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Authors: Uzodinma Iweala

Tags: #Social Science, #Travel, #Africa, #West, #Disease & Health Issues

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BOOK: Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope
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“My wife died soon after. I loved her very dearly until the day that she died.”

He would later find out that his second wife’s first husband had died of HIV/AIDS.

The story Samaila tells of his experience with polygamy and HIV/AIDS does not fit with the polygamy-equals-promiscuity paradigm. It is not the story of a sex-crazed maniac, the societal convention that allows him the ability to fulfill his boundless desires, and the disease that has come to expose how morally backward he is. Rather, it is the experience of a decent and honorable family man struggling to understand how this disease entered into his life. This is not to offer a full-throated defense of polygamy, a practice that sparks debate about the roles and rights of women in a given community; rather, it is to say that within the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one must be careful not to offer simplistic and moralizing conclusions about sexual relationships that exist outside of a certain familiar cultural context. The associated judgment only increases anxiety about the propriety of sexual practice and prevents valuable discussion that might increase understanding of the epidemic’s progress. As it turns out, there might be something about a polygamous relationship that speaks to a more generalized pattern of sexual interaction in Nigeria (and sub-Saharan Africa) that may indeed affect the spread of the epidemic, but it has nothing to do with an innate African promiscuity.

Back in New York on a summer day so hot as to make even the most authentically Nigerian person wilt, I paid a visit to Helen Epstein, scientist, journalist, and author of a book on AIDS,
The Invisible Cure
. We sat beneath a large umbrella on the stone patio in the backyard of her Harlem row house, an ice-cold pitcher of water perspiring between us, and discussed the various theories of why HIV/AIDS has spread further and faster in sub-Saharan Africa than in other places.

“It’s not that Africans are any more promiscuous than Westerners,” I remember her saying. “The average number of lifetime partners is about the same. It’s that the patterns of sexual interaction are different.”

Patterns of sexual interaction matter tremendously in the spread of the disease. In the West, people tend to engage in sequentially monogamous relationships. In other words, each person has one partner at any one time, with very little overlap between relationships. In such arrangements, a sexually transmitted infection like HIV/AIDS can still pass from person to person, but the completion of one relationship and the establishment of another limit the rate at which it moves. In sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria included—more emphasis has been placed on the idea of concurrent partnerships, sexual relationships that overlap in time. These overlapping relationships can create a sexual network that, as one study argues, “dramatically increases both the size and variability of an epidemic … the speed with which the epidemic spreads.” Thus it is likely that HIV/AIDS is more widespread in Africa not because Africans are any more promiscuous or weirdly sexual than other people, but as a result of the presence of sexual networks that allow for increased likelihood of exposure to and transmission of the disease.

A polygamous relationship like Samaila’s, because it is so visible and culturally sanctioned, provides an easy and potentially judgment-free example of how concurrency accelerates the spread of HIV in a population. But not all relationships in Nigeria are explicitly culturally sanctioned, though they may still be affected by concurrency. While concurrency counters the idea of a more promiscuous African sexuality as being the cause of the epidemic, it does little to quell the anxiety about the moral quality of sexual relationships that are unsanctioned in this time of HIV/AIDS. These changing relationships are the subject of much agonizing in countries like Nigeria, where increasing urbanization and migration have weakened community control of sexual practice and inspired new ideas about the proper place of sex.

“I know that people are beginning to embrace sex as a human behavior between two adults that you cannot avoid,” a young banker I know named Fatimah said to me during one of our many conversations. Her unconscious use of the word
avoid
perfectly expressed the tension that surrounds emerging attitudes toward sex in Nigeria. Many people I spoke with suggested that the proper behavior was waiting until marriage, a comment followed by the caveat “but body no be wood!”—in other words, humans are not inanimate objects and desire eventually wins.

Fatimah always looked every bit the modern African woman. She always dressed very stylishly, multicolored scarves wrapped around her head, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and crisp black pantsuits with pinstripes or form-fitting dresses cut from traditional fabric.

“Before, if you’d seen two people kissing, it would be a jawbreaker,” she said. “It was something that you shouldn’t do. People would go, ‘Oh my god!’ But now it’s normal—kissing in public is nothing. People having sex with different partners is a very common thing. I have my circle of friends, and I know how we behave, and I know how we talk. For some people, it’s actually very cool for them to talk about having different kinds of partners. I’m sorry to say it, but over here, all the guys, like ninety percent of the guys I know, go casual with sex. They have many partners. It’s something that is common. It’s something that is normal here. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Nigeria, a guy having more than one partner is something that is OK.”

The official national health survey reports that 26 percent of Nigerian men in both rural and urban areas report having multiple or concurrent partnerships. That is not an insignificant segment of the population and does suggest that concurrency may indeed have cultural roots. I suspect the percentage might actually be higher, given people’s tendency to underreport their sexual activity when asked. In fact, some studies have found that when the populations are sorted by age and gender, the number of men in concurrent partnerships rises to 77 percent.

“What about for women?” I asked.

“For here, a girl should not have more than one partner whether married or not,” she said. “But now I’ve noticed the trend is changing. It’s becoming more common. It’s only normal for a human being to want to have sex, and if you’re not getting it with your man and you find yourself in a vulnerable position, you’ll end up doing it.”

Only 2 percent of Nigerian females report having multiple partners, which reflects the fact that Nigeria is still quite a conservative country when it comes to female sexual behavior. Unfortunately—as is the case in most of the rest of the world—a woman who does not conform to the societal ideal of proper female behavior is quickly and negatively labeled. Thus this statistic is somewhat misleading, for it captures only women who actively seek multiple partners. In reality, many women involved with men who are in multiple partnerships are also in concurrent relationships. Therefore it is probably safe to say that the percentage of women in concurrent relationships—even if not by choice; for example, to avoid extreme poverty—may be close to the percentage of men.

“I’ve had multiple—if you would call two multiple—partners. That’s the most I’ve had,” she continued. “I was single, and then my ex-boyfriend decided to come back. He was like, ‘OK. I’m back. I’m serious now. I’ve got my life straight. Let’s do this. Let’s get married.’ I was there because I thought this guy was serious about me and I don’t have anyone, so why not? Let me give it a try and see what will come out of it. And I actually liked him before, so I thought, OK, maybe I’ll feel something for him. The other guy—it was just a very rare thing. I met him and we started talking, chatting, meeting. We became very close. We’re still very close. So one thing led to another and we had sex and we just liked it. We just enjoyed it. But then the guy is from Imo State, and he’s obviously a Christian. He could not take me home, and I could not take him home. It could not happen. His parents are very strong Catholics. My parents are Muslims. I’m Hausa. He’s Igbo. He’s from the south. I’m from the north. We knew it was not going to go anywhere, but we really liked each other. We enjoyed sex. We enjoyed talking. We were good friends.”

Fatimah’s views reflect a newer, more cosmopolitan philosophy of sexual interaction in which, according to Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye and Richmond Tiemoko, in their introduction to the book
Human Sexuality in Africa
, “‘shared pleasure’ has gained prominence over ‘life creation’ as amply demonstrated by worldwide declines in fertility and a growing youth culture.” HIV/AIDS plays a complicated role in understandings of this new and emerging sexual behavior. On one hand, for those in Nigeria who believe such new attitudes to be wrong, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS demonstrates a pervasive social corruption and thus necessitates a return to traditional ways of sanctioned sexual interaction as delineated by religion or local cultures. For the more progressive, HIV/AIDS has made clear to Nigerians that a world in which everyone waits until marriage to have sex, and once married, has sex only with his or her spouse, is fantasy. It has forced a discussion that reveals we are all having more of the “wrong kind” of sex than we would have initially wanted to admit and therefore are all more exposed to the virus. At the same time, it requires that we modify our notions of sexual morality. The newer HIV/AIDS awareness programs acknowledge this much. No longer can people legitimately preach that we should simply return to abstaining from sex, as our religious deities and cultural norms demand, in order to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, because it is becoming more apparent that such abstinence never really existed. To do so would be to deny the evidence and the truism that “body no be wood.” In a nod to the fact that many people are clearly having sex, we now have public health recommendations like the ABCs of Sex, first pioneered in Uganda: Abstain, Be mutually faithful to one partner, and use Condoms if you can’t do the first two. The last directive represents a monumental shift in the way we in Nigeria, with all of our religious predilections, think. Though there is still a cultural norm that condemns all sex outside of marriage, traditional sexual mores now have to share the space and in some cases do battle with condoms, which can be seen as defining a new threshold between legitimate and illegitimate sex. Good sex involves condoms, and bad sex, the kind that spreads HIV/AIDS, does not.

“Do you use condoms?” I asked Fatimah.

“I practice safe sex. Inasmuch as I want to have sex and enjoy it, I really, really try so hard to practice safe sex, ‘cause I’ve seen someone die of HIV, and it’s not a good experience for my family, for her family, and obviously for the way that she died. I wouldn’t want to put anyone through that. Pregnancy is not something that I’m scared of, because there are many ways to get rid of a pregnancy. But there is no way to get rid of AIDS when you get it. I can be pregnant and my parents might be mad at me, but my parents will forgive me. God will forgive me, and I will live to raise my child. But if I have HIV, I will be hurting my parents, because people begin to judge you, and that’s what I don’t want. I would rather not have that shame and painful death in the future. I would just rather use the protection.”

It is telling that at one point in our conversation, Fatimah told me, “Even if my husband ends up sleeping around, I’ve already prepared my mind on how to control it. I don’t want a husband who sleeps around without protection. I’m the type that would pack my husband’s traveling case with condoms inside. I was telling my boyfriend that if he has to cheat on me—and he was like ‘No! No! No! Stop telling me this. You’re trying to put ideas in my head!’—I was like, ‘No! If you have it in you, you will do it. I’m just giving you my own little conditions.
Please, please, please
, safe sex whatever you do. And don’t bring it near me.’ I’d rather handle the situation at hand. I’d rather tell him these are my conditions if you have to do it. ’Cause I know, sometimes we’re all human.”

A majority of Nigerians know about condoms, even if we do not always use them correctly or consistently. Ninety percent of people in urban areas and 64 percent of people in rural areas have heard of male condoms. You can find them in hotels and gas stations, in drugstores and even roadside kiosks. Nigerians have used over 900 million condoms since 2002, and that number will only rise. They are here to stay, and they are changing the way we have sex, but the relationship we have with them is complex.

“For example,” a driver I know named Obong told me as we sat at a brukutu joint where he had taken me for an after-work chat, “now, if I see you with a girl, I will now tell you, ‘Remember your bulletproof.’ I will now tell you, ‘If you see a big river—like river Niger or Benue—instead of you to sleep with this girl without condom, so it is better for you to use block, put rope on it, hang it on your neck, and jump inside river.’” He wrapped an invisible rope around his neck and then pantomimed tossing a heavy cinder block over the edge into a river, followed, after a short pause, by his body.

Obong returned to our coarse wooden bench beneath a flamboyant tree with its red blossoms and fanned himself slowly with that morning’s folded newspaper. His shirt bore dark sweat stains where it folded into the creases of his body. He was not an especially large man, but he joked about his growing potbelly and how the extra weight made him sweat a little harder. Around us sprawled a chaotic convention of bars and brothels connected to illegally rigged extensions from the power grid. Men sat in groups, holding bottles of Guinness stout or Star beer as they conversed loudly with one another. Ignored and unhindered, roaming goats gnawed the sackcloth walls of temporary buildings and nuzzled the ground for bits of rubbish.

“To commit suicide is better than you to go on that girl without condom,” he said again. “Because you should remember what is happening in the town. If you should go enter like that, it means you use rope, tie your neck like that, jump in river. From that you understand where you’re going.”

BOOK: Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope
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