A Senator in Zimbabwe wants the government to do research “into a substance that will make men lose appetite,” to curb men’s “insatiable greed for women,” because, the Senator says, when designing “these parts we use for mating” God didn’t know about HIV.
Zimbabwe is a landlocked East African country of 12.5 million people where 1.6 million adults are HIV positive, or almost 13% of the total population. About 60% of them are women, who overwhelmingly contract it through unprotected heterosexual intercourse. Many children also acquire it through mother-to-child transmission (during childbirth and through breast feeding) but the primary vector, as in most of sub-Saharan Africa is unprotected penis-vagina sex, with the rapid spread usually attributed to rampant male infidelity and the unwillingness of men to use condoms even when they’re available.
The Senator in question, Sithembile Mlotshwa, represents Matobo, a ward in Matebeland South, near(ish) the border with Botswana and South Africa. Here’s what she said in an address before the Senate, as quoted in NewZimbabwe.com‘s charmingly titled Senator proposes men sex limiter to curb HIV spread:
We have looked at the use of condoms and abstinence but I still think we have to look at the rate of mating of human beings because through their mating, HIV is being spread,” Mlotshwa said on Wednesday while contributing to a debate on HIV/AIDS and access to treatment.
The only avenue left is for us as parliamentarians to decide or suggest reducing the appetite of men and their insatiable greed for women.
If the scientists that we have here look into the issue of trying to inject men with a substance that will make them lose appetite, and use that chance once a month at home, I think that might help.
I don’t think that when God created these parts which we use for mating, he was thinking that one time there is going to be this HIV. I am looking at it from this angle and I am thinking that when we were created, this problem of HIV was not there. People might think that I am joking, but I am serious.
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Her comment that “people might think that I am joking” came, according to New Zimbabwe, because her comments on God had elicited chuckles from her fellow Senators. New Zimbabwe points out that “Aids [sic] activists blame the disease’s spread on cultural and behavioural factors such as gender stereotypes which reduce the leverage women have in negotiating protection with their partners; infidelity; poor literacy and multiple partners which are still culturally-accepted in parts of Zimbabwe.”
Senator Mlotshwa also called for HIV tests to be mandatory throughout the country, and posted publicly. According to an article in Zimbabwe Online, Mlotshwa’s fellow Senator, Jenia Manyeruke, responded by calling instead for more antiretroviral drugs, and to have “n’angas” or “prophets” trained to dispense them. N’angas are village healers among the Shona people; because of the lack of doctors, public health efforts in Zimbabwe have recently focused on training village healers to dispense both traditional and western medicines when appropriate, and recognize illnesses they can’t treat themselves for referral to hospitals.
HIV is ubiquitous enough in the country, and doctors rare enough, that the health system must rely on n’angas to dispense HIV treatments.
According to the Wikipedia article on HIV in Zimbabwe, “Young adults and women are hardest hit by the epidemic. In 2005, approximately 930,000 women over the age of 14 were estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe.” As in much of Africa south of the Sahel, frequent migration for jobs means that men are in proximity of sex workers with great frequency, and condom use is rare. What’s more, poor healthcare overall contributes to the ease with which HIV is transmitted. But Zimbabwe’s “brain drain” of health care professionals fleeing this wrecked state has made things worse in the last 5 years:
Zimbabwe continues to suffer a severe socioeconomic and political crisis, including unprecedented rates of inflation and a severe ‘brain drain’ of Zimbabwe’s health care professionals. Elements of a previously well-maintained health care infrastructure are crumbling. Zimbabwe’s HIV crisis is exacerbated by chronic food insecurity. Sub-optimal nutrition increases the vulnerability of individuals with compromised immune systems to life-threatening opportunistic infections, such as tuberculosis. Gender inequality and widespread practices of multiple and concurrent sexual relationships, and cross-generational sex fuel Zimbabwe’s epidemic, particularly among youth. Social norms, including stigma associated with HIV/AIDS, excessive alcohol consumption, and a reluctance to talk about HIV status or sexual relations also create barriers to behavior change.
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You might think that in a country where armed gangs, the police and the military spent much of 2008 cruising the countryside beating the shit out of the President’s political opponents, one of the very worst ideas one could come up with would be to hand out pre-loaded syringes of Depo-Provera instead of clubs and AK-47s to those very same thugs, and load them up in SUVs so they can travel around forcibly injecting every male in the country.
While I applaud Senator Mlotshwa’s bravery in even talking about the AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe’s parliament, I submit to her that tackling those other elements of cultural communication barriers, rampant sexism, and “cross-generational sex,” as well as the reluctance to use safer sex, are likely to be far more successful than some mythical, undeveloped drug that can be “injected,” presumably non-consensually, into Zimbabwe’s rampaging and dangerous boner-owners. Perhaps addressing the disintegrating public health infrastructure would be the first step.
When I call Zimbabwe a “wrecked state,” I’m not just whistling “Dixie.” The nation was the scene of a mind-boggling amount of political violence in the lead-up to the 2008 elections, mostly perpetrated by thugs hired by president Robert Mugabe (who remains in office) to prevent political activity by opposition groups. The instability resulted in inflation of 5 quintillion percent. Yes, quintillion. No, I’m not joking — in 2009 the government introduced a $100 trillion bank note. Wikipedia actually says “516 quintillion,” but you know how it is…5 quintillion, 500 quintillion; sooner or later you’re talking real money.
The nation of Zimbabwe was, incidentally, called Rhodesia by its ruling white majority from 1966-1979, when it was still called Southern Rhodesia by the British — who never recognized Rhodesia’s independence from the British Empire. The country became Zimbabwe following victory by black rebels in 1979 and the formal end of British Rule.
President Mugabe, a former schoolteacher, has been in power ever since. Popular at first, he has increasingly enforced his rule with violence against civilians at the hands of the military and police. Extrajudicial arrest, torture, and the rape of women and children were rampant in the Mugabe regime, and were particularly so in 2007-2008 in the lead-up to the election. According to the international diplomatic community, Mugabe reportedly gave up a substantial amount of power in a settlement following the violence in 2008.
But not everybody’s dancing on Mugabe’s corpse just yet. According to white Rhodesian returned-expat journalist Peter Godwin‘s book The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s behind-the-scenes 2008 cession of power to his main opponent Morgan Tsvangarai, who became prime minister, required the utter “selling-out” of Tsvangarai, over which most supporters of Tsvangarai’s opposition (which is most of the country) felt betrayed enough to totally reject Tsvangarai’s legitimacy.
Godwin strongly implies that Tsvangarai sold out his supporters in order to gain a measure of power, and that Mugabe’s “stepping down” in terms of real power was little more than a fiction cooked up for the international press, the diplomatic community, and the U.N., which could then “move on” from its concern about Zimbabwe to other, more important countries. Zimbabwe is basically the country fictionalized in Sydney Pollock’s last film, The Interpreter, which came out well before the 2007-2008 wave of violence. By all accounts, the economic recovery has been modest and there has not been the outpouring of Western aid one might expect in a country with these problems. On the contrary, most Western investment has fled.
As I’ve said before, virtually all sexual woes must be viewed in a context of poverty and lack of opportunity. The HIV crisis in Zimbabwe, and in Africa overall, has been at apocalyptic levels for many years. The efforts of public health agencies to alleviate it is hindered by the West’s unwillingness to provide the kind of medical aid that can’t be looted by the corrupt Mugabe’s government. But Zimbabwe is far easier for first-world nations to ignore, because the government appears to have regained “control,” in the same way that the good Senator wants Zimbawean men to “control” their raging boners.
Of course, if the Zimbabwean government could “control” anyone, they might want to start with their own military, police and government-affiliated armed gangs infamous for spreading political terror. But why would they want to do that, when it’s the illusion of lack of control that kept the government in power…and the reality of behind-the-scenes control that have kept Zimbabweans in chains all these years, while the West turns a blind eye?
It’s easy to laugh at the idea that a lawmaker would promulgate the idea of shooting men up with an anti-sex drug. But the AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe is no laughing matter. It’s exactly these kind of twisted and insane suggestions that lead to the paralysis of real public health efforts that might help stem the tide of HIV transmission. Perched atop Western disinterest, and poverty, and both western and local political conservatism and corruption, the unwillingness to stick to what we know works in public health helps make HIV prevention in impoverished Africa a fresh hell every day for those trying to do the work.
It’s not time for crazy ideas. It’s time for the proven techniques of public health, sex education and economic development to be treated like the obvious answer they are…and have always been, in every country.
Image: Photo by Australian phtographer Lam Tran of Zimbabwe-born, Newcastle-educated fashion model Renny Chivunga, a member of the meZuzuru tribe from Chihota, Zimbabwe — also a trained and qualified chemical engineer (really). From Lam Tran’s blog. Also check out Renny’s interview in Zimbabwe’s ZimEye.
Poverty causes So much pain, both in the countries where it rips people’s lives apart, and in the countries where the pain is exported to when someone exploits those poverty-stricken people as soldiers, as so often happens. I’m not sure if there Is a solution, as so many leaders in Africa are willing to look the other way. In Libya, there’s a serious opposition movement, but in Zimbabwe, it’s been crushed into a fine powder, with everyone who could do something not caring enough or too busy. Tsvangarai did somewhat sell out his people, but only after his wife was killed in a car ‘accident’, a technique well practiced by Mugabe’s people as a tool of disposing of opponents. I think Tsvangarai lost a lot of his fight, and perhaps even suffered brain damage, in that one event. So much suffering in that country.