← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Blond Knight
Thread ID: 18231 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-05-13
2005-05-13 21:23 | User Profile
But really folks, there is no such thing as race...
[url]http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/11/news/malawi.php[/url]
The International Herald Tribune
An African cleansing rite that now can kill By Sharon LaFraniere The New York Times THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2005
MCHINJI, Malawi In the hours after James Mbewe was laid to rest three years ago, in an unmarked grave not far from here, his 23-year-old wife, Fanny, neither mourned him nor accepted visits from sympathizers. Instead, she hid in his sister's hut, hoping that the rest of her in-laws would not find her.
But they hunted her down, she said, and insisted that if she refused to exorcise her dead husband's spirit, she would be blamed every time a villager died. So she put her two small children to bed and then forced herself to have sex with a cousin of her husband.
"I cried, remembering my husband," she said. "When he was finished, I went outside and washed myself because I was very afraid. I was so worried I would contract AIDS and die and leave my children to suffer."
In Malawi and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: Sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, to save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease.
Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.
Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason HIV has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans, killing 2.3 million last year alone. They are being prodded by leaders of the region's fledging women's rights movement, who contend that lack of control over their sex lives is a major reason why six in 10 of those infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women.
But change is coming slowly, village by village, hut by hut. In a region where belief in witchcraft is widespread and many women are taught from childhood not to challenge tribal leaders or the prerogatives of men, the fear of flouting tradition often outweighs even the fear of AIDS.
"It is very difficult to end something that was done for so long," said Monica Nsofu, a nurse and organizer against AIDS in the Monze district in southern Zambia, about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, south of the capital, Lusaka. "We learned this when we were born. People ask, 'Why should we change?"'
In Zambia, where one out of five adults is now infected with the virus, the National AIDS Council reported in 2000 that the traditional practice was very common. Since then, President Levy Mwanawasa has declared that forcing new widows into sex or marriage with their husband's relatives should be discouraged, and the nation's tribal chiefs have decided not to enforce either tradition, their spokesman said.
Still, a recent survey by Women and Law in Southern Africa found that in at least one-third of Zambia's provinces, sexual "cleansing" of widows persists, said Joyce MacMillan, who heads the organization's Zambian chapter. In some areas, the practice extends to men.
Even some Zambian volunteers who work to curb the spread of AIDS are reluctant to disavow the tradition. Paulina Bubala, a leader of a group of HIV-positive residents near Monze, counsels schoolchildren on the dangers of AIDS. But in an interview, she said she was ambivalent about whether new widows should purify themselves by having sex with male relatives.
Her husband died of what appeared to be AIDS-related symptoms in 1996. Soon after the funeral, both Bubala and her husband's second wife covered themselves in mud for three days. Then they each bathed, stripped naked with their dead husband's nephew and rubbed their bodies against his.
Weeks later, she said, the village headman told them this cleansing ritual would not suffice. Even the stools they sat on would be considered unclean, he warned, unless they had sex with the nephew.
"We felt humiliated," Bubala said, "but there was nothing we could do to resist, because we wanted to be clean in the land of the headman."
The nephew died last year. Bubala said the cause was hunger, not AIDS. But her husband's second wife now suffers symptoms of AIDS and rarely leaves her hut. Bubala herself discovered she was infected in 2000.
But even the risk of disease does not dent Bubala's belief in the need for the ritual's protective powers. "There is no way we are going to stop this practice," she said, "because we have seen a lot of men and women who have gone mad" after spouses died.
Nsofu, the Catholic nurse and AIDS fighter, argues that it is less important to convince women like Bubala than to convince the headmen and tribal leaders who are the custodians of tradition and gatekeepers to change.
Nsofu said she had suggested to tribal leaders that sexual cleansing most likely sprang, not from fears about the vengeance of spirits, but from the lust of men who coveted their relatives' wives.
Like their counterparts in Zambia, Malawi's health authorities have spoken out against forcing widows into sex or marriage. But in the village of Ndanga, about 90 minutes from the nation's largest city, Blantyre, many remain unconvinced.
Evance Joseph Fundi, Ndanga's 40-year-old headman, is courteous, quiet-spoken and a firm believer in upholding the tradition. While some widows sleep with male relatives, he said, others ask him to summon one of the several appointed village cleansers.
In the native language of Chewa, those men are known as fisis or hyenas because they are supposed to operate in stealth and at night.
Fundi said one of them died recently, probably of AIDS. Still, he said with a charming smile, "We can not abandon this because it has been for generations."
At the traditional family council after James Mbewe was killed in a truck accident in August 2002, Fanny Mbewe's mother and brothers objected to a cleanser, saying the risk of AIDS was too great. But Mbewe's in-laws insisted, she said. If a villager so much as dreamed of her husband, they told her, the family would be blamed for allowing his spirit to haunt their community, on the Malawi-Zambia border.
Her husband's cousin, to whom she refers only as Loimbani, showed up at her hut at nine o'clock at night after the burial.
"I was hiding my private parts," she said, in an interview in the office of Women's Voice, a Malawian human rights group. "You want to have a liking for a man to have sex, not to have someone force you.
"But I had no choice, knowing the whole village was against me."
Loimbani, she said, was blasé. "He said: 'Why are you running away? You know this is our culture. If I want, I could even make you my second wife."'
He did not take her as a wife. He left her with only the fear that she will die of AIDS and that her children, now 8 and 10, will become orphans. She said she was too fearful to take an HIV test.
"I wish such things would change," she said.
IHT Copyright é 2005 The International Herald Tribune | [url]www.iht.com[/url]
2005-05-13 22:24 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Blond Knight][QUOTE] "I cried, remembering my husband," she said. "When he was finished, I went outside and washed myself because I was very afraid. I was so worried I would contract AIDS and die and leave my children to suffer." [/QUOTE] This is so horrible. It sure explains a lot.