outsiders are going to change village culture by passing negative judgment on practices that once embodied positive values in those communities. Sumani spends his days teaching math and religion in a refugee camp as part of the long journey to Jesuit priesthood. With the help of the African Jesuit AIDS Network, he has begun his own culture change program mining one of the richest veins of Malawian culture. An accomplished musician, the scholastic used a small grant from AJAN to produce the first Malawian CD entirely of songs about AIDS. In Malawi, music drives political campaigns, religious awareness, social change, the collective soul of the nation. Songs about AIDS can reach a broad audience and touch people more profoundly than anything else, said Sumani. He warns that people who worry about old village traditions are worried about practices already fading into history. “Culture is something that is happening now,” he said. As a younger generation moves away from rural life, they are faced with new questions about their values and how they can be expressed. Sumani sings about the place of women in society and in marriage. His songs extol marriage as an equal commitment, and he is beginning to see signs of change in how men and women relate. “Women will say, ‘I’m not going to be just a passenger in this relationship.’ ” For Sumani, AIDS education isn’t just giving people clinical facts about the disease. He sees a more complete process of education giving people a new awareness of their power to make choices which shape their lives. “The message is getting in, but that has to be accompanied by empowerment — education,” he said. Sumani’s next CD will also be about AIDS. He plans to call it Kukonda Koona, “To love truly.” The lyrics to his new songs are driven by his conviction that “this HIV thing is killing us not because we love too much, but because we don’t love enough.” To order Sumani’s CD Sankha Moyo send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . The Canadian price is $15, taxes and shipping included. |
NAIROBI, Kenya - Lydia Birongo Ogware is a woman of definite opinions, none more definite than her opinion about Luo men.| < Prev | Next > |
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