SOUTHERN AFRICA: Redefining masculinity in era of HIV/AIDS

These and related topics were discussed at a regional conference on men and HIV/AIDS held last week in Pretoria, South Africa.

At the three-day conference, organised by the Regional AIDS Initiative of Southern Africa of Voluntary Services Overseas (RAISA/VSO), activists and researchers from Southern and East Africa explored issues of male involvement in the pandemic.

Participants agreed that the concept and practice of masculinity needed to be reconstructed in ways that fit new socio-economic realities, from rural-urban migration to women's advancement, AIDS and unemployment. A new way of perceiving manhood would empower men to live their sexuality differently and to take active community responsibility.

Studies and surveys presented at the conference showed that men and boys across the spectrum of race and class feel disoriented by socio-cultural changes taking place in Southern Africa.

"Today's system has lessened men's role as decision-makers," said Douglas Kabanda, a social scientist with the Promotion of Traditional Medicine Association of South Africa.

The sense of displacement and irrelevance, coupled with unemployment and poverty, undermines male self-esteem. It leads to sexual behaviour that puts them and their partners at risk of HIV/AIDS, such as promiscuity, irregular or no condom use, violence and alcohol and drug abuse. 

Many, if not most men, do not engage in such behaviour. But they have little visibility in the predominant discourse of "men as drivers of the epidemic", analysts noted. 

Thus, negative male images channelled by the media and by society "are internalised by young men, turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Sebastian Matroos, of the Youth Skills Development Programme of the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria.

Matroos works with marginalised young men - unemployed, drug addicts, drag queens and male sex workers - in Pretoria townships. "There is more rejection than inclusion with the result that young men feel blamed for all social evils and withdraw," he explained.

The last decade has seen an explosion of interventions around HIV/AIDS centred on women and girls. There is greater understanding of the gender dimensions of the epidemic. But many interventions fail because they do no take into account the identity constructions of the men who interact with women and girls as partners, husbands, fathers and relatives.

Among these core elements are the notions of a biologically rooted male sex drive, males as risk-takers, sex as penetration, and masculinity as conquest and domination.

"Changing the relationship in masculinity and HIV risk is about far more than just changes in behaviour and technology, but rather abut transformation in the very identity of men," argued Graham Lindegger, of the School of Psychology at Natal University, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. 

Lindegger described the major findings of a study on how masculinity is constructed and maintained in South African schools and the effects of race and class on these constructions. The overall finding for all types of schools is, in the words of a principal, that "our boys seem to be lost".

On the positive side, several AIDS interventions in the region report some success in involving men in non-traditional ways. 

In Malawi and Zambia, two home-based AIDS care programmes in villages are succeeding in recruiting men as volunteer caregivers, which traditionally has been a woman's job.

Out of 600 caregivers in 52 villages, 200 are men, reported the Tovwirane AIDS Association, which works in Nsimba district in northern Malawi. 

"It is easier for a man to nurse and bathe a sick man or to offer condoms to men," said Stephen Gichuki, of Tovwirane. 

Churches help to identify volunteers. Often, said Gichuki, the man has cared for family members with AIDS, or the wife has died and no relatives offer to care for sick children, and the man steps in as caregiver.

The conference addressed often marginalised issues, such as male to male sex in prisons, risk behaviour among drug users, the sexuality of young black gay men in townships, male sex workers and male rape.

Men United is a South African group dedicated to breaking the silence about male rape, providing support and care for survivors and their families, and educating youth to speak out against all sexual abuse.

Founder Ivan Louw is himself a survivor. In 2001 he was hijacked, tortured and raped by three men near Pretoria. Narrowly escaping alive after being doused with petrol, Louw refused to keep silent and accept the stigma associated with male rape. 

"Police do not enforce stigma, society does, we do, and we can change this," said Louw. 

The emotional turmoil of a male rape survivor is compounded by the invisibility of the crime and the "macho" image prevalent in male education, Louw noted.