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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Virginity Testing and AIDS Prevention
| Panel |
31. Sexuality and Politics in Africa
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| Paper ID | 296 |
| Author(s) |
Wickstrom, Anette
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The aim of this project is to understand how people in rural KwaZulu Natal try to achieve health. The research area is a poor area severely affected by the AIDS epidemic. This study relies on ethnographic methods such as participant observation and informal interviews and has mainly focused on ten families and ten traditional healers. The results suggest that people engage in a way of thinking about health, causality, and prevention that is grounded not only in the individual, but also in the social interactions that make up everyday life. The assumption of many Zulu is that human agents actively bring about other’s misfortunes, rather than chance or infectious agents being the cause of sexual problems, illness, or death.
Understanding this alternative view of causality and the person has relevance to many areas in public health. AIDS prevention programs, for example, often gear their messages to individuals who are presumed to be relatively autonomous, perhaps missing their target audience who imagine causality and personal responsibility in different terms. An alternative way of addressing the AIDS epidemic that is more grounded in local conceptions of health, prevention and causality is local virginity testing, introduced among some Zulu in an anxious effort to handle the epidemic. By physically examining girls’ hymens to check if they are virgins, Zulu try to increase individual responsibility via collective pressure and support. By making virginity a matter of public record, the thinking goes, they can help girls delay their sexual debut and get men to respect the girls’ sexual integrity.
My study of virginity testing shows how cultural practices are being reinvented to meet new challenges, while retaining culture-specific modes of understanding. For Zulu girls virginity has always been a matter of pride, and historically the powers virgins are believed to embody have been important in fighting plagues and epidemics. Today modern phenomena such as certificates of virginity and HIV-negative blood tests are made appropriate to novel situations. In other words, in the face of the AIDS epidemic and large-scale efforts of the state and the West to handle this issue in Africa, the Zulu are fashioning their own response and public health efforts, grounded in and inspired by deep cultural convictions about the nature of persons, sociality, and causality.
However, in July 2007 the South African Parliament banned virginity testing for girls under 18 years old. This is an act in direct contravention of Thabo Mbeki’s appeal for an African Renaissance where traditional practices would be used to handle African problems. In contrast to virginity testing, male circumcision is not being banned in the Children’s Bill. Instead, it is stated that “every male child has the right to refuse circumcision”, thus giving boys an agency and autonomy not granted to teenage girls who are forbidden by the state from undergoing virginity testing. This tendency to try to create a good society through protecting the woman is described by Gayatri Spivak (1988:306) by means of the phrase “White men are saving brown women from brown men”.
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