Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope (11 page)

His dramatic endorsement of condoms reflects a sentiment that is remarkably widespread in Nigeria. However, while awareness about condoms and their role in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS is high, condom usage is despairingly low. Only 28 percent of sexually active Nigerians have ever used a condom during intercourse and, as expected, there is more condom use in urban areas than in rural areas. The question, of course, is why—if people know about condoms and their role in preventing HIV/AIDS, why are they not using them?

There are a number of possible reasons why people don’t use condoms during sexual intercourse, many of which point to the anxiety generated by the sexual experience. First, both men and women the world over agree that sex feels better without condoms. A number of studies suggest that this is the number one reason why people do not use condoms when having sex. This is probably as true in the United States as it is in Nigeria and throughout Africa. Furthermore, condoms can be expensive for the average person in Nigeria, who hasn’t much disposable income. Condoms are also awkward. They are awkward to buy, even in the passionately liberal New York City, as they make a bold statement about one’s sexual activities. This may be more true in Nigeria, where sex is not discussed as openly as in other places. A number of people I spoke with said shopkeepers cast disapproving glances in their direction when they tried to buy condoms. Some received sermons about the sinful nature of premarital sex. Worse, some women were propositioned immediately upon leaving the store. Condoms also break the flow of romance and passion. One young man told me that he thought guys don’t like to use condoms because putting one on gives both parties the chance to consider how sinful sex is. Another young man told me about a university friend who avoided that awkward moment, when the girl might say no while he was putting on the condom, by donning one before going out for the night. Then there are the rumors, the most pervasive and destructive of which is that condoms often break.

“That’s just it,” Obong said when I asked him what he thought about the idea that condoms are unreliable. He then elaborated. “I was on this assignment in the south, and there was this girl. She was just making phone call when I passed. She was in a wheelchair,” he continued. “All this wheelchair that First Lady used to dash people that cannot walk
*
That’s the wheelchair she were using, rolling it with her hand. If you see her, how she fat and sit on the wheelchair, you think maybe she look like somebody who has a baby at hand. She’s a pretty girl even though she’s paralyzed—keep herself very neat, with long hair. Since she sit down in the wheelchair, I believe that people doesn’t rush to her like these other beautiful ones that pass. See, when you see a beautiful girl, it’s not only you that see her; many people see her, but those who have money, they go on her. I was not with enough money to spend for all those kind big girls in that area. I now look at her in that way that if I succeed, it will not cost me a lot. Since she agree, I now come to her place later in the evening, since I have that appointment with her. And I just buy her little provision, buy her something in the leather,” he said, referring to plastic grocery bags that, for reasons I have never understood, Nigerians call leather.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Well, I play with her. I was trying to touch her breasts, play—you know, in romantic way—for her to make a move so that she can allow me to do my aim of coming there. She enjoy me. And I fire her very well. Then I now realize that the taste of my coming to release was now not like when I start. I think you understand?”

I nodded. The condom was no longer in place.

“You know by that time you reach, at the point of release, it has no control at that time. Even if they point you gun, you think, you feel, let them shoot. But it’s only till when you come down from there you now realize that ‘Ah! So somebody is standing here with gun to shoot me!’ So I keep on till when I release. After I release, I now find out that the rope of the neck of the condom was on my prick. I now find out that the condom tear. I now ask her to check where is the remaining condom. I even put hand in her private part to look for it—whether the thing cut and go inside. Nothing. The condom tear and now fold as I’m seriously injecting. I now find that all my sperm has released inside her private part. I say, ‘Wow!’ I say, ‘Well, it has happened. It has happened. Since this thing has happened like this, any STD, surely if she has, I will take it. If it is STD—whether nah HIV or not—if God says I should take it, I will take it. If God says I will not take it, then OK.’” He shivered in remembrance of the moment.

“What did you do after the condom broke?” I asked.

He released a guarded smile and spoke slowly. “After that thing tear, I did not even care to use even the second condom I was having. I say, ‘After all, I already release into her.’ She let me know I’m fit. I’m a man; I fire her five times. I have to continue. I have to.”

What would you do at this moment? What would I do? Almost every sexually active person has experienced a broken condom. It causes an intense anxiety even as it generates a certain rush from exposure to the risk of pregnancy or disease. In my friend’s case, his feelings illustrate the larger dilemma and complexity of choices that people face in a time of changing moral standards and attitudes about sex. The belief that sex outside of marriage is wrong still holds sway even as we acknowledge that in practice we often ignore moral convention. Condoms are often seen as tools that enable sin or wrongdoing even if they do provide the benefit of protection against HIV/AIDS. But condoms also diminish sexual pleasure and are considered faulty. They raise the question: if certain kinds of sex are sinful and possible punishment in the form of HIV/AIDS awaits anyway, why mitigate the pleasure of the sin? Many people make that decision and forgo condoms despite the risks. For others the result is mental and emotional gymnastics that seek to take the sin out of sex and in so doing remove the threat of HIV as a possible consequence or punishment. The anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith describes one of the main ways this is done in Nigeria as moral partnering, the construction of sexual relationships in the language of monogamy and religion, in which relationship morality is associated with decreased risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS.

On one of my trips to Lagos, in 2007, I had a long chat with Dele, a university student who explained the idea very clearly: “So basically me, I believe that if you love somebody—as in when, I mean, you
love
somebody, you have to be faithful to the person for you to even love the person. I’m using myself now as an example. My ex-girlfriend—I was faithful to her to the core. I trusted her. I still trust her, you get? If you and your partner trust each other, I don’t think there’s going to be any room for fear of AIDS or any kind of sexual disease.”

He spoke loudly, but it was hard to hear him over the din outside. We sat by a lectern in a chapel in the compound of a mutual acquaintance. A carved wooden Jesus looked down at us from a simple wooden altar. It was election season then, and the politicking was in full swing. Along the streets, political posters covered nearly every available surface, and vans laden with speakers blasting the advertising jingles of the various candidates could be heard even inside. Dele was a physics major at the well-regarded University of Lagos. Freshly barbered with his hair brushed forward and smoothed to a black shine with sweet-smelling oil, wearing a pressed short-sleeve shirt, stylish jeans, and sneakers that were impossibly white, given the dusty streets outside, he looked more like a
GQ
model than a physics nerd. He made me incredibly self-conscious of my rumpled green tiedyed shirt and hair that I hadn’t had cut in months.

“Tell me about your girlfriend,” I said.

“She’s my ex-girlfriend now,” he said, shifting his weight in an uncomfortable orange plastic chair. “She’s the girl I’m still going to get married to, because I pray to God about it. I used to be seriously crazy about the girl. I’m still crazy about her. She was a very beautiful, reserved girl. She’s pretty.” His hands clutched each other, massaged each other as he sat otherwise still, causing a flutter in his sleeves. “Yeah. She has very good shape, very lovely shape. Yeah. Fit,” he said. “She was a virgin.” He made sure to point this out. “I just wanted to date her. I don’t know
sha
. Probably I just wanted to sleep with her or something when I first met her. She was really proving stubborn and everything. OK, I now started liking her
sha
. Then we started dating. She’s the best thing. She changed my life. Seriously, she changed my life. I started breaking up with a lot of girls. I broke up with like half of my girlfriends in the first two weeks.”

“Sorry,” I interrupted. “You said you broke up with half of your girlfriends?”

“Then, officially, I had eight girlfriends,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t have time again for girls like that. As in she had this one kind of impact on me. Then later, after about one month or so, I broke up with everybody apart from one other girl. I really liked that girl too. Then along the line, after one and a half years, I just had to choose one.”

How can you be faithful to more than one person? I didn’t understand it at first, but Dele’s story shows the mental and emotional constructs people create to cope with prohibitions against sex. In the realm of moral partnering, the terms
boyfriend
and
girlfriend
have positive moral connotations and are thus preferably used to describe relationships. A person can potentially have more than one moral partner at a time, as the start of one relationship might overlap with the end of another. Condom usage is not high in these relationships because it suggests the possibility of “one’s own or one’s partners’ infidelity.” Furthermore, I imagine that asking whether or not a partner has been tested for HIV would also imply that the person is or has been immoral. These factors lead to a mental picture of low risk of exposure to HIV that does not translate into reality.

The reality of the situation is that we all, when we make the decision to be sexually active, place ourselves at some risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. While some groups may be more at risk than others, the virus has the potential to infect all sexually active people. This should not be a cause for alarm and further restrictive grouping or meaningless prohibition of sexual activity. Rather, it should lead us to more open and accepting discussion about what Samaila, the former police officer, called “the greatest pleasures of life: love, sex.” By understanding how sex in Nigeria—indeed, throughout Africa and the world—influences and is influenced by the presence of HIV/AIDS, we can better enable ourselves to halt the epidemic’s progress.

O
n one of my trips to Nigeria, Doc and Samaila introduced me to a man named Ikenna, who ran a bar on the same military base where I happened to meet Elizabeth. He was small, with short arms protruding from the rolled sleeves of a blue, orange, and green dashiki. The fabric engulfed him so completely that his body wandered within it even as he sat perched on the edge of his plastic seat. I wiped my forehead and face repeatedly with a paper napkin that dissolved into bits that stuck to my sideburns and beard. He didn’t sweat, not a drop or even a shine on his forehead in the low lights as he sat across from me. He was extremely attentive, carefully monitoring and measuring the proximity of opportunity (a customer) or the velocity of danger (a drunk customer). He kept a steady watch over his bar girls, ready to berate them into skips and smiles as they suffered the indignities of heat, the buckets heavy with bottles of drink they carried, and the catcalls of intoxicated men. His eyes were pulled down into a tired, wary slant by a persistent frown. He had a potbelly that was visible when he stood momentarily to see what business, if any, needed attending to while we spoke.

That night, clouds intermittently obscured the moon, and in the low light, I watched soldiers milling about; even though drunk, they carefully avoided old divots filled with a collected mess of wash water and carelessly discarded drink. They shouted hearty greetings in the local Hausa language, “Sanu! Sanu!” or pidgin English, “How now!” with handshakes pulled into hugs, then released again into handshakes that ended in snaps. Colored lights played across the open courtyard and bounced to the rhythm of the music blasting through the loudspeakers: 2Face Idibia’s “African Queen”—“You are my African queen, the girl of my dreams”—was the popular song of the moment, and it seemed to play on repeat. Between the beer and Coke bottles, over the wood-smoked suya, peppered meat, which Ikenna and I jealously protected from persistent flies, we tossed some conversation starters back and forth—“Did you see the Super Eagles play? Why can’t our boys just play good football anymore?”—the neutral subjects you speak of when you know a person only so well and talk centers on common subjects: rainy season versus dry season, country calm versus city chaos.

“You’re welcome,” Ikenna said to me softly, without warmth, after the chitchat dissipated. I put my notebook on the table between us and he watched with interest as I leafed through to a blank page.

“So,” I said, bouncing my knees, “tell me about yourself.”

He settled into his seat for a moment, slid his traditional cap off his head into his lap, revealing a closely shaved head, hairline receded into a deep W, and sighed.

Ikenna was much older than he looked. Originally from the east, he was the son of a poor farmer. He was supposed to go to college, to lift his family from poverty with his education and perhaps a career in the civil service, business, or medicine, but his terrible exam results at the end of secondary school prevented that. Instead he got on a bus with his few possessions in a bag, his only guide the address of an older sister who had married a man from Kontangora, a small town near the military base, and began the journey north. His first job was managing bars, then he moved into brothels, and then after Sharia law became a problem for certain establishments, he moved into selling drinks on a military base. Twenty years later, he was still here, but at some point along the way, he had gotten HIV.