AIDS and religious practice in Africa 9789004164000, 9789047442691

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction: Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and AIDS in Africa (Felicitas Becker & P. Wenzel Geissler, page 1)
NEW DEPARTURES IN CHRISTIAN CONGREGATIONS OF LONG STANDING
The Rise of Occult Powers, AIDS and the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda (Heike Behrend, page 29)
Christian Salvation and Luo Tradition: Arguments of Faith in a Time of Death in Western Kenya (Ruth Prince, page 49)
The New Wives of Christ: Paradoxes and Potentials in the Remaking of Widow Lives in Uganda (Catrine Christiansen, page 85)
CONVERGENCES AND CONTRASTS IN MUSLIMS' RESPONSES
AIDS and the Power of God: Narratives of Decline and Coping Strategies in Zanzibar (Nadine Beckmann, page 119)
Competing Explanations and Treatment Choices: Muslims, AIDS and ARVs in Tanzania (Felicitas Becker, page 155)
'Muslims Have Instructions': HIV/AIDS, Modernity and Islamic Religious Education in Kisumu, Kenya (Jonas Svensson, page 189)
PENTECOSTAL CONGREGATIONS BETWEEN FAITH HEALING AND CONDEMNATION
'Keeping Up Appearances': Sex and Religion amongst University Students in Uganda (Jo Sadgrove, page 223)
Healing the Wounds of Modernity: Salvation, Community and Care in a Neo-Pentecostal Church in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (Hansjörg Dilger, page 255)
Gloves in Times of AIDS: Pentecostalism, Hair and Social Distancing in Botswana (Rijk van Dijk, page 283)
ANTI-RETROVIRAL TREATMENT: FAILURES AND RESPONSES
Leprosy of a Deadlier Kind: Christian Conceptions of AIDS in the South African Lowveld (Isak Niehaus, page 309)
Subjects of Counselling: Religion, HIV/AIDS and the Management of Everyday Life in South Africa (Marian Burchardt, page 333)
Therapeutic Evangelism-Confessional Technologies, Antiretrovirals and Biospiritual Transformation in the Fight against AIDS in West Africa (Vinh-Kim Nguyen, page 359)
Conclusion (John Lonsdale, page 379)
Notes on Contributors (page 385)
Index (page 389)

Citation preview

Aids and Religious Practice in Africa

Studies of Religion in Africa Supplements to the Journal of Religion in Africa

Edited by

Paul Gifford School of Oriental and African Studies, London

VOLUME 36

Aids and Religious Practice in Africa Edited by

Felicitas Becker and P. Wenzel Geissler

S ‘ 46

BRILL LEIDEN « BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: Young woman praying during a Legio Maria healing ritual, western Kenya. Photograph by Wenzel Geissler, 2001.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data AIDS and religious practice in Africa / edited by Felicitas Becker and Wenzel Geissler.

p. ; cm. — (Studies of religion in Africa, ISSN 0169-9814 ; 36) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16400-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. AIDS (Disease)—Africa— Religious aspects. I. Becker, Felicitas, 1971- I. Geissler, Wenzel. III. ‘Vitle. IV. Series: Studies on religion in Africa ; 36. [DNLM: 1. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome—Africa. 2. Religion and Medicine—Africa. WC 503.7 A2868 2009] RA643.86.A35A343 2009 362.196°97920096—de22 2008049236

ISSN 0169-9814 ISBN 978 90 04 16400 0 Copyright 2009 by Koninkliyke Brill NV, Leiden, ‘Uhe Netherlands. Koninklyke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Koninklyke Brill NV has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklyke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

CONTENTS Introduction: Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and AIDS in Africa wo eecececceceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees | Felicitas Becker G PR Wenzel Geissler

NEW DEPARTURES IN CHRISTIAN CONGREGATIONS OF LONG STANDING The Rise of Occult Powers, AIDS and the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda 0... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee = 29 Heike Behrend

Christian Salvation and Luo ‘Tradition: Arguments of Faith

ina lime of Death in Western Kenya... eee 49

Ruth Prince

The New Wives of Christ: Paradoxes and Potentials in the

Remaking of Widow Lives in Uganda ou... eee 85 Catrine Christiansen

CONVERGENCES AND CONTRASTS IN MUSLIMS’ RESPONSES AIDS and the Power of God: Narratives of Decline and Coping Strategies 1n Zanzibar .o..eeeeeeeeeeeessssttttteteteeeereeee = LILY Nadine Beckmann

Competing Explanations and ‘Treatment Choices: Muslims, AIDS and ARVs in ‘Tanzania oo eesessssseeeeetettteetertrterreeee, = LOD felicitas Becker

‘Muslims Have Instructions’: HIV/AIDS, Modernity and

Islamic Religious Education in Kisumu, Kenya .......... 189 Jonas Svensson

v1 CONTENTS PENTECOSTAL CONGREGATIONS BETWEEN FAITH HEALING AND CONDEMNATION ‘Keeping Up Appearances’: Sex and Religion amongst University Students in Uganda wocssccccccceceeteeeeeeeeeeeeeee 223 Jo Sadgrove

Healing the Wounds of Modernity: Salvation, Community and Care in a Neo-Pentecostal Church in Dar Es Salaam, TanZania oieeeesssssssssccccecccccceccceccccccceeecceeeeeeeeeeeeeeceesesseesetseeestsses DOO

Hansjorg Dilger

Gloves in ‘Times of AIDS: Pentecostalism, Hair and Social Distancing in Botswana .........eeeeeeeeesssseeenreeeeeeeeeeeeeesstsststsstteteee, 209

Ryk van Dyk

ANTI-RETROVIRAL ‘TREATMENT: FAILURES AND RESPONSES

Leprosy of a Deadlier Kind: Christian Conceptions of AIDS in the South African Lowveld oe... eecceeeeeeeeeeeesssssstetteeeee, OO Isak Niehaus

Subjects of Counselling: Religion, HIV/AIDS and the

Management of Everyday Life in South Africa we. = 333 Manan Burchardt

Therapeutic Evangelism—Confessional ‘Technologies, Antiretrovirals and Biospiritual ‘Transformation in the Fight against AIDS in West Africa... eeeeeceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeseeeee DOO Vinh-kim Neuyen CONCLUSION vee eeeeeeeeessssssneeeeeeeeeeeecesesssssssssstteesessssssssssssseee I/O

John Lonsdale Notes On Contributors oo. ecccccccccececeeeeceeeeeeeeeeeesesesssetsteesteeses DOO Index eee eeeesesssneceeeeeeeesssseeeeeeeecessssssaeeeeessessssssseeeesessssssseees OOD

INTRODUCTION: SEARCHING FOR PATHWAYS IN A LANDSCAPE OF DEATH: RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA Felicitas Becker & P. Wenzel Geissler AIDS, Africa and ‘religion’

Nobody would deny that religious practice 1s important in confronting AIDS in Africa, but the attention given to religion in the context of the AIDS crisis has maintained a fairly narrow focus. The role of religious organisations in providing care and support for sufferers is well known (e.g., Islamic Medical Association of Uganda 1998; Benn 2000).

It has recently been boosted by the channelling of much of the USA‘s government’s substantial funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and care through ‘Faith-Based Organizations’ (BOs), and these organisations, in turn, have multiplied and expanded their work. Religious groupings are thus instrumental in, instrumentalised by, and arguably instrumentalising the organisation of HIV-related interventions. It is also well known that on other occasions, religious dogma has proved antithetical to the struggle against the epidemic, for example in the cases of some forms of evangelical fundamentalism and the official line of the Catholic Church regarding condoms to prevent HIV infection. Both these aspects—the role of religious institutions in care, and of religious ideas in negotiating appropriate preventative measures—will also be addressed in this volume. The focus of this book, though, lies elsewhere: on the way people rely on shared religious practice and notions and on personal religious commitments in order to conceptualise, understand and thereby to act upon the epidemic, and on the suffering and loss that it brings about, so as to pursue life and creativity

in spite of it. he aim is not to supplant, but to add to the alreadyexplored perspectives. In particular, tracing the involvement of religious practices and commitments in dealing with AIDS helps understand (and hopefully constructively address) those religious reactions that at first appear unhelpful to experts focusing on treatment and prevention. ‘The studies presented here encompass East and Southern Africa as well as one West African case, with a bias towards East Africa. ‘lo some extent, this bias reflects the research orientation, and hence networks,

2 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

of the editors (rather than any preference on their part). But it also reflects the fact that research on the ramifications of the AIDS crisis has been going on for longer where this crisis 1s older and most acute. Given Africa’s diversity, even continental coverage would never have been achievable, and it is to be hoped that West Africa does not have to suffer an AIDS crisis of the same proportions as the South or the East of the continent to encourage interest in the issue. In the following pages, we discuss some of the issues that connect the otherwise diverse contributions. We aim to highlight some reasons why the interaction between AIDS and religious practice 1s important, and to point out directions for further research. Firstly, though, we have to clear the ground a bit by explaining our use of the notion of religion and its aspects, religious practice, thought and commitment. ‘That done, we examine an apparent turn towards restrictive application of religious dogma that connects religious debates about AIDS with broader trends of religious change. Next, we discuss the interaction of religion and AIDS in the context of Africa’s ever-deferred hopes for progress and modernity. ‘This leads on to questioning the part of politics in this interaction. Lastly, we give space to the implications of the ongoing ‘roll-out’ of anti-retroviral drugs: not only because it changes many of the equations discussed here, inasmuch as they were observed before wider access to antiretroviral medication, but also because it suggests new directions for research. Refractions of the notion ‘religion’

Given the increasing salience of religion as a motive, or pretext, for action (as well as the refusal to act) in global public discourse, and the closeness of HIV/AIDS to suffering and death (phenomena which are readily defined as a preserve of religious specialists even in the most secularised societies) the importance of religion appears obvious. But what sort of religion? The authors assembled in this volume are not interested primarily in the role of professional religious experts, and do not limit themselves to organised religious practice. ‘hus although the contributions focus on groups that either explicitly or indirectly draw

on the teachings of either Islam or Christianity, they set out from a notion of religious commitment and practice as part of everyday life. As such faith is inevitably informed by the intellectual-cum-social-cumpolitical currents mixing in Africa today: local religious heritages, world

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 3 religions, notions of science and progress, the biomedical discourse of

AIDS campaigns and the authority of the state that endorses them, and, not least, the experience of material deprivation which the destructuring and criminalisation of African nations and economies have brought about (see, e.g., Gifford 1994; Maxwell 1998; Meyer 1999; Sanders 2001). ‘The interaction between religion and AIDS, in other words, 1s bound up with the wider experience of suffering within which the epidemic is set, and with other non-religious narratives and practices through which people address the experience of HIV/AIDS. On such ‘popular epidemiologies’ there is by now an important body of literature (see Setel 1999: 183). It tells us that people and communities affected by the virus range far and wide in their search for explanations, calling upon their knowledge of politics, commerce and international relations as well as diverse views of health and healing. In these public searches for meaning, AIDS can as well become a divine punishment, as it can turn into witchcraft (e.g, Yamba 1997), or into biological warfare or a plot hatched by authoritarian governments, single super powers and international donors (e.g., Schoepf 1995; Hooper 1999; Pickle et al. 2002; for an overview, see Iliffe 2006: 80). ‘These insights have provided many leads for the contributions to this volume. Nevertheless, the studies presented below indicate that it would be misleading to subsume the diversity of such non-scientific explanatory narratives as now abound in Africa under a vastly broadened concept of ‘religion’. For instance, Ells & ‘ler Haar have recently categorised discourses about anything invisible as ‘religious’, and ascribed to African cultures a propensity to focus explanations for calamities as well as for power and success on such invisible forces (2004). ‘Their account refocuses attention on the salience of notions of the occult in Africa’s politics and on the relevance of religious practice to addressing social anomie. Still, subsuming the doubts and speculations that haunt African public debates and politics under an extended notion of ‘religion’ risks

reiterating old debates about the ‘rationality’ of African actors and evoking dated cultural stereotypes. With regard to the subject in this collection, the result would be to lump together all narratives outside the narrowly defined scientific truth about AIDS as ‘religion’. ‘This, in turn, would provoke the question why faith in sclence—which after all is equally invisible to all but few people—should not be classified as religion, too. In effect, 1t would give simultaneously too little importance

4 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER and too much meaning to economic anxiety and political rumours, and misrepresent the religious.

The present collection suggests that religious commitments and practices, In contrast to urban myths, political rumours and trust in scientific authority, are not primarily about ‘the invisible’. Rather, they are about the everyday, tangible, material world and its inherent forces, about the humans and things that make up one’s world and constitute life, and about the relationship between this realm and that of divinity.

It is to these forces and this relationship, within, rather than outside, everyday life, that many of the contributors to this volume attend: to the ways in which people in Africa navigate a way through landscapes which some of them describe as ‘dying’, but which nevertheless are the only ones available to them, and the ones that sustain their lives and hopes. The variety of phenomena discussed here highlights not only the absence of a comprehensive definition of ‘religion’, but also the problematic nature of this concept in African contexts. Paul Landau (1999) has argued that the notion of ‘African ‘Traditional Religion’ in itself 1s intricately connected to missionaries’ efforts to identify and manipulate what they had made out to be their indigenous ‘competition’, and that the appropriation of Christian concepts in Africa has long born traces of the initial relationship between Christian masters and ‘pagan’ servants. In the present context, it 1s typically Africans who evoke notions of religion, its deficiencies or absence, to make points about health and society. Still, 1t 1s well to keep in mind that the religions people argue

about or appeal to are something negotiated and constructed among unequal relationships, rather than found in place. It helps understand the implicitly political nature of the Muslim reformists discussed by Becker, Beckmann and Svensson, as well as the South African Zionists and Pentecostals observed by Niehaus and Burchardt. Prince’s argument about the co-construction of born again Protestantism and neo‘Traditionalism in Kenya has a similar thrust. Religious arguments, in this context, make reference not only to the spiritual, but, as anthropologists

have shown many times over, to history and the political-economic process (e.g. Gomaroff & Comaroff 1991). In fact, AIDS prevention efforts suggest other long-term continuities

than those traced by Landau, between the activities of missionaries and those of AIDS experts. Much as missionaries defined (African) ‘religion’ as either aligned with or opposed to their ultimate aim of saving souls, contemporary AIDS institutions engage with (and thereby

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 5 define) ‘religion’ as an order of meaning and of social relations, which can either facilitate or obstruct their efforts to change ideas and practices and save lives. This continuity 1s evident also in the way AIDS education focuses on and problematises women. Similar to the missionaries’ concerns (later taken up by colonial government) with ‘hberating’ African women by improving their hygiene and childcare skills and recreating them as modern, Christian wives (see e.g. Vaughan 1992; Hunt 1999; Ferguson 1999, Mutongi 2007), today, again, women’s behaviour is seen as crucial to stemming the tide of AIDS. ‘This time, women are expected to learn a version of late-Huropean-modern female assertiveness in gender relations (if often in a Christian guise), rather than the housewifeliness

of mission modernity. he papers presented here give some insights into why such ‘life skills’ in gender relations and sexual practice are often hard to apply. Besides the well-known facts of economic and personal dependency, there are things at stake in which women may be particularly invested or which affect them more: for example, broader

Luo understandings of growth (Prince) or Muslim notions of female virtue (Beckmann, Svensson). At the same time, as Christiansen’s chapter shows, some women actively embrace religious forms to remodel their

womanhood in the days of AIDS. Despite these doubts about the value of ‘religion’ as analytical category, and especially so in the African context, we have retained the term, if used sparingly, due to its organising capacity. Irrespective of our difficulties in coming a lasting and transferable definition of religion, many people in Africa (as elsewhere) attribute great importance to that which it is used to describe and may apply it to core concerns in their lives. It is ultimately due to the evocative quality of the term as well as its sheer convenience, rather than the analytical usefulness of the concept, that we can use religion as a useful way to approach understandings of and ways of confronting AIDS. AIDS and the prescriptwe turn in religious life

In medical and policy debates about HIV/AIDS, the place of religion is sometimes deceptively clear: the preserve of religious experts is to preach and oversee behavioural change, if not only for biomedical reasons. Religious commitments, in this view, are above all a source of restrictions, and ideally a force to restore order in the face of (primarily

6 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER sexual and gendered) confusion. Yet, whether religious restrictions of personal freedom will actually reduce the risk of acquiring AIDS is an open question. With many other studies, several contributions to this volume underline that the famous ABC (‘Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom) formula for HIV prevention, with its emphasis on ‘choices’, barely scrapes the surface of the way people experience, practise and

think about sex. Risky behaviour can arise from lack of choice and imbalanced power relations, but also from the fact that the concept of viral infection may be alien, or less important than ritual obligations to engage in bodily intercourse. People may give religiously sanctioned relations precedence over concerns with the individual body and life-

expectancy, and prioritise the wish to have children and be part of a larger process of life. Religiously motivated self-restraint 1s one factor among many social commitments operative here.

Religious rules can even be a risk factor in the context of AIDS. The official line of Catholic Church is to condemn the use of condoms, still the only effective way of avoiding infection outside exclusive

relationships with an HIV-negative partner. Likewise, the evangelical Protestant lobby that has recently shaped much American AIDS policy rejects condoms as well as extra-marital sexual intercourse. It has succeeded in tying the recent ‘Presidential’ funds for antiretroviral drugs, a substantial contribution, in material terms, to global health intervention and the fight against AIDS, to the condition that abstinence and faithfulness, rather than condoms, are advocated for HIV prevention, and to a preferential use of BOs for HIV-prevention efforts. At the

inter-personal level, different studies of gender, HIV and religion have shown that born-again Christianity can ‘empower’ women to protect themselves against unwanted sex and HIV infection (Cattell 1992; Ogden 1996; see also the chapters by Christiansen and Prince), although it has also been suggested that Pentecostalism might subdue women under renewed patriarchal control and thereby expose them to unwanted and unprotected sex (Mate 2002). It is no coincidence that many of the chapters examine new, radical religious movements. Pentecostalism, Revivalism, neo-lraditionalism and Muslim reformism are all characterised by their demand for exclusive commitment and for a fundamentally restructured everyday life, often focusing on mundane practices. They present different instances of the growing importance of religious prescriptions in contemporary Africa as much as many other parts of the world. The intensification of the restrictiveness, even aggressiveness, of religious injunctions that

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 7 the present contributions suggest (Becker, Behrend, van Dik, Prince, Svensson) presents an explanatory problem. In spite of initial appearances, the causal relationship between it and the experience of AIDS is not obvious. Has the trauma of AIDS-related suffering triggered a tightening of religious restrictions, as part of avoidance strategies that can border on panic, or have religious groups already committed to the tightening of dogmatic stances been able to seize the metaphor of AIDS to promote their interpretation of religious morality and practice, as well as the influence of their organisations? ‘The stress, fear and misery associated with AIDS provide an obvious reason for the further enforcement of restrictive ‘avoidance strategies’.

It is fair to assume that the AIDS-induced sense of crisis and rupture in both individual lives and the fabric of sociality encourages exclusionary actions, as among the Catholic witch-hunters observed by Behrend, stark personal choices, as among Christiansen’s young Saved widows, and restrictive interpretations of religious practice, as among Becker’s reformist Muslims and Prince’s traditionalists. Yet, such processes of

exclusion are likely to be ambiguous as the passage from rhetorical commitment to everyday practice is more complex than explicit statements of it generally allow. The tensions between Pentecostal commitment, personal practices and social commitments are well illustrated by Sadgrove’s chapter on Ugandan university students, and van Diyk’s on Ghanaian Pentecostal hairdressers; while the former, despite strong religious commitment, do not always follow their prescriptions, the latter emphasise religiously motivated separations overlapping with class difference, and draw selectively upon the religious obligation to care for others. The overall increasing rigidity of religious notions, or assertiveness of their proponents, invites speculation on the ‘revenge of God’ (see Kepel 1993), not on Africa, but on the relativist anthropologist. ‘The global rise of religious fundamentalisms in all three monotheist religions—and, partly in response, in ‘traditional’ religion—has baffled western observers who took the restriction of religious commitment to a personal and private sphere as part and parcel of the inevitable diffusion of modernity, in Africa as elsewhere. Instead, the evidence increasingly supports the assertion that rigid distinctions between believers and unbelievers, the saved and the rest, are a characteristic aspect of what Latour described as the ‘modern constitution’ (1993).

In Africa, these radical dichotomous patterns were promoted, in particular, by Christianity. While the early expansion of Islam in Africa

8 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER initially produced relatively open forms of Islamic practice, Christian influences introduced with colonial mission have since their inception considered their project as one of opposition and struggle—against pagan tradition, immorality and the past—and they have introduced Manichaean morality and according behavioural prescriptions, enforced by racial and economic segregation, into the African religious imagination. It 1s thus clear that exclusivity and restrictiveness, prescriptions and prohibitions, have been observable well before AIDS, and arguably even before the recent rise of rigid, prescriptive religious discourses. While restrictiveness clearly is an important characteristic of faithbased responses to AIDS, it need not be overemphasised to the expense of other dimensions of religious experience. Some earlier anthropological studies of AIDS in Africa drew heavily upon academic concepts like ‘taboo’ to argue that indigenous religious explanations attributed AIDS-related death to rule-infringements (see for an overview Iliffe 2006: 91-92). But besides prohibitions and separations operate the unifying and merging dimensions of religious commitment and practice;

the double bond that religious experience and practice has with both order and disorder. As Victor ‘Turner, among others, has shown, religious commitment and engagement with divinity involves both rules of restraint and separation, e.g. abstinence in customary ritual or Christian and Muslim conduct, and commitment to the opposite, communitas and

transgression of boundaries. ‘his may be reflected in rituals of communion such as the emphasis on prayer among reformist Muslims that feature in Becker and Svensson’s accounts or the liturgical practices of charismatic churches like Sadgrove’s and Dilger’s Pentecostals. It also occurs in the liminal states that are involved in possession by the Holy Ghost (Dilger, Sadgrove, Behrend) or ancestral spirits (Prince), or in prescribed ritual (or marital) sexual intercourse, as the rituals of widow inheritance, discussed by Christiansen and Prince, illustrate. Rather than providing prescriptions and distinctions, religious practices—initiation rites as much as the Christian Eucharist or Muslim Salat—also potentially imply the creative dissolution of boundaries and the transformative merging of ordered separations, from which life-force is released. ‘Vhus understood, religion allows the possibility of

uncertainty and surprising event, rather than erasing doubts; it opens up pathways rather than setting closed frames, ‘starting points and not finalities’, in the terms of Susan Whyte’s pragmatist anthropology (1997: 20). Most of the papers below show that religious debates in

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 9 contemporary African everyday life do not succeed in imposing a closed dogmatic order or fixed explanatory frames, despite concerted efforts by some to deploy religion to such effect. Instead, religious knowledge and practices open up fora to negotiate the relations between creative order and amorphousness, between collective rules and particular desires, and

between life and death. While the struggles of East African widows between Christian and ‘traditional’ religious and other commitments show this tension most clearly, similar tensions are at play between traditional and reformist Muslims in Becker’s chapter. AIDS, religious change, and the long-term slide towards Africa’s ‘abjection’

The focus on AIDS as central event and narrative which is characteristic of much literature on the epidemic does not necessarily reflect Africans’ experience. What biomedically appears to be AIDS 1s usually discussed in relation to wider social ills rather than to an immunological imaginary, and these critical discussions insert themselves into narra-

tives about destruction, confusion and loss, which have been told in eastern Africa since the early years of the last century (see, e.g, Cohen & Odhiambo 1989). ‘This longer historical trajectory is what lends force and credibility to the South African president ‘Thabo Mbeki’s seemingly

irrational argument concerning the origins of HIV beyond the narrow confines of virology (see Fassin 2007). Epidemics, of rinderpest and sleeping sickness, measles and influenza, have featured in these narratives, as have ‘outbreaks’ of religious fervour—sometimes one related to the other (e.g., Ogot 1963: 255-7; Ranger 1992a). What Prince’s Kenyans call ‘the death of today’—the AIDS-related sickness and death of the past decade—1s widely regarded

as but the most recent consequence of longer processes of change that have affected the constitution of sociality itself. ‘The nostalgia and laments about loss and anomie that dominate in the views of Niehaus’s rural South African informants, as well as in contemporary Zanzibar and western Kenyan public oratory, are a recurrent theme in twentiethcentury Africa (see, e.g., Prince 2006; Ferguson 1999). ‘The words of Achebe/Yeats, ‘things fall apart’, which generations of East Africans have read in school, make as much sense (though possibly referring to different ‘things’) to young people today as they did to their grandfathers. This contrasts with the presentism of research funders, public health experts, policymakers and the mass media, who may ignore the fact

10 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

that AIDS is but one of the scourges that have befallen Africa over the past century. Nevertheless, AIDS 1s a scourge that could be said to strike at the very core of religious practice. Anthropologists have observed the ‘sacred’ status of bodily intercourse and gendered relations of humans as well as non-human entities (e.g. Heald 1999; Sanders 2002) in Africa. Others

have noted religious concern with generation (e.g. Lienhard 1961; Turner 1967) in many African societies. While it would be reductionist to associate African religious practice with ‘fertility’, narrowly focusing on biological understandings of reproduction, most scholars would agree

that acts of gendered complementation, and of creative unions have a particular place in non-Christian (and, arguably, also Christian and Muslim) forms of religious imagination and practice in Africa. Already the destructive dimensions of colonial occupation and of economic exploitation and neglect, which produced profound changes in kinship and livelihood and challenged older notions of ‘growth’, therefore went to the heart of religious commitment. Bans on polygamy and widow inheritance, restrictions on sexuality and fertility, as well as loss of

land and livelihood and shrinking cattle and pasture, malnutrition and new infections, all challenged prevailing ways of engendering human growth through ritual practices. After all this, it 1s little surprising if AIDS, conceived of as final cessation of growth after the bodily union turned into a source of death rather than renewal, appears to complete secular processes that have eroded both African modes of living and engendering life, and the attendant religious or ritual forms. While AIDS is not perceived as a radically new experience, neither are the religious engagements with AIDS. The experience of this illness is embedded both with much older debates among Africans on the ways their lives have been changing, and with the experience of these changes themselves. ‘These changes have often been forceful and destructive, and ambiguous even during the short period of the colonial and post-colonial ‘the developmental state’ between the 1940s and 80s; during the past two decades of neoliberalisation and economic and political crisis—that 1s in most living people’s memory—they have been overwhelmingly negative. ‘The encounter between religious practice and AIDS, then, is part of Africans’ long-standing struggle with adversity, assault and domination. ‘Thus, both the turn towards faith healing, with its processual, euphoric

and trance-like qualities, and the re-examination of behavioural rules and scriptural teachings in the context of AIDS draw on long-standing

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA I] notions and practices. Prophecy and possession have been involved in confronting colonial rule and in living with it, inspiring movements such as langanyika’s Maji Maji, Kenyan Mumbo or Central Africa’s Watchtower (Iliffe 1979; Wipper 1978; Fields 1985). Spirit possession has provided spaces of action for Muslim women in Africa probably for centuries (Boddy 1989; Makris 1996). Clashes between religiously founded rules of differing derivations pre-date colonialism in the case of Islam; they have been a salient feature of mission Christianity for the whole of its existence (Pels 1999). AIDS, science, and deferred modernity

Coping with AIDS, then, is but the most recent in a long line of struggles that people in Africa have lived through in the second half of the twentieth century. The foreclosure of ways for individuals and communities to grow—in terms of kinship and personal advancement—already motivated resistance to colonial rule, and it has recurred in a multitude of guises since (Lonsdale). Economic turnarounds beyond

the control of Africans, and equally uncontrollable, if more locally produced, political uncertainty, have translated into accumulating strictures and hardship. Africa has experienced a long, slow decline from the optimism of the mid-twentieth century age of ‘development’, and its people are struggling to make sense of this predicament—Africa’s current ‘abjection’ (Ferguson 1999)—which seems to aflect everything,

from individual bodies and lives to the wider social, economic and political world.

The papers in this volume again and again show that to the minds of many people living through it, the AIDS epidemic 1s not a clearly delineated specific event, but a part or a stage in a long procession of misfortunes. ‘hus they also suggest that it is part of the attraction of faith-based explanations of HIV/AIDS that they resemble the problems Africans face in being wide-ranging and comprehensive. ‘They do not promise only to help people deal with AIDS, but offer explanations also of other social ills, and suggest entire ways of life. Religious debates in the times of AIDS therefore also contain a critical evaluation of the past century of change, and they are always discussions about the ‘problem of modernity’ and its instantiations, such as the state and its laws, capitalism and economic differentiation, and science and medicine.

12 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

Regarding the relevance of the notion of modernity for people in Africa, the papers highlight the extent to which it has become an ‘emic’ term; part of the way people in Africa think about their predicament. For example, Pentecostals in Dar es Salaam (Dilger) as well as Muslims in Mainland ‘Tanzania and Zanzibar (Becker, Beckmann) all grapple with the notion in different ways. Clearly, the meanings of modernity are slippery and its evaluation is ambiguous; it may be an unfulfilled promise (Becker) or an accomplished process of alienation (Beckmann).

One way of acknowledging this diversity 1s by including everything contemporaneous with the present into the purview of ‘modernity’. ‘This makes witch burnings and criminal states into ‘African modernities’ (e.g. Comaroff & Comaroff 1993). James Ferguson, however, has warned that this inflationary use of modernity may be politically counterproductive, contribute to the dissolution of the modern project, and that it is likely to be incomprehensible, indeed offensive, to African citizens for whom ‘modernity’ has quite clear meanings such as effective health care, democratic representation and employment (2006; see also Deutsch et al. 2002). ‘The contributors to this volume on the whole treat ‘the modern’ as possessing a more specific meaning than that captured by ‘multiple modernities’, yet slightly broader than these material hopes and aspirations. Here, modernity refers to a historically situated project, which alongside the progress implied by ‘modernisation’ also refers to a particular governmental order and particular forms of discipline and morality (see Ferguson 1999, Becker 2008, Prince & Geissler 2009). It is the crisis of this ambiguous project that interacts in several of the chapters below with religion and AIDS. Understood in this way, ‘modernity’ is something that the African religious actors discussed here situate themselves towards in different ways. Ghanaian Pentecostals in Gaborone (van Dik) and Ugandan ones in Kampala (Sadgrove) appear to view modernity as something they still have to bring about by their actions, while the Pentecostal community in Dar es Salaam observed by Dilger is seeking, in his words, to heal the wounds modernity has caused. Meanwhile the members

of rural African-led churches in South Africa observed by Niehaus might agree with Zanzibari Muslims encountered by Beckmann that modernity has washed over them and left them to pick up the pieces. Muslim teachers in Western Kenya (Svensson) and Muslim radicals in ‘Tanzania (Becker), meanwhile, look upon the means to be modern as something to be wrested from Christian ideology and state control.

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 13 Prince, by contrast, describes ‘neo-traditionalists’ using an idiom of wholesome tradition and contemporary (modern) corruption, which reflects older idioms of distinction and rupture, such as missionaries’ invective against pagan ‘backsliding’.

On the whole, the present contributions reinforce a point that has recently passed from being controversial to forming a new consensus: the fundamental(ist) elements in the religious discourses examined here

should be understood, not as pre-modern atavisms or anti-modern reactlon—naive attempts to reconstruct past epistemologies and social orders—but as characteristically modern forms of argument, situated in modern experiences and even if not necessarily about modernity, still firmly rooted within it (see e.g. Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Englund & Leach 2000). At the same time, these arguments can be said to reflect a broader modern tendency to classify and separate (Latour, 1993). But recognition of their falling into this widespread pattern 1s no substitute for tracing the more specific motives that animate, for instance, the antiwitchcraft “carpet bombers’ Behrend describes, or the Muslim reformists and Luo traditionalists that Svensson and Prince, respectively, observe in the same area of western Kenya. Medical science is a particularly important refraction of the modern experience in the current context. In biomedical recommendations and education programmes focused on them, African AIDS victims encoun-

ter the entire complex of the practice of science and of ‘scientism’ (the evocation and reification of science for specific goals). People in Atrica have long been told that ‘scientific’ attitudes are a precondition for ‘development’. Now, medical experts’ insistence that they have no cure for AIDS, intended as a warning against risky behaviour and bogus cures, 1s easily taken as a declaration of the defeat of science. African listeners may take scientists’ insistence on their own limits as their giving up on addressing the continent’s problems, all the more as in Africa’s

post-colonial experience, the blessings of development and science have been permanently unequally distributed and often elusive. Such interpretation is expressed in the rumours, widespread in Africa, that ‘the Americans’ or ‘the Whites’ have a cure for AIDS which they refuse to share with African sufferers. ‘These rumours, in turn, hark back both to Biblical idioms of ‘stolen blessings’, and to political calls for access to free antiretroviral treatment and care.

‘The widespread occurrence of faith healing, especially among Pentecostals, is clearly an attempt to provide possibilities where scientists and medical doctors appear to fail. ‘he conflict between Christian

14 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

healing and biomedicine, moreover, reveals to Africans a split within the ‘Western tradition’, as both the lines of thought, both Christianity and modernist scientism, have European ancestry and were closely

intertwined in their colonial origins (see e.g. Ranger 1992b). One might surmise that the present shift, across Africa, from the old mission Churches to new forms of Charismatic and healing ministry, is related to this loss of credibility of the older alliance between biomedicine and ‘mainstream’ denominations. But, as Dilger’s paper describes, believ-

ers in faith healing are also finding compromises that allow them to combine the solace of faith healing with an acceptance of biomedical interpretations. A similar point can be made about Muslim reformists. However rigid the prescriptions for their co-religionists’ behaviour that

they propose, their insistence on the centrality of the scriptures for Muslims and on formalised ways of interpreting them 1s also an assertion of a different kind of rationality. ‘hey often insist that the Qur’an does not clash with science, but rather endorses and prefigures it. At the same time, they proudly assert the moral as well as technical relevance of the Qur’an, which, to their minds, 1s a particular strength of Qur’anic as opposed to scientific rationality. ‘The restrictive rhetoric of Muslim reformists notwithstanding, more mainstream Muslims, too, struggle to reconcile the findings of science with the scriptures. Much like Christians, they find ways to live with the disaster unfolding around them by placing it within God’s plans. Thinking and acting about AIDS, then, people in Africa also reassess the elusive promises of modernity and its harbinger, science. At times, it appears that, having found themselves excluded from the once so promising ‘modern world’, they are finding entirely new categories to define their place in the world. Pentecostal Christians are defining this transient world ever more starkly in contrast to the next, eternal one, hoping for a leap forward in time. Muslims, on the other hand, insist on the necessity for their home regions to become fully integrated into the Dar-ul-Islam, the realm of Islam, which they oppose in spatial, rather than temporal, terms to ‘the West’. ‘[raditionalists advocating ‘African custom’, meanwhile, are developing an account of their home regions as culturally separate from other regions of the world and threatened in their authenticity; where Pentecostal Christians propose a rupture forward and away from the world, traditionalism could be said to call for the opposite move, back to the origins, and to the earth.

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 15 AIDS, religious congregations, and politics

A political strand runs through the narratives in this collection, of secular decline and attempts to situate oneself towards modernity. It 1s most obvious where the actions of the state are at stake, but typically it does not stop there, and often it is more submerged. It has been said that in societies where descent networks are crucial for organising social interaction, cooperation and control, ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains become intermingled (Marks and Rathbone 1983; see also Giblin 1992).

The presence of the state notwithstanding, the web of relationships constituted by families, kin, and religious congregations still shapes a person’s options for autonomy and dependency, and personal well-being

remains intertwined not only with that of religious congregations but also of the body politic.

The failures and limitations of official capacities to counter the AIDS epidemic leave a space for religious action to occupy: the relative dearth of counselling services in Cape ‘Town (Burchard) and of medical and social services at large in Dar es Salaam (Dilger) frame religious responses to AIDS. Religious congregations and I’BOs thereby end up paralleling state institutions. ‘The relationship is not only one of marginalisation and mutual avoidance, though: Muslim secondary school teachers in Western Kenya, for instance, use their curricula on AIDS

with a sense of official entitlement, as Svensson shows. At the same time, the relationship between FBOs and the congregations in which they are based has its own political problematic. Nguyen’s study of counselling organisations in Burkina Faso, which in effect serve as a gate-

way between HIV-positive patients and ARV providers, indicates this.

The conjuncture of concern about AIDS, societal—particularly moral—decline and the failures of the state is clearest in two otherwise very different settings: among rural Zionist Christians in South Africa (Niehaus) and urban Muslims in Zanzibar (Beckmann). ‘The former experience post-apartheid South Africa as a site of continuing, even increasing social anomie, where the state continues to be part of the problem rather than the solution. ‘The latter translate concern about

Zanzibar’s marginality within the Tanzanian state into a discourse

of Islamic morality under threat. However, in spite of the much more proactive response to HIV/AIDS of the Ugandan government, Behrend here found Catholic witch hunters who act on a perceived need to tackle the rise of occult forces: in this case, the aggressive and bitter response cannot easily be explained with official neglect or

16 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER meddling. ‘The perceived failures always take place at the local as well as the national level. ‘he people observed by Niehaus and Beckmann

in fact recognise this, as their debates oscillate between political and communal failures.

Still, even in countries with ‘weak’ states, the health of citizens remains intertwined with that of the political system. Becker suggests

that the relations of religious experts to the state shape both their response to state-endorsed AIDS education, and their listeners’ response to the advice they give. Prince’s discussion of customary practices and inheritance law points at the fraught relationship between different legal

frames and the absence of democratic public negotiations of these; moreover, the adjudication of a “Luo council of elders’ draws attention to the lack of democratically constituted legal bodies and a civil society engaging with these. Behrend’s ‘carpet bombing’ Catholic vigilantes are likely to be informed by Uganda’s warlike recent history. ‘Uhus, even with an issue as personal as how to live with the danger and suffering of AIDS, religious commitment does not escape the realm of politics. It is clear that, for Muslims, AIDS is implicated in an uneasy negotiation of their position within the East African states. Yet for Christian denominations, too, the way they place themselves vis-a-vis the state needs constant watching and re-thinking (Gifford 1994). At a more intimate level of power relations, Prince and Christiansen present strikingly different trajectories and interpretations in neighbour-

ing regions on the northern shores of Lake Victoria: Prince among Kenyan Luo, Christiansen among Luhya people in across the border in Uganda. In both cases, villagers are concerned about the continuance

of widow ‘inheritance’ in the presence of AIDS; about negotiating ‘Saved’ Christian condemnation of the practice, and about alternative means of ensuring the continuity of life. Yet while Prince focuses on collective efforts to maintain ’growth’ through relations with the past, and personal compromises inspired by these efforts, Christiansen emphasises widows’ readiness to break away from preconceived social roles by evoking ‘saved’ status. ‘The contrast 1s only partly a matter of diverging research interests. It also shows how similar religious injunctions can impinge very differently on individual lives. ‘The differences are the outcome of contingent societal factors among which legal and

economic factors are prominent: the politics of the family are not ultimately isolated from formal politics.

The authors gathered here, then, present both contrasts and continuities with other recent publications on AIDS that have examined the

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 17 politics, or apparent lack of it, of the African AIDS epidemic. Alex de Waal, for example, has deplored what he perceives as the political quiescence surrounding AIDS in Africa, and attributed it above all to denial, both among politicians and populations (de Waal 2007). ‘The accounts presented here suggest something quite different from political quiescence and denial: widespread, diverse efforts to respond, both practical and intellectual, but predominantly directed towards realms of social action which escape de Waal’s narrow, state-centred definition of politics. By contrast, Epstein’s focus on the importance of behavioural change in slowing down Uganda’s epidemic, and the role of internal politics in international AIDS organisations in obscuring this factor, resonates with the emphasis on intimate negotiations and problematic relationships with officialdom in the present collection (Epstein 2007). Iliffe, too, (2006: 126-131) interpreted the evidence on behaviour change in Uganda to mean that people reduce risky behaviour once the theses of AIDS educators have been borne out by people’s own experience. Once enough people have died for conclusions to be drawn about the patterns in these deaths, the desire to live, he suggested, would lead

to the appropriate pragmatic responses. [The present collection of case studies similarly shows that people are learning quickly; that they are looking for the causes of the epidemic and for ways to control it, and that, despite the mistrust towards officialdom, biomedically based explanations and recommendations are seriously discussed along with others. ‘hese learning processes can in turn impact on ritual practice, as the discussions, in Kenya and Uganda, about less risky alternatives to the neo-traditional prescriptions of ‘widow inheritance’ show (Prince and Christiansen). Yet, to arrive at such reforms of knowledge and practice, politics and policy must work towards certain basic conditions. In particular, people must be able to access, negotiate and weigh information from different sources so as to try out different interpretations. ‘hey must,

for example, develop a workable notion of sexual transmission and they must be in a situation in life that allows them weigh the avoidance of risk against other considerations, whether ritual, romantic, pragmatic or mercenary that may encourage risk-taking. They also need access to the material tools of preventing and countering HIV infections: condoms and possibly other innovative devices, and medicines. That these conditions are elusive even in the presence of AIDS prevention programmes has been argued (Campbell 2003) and is also

18 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

evident from the case studies. A host of factors encourage dangerous choices: the appearance-consciousness and relative lack of means of Sadgrove’s Ugandan university students; the strictures that Ghanaian ‘ouest workers’ in Gaborone operate under (van Dyk) or the assertion of masculinity in the context of instable gender relations left behind by labour migration under apartheid (Niehaus). Political strictures are acquiring a new acuteness as Africa moves from the era of AIDS education and palliative treatment into that of antiretroviral treatment (ART). ‘The provision of these drugs presents a challenge for weakened national health systems and their transnational donors, but also an opportunity to pursue religio-political agendas. In south-eastern ‘Tanzania, according to medical workers in the region, the implementation of a US-funded ART programme was put off several times to accommodate the donors’ demands for control over the supply of the drug. Similarly, at the time of writing this introduction, the widows in the village described by Prince are still struggling to obtain the ART, although antiretroviral drugs ought to be available for free since 2006 (thanks to government policy and US American funding through GAP and PEPFAR, which in turn are shaped by a particular version of Christian ideology). These experiences with ART underline the institutional obstacles that obstruct change in official responses to the epidemic; obstacles that ultimately are based in political decisions and economic resources. ‘This situation points to a new set of questions concerning HIV/AIDS and religion: the ways in which HIV treatment campaigns and ART drugs engage with religious ideologies and religious subjectivities, on a personal and social level, as well as on the level of HIV policy and politics, both national and global. ART, subjects, and subjection

The possibility of HIV testing so as to take action to obtain drugs and access health care in order to live with HIV has created new opportunities for religious exhortation as well as self-reflection. ‘The suggestion that the experience of a positive diagnosis and subsequent reorientation towards living with HIV (and, hopefully, ARVs) could ‘call forth new selves’ (in Neuyen’s phrase), in particular in connection with the Pentecostal experience of being ‘born again’, caused some discussion among the editors. It is rooted in Foucault’s insistence that power

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 19 regimes work on people not only by limiting and controlling, but also by cultivating and shaping them. Moreover, there can be little doubt that the adaptation to living with HIV has to be, and being born again can be, a profound reorientation, and one relevant to what Foucault called the ‘care of the self’. But, as Sadgrove and van Dyk remind us in their chapters on Pentecostals in Kampala, Uganda, and Gaborone, Botswana, being born again may sometimes be predominantly about scaling existing social hierarchies, formulaic, pragmatic and not particularly personal. More generally, it is problematic to speak of new selves without demonstrating how they are different from those selves that Africans surely

have long cultivated, unless we want to treat ‘the self’ as a cultural category simply absent in certain contexts. Much recent African ethnography (e.g. Lambeck and Strathern 1998; Piot 1999; Helle-Valle 2004; Niehaus 2002; Geissler & Prince 2007, 2009, in press) draws upon older anthropological work on African personhood and Melanesian sociality, to explore differences between the notion of ‘self’ and ‘individual’ as cultivated in the West since the enlightenment, and more relational (for some accounts ‘dividual’) modes of socially producing persons. Implicit

to this differentiation between western and non-western personhood can be a problematic assumption of general historical change from more relational to more individual personhood, from ‘pre-modern’ to modern; ‘non-western’ to ‘western’. ‘To avoid this a-historical dichotomisation, one needs to keep in mind that mages of difference, like ‘individual’ and ‘dividual’ personhood, or social ‘flows’ vs. bounded ‘selves’, are not entities that can be had by themselves. ‘hey serve as pairs, as ‘convenient fictions’, as Strathern had it, to prize open the complex social and cultural negotiations that occur when concepts, terminology and practices originating in vastly different social, cultural and political-economic settings are articulated

upon one another. It would be obvious nonsense to claim that HIV education brought selves to previously selfless peoples—this would reproduce century old stereotypes of Africa, misrepresent the complexity of personhood anywhere, and grossly overestimate the capacity of external intervention, be it capitalism, mission, or HIV programmes.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that religious programmes that encourage adherents to cut generative and genealogical ties (such as described by van Dijk), economic projects that enforce accumulation and private property, or an HIV training to exercise self-control and choice (Burchard), pose new questions in social settings in which

20 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

procreative relations of gender and generation are fundamental to identity, or in which sharing is considered not only morally superior, but vital and generative (Prince). To understand the resulting negotiations and connect them back

to questions of power and dependency, a focus on the making of subjectivities can be useful. ‘The aim is not to reify imagined ‘cultural’ differences between Africa and the West, or to exaggerate the impact of pharmaceuticals and their providers into totalising new regimes of

sovereignty and citizenship. Rather it is to study the new formations that emerge between new medical problems and solutions, old and new

forms of government, and the bodies of citizens and sufferers. ‘The extent to which these formations involve an examination and reshaping of selves or subjectivities unsurprisingly varies greatly between places and among persons. Discussing the effects of ‘western’ and especially missionary healthcare regimes in colonial Africa, Megan Vaughan once warned against overly quick assertions of subject-formation through medical rationali-

ties (1991). ‘hese medical systems, she argued, were so limited, and their categories for imagining Africans as persons so coarse, distant, approximate, that very little can be said on the basis of the systems’ pronouncements about if and how they interacted with the medical subjects’ personhood. Present levels of medical and especially pharmaceutical intervention in Africa are of course much more intense than at the (colonial) time studied by Vaughan and, maybe more importantly, they are much more focused (namely on HIV) and centralised (notably in the US government’s initiatives). Nevertheless, Vaughan’s qualifica-

tion of a straight “Foucauldian’ approach is well kept in mind when discussing current changes of subjectivity and personhood in Africa. We have to establish more clearly in which ways medical intervention in Africa has actually changed since the colonial period—especially given that health services remain so woefully limited—how, in different

settings, discourses are articulated upon lives, and how new medical and governmental technologies are deployed. Among the present authors, Isak Niehaus’s account of parallels between attitudes to leprosy and AIDS in the South African lowveld suggests continuities between colonial medical interventions and imaginaries, and the present. Likewise, colonial sleeping sickness epidemics, their effect on people’s imagination, and the control measures against

them could be said to prefigure certain traits of HIV pandemic and policy. Such historical continuities should lead us to ask about the

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 21 more subtle differences between past and present, rather than propose wholesale new social formations. ‘The apparent continuities evoked by Niehaus form a striking contrast with Burchard’s observations from urban South Africa, and Nguyen’s from Burkina Faso, that deal with the experience of ‘living positively’. These two papers most clearly suggest that such new subjectivities (to

use a term suggesting something less fundamental and more easily malleable than ‘self”) are emerging. Among Pentecostals in Uganda, Sadgrove observes a more gingerly and intermittent move towards practicing new forms of care of the self, while Christiansen observes the emergence of a new kind of social persona among widows. In Zanzibar, though, Beckmann shows that Zanzibari Muslims often cope with being HIV+ by shifting from speaking of infection as divine punishment for individual transgression to speaking of a trial which

HIV-sufferers undergo on behalf of the entire community that has fallen short of God’s ideals. ‘Uhis allows the victims to envision a place for themselves within a Muslim milieu that continues to display very judgmental attitudes towards them; it enables them to keep their selves, as 1t were, within normal range. Counselling, Rhetoric and extraversion: ‘performing’ survwal jor Western audvences?

Another way of looking at the new forms of subjectivity that emerge at the interstices between religion and AIDS would be in terms of performance, emphasising not so much processes of self-making, but the representation of new selves to specific audiences, aiming for specific effects. Now that AIDS has become a treatable condition, 1t shares in the fundamental problem of all medical conditions in Africa: how to make treatment available. ‘The debates about ART in South Africa, claimed

by some with reference to universal rights, and questioned by others, including the president, as a political risk and a possible deflection of attention from the political-economic causes of the epidemic (see Fassin 2007), have made it abundantly clear that even in Africa’s wealthiest nation, AIDS sufferers cannot rely on their government to provide ART and, more importantly, that governments and citizens rely upon multiple

other agencies—non-governmental as a well as bilateral and international, public as well as charitable and private—to access treatment. ART thus implies new dependencies and threats, which are reflected in

22 FELICITAS BECKER & P. WENZEL GEISSLER

discussions and rumours about standards of treatment, and which can be interpreted as Nguyen does, as generating ‘therapeutic citizenships’ that might replace older attachments and responsibilities. People (patients and governments) in Africa are dependent upon ‘donors’ beyond their control to survive. It would thus not seem an excessive simplification if we assumed that they try, through their behaviour, to harness these powers. Nguyen, for example, observes the interaction between HIV positive people and faith-based counsellors in Burkina Faso. He argues that people are living up to drug providers’ ideals of ‘living positively’ so as to encourage ARV provision; performing

survival to the donors to keep them donating. ‘hey use standardised confessional forms with religious connotations to create an appealing performance. Such an orientation towards an overseas audience is not new: the performance of ‘western’ values and styles has been part of colonial and post-colonial sociality throughout the past century, conflating changing subjectivities, creative mimesis and utilitarian manipulation (see e.g. Mutongi 2007). What is new 1s the fact that the success of these performances directly determines survival. ‘Uhe stakes are high, and so is pressure to perform well. The tendency towards externalising display is not limited to AIDS. Recently, Kenyan youths have been performing violence for the cameras,

and the dependence of African AIDS victims on overseas providers brings to mind Bayart’s exploration of the ‘extraversion’ of African polities: the long-standing ability of elites not Just to depend on, but to manipulate inflows from abroad (Bayart 1993). ‘his reminds us that the manipulation of the provision of ARVs, including their exploitation for extraneous ends, 1s always a possibility. For example one might

argue that faith-based counsellors, the newest and fastest morphing new African healthcare care profession (if this is the right word) have taken shape precisely at the intersection of HIV, NGOs and religious commitments, as well as between new Christian selves, new styles of ‘positive living’ and the performative demands of a new labour market funded by broadly faith based overseas HIV aid (Prince 2008). The contributions to this volume, then, are forays into an exciting new field of enquiry: into the shifting outlines of Africans’ lives during an age of HIV and I'BOs, non-governmental politics and politicised aid.

They draw attention to the creative powers released by the struggle to live with HIV, but they also remind us that HIV 1s but one factor in the processes that reshape African socialities and polities. In their diversity, they make clear that no one academic narrative can do justice

RELIGION AND AIDS IN AFRICA 23 to these processes of change. Nevertheless, for the present authors the multi-stranded narratives of religion, with their ambiguities and their combination of explicit discourses and implicit, embedded everyday forms, have proven a valuable starting point for the understanding of Africa in the times of AIDS.' References

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Prince, Ruth J. 2008. ‘HIV counsellors in Kenya—the fragmentation of professional knowledge and the continuity of everyday life’. Paper presented at the conference ‘Regimes of care—relations of care’, Cambridge, African Studies Centre, June 6th 2008. Prince R. J. & Geissler, P, W. 2009, in press. The Land is Dying. Contingency, creatwity and conflict in western Kenya. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

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——. 2002. ‘Reflections on two sticks: Gender, sexuality and rainmaking.’ Cahiers Etudes

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THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS, AIDS AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN WESTERN UGANDA Heike Behrend Introduction

When I came to ‘looro in western Uganda in 1998, I was more than surprised to find people talking about abali wawaniu, man-eaters or cannibals. Women and men from all social classes, in towns as well as in rural areas, complained that cannibals were killing and eating their relatives, friends and neighbours. ‘These cannibals likewise were said to be witches, because they first bewitched their victims so that they died.

Then, after the burial, cannibals resurrected the dead not so much to work for them as zombies (cf. Ardener 1970, Fisiy and Geschiere 2001: 241) but to eat them at a sinister banquet with other cannibals. ‘Uhus, these cannibals were part of a radicalised witchcraft discourse: whereas witches kill only once, cannibals kill twice, doubling and prolonging

the horror of death. While, in the 1970s, man-eaters were still assumed to be confined to Kajura in Mwenge district, 1t was said that since the 1980s they had greatly multiplied and spread into other regions. In 1998, I was told that cannibals were everywhere; in some regions where they had become epidemic a sort of ‘internal terror’ (Lonsdale 1992: 355) reigned, a secret war, In which anyone you encountered could be an enemy, prepared to kill and eat you.!

' IT am grateful to Paul Gifford and the participants in the Seminar on Faith and Aids in Africa, organised by SOAS and the School of Hygiene and ‘Tropical Medicine, in London for their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Brad Weiss for his review and kind critical remarks. Furthermore, my thanks go to the VW-Foundation and the Special Research Program 427 for having generously financed my research.

30 HEIKE BEHREND Occult forces on the rise

In recent years, religion and even the ‘religious’ have resurfaced in various parts of the world with unprecedented force. Various religious groups, Islamic as well as Christian, entered the political arena, challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities ( Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Responding to the forces of globalisation, the liberalisation of the market, the decline of states and the emergence of new media in the last two decades, political theologies have emerged that forcefully counter the western concept of religion as a private individual matter. The ‘return of the religious’ has also become the object of a complex debate among philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion and anthropologists (for example de Vries and Weber 2001), reinforcing the view that the more or less uncontested

narrative of a secular modernity had obscured the fact that in most historical formations the political in various ways had been contingent upon the authority or explicit sanctions of a dominant religion. Indeed,

the clear-cut separation between the domains of the religious and the state became problematic and instead the interconnectedness and complementarity of both domains have been placed in the foreground (Derrida 2001). Among anthropologists working in Africa, the idea of ‘a return of the religious’, however, was shifted more to themes like ‘the actuality of evil and ‘the rise of occult forces’. Yet, like their colleagues in other disciplines, most anthropologists took as the main causes for the dramatic rise in occult powers the global capitalism unleashed by neoliberalism and the breakdown of the public sphere in postcolonial states producing new exclusions, increasing poverty, illicit accumulations, and thereby radical inequalities’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993, 1999). While some authors stress the consequences of the Structural Adjustment Program

of the IMF and the World Bank in ‘freeing the market’ and thereby freeing also the possibilities for marketing the occult (Sanders 2001: 162), for others it 1s, above all, illicit accumulation and the exploitative

extraction of labour and life-force that leads to the rise of witchcraft

* Although the question of whether witchcraft and the resort to occult forces is increasing in contemporary Africa is difficult to answer because the data base is rather

insecure, there is no doubt that many people in Africa are experiencing what they believe to be an upsurge in occult powers (Moore and Sanders 2001: 10).

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 3] and cannibal accusations (Colson 2000, Shaw 2001). Against the integration of global factors, Maia Green, for example, emphasised that witchcraft panics must be understood, above all, in the context of the actual relationships between different local political institutions (Green 2003: 122), while Birgit Meyer stressed the impact of modern media, radio, ‘IV, video and print media in spreading and increasing the reality (and truth) of occult powers (Meyer 2003: 28). Yet, while emphasising different aspects, most authors agree more or less that the emergence of satanic spirits, witches, cannibals, ritual killings and human sacrifices have to be seen as the contradictory effects of global capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. It is interesting to note that religion in this African context has made its comeback not only as an empirical given, as the vehicle of various identities, values and cultural expressions, but also as an ‘interpretandum’ whose semantic, figurative and rhetorical potentials serve as a powerful analytical tool (de Vries 2001: 6 f.). Religious discourse came to be seen as diagnostic and as a more or less critical commentary on the unfolding of a (post)modernity in Africa in which witches, satanic

spirits and cannibals expressed the dark side of kinship (Geschiere 1997) and the asocial greed necessary for accumulation in a capitalist market economy. Yet, to see witchcraft discourses as a local critique of globalisation and modernity resonates strongly with western anti-capitalist criticism

(Moore and Sanders 2001: 13). Although I share this criticism, I am afraid that 1t may be that anthropologists are telling a popular liberal tale through ‘others’ (ibid.). ‘To voice one’s own criticism through ‘the other’ has a long western tradition, starting with Montesquieu’s Lettres

Persanes, and we have to be careful not to fall back on this tradition by making use of ‘others’ to articulate our own faultfinding. ‘Uhus, I agree with Moore and Sanders that we need to pay close attention to witchcraft in specific social and historical settings rather than assume monolithic meanings.

In contrast to most of the authors who have participated in the debate, I think it possible to be more specific about the main causes of the recent rise of occult forces in Africa. Against the tendency to find the origin of their rise in the invisible hand of capital, I would like to introduce two arguments that have not been recognised suthciently by other scholars. First, I would relate the dramatic activation and rise of occult forces in Africa to the increase in death rates through the AIDS epidemic (and to a lesser extent the local wars). ‘The AIDS epidemic 1s

32 HEIKE BEHREND also an epidemic of poverty and so my argument cannot be separated from economic and political conditions. Surely, to understand the rise of occult forces in the last decades in Africa we have to deal with a complex interplay of processes and forces. Yet, with Victor ‘Turner I would like to claim that it is not sufficiently recognised how closely the rise of witch® beliefs and accusations is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality (lurner 1967: 113).

In addition, although various scholars (Meyer 1999, Meyer and Pels 2003, Gifford 2004) have shown in detail that in Africa modern Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense, they missed

the point that precisely the fight against the occult reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’.* Christian (and non-Christian) anti-witchcraft

movements strongly reinstate the occult powers they fight against. Sometimes these movements—in Europe as well as in Africa—actually

create the crisis or moral panic they react against and make use of it by identifying a new group of outsiders to gain power and legitimacy in the political arena (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994: 18). Thus, the recent rise of occult forces in Africa is also—to a certain extent—owed

to the many Christian fundamentalist movements and churches who with the help of the Christian God and, above all, the Holy Spirit are fighting the occult (satanic) powers, thereby contributing to their reality and proliferation.

In the following, I will unfold these two arguments and give as an example the situation in the kingdom of ‘Tooro in western Uganda where the AIDS pandemic is rampant and a lay organisation of the Catholic Church started witch-hunting. Epidemics and the dynamics of witchcraft

In an article published in 1964 on witchcraft and sorcery, Victor Turner, against the structural-functionalist approach of classic social anthropology, promoted process-theory, long-term studies and—most

> In the following, I shall use the term ‘witchcraft’ to include also sorcery, as do English-speaking people in ‘looro. * While much ink has been spilt on legal and political institutions, such as courts in Cameroon that invigorate the occult, only rarely have scholars dealt with Christian churches and movements doing the same. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who made me aware of this fact (and others).

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 33 important—he made the point that ‘it is not sufficiently recognised how closely witch beliefs are associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality...’ (Lurner 1964: 113). And he proposed seeing witchcraft accusations as the product of a complex interplay of processes and forces, such as epidemics, the rise and fall of death rates, labour migration, wars and feuds (ibid.: 115).

Even before ‘Turner’s text, Elenore Smith Bowen (alias Laura Bohannon), in her autobiographical novel Return to Laughter (1954), described a witch-craze following the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Northern Nigeria. One of her protagonists, an elder, himself accused of being a witch, says: “Who does not know the terror and the death and the hate that it (smallpox) brings? I fear nothing else, but I fear the “water” (smallpox) (Bowen 1954: 266). In Northern Nigeria smallpox was seen as a manifestation of witchcraft. As the epidemic was spreading, so also were witches, creating a situation of internal terror. C. Bawa Yamba (1997), in a study on witchcraft accusations and witchfinding in Zambia, connected the rise of occult forces with the rising death toll from AIDS. And Susan Reynolds Whyte (1997) in her book on Bunyole in northeast Uganda suggested that the AIDS epidemic reinforced the usual suspicions that danger comes from other people (Whyte 1997: 222). Most people in Bunyole who probably had AIDS looked for agents like sorcerers and cursers not only to explain their suffering but also to involve meaningful action through anti-sorcery

medicine and rituals, thereby explaining the suffering of people with AIDS in terms of cursing and sorcery (bid.: 215f). Likewise, outside Africa, in their studies on witchcraft and sorcery in Papua New Guinea, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern suggest that occult forces can also be precipitated by disease and epidemics (Stewart and Strathern 1999: 645). Besides other factors, they stress the epidemic spread of the disease and the epidemic of representations in terms of images of violence such as witches and cannibals. When death through an epidemic becomes omnipresent, witchcraft accusations rise. Yet, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer in his study on the persecution of witches in Bavaria (1987) has shown, the connection between the rise of witchcraft accusations and epidemics is not static but dynamic and changing. He points to various mechanisms

of self-lmitation, when, for example, close members of the dominant group of the accusers become accused, as well as to the possibility of a paradigm shift that leads, for example, to the interpretation of the epidemic as divine punishment, thereby reducing or even stopping witchcraft accusations.

34 HEIKE BEHREND Internal terror in Tooro

In western Uganda, the region I focus on, AIDS has reached its climax in the last years: 7.4°% of the population are HIV-positive according to the latest survey of 2004/05. As my research assistant Jacinta Kabageny,

aged about 50, explained to me, while she was young, once a year somebody would die, nowadays, she said, she has to go to funerals every

week. Nearly every family, rich as well as poor, has lost one or more members. ‘Death is eating everybody’, many people in ‘Tooro said. ‘They

also said that they do not have enough tears to mourn the dead. The high death rates contributed substantially to the creation of a situation of internal terror that (in some regions of ‘looro) found expression in an epidemic of witches and cannibals.’ Following the classical witchcraft paradigm described by Evans-Pritchard, if a person becomes sick or dies, often somebody close to this person, a relative or a neighbour with whom the deceased was in conflict, is accused of being responsible for the death by having bewitched and ‘eaten’ the victim. When the death rate is rising, this shifting of responsibility and guilt to the inside of communities increases discord, hatred and fear, sometimes to an unbearable extent. ‘he more people die, the more witches or cannibals seem to be active and responsible. ‘Vhus, the epidemic of AIDS,

at least in two regions of ‘looro—Kyarusozi and Kijura—was given cultural expression as an epidemic of witches and cannibals eating up bodies of people and leading to a self-exacerbating situation.

The government and numerous NGOs have launched various information campaigns to medicalise AIDS. And it 1s true, in a way, they have been successful. Kew people in western Uganda would deny that one contracts AIDS through sexual contact with an HIV-positive partner. Yet, unfortunately, this explanation is perfectly compatible with witchcraft accusations because the witchcraft discourse functions as a secondary rationalisation by addressing the question ‘Why me

» The emergence of a situation of internal terror has as its main mechanism the witchcraft discourse, yet it has also to be seen within the background of economic depression, a guerrilla war by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the decline of the local government, widespread corruption and struggles about land. I have dealt in detail with the discussion of internal terror in ‘looro already in two articles: one article in German (Behrend 2004), the second on the same subject in English (Behrend 2008) while a further text deals more with the various practices of evidence production

by the Catholic lay organisation of the Uganda Martyrs and the local government (Behrend 2006).

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 39 and not another?’. While Europeans are not really able to answer this question, referring to ‘chance’ or ‘bad luck’, or taking the responsibility on themselves, in western Uganda it 1s, at least up to now, the witchcraft discourse that most often gives the answer. ‘Thus, although most people nowadays would agree that AIDS 1s a ‘natural’ disease, the campaigns have hardly diminished the suspicions and charges of witchcraft and cannibalism. Although many people know that AIDS is not caused directly by witchcraft, a witch can influence a man or a woman, for example, to drink too much beer so that he or she leaves all caution aside and has sex with a HIV-positive person and so may contract the virus. In addition, those who are HIV-positive and their kin usually deny a diagnosis of AIDS and try to identify a witch or cannibal whose evil acts can be counteracted. AIDS therefore, like other epidemics, contributes substantially to the fear of witches (cf. Colson 2000: 353).

In conversations with people from NGOs dealing with AIDS in ‘Tooro, 1t became obvious that in their campaigns witchcraft as a subject of discussion was completely excluded. “We do not want to create unrest and conflict’, a woman told me. Likewise she insisted that ‘witches and

cannibals are there’. Most people to whom I talked in ‘looro—with one exception—shared her view.® Thus, the medicalisation of AIDS has taken place only partially and does not bring to an end the agency of occult forces. Although officially promoting a medicalised concept of AIDS, many of the Christian churches in practice use concepts of sickness and healing that are based on supernatural powers, the powers of the Christian

God and his adversary Satan. A Catholic explained to me that ‘the wage of a sin is disease!’ “Committing sins’, he said, ‘opens the body for an invasion of satanic spirits’. Yet, he also said, “With God’s grace everything 1s possible.’ And he told me that he went for an AIDS test some years ago; it was positive; he prayed and prayed and prayed and when he went for the next test some time later, the result was negative! Thus, obviously the ‘medicalisation’ of AIDS never really challenged local meanings.

° The exception was a high-ranking police officer coming from another area of Uganda who told me that he could not afford to believe in witchcraft; if he did, he would not be able to do his job.

36 HEIKE BEHREND AIDS, punishment and anti-westernism

As already mentioned, besides the witchcraft and cannibal discourse, alternative explanations of AIDS were spread by various institutions. Indeed, some of the Christian churches and movements 1n western Uganda tended to explain AIDS as a punishment by God for immoral and sinful behaviour. For example, the leaders’ of the Movement for

the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Kanungu® of the Rukungiri District, neighbouring ‘Tooro, identified the AIDS epidemic—“a disaster that has befallen the world’—as ‘a punishment that has been released to the world due to its disobedience’ and as a threat ‘unless you people, repent, you will all be wiped out by AIDS’ (Behrend 2001: 83). In the same way, some ‘traditionalists’ saw AIDS as a punishment of the ancestral spirits for having neglected ‘traditions’, the way of the ancestors. By doing so, both shifted the responsibility

for suffering to an otherworldly power—the Christian God or the ancestors—as well as to the suffering individual, thereby preventing the identification of witches or cannibals. It was the restoration of the moral order that both Christians and ‘traditionalists’ promoted as a way out of the predicament. Besides this explanation of the AIDS epidemic as divine punishment, there is an increasingly anti-western discourse to be found in ‘Tooro as well as in other parts of Africa. Some people with whom I talked interpreted the AIDS epidemic as a western conspiracy to reduce or even destroy the African population.” Within the background of the dominant western discourse about family planning and the necessary

’ The leaders of the movement were all Catholics; some of them, however, were excommunicated.

® On 17 March 2000, about 500 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the ‘Ten Commandments of God (MRITCG), most of them women and children, perished in Noah’s Ark, their main church, in Kanungu of the Rukungiri District in western Uganda. When in the following weeks more and more graves were found in Kanungu and other areas of Uganda, what had at first seemed to be a mass suicide turned out to be a mass killing as well (Behrend 2001). ” This vision is not confined to Uganda but is also shared in Kenya and some parts of western Africa. In Mali, for example, the image of a ‘perverse European’ was constructed in a sort of ‘myth of origin’ of the AIDS epidemic. People told of a European development agent or expert who paid an African prostitute to have sex with a dog while he watched. Out of this perverse intercourse AIDS was born (Machein 1999: 43). his story also circulates on the Kenyan coast, in Ghana and Nigeria and is, for instance, taken up in the Nigerian video production, ‘Glamour Girls II: Uhe Italian Connection’, by Christian Onu (1996).

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 37 reduction of population growth in Africa by development agencies, this impression 1s not completely irrational. As no cure has so far been found for AIDS, western medicine and aid organisations are accused of

being producers of death more than of life. In local popular counterdiscourses to the western prevention activities’ in ‘Tooro, for example, condoms were suspected of not protecting people from infection by HIV, but, instead, of being infected themselves and spreading the deadly disease. In addition, the presence of numerous western ‘experts’ was taken as a proof that after the deaths of all Africans the Wazungu (Europeans) would take over the country. ‘Io prepare for this takeover in near future, the Wazungu, as I was told, already built all the beautiful houses and planted exotic trees to enjoy life when all Africans would be dead. ‘Thus, a sort of re-colonisation was imagined, this time, however, on the basis of genocide. Furthermore, the practices of western AIDS researchers and their local counterparts have increased the mistrust in western medicine, which was practised with sometimes doubtful measures, some of which had been established during colonial times. For example, under the regime of colonial medicine people were forced to donate blood, a provision that, as Luise White has shown, substantially contributed to create or activate fears of vampirism (White 2000). As Bob Mwesiye, a health worker of the German GTZ health project in ‘Tooro, told me, even today people especially in the more rural areas are reluctant to give their blood for HIV testing because they fear it is being sold and drunk by Wazungu vampires. ‘Thus, it seems that in spite of all westerninspired NGO campaigns of ‘enlightenment’ about the ‘natural’ AIDS epidemic, recent bio-medical practices have not succeeded in building up some trust, but instead they often reaffirmed the view of the west’s conspiracy to extinguish all Africans. So far, a self-limiting mechanism of the witchcraft epidemic through

a radical paradigm change has not taken effect. Indeed, in spite of alternative discourses, the witchcraft and cannibal discourse in ‘looro has served as the dominant explanation for the suflermg and death of so many people.

'° "This is even more remarkable because Kabarole District was chosen for a long-term

AIDS project already launched in 1986. ‘This project financed by the German GTZ in some aspects was exemplary, for example, by integrating local ‘traditional’ healers and by giving out free condoms. Yet even these attempts did not prevent anti-western discourse from proliferating, and they may even have furthered it.

38 HEIKE BEHREND Indeed, witchcraft not only reflects social tensions and conflicts but actually is an aggravator of all hostilities and fears in a community. With the rise of death rates through the AIDS epidemic, witches and cannibals multiplied as internal enemies and created a situation of internal terror. While neither the king of ‘Tooro, who in precolonial times had

the duty to cleanse the country from evil, nor the local government took measures to fight against witches and cannibals, desperate villagers

started killing those people they thought to be responsible for disease and death. I was told by a police officer that, for example, in Kyura, from January to August 2002 about five people had been lynched by enraged villagers. ‘The local government could not deal with witches and cannibals, nor could it protect either villagers who felt threatened or their adversaries, suspected witches and cannibals, who fled into police custody to be guarded from mob justice. When I visited Fort Portal in August 2005, I saw an elderly woman

of about 65 years of age sitting beside the main road in front of a Stanbic Bank. Like clochards in Paris, she had made this place her home,

using plastic bags from famine relief to cover herself against rain and cold. When I asked my friends who she was I was told that she was a cannibal. She had been chased from her village and brought to the police. Because there was no evidence against her, the police had sent her back to her village but she refused to go home, fearing that the villagers would kill her. She moved to different places but was always rejected. People would scream and run away. She decided, therefore, to stay in town in front of Stanbic Bank under the protection of two policemen who were guarding the bank and whose presence prevented other people from stealing from her, raping or killing her. She had stayed at this place for more than six months as some sort of public visual reminder of her social exclusion." The Catholic Church in western Uganda

In ‘Tooro, the gradual erosion of the state and the perceived failure of public institutions combined with the radicalisation and indigenisation

'' When we visited her, she told us that she was protected by Jesus and Holy Mary, showing us a little silver cross she was wearing around her neck; she said she was Catholic and had lost all her children and even her grandchildren. ‘They all had died from ‘slim’ (the local English term for AIDS). She said that she had not eaten them.

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 39 of the churches has contributed to a situation in which especially the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 1990s entered the public arena. Not so much the clergy, but above all lay organisations responded to the situation of internal terror by challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities ( Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Like believers in fundamentalist Islam, charismatic Catholics reclaimed the centre of public attention and authority. They made their appearance as a discourse of social order in a dramatic fashion: violently (bid.: 243).

In the Catholic Church in western Uganda, the last two decades have produced a wide range of popular expressions with strong lay and sometimes clerical participation (Kassimir 1999: 249 ff). Although the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) favoured

a theology of ‘inculturation’ to encourage the Africanisation of the Church, the implementation of this new religious policy from top-down in ‘looro up to the 1980s largely failed. Also, up to this time, the most pressing spiritual interests of many Catholics—healing and protection from witchcraft—were not realised (ibid.).

While, up to 1986, the Anglican as well as the Catholic Church more or less had a monopoly in Uganda, since the coming to power of Yower! Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) this monopoly was shaken by various movements inside as well as outside the established churches, sometimes inspired and financed by American fundamentalist Christian groups. Since 1986 there has been a surge in Christian healing cults led, above all, by women and in apparitions of the Virgin Mary connected with miracle cures of AIDS and other diseases (Behrend 1997, 1999). During this time, the Catholic church started to lose more and more of its members to independent churches which specialised in healing and the fight against witchcraft. To counter this, the Catholic Charismatic revival movement took

on a new thrust in 1981 when a Holy Cross sister and brother from the USA came to Fort Portal and founded the first charismatic prayer group. In it believers started to experience the pouring of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance from evil spirits and inner as well as physical healing. While the charismatic movement in ‘looro attracted, above all, better-educated people and younger clergymen, various lay organisations of the Catholic Church, the Legio Maria or the Uganda Martyrs Guild, absorbed poor people, mainly women, who in the situation of internal terror were the ones who suffered most.

40) HEIKE BEHREND The Uganda Martyrs Guild

In 1885 and 1886, king Mwanga of Buganda beheaded, speared, hacked into pieces and burned a number of young Catholics, Protestants

und Muslims,'* most of whom were working as pages at the king’s court. The reasons for the persecutions of Christians and Muslims in Buganda have been heavily debated (Kassimir 1991). Since this time, the Catholic Church, in particular, attempted to make the Catholic victims

the centre of a cult of martyrs,'’ interpreting them as the followers or sons of older African martyrs such as Perpetua, Felicity, and Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. In 1897 the Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG) was founded by Archbishop Henry Streicher who trained people to help in the evangelisation process. In 1920, the Uganda Martyrs were beatified and in October 1964 canonised. ‘The UMG evolved into an organisation for Catholic action which continued to have chapters in most districts and dioceses. Some of these chapters became highly politicised and had varying degrees of influence on local branches of the Democratic Party that was formed (as the party of the Catholics) in the 1950s (Kassimir 1991: 378). An impressive shrine was built in Namugongo to commemorate the martyrs and to establish a cult centre, but not until the emergence of a new form of popular Catholicism in the 1980s did this shrine, as well as those in Nakivubu and Katoosa, start to gain importance and large-scale and regular pilgrimages begin. Around 1995, the UMG started ‘to go and free people from evil in abandoned places’, that 1s, they took up the practice of witch-hunts, now called ‘crusades’. Whereas the colonial state as well as the early Christian missionaries in their reluctance to fight witchcraft and witches were suspected by local people of protecting the evil forces and of being themselves witches and cannibals, the Catholic Church in ‘Tooro now made use of the political potential of anti-witchcraft practices (cf. Green 2003: 140, Douglas 1999). Following the Inquisition and witch-hunts in the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Europe, the enlightened '* Under King Mutesa, Mwanga’s father, some ‘pagans’ also became martyrs, as I was told, because they refused to convert to Islam, the religion the king favoured for some time. '’ Ron Kassimir (1991) has shown in detail how the executions of Christian Baganda

came to be represented and substantially known as the martyrdom of Catholic Ugandans.

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 4 | Catholic Church, after resisting for a long time resorting to such prac-

tices in Africa, did not object when in the 1990s the UMG entered the political arena and started to fight evil. By doing so, the church appropriated an important aspect of precolonial and early colonial kingship (cf. Gifford 2004: 175): the king’s duty to cleanse the country from evil. In addition, through the fight against evil in the public arena, the Catholic Church succeeded in regaining power and ‘souls’ she had lost in the struggle with other established and independent churches. Crusades

The first crusades the UMG organised were extremely violent. I was told that in Kabende an elderly Protestant woman was identified as a notorious cannibal. When she was caught by some members of the UMG,, she turned into a black cat. The cat was beaten, but, as soon as they started to burn it, the animal changed again into the woman, who was seriously injured and had to be taken to hospital. She sued three members of the UMG—among them the president—and they were punished and imprisoned. Because more people complained, after this incident the Catholic Church forbade further crusades. For two years, members of the UMG were taught in workshops not only the Bible but also, and above all, how to carry out non-violent witch- and cannibal-hunts. After these instructions, Guild members were allowed to continue crusades which now followed a rather fixed pattern. Under the guidance of an American priest and the president of the UMG the witch-hunts or crusades were directed against ‘pagans’ as well as women and men from other Christian denominations,'* some of whom were identified as witches and cannibals. ‘Uhus, the UMG appropriated a discourse that connected religion and violence and turned war into a ‘holy war’. Like everywhere else in the world where these concepts are used, in looro they idealised violence, declared a just war and legitimised the stigmatisation and exclusion of certain people.

'* One crusade in which I was allowed to participate in August 2002 was taking place in Kyamiaga in Buhesi subcounty and obviously was an attempt of the UMG to regain ‘lost souls’ from the Seven-Day-Adventists.

42 HEIKE BEHREND Before the UMG went on an ‘operation’ or ‘crusade’, they announced their plans in monthly papers and on the radio. ‘They sent letters to the local council and to the police, and sometimes, when they feared fierce resistance they asked for police protection. ‘Uhe day before the operation

they fasted; the night was spent in church singing and praying until their bodies were filled with the Holy Spirit. In addition, the ‘weapons’ to fight the enemy—Bible, plastic bottles filled with holy water, rosaries and crucifixes—were ‘loaded’ with the Holy Spirit to empower them and transform them into efficient instruments to fight evil. In the early morning they took off in lorries. As the president of the UMG explained to me, they had to be very careful because witches and

cannibals would set traps to fight the UMG. After arrival in the villages, they walked from house to house, an ‘operation’ known as ‘carpet bombing’. ‘Thus, they used the vocabulary of modern warfare.

They moved in groups of twelve to twenty people, each group having a secretary who recorded what was said and done. When they reached a house in which something evil was thought to be present, the Holy Spirit used their bodies as an indicator for the presence of satanic powers. Then some especially gifted members of the UMG, often children, fell to the ground, trembling and shaking violently until the evil person or thing had been detected. When all the satanic items had been collected—such as pots, a dried human hand, pieces of cloth belonging to people who had died and been ‘eaten’, horns (mahembe) and all sorts of medicine—they were displayed in front of the church to be seen by everybody. hey gave material evidence of their repudiation and likewise were made the relics of a great transformation providing a powerful mechanism—also used by western missionaries—to express materially the fact of conversion and the triumph over satanic forces (Thomas 1991: 155 f.). The satanic items were also photographed, the photographs supplying proof of what had taken place. ‘The pictures were circulated and put into albums that were shown to visitors as a sort of trophy and memory of the UMG’s power and success. In addition, politicians were called to witness the event. After being displayed and photographed, the satanic objects were destroyed and burned. ‘To end a crusade, members of the UMG offered night sessions of preaching and praying, answered questions from the local population, and the Catholic parish priest led a service of holy communion.

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 43 Healing cannibals and witches

Cannibals and witches were seen as only indirectly responsible for their

evil deeds because the forces of Satan made them do what they did. They were therefore given the chance to be cleansed and healed." Besides being prayed for and having hands laid on their heads, they were also made to vomit, to reverse the process of incorporation which had produced their greediness for human flesh. Part of the healing process was the witch’s or cannibal’s confession in which the accused had to narrate in detail whom he/she had eaten, and when and how it had happened. Furthermore, if a cannibal was identified s/he had to give the names of other cannibals s/he had been working with. As during the times of the Inquisition in Europe, in Tooro whole networks of people were established and then put under pressure to confess their satanic deeds. ‘Uhe confessions produced more detailed knowledge about witches and cannibals, leading to a further

proliferation and differentiation of the cannibal discourse and gave additional proof to the reality of occult forces. There were very few people who insisted on their innocence and refused to confess that they were cannibals. When, during my last stay in 2005, I asked the UMG’s president why the woman accused of cannibalism who had taken refuge in front of the Stanbic Bank had not been cleansed by Guild members, he told me that she had refused to

be treated by the UMG. The cleansing required confession, but she had maintained her innocence and therefore not accepted the offer. Her refusal, however, led the UMG’s president not to doubt that she was a cannibal but to declare her as mad, thus pathologising her. By insisting on her innocence, the woman had to pay the price of radical social exclusion. ‘hus, there was a strong pressure to confess and thereby reinstate the reality of occult forces.

When I visited the areas that had been the targets of the UMG’s first crusades, people told me that they had not realised how many cannibals were living in their villages before the UMG came and brought

evidence of the presence of evil. ‘They also said that it was only the UMG that succeeded in providing material evidence of cannibalism

' akithikirire is a concept in Lutooro that connotates ‘to be without blemish’, ‘spotless’, ‘pure’ and ‘holy’; thus cleansing, healing and making holy are merged.

44 HEIKE BEHREND such as the ‘dried human hand’, or pieces of cloth from people who had been eaten. Thus, the revelation of and fight against occult forces led to their being reinstated and growing even more powertul. Indeed, the crusades reinforced the belief that local witches and cannibals were the root of suffering, thereby continuing to target those close at hand and vulnerable to local pressures rather than accuse those in power (cf. Colson 2000: 344). And most local people in ‘Tooro with whom I had the chance to talk were grateful for the discovery and cleansing of evil powers.

It is important to note that, although the UMGé stigmatised and excluded certain people by identifying them as agents of evil, they nonetheless through practices of healing made possible their reintegration. While asserting the presence of occult powers and contributing to their proliferation, the more or less violent witch-hunts nevertheless provided a sense of security and empowerment to desperate communities and marginalised people, while at the same time stigmatising and excluding a few women and men as scapegoats. Although the UMG, by trying to deal with, explain and terminate the situation of internal terror, itself ended up participating in the very process of production of the crisis, 1t nevertheless succeeded in containing violence.

As already mentioned, the healing or cleansing of the identified witches and cannibals reversed their exclusion and gave them the chance

to be reintegrated into village life. Ex-cannibals after confessing and being cleansed went back to their villages. People would accept their being healed, yet, I was told, a certain suspicion remained. Whenever misfortune befell a person or somebody became sick or died, it was, first of all, the (ex-)cannibal who was accused. In this ambiguous position, many people who felt (potentially) hunted decided to join the hunters, the UMG. I was told by the UMG’s president that the Guild at the end

of the 1980s had about 30 members; in 2002 it had about 10,000. He also told me that up to now no active member of the Guild had been accused of being a cannibal or a witch by Guild members. ‘Thus, it 1s not by chance that the UMG became the fastest growing lay organisation of the Catholic Church in ‘[ooro.

Finally, let me come back to the rise and proliferation of occult powers. As already mentioned, various scholars have shown in detail that in Africa modern Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense. In addition, as I have tried to show, it 1s precisely the fight

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 45 against the occult forces that reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’. The UMG,, in its struggle against satanic agents, witches and cannibals, strongly reinstated the occult powers they fought against. Indeed, the logic of mutual outbidding that characterised the Guild’s fight against evil made it inevitable that their members, and in particular, their leaders, constantly gave proof of dangerous evil forces to show their own superior power. When the satanic forces intensified and proliferated, then also the powers of the Catholic God had to do so and vice versa. In a way, the UMG was trapped in this dynamic of the mutual constitution of good and evil, of a boundary and its transgression. Because of this dynamic, evil spread and obtained even a cosmic dimension. It was to be exposed not only in human beings, but also in trees, flowers and other plants, as well as in black cats, dogs, monkeys, snakes, lizards, frogs and cockroaches. ‘The Guild’s members contributed extensively to this proliferation of evil powers and reacted to it by producing what I would call ‘Christian

Magic’, an endless series of miracles and wonders that made their practices more powerful. While, on the one hand, connecting with the Christian tradition of wonders, they, on the other hand, also took recourse to the local tradition of miracle production and calculated show eflects of “pagan’ spirit mediums and ‘witch doctors’, thereby increasingly approaching what they were refusing and fighting against. As a former witch-doctor explained to me, many people converted when

they saw the power of the UMG. Although sometimes interpreting AIDS and other diseases as ‘natural’ or as divine punishment, Guild members did not really attempt to abandon the witchcraft discourse. ‘They did not try to establish a self-reliant Christian person. Although members of the Guild took sin as a precondition for the invasion of the sinner’s body by satanic forces

and so introduced an element of responsibility into their discourse, they had to insist not only on the existence but also on the permanent threat of outside satanic forces, because only through fighting these forces could they give proof of their own powers. Thus, not only the increasing number of deaths from AIDS and the interpretation of disease and death in terms of witchcraft, but also the anti-witchcraft activities of the UMG, trapped in the dynamics of the mutual constitution of good and evil, contributed to and intensified the rise of occult forces, while likewise containing violence.

40 HEIKE BEHREND References

Ardener, Edwin. 1970. ‘Witchcraft, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. London: ‘Tavistock Publications, 141-160. Behrend, Heike. 1997. ‘Das Wunder von Sembabule: Die kurze Geschichte eines AntiAIDS-Kultes in Uganda’. Anthropos, 92, 175-183. ——. 1999. Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda. Oxford: James Currey.

——, 2001. ‘Salvation and ‘Terror in Western Uganda. The Movement for the Restoration of the ‘Ten Commandments of God’, in Jan Lodewyk Grootaers (ed.), Millenarian Movements in Africa and the Diaspora (Bulletin des séances supplement). Brussels:

Belgian Association of Africanists, 77—96. ——. 2004. ‘“Satan gekreuzigt”: Interner Terror und Katharsis in ‘looro, Westuganda’. EMstorische Anthropologie 12, 2, 211-227.

—., 2006. ‘Witchcraft, Evidence and the Localization of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda’, in Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada (eds.), The Making and Unmaking of Differences. Bielefeld: ‘Transcript, 43-59.

——. 2008. ‘Catholics and Cannibals: ‘Terror and Healing in ‘looro, Western Uganda’, in Michael Bollig, Aparna Rao and Monika Boeck (eds.), The Practice of War, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Behringer, Wolfgang. 1987. Hexenverfoleung in Bayern. Munich: Oldenbourg. Bowen, Elenore Smith. 1954. Return to Laughter. New York: Natural History Library Edition. Colson, Elizabeth. 2000. “Uhe Father as Witch’. Afnca 70, 3, 333-358. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff (eds.). 1993. Modernity and its Matcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolomal Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ——. 1999. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’. Amencan Ethnologist 26, 2, 279-303. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. ‘Glaube und Wissen. Die beiden Quellen der “Religion” an den Grenzen der bloBen Vernunft’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattima (eds.), Die Rehgion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. de Vries, Hent. 2001. ‘In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the ‘Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds), Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 3-42. Douglas, Mary. 1999. ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed: The Lele Revisted, 1987’. Afnca 69, 2, 177-193. Fisiy, Cyprian F., and Peter Geschiere. 2001. ‘Witchcraft, Development and Paranoia in Cameroon’, in Henrietta Moore and ‘odd Sanders (eds.), Magical Interpretations, Material Reahtes. London and New York: Routledge, 226-246. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Ajnca. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gifford, Paul. 2004. Ghana’s New Christanity. London: Hurst & Co. Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. 1994. Moral Panics:. The Social Construction of Deviance. Gambridge, MA: Blackwell. Green, Maia. 2003. Priests, Witches and Power: Popular Christianity after Mission in Southern

Tanzania. Gambridge: Cambridge University Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2000. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kassimir, Ron. 1991. ‘Complex Martyrs: Symbols of Catholic Church Formation and Political Differentiation in Uganda’. Afncan Affairs 90, 357-382.

THE RISE OF OCCULT POWERS 47 ——, 1999. “The Politics of Popular Catholicism in Uganda’, in ‘Thomas Spear and Isaria Kimambo (eds.), Kast African Expressions of Christianity. Oxford: James Currey,

248-274. Lonsdale, John. 1992. “Phe Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds.), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. London: James Currey.

Machein, Henning. 2000. ‘AIDS, Wissen und Macht in Afrika: Zur Produktion von Wissen in der Aidspravention in Mali’. MA thesis, Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne. Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——. 2003. ‘Visions of Blood, Sex and Money: Fantasy Spaces in Popular Ghanaian Cinema’. Visual Anthropology 16, 15-41. Meyer, Birgit, and Peter Pels (eds.). 2003. Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moore, Henrietta, and ‘Todd Sanders (eds.). 2001. Magical Interpretations, Matenal Reahties: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Africa. London and New York: Routledge.

Sanders, Todd. 2001. “Save our Skins: Structural Adjustment, Morality and the Occult in ‘Tanzania’, in Henrietta Moore and ‘lodd Sanders (eds.), Magical Interpretations, Matenal Reahtes. London and New York: Routledge, 160-183. Shaw, Rosalind. 2001. ‘Cannibal Transformations: Colonialism and Commodification in the Sierra Leone Hinterland’, in Henrietta Moore and ‘Todd Sanders (eds.), Magical Interpretations, Material Reahtes. London and New York: Routledge, 50-70. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 1999. ‘Feasting on my Enemy: Images of Violence and Change in the New Guinea Highlands’. Ethnohistory 46, 4. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Matenal Culture, and Colonialism in

the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery: ‘Taxonomy versus Dynamics’, in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and Mistory in Colonial Africa. Berkeley:

University of California Press. Yamba, C. Bawa. 1997. ‘Cosmologies in ‘Turmoil: Witchcraft and Aids in Chiawa, Zambia’. Africa 67, 2, 200-23.

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CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION: ARGUMENTS OF FAITH IN A TIME OF DEATH IN WESTERN KENYA! Ruth Prince Introduction

Nyanza Luos could face extinction in six years due to AIDS, two leaders said yesterday... A one-day seminar opened by Provincial Commissioner

Joseph Kaguthi was told that wife inheritance and certain traditional norms were critical factors contributing to the high AIDS toll among the Luo population. ‘Aids: Luos Facing Extinction’. Daily Nation, kenya), 14th October 1994. The crisis 1s not Terruok (fornication) or Chode (adultery) but Golo chola (ritual cleansing) and Ait (family guardianship). Here there is no salvation, no wealth, no education, no foreign or non-Luo origin, no westernisation.

Marriage had been sealed by bridewealth and ritually consummated on the nuptial night; and now, a husband 1s lost, wife and children are left behind, ritual cleansing is the answer. Any unorthodox alternative ok kony (will not do).? Ker FfaRamogi is dead: Who shall lead my people? Reflections on past, present and

future Luo thought and practice. Gem Ogutu 1995: 25.

Widow cleansing has turned out to be the most abused and scoffed at ritual and yet it was the most elaborate and solemn ritual among the Luo (ibid.: 12).

The challenge of AIDS is shaping arguments about faith and between faiths among Luo people in western Kenya, as it has engendered an acute search for meaning and scrutiny of beliefs and practices. At the same time, faith is central to people’s engagements with and responses to

' Research for the article was supported by a scholarship from the Danish Council for Research in Developing Countries, under Danida, and by a Wenner-Gren predoctoral grant. I am grateful to the people of Uhero for welcoming me into their lives and to the Danish Bilharziasis Laboratory and the Institute of Anthropology, Copenhagen, for making the fieldwork possible. For their helpful suggestions and support in producing this article, I particularly wish to thank Felicitas Becker, Harri Englund, John Lonsdale, Susan Whyte, Todd Sanders, Jens Aagaard-Hansen and the late Sue Benson, as well as the JRA reviewers and editors. Wenzel Geissler has shared this work in many ways and it is the product of our numerous discussions. * ‘This pamphlet was written by a Luo intellectual in response to the death of the Luo politician and leader Oginga Odinga. The text is written in English and interspersed with Dholuo terms, which the author translates himself.

90 RUTH PRINCE the AIDS epidemic. Many of the tensions about AIDS in public debates and in everyday lives are shaped by people’s commitment to different faiths. A core area of concern 1s the practice of widow guardianship or ‘inheritance’, in which a widow must sleep with another man in order

to ‘cleanse’ the death of her husband and ‘open the way’ for future familial well-being and growth. Widow inheritance is a focal practice of ritual regeneration within what has become known as ‘Luo tradition’, and, in the age of AIDS, traditionalists regard it as being central to family as well as community survival. Yet for others, in particular ‘Saved’ or ‘born-again’ Christians, widow inheritance is a “backward’

or ‘heathen’ practice and the pernicious root of the AIDS epidemic among Luo people. ‘This paper begins from the heated debates between Saved Christians and traditionalists about widow inheritance in order to examine the complex relationships between tradition, Salvation and AIDS in western Kenya. “The land 1s dying’: arguments about AIDS and about faith

Western Kenya, the homeland of the Luo, is currently suffering an epidemic of AIDS that developed in the late 1980s and took hold in the 1990s. My fieldwork, which centred on a village I call Uhero in central Nyanza province, was deeply shaped by people’s experience of AIDS, as here almost every extended family had lost loved ones or was nursing sick relatives, and people spent their weekends attending funerals.” ‘This experience of suffering, on both a personal and community level, is often referred to as ‘the death of today’. Many Luo regard it as the outcome of a longer history of ‘confusion’ in social relations, gender roles and morality. ‘There 1s a strong nostalgia both for the loss of Luo traditional morality, engendered by labour migration and conversion to Christianity during the early decades of the twentieth century, and for the heyday of modernisation and upward mobility, the 1950s through to the 1970s. ‘The latter period 1s remembered as an era of new oppor-

tunities, of free education and urban employment. Labour migration also sustained rural households struggling to survive on the produce of

> At the time of my fieldwork, which took place from 2000 to 2002, UNAIDS and Kenyan government figures suggest that 22° of adults in western Kenya were HIVpositive, probably a conservative figure; by the end of 2001, 1.5 million people had died of AIDS in Kenya (KNACP 1998; UNAIDS 2003).

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION D1

their land (Fearn 1961; Hay 1976; Potash 1978; Stichter 1982; Cohen & Odhiambo 1989). Since the 1980s, however, falling real wages and growing urban unemployment have led to reverse migration by men (Francis 1995). ‘This has placed great strain on rural households and marital relations, as the gender roles of male breadwinner and dependent wife, established during the heyday of labour migration, are being undermined (ibid.; Whyte & Kariuki 1997). Meanwhile unemployment and AIDS prevent young people from ‘moving ahead’, becoming full adults and establishing families. For many, the AIDS crisis thus expresses a more profound loss that has taken place in the Luo community over a longer historical period. This sense of loss is summed up in a saying, common among old and young, ‘the land is dying’ (meaning people and community as well as the land itself). It is engendering intense scrutiny of both ‘traditional’ and Christian beliefs and practices, as well as heated arguments about the roots of the epidemic and the right way to ‘move forward’. ‘Uhese arguments continually return to the issue of ‘growth’, understood as the generation or regeneration of moral and social practices that underlie personal, familial and community well-being and continuity. Such arguments dominate everyday conversations in the village, as well as public discussions on the radio, in newspaper articles, at internet sites and in popular music (Prince 2006). The subject of widow inheritance (called éero or ‘to take’ in Dholuo)* 1s

at the centre of many of these arguments, both among Luo people and in the Kenyan media more widely.’ ‘Saved’ or ‘born-again’ Christians (those who follow the pathway of Salvation introduced into the Anglican church in East Africa in the 1930s) regard the AIDS epidemic as partly a consequence of people “backsliding’ into traditional, hence ‘heathen’ and ‘sinful’ ways. [he practice of widow inheritance is particularly suspect, as the idea of sexual intercourse being a pathway to ritual cleansing

* ‘The term ‘widow inheritance’ is by no means a correct translation of tero, which simply means ‘taking’. However, in this paper I refer to the practice as widow inheritance for the ease of the reader and because this is the English term that Kenyans themselves

use. [he term ‘inheritance’ is misleading, because it suggests ideas of property that did not exist in past practice of ‘ero. ‘loday, the practice of ‘ero is deeply entwined with concerns about property and wealth. I have explored the modern transformations of tero elsewhere (Prince 2004) and, for the purposes of this paper, do not go into these historical complexities.

» For example, “Tale of the Naked Luo Widow’, Daily Nation (Kenya), 22 January 2004; “Tradition or Not, Pll Have None of it’, Daily Nation USenya), 18 June 2004.

92 RUTH PRINCE and renewal is antithetical to Saved Christian sensibilities (Geissler & Prince 2005). Widow inheritance is also part of a body of ‘traditional’ practice that is seen to compromise modern and Christian identities. In the Saved view, ‘growth’ or development is contingent upon a rupture with the past. This requires the individual to be ‘born-again’, to live a Christian life by disengaging with practices and social relations that compromise this identity. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, widow inheritance is regarded as not only sinful but dangerous, as it spreads disease and death.® Today, Saved concerns about sinful practices and bodily boundaries resonate with the AIDS discourse of infection and protection. Saved widows often justify their refusal of tero by saying ‘we don’t want this disease in our home’. While those who follow what people in English call ‘Luo tradition’ (known in Dholuo by various terms such as ‘Luo ways’, ‘ways of the past’, or “ways of the ancestors’) are also Christian, they see no conflict between Luo and Christian ways. ‘raditionalists acknowledge AIDS but they argue that the sickness and death have another meaning, which extends well beyond the biomedical facts of HIV/AIDS. “This 1s chira’, they say, a sickness that embodies a blockage in ‘growth’ and that arises from ‘confusion’ in social relations, when people forget to follow, or explicitly reject, the ritual practices or rules (chike) that structure kinship and social life and engender growth. From their perspective, the ‘death of today’ expresses a confusion of relations, a lack of continuity with the past, and a loss of moral direction, which necessitates a ‘return to Luo ways’.

For traditionalists, tevo brings about renewal and regeneration after death, and 1s a sacred practice at the heart of Luo culture. Widows who embrace tero generate new growth and life, while widows who refuse iero bring chira, stagnation and death to their home and family, as they

remain bound to their dead husbands. ‘Traditionalists argue that by refusing lero Saved widows create ‘confusion’ in the home and ‘mess up’

the proper direction of growth, as this can only be ‘opened’ through the complementary fusion of man and woman. In their view, Saved people are largely responsible for the loss of connection with the past that has resulted in a loss of direction in the present. It is this confusion that has resulted in the illness chira—the death of young people and the

® An epidemiological study of widows in Nyanza suggests that widow inheritance does indeed contribute to the spread of HIV infection (Okeyo & Allen 1993).

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 53

stagnation in the growth of families. ‘Traditional discourse thus appears to reject the biomedical explanation of ‘the death of today’. However,

among people in Uhero, there is little consensus about the relationship between chira and AIDS. Luo tradition, Christian Salvation, and the increasingly prominent AIDS discourse offer incompatible moral regimes, which heighten the deep sense of moral ambiguity and confusion that people experience. For those concerned with following tradition, the problem of widowhood has become particularly acute because AIDS has created many young widows. Such young women should be at the centre of family growth, but the death of a husband abruptly curtails this. In the past and according to Luo tradition, one of the dead husband’s brothers or kinsmen would become the widow’s guardian, take care of her children and give her more children in her husband’s name (Mboya 1938; EvansPritchard 1965; Potash 1986). However, people say that with the high death rate from AIDS in recent years, brothers and kinsmen are either deceased themselves or they are reluctant to undertake the responsibility of another household. It 1s becoming common for an unrelated man to be given money or goats to ‘cleanse’ the widow of her husband’s death. People also complain that ‘these days’, widows ‘go to a bar and find a man there’. Meanwhile, land pressure is creating conflicts within families, and there are reports that widows are being forced off their husband’s land (see www.kaippg.com).’ Traditionalists today are thus concerned with two issues: how to re-centre widow inheritance in the home and the family, rather than the ‘bar’ and the market, and how to counter the increasing tendency of widows to refuse to have anything to do with éero in the name of Christian Salvation. The following conversation, which took place in a home in Uhero,

expresses the controversy about éero, salvation and tradition in the context of the death of today. Old Mary commented to her grandson’s

wife, MinGrace, that in the old days, people did not die as they do today. As often happened, this prompted a debate about death, sickness,

chira and AIDS, the Luo rules and Salvation, which centred on the issue of widows. Mary: Nowadays people just die in any way. It 1s the young who de and the old who remain. You just keep quiet, but your tears are flowing. Nowadays people just

’ The Kenyan AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group.

o4 RUTH PRINCE shit death. We only hear that so-and-so has been attacked by this venereal disease, I don’t know what it 1s called, this one that makes people thin. MinGrace (teasing): Ls it really a venereal disease that 1s killing people? Mary: Js it not chira if your husband dies and you go to be shaved in a bar? |mean-

ing to have sexual intercourse with a man in a bar as a way of cleansing oneself of the husband’s death]. Won’t chira then affect your child? MinGrace: So is it chira or is it venereal disease that 1s killing people?

Mary: /t is chira. MinGrace: But you just said it was venereal disease. Mary: Nowadays it 1s called that venereal disease...

Both agree that, with the death of today, following chike has become urgent. Although these days people are either opportunistic about following the rules, or they are Saved and refuse to follow them at all, they should return to the rules ‘if they value what they make in their houses’. MinGrace playfully challenges Mary: Jt is you older people who are responsible; you do not teach us what to do when our husbands die, so we go to be shaved in a bar and there we bring back death. Our mothers are Saved, they have cleansed themselves of the rules of the earth, so they can’t teach us about the rules, and we don’t know how to finish the rules of death. A Saved mother may refuse tero, but she will have to follow the rules to make a way for us! Mary: Yes, it is Saved people who don’t follow those things any more who are responsible for this confusion.

MinGrace accuses Mary, playfully, as a member of the older generation, who should be teaching the younger: /¢ is you who are killing your children. You are the venereal disease that 1s killing people! You block this side and open this side! You are the AIDS that 1s killing us! Mary: Jes, we are the ones making you sink. We are Saved up in heaven, but we are going to bring destruction to the home.

Because of their relationship, Mary and MinGrace can tease each other (Geissler & Prince 2004). Neither is Saved, but since Mary 1s the oldest member of the home MinGrace playfully accuses her of responsibility for the moral confusion of today. However, their real target is Rebekka, MinGrace’s mother-in-law and Mary’s son’s wife. Rebekka is Saved and refuses to follow the Luo rules. She claims that if her husband dies before her, she will refuse tero. In joking about Saved people bringing destruction to the home, MinGrace 1s indirectly voicing a concern about her mother-in-law’s responsibility for ordering the growth of the home.

As we can see in this dialogue, Salvation and tradition propose opposite pathways of ‘growth’ and regeneration in the face of ‘the death of today’. ‘Tradition calls for a ‘return’ to what are construed as ‘past’ ways, while Salvation necessitates a break with a past that has

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION ID

dragged the Luo ‘backward’ and now obstructs the future. ‘Tradition calls for ritual action to be re-centred in the home, the land and the Luo people, while Saved people look to heaven and strive to forge a personal pathway to God. ‘The polarities between these two pathways are captured in their Dholuo terms: Saved practices are referred to as ‘things of heaven’, ‘things of God’ and ‘Christian ways’, while traditional practices are called ‘ways of the earth’, “Luo ways’ and ‘things of the ancestors’. As with all polarities, each needs the other. While Salvation needs tradition as its antithesis in the struggle against sin, tradition sets itself up against those Christian ways that have led to a neglect of customary practices. Yet the increasing objectification of tradition as a body of custom 1s itself heavily influenced by Christian thinking. Christian and traditional practices here produce each other, as has been observed elsewhere in Africa (Comaroff 1985: 142-5; Bloch 1986; Green 1993; Peel 2000).

In order to understand the heated arguments between Saved Christians and traditionalists about ‘the death of today’ in general, and about widow inheritance in particular, I will explore how these different pathways propose radically different ways of life. Below, I tell

the stories of three widows in Uhero. I then examine in more detail the polarity between Salvation and tradition. I explore their respective beliefs and practices, their histories and their social dynamics. Finally I examine the negotiations and compromises between Saved and traditional pathways in the context of the “death of today’, as people strive for growth and life. Some widows and their chowes in Uhero Mercy’s refusal to follow tradition

Mercy Ogumba (b. 1955) was one of the wealthiest persons in the vil-

lage. When her husband died in 2000, Mercy was adamant that she would not follow any of ‘these Luo traditions’ and she would certainly not let herself be nherited: ‘We are a Saved family’, she said, ‘and I don’t want this illness in my home’. As her husband had been Saved, Mercy’s refusal to be inherited was expected by her church members. However, some members of her husband’s family, in particular his oldest nephew Solomon, the headmaster of a secondary school, strongly disapproved. After his uncle’s death, Solomon considered himself to

be the head of the family, and he wanted things to be done in the

96 RUTH PRINCE ‘traditional’ way. Solomon and several of his cousins at first refused to attend their uncle’s funeral. In the end they appeared briefly, but complained bitterly that the traditional rules were not being followed. Meanwhile Mercy adamantly refused to follow any of the traditions associated with burial, as, she explained, ‘If I follow one rule, then

I will have to follow them all, and I will end up being inherited’. Her position was quite secure; her name was on the title deeds of her property, she had a bank account and she earned a decent salary. She was therefore quite independent of her in-laws and was in no danger of being forced into taking a new husband. However, she was upset at the dispute with her in-laws, and for many weeks and months continued to proclaim her Salvation and assert that ‘Jesus 1s my

husband’. Anyango’s refusal of tero

In late 2000, Anyango’s husband Otieno died in hospital in Nairobi. The family had been living in Nairobi for some years, but, as is conventional, Otieno’s body was transported to his rural home for burial. During the long funeral preparations and during the days after the burial, Otieno’s mother and his brothers placed intense pressure on Anyango (b. 1968) to enter a leviratic union. One night shortly after the burial, they sent their chosen man, a kinsman, to the house Otieno had built for Anyango in his parent’s home. Anyango sent him away. In response, her husband’s mother and sisters refused to provide her with water and food, arguing that, by refusing to be ‘taken’, Anyango carried the chola or ‘dirt’ of her husband’s death, and that she posed a threat to those around her, particularly through shared commensality. According to Anyango, another reason for her in-laws’ actions was their

concern that if she later married another man outside her husband’s lineage, their son’s modest wealth would be appropriated. Afraid of accusations that she would bring sickness to the home, Anyango quickly left for Nairobi. Being well educated and having a permanent job, Anyango was not dependent upon access to her in-laws’ land. She therefore continued to live in Nairobi and avoided their home, although she allowed her youngest daughter, who was Otieno’s child, to visit them. On trips to western Kenya, Anyango stayed with her own

mother, who, as a Saved Christian, did not fear the consequences of the widow’s chola. Shortly thereafter, Anyango herself became ‘Saved’. She has not married again.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 37 Doreen’s concern for her sons’ growth

Doreen’s (b. 1963) position was very different. Her husband, one of the four adult sons of a large home in Uhero, died in 2000 while living in town. Until his death, Doreen had been living in the town with him and their children. After she brought her husband’s body back to his father’s

home in Uhero for burial, Doreen stayed on there with her children. Doreen herself gradually sickened after her return to Uhero, and she became increasingly concerned that her husband had not established his own home before he died. According to Luo tradition, this prevented their three sons from building their own houses and establishing their own homes. Since their father was dead, they would not be able to build until Doreen had been ‘taken’ by another man, who would then build a house for her on her husband ’s land and thus establish a home for her there. ‘Through this union between their mother and the jader (a man who

‘takes’ a woman in a leviratic union; often translated by Luo into English as an ‘inheritor’), the sons would be able to ‘go forward’ and

build their own houses, and thus engender further ‘growth’ of the home and the family. Since two of Doreen’s brothers-in-law were also recently deceased and the other was reluctant to inherit her, Doreen looked for a jaier herself and found Abel, a sixty-year-old married man of an unrelated lineage. She paid Abel with her two remaining goats, and together they built a house for Doreen in the new home. By this time (January 2002), Doreen was herself very sick and did not expect to live long. Perhaps for this reason, the house that was built for her

was temporary. Soon after she moved into the house, and her sons built their own bachelors’ houses in the new home, Doreen died. She was buried beside her new house, which, six months later, was already disintegraing. However, before she died she told people she was satisfied that at least she had ‘opened’ the way for her sons’ future growth. We cannot conclude from these stories that religious commitment was the dominant factor motivating the widows’ behaviour. Economic

factors, In particular the degree of a widow’s dependence upon her in-laws’ land and her position in her husband’s home, certainly shape a woman’s options. Perhaps Doreen had little choice but to accept a jater since her mother-in-law had the final say in allocating her dead sons’ land. Yet there are other cases where rural, poorly educated widows refuse a jater because of their Salvation and other cases where well-off women choose éero. Economic factors may also work against vero: in a situation where men are increasingly jobless, some women

98 RUTH PRINCE complain that éero just means ‘another mouth to feed’. The stories do show however that the pathways available to a widow in response to her husband’s death are fundamentally shaped by Salvation and tradition. Even in Anyango’s case, where her turn toward Salvation happened after her decision to refuse a jater, becoming Saved helped her to resist further pressure from her in-laws. Six years on, she continues to be strongly committed to her church and to Salvation. ‘The stories also suggest that disagreements between Saved people and traditionalists about the death of today and how to deal with it are causing ruptures in kinship relations. Christianity and Salvation

In Uhero today, everyone is Christian. While there are over twenty Christian denominations in Uhero village, in this discussion I focus on Anglican Christianity and particularly the movement of Salvation within the Anglican Church.’ This is because, historically, politically and socially, the Anglican Church has been a dominant force in shaping Christianity in western Kenya. Anglicanism was brought by the Church Mission Society (henceforth GMS) in 1904. CMS missionaries made the first translations of the Bible into Dholuo and laid the foundations of the opposition between ‘Christian ways’, which they equated with progress, and ‘traditional ways’, which they equated with the pagan past (Ogot 1963). ‘These oppositions continue to be drawn upon by JoUhero (‘people of Uhero’) today, whatever their denomination. However, while members of other churches have been engaged in various syntheses of Christianity and Luo ways (Barrett 1968; Perrin-Jassy 1973; HoehlerFratton 1996), Anglicans and particularly Saved Anglicans continue to polarise them and to actively oppose any contact with “Luo ways’ in their everyday lives. ‘This forces much of social practice and identity into binary patterns, which shapes everyday life in Uhero.’ This polarity also dominates arguments about AIDS and the proper ways of dealing with the death of today.

According to GMS missionaries and their converts, to convert to Christianity entailed a complete transformation in one’s way of life. The GMS demonised Luo ancestral spirits, ritual and medicine as ® Since 1999, called the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK). ” See Keane 1995 for a similar case in Indonesia.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION D9

well as social practices like polygamy and beer drinking (Ogot 1963: 256; Strayer 1978; Kirwen 1993). Such practices, it was believed, prevented Africans from becoming true believers and embracing ‘modern’ values and institutions such as schooling, biomedicine, monogamy and the nuclear family (Odhiambo 1973). As elsewhere in Africa (e.g. Beidelman 1982; Ranger 1992; Comaroff & Comaroff 1997; Meyer 1999; Pels 1999), missionaries, and many of their African converts, saw their mission as converting Africans not only to Christianity but to ‘civilisation’, and they strove to transform not only religious beliefs and rituals but many of the practices of daily life (Hay 1992).'° From its beginnings, then, Christianity involved a polarisation of ways of life between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and a rupture with habits and practices defined as heathen. Given the hostility of the Anglican church to Luo ways, why did people convert to Christianity? As elsewhere, conversion provided access not only to a seemingly powerful God, but also to resources and skills that were becoming important in colonial society, such as literacy and numeracy, and new agricultural crops and techniques (Richards 1956;

Odhiambo 1973; Hay 1992, 1996). Christian converts were favoured

in colonial employment and CMS converts formed a large part of the labour elite (Hay 1992, 1996). Through its focus on monogamy and the nuclear family, education and achievement in secular society, Anglicanism has continued to be a pathway of upward mobility and has contributed to social differentiation (Ogot 1963; Lonsdale 1969). However, Anglican Christianity was not embraced by everyone. Already by 1910, dissatisfaction with the hostility of mission churches to African culture had led to the emergence of an independent church in Luoland, which practised a more syncretistic Christianity, and by the 1930s several independent African churches existed (Ogot 1963; Anderson 1977; Wipper 1977). This pattern of schism from mission churches continued during the twentieth century (Barrett 1968; Hoehler-Fatton 1996). It underlines that many Luo did not in fact accept the mission church’s rejection of ‘tradition’, and that the relationship between Christian

'° The first Christian converts, some of whom set up Christian villages to enable them to live separately from others, became known by various names that indicate the close association between conversion and the transformation of everyday habits, such as jonanga (‘the people of the cloth’), jooduma (‘the people of maize’) and jolony (‘the people of modernity’) (Odhiambo 1973; Cohen & Odhiambo 1989).

60 RUTH PRINCE ways and Luo ways have been part of a ‘long conversation’ among Luo Christians themselves (see Kirwen 1993). In the 1930s, this tension was inflamed by a movement that emerged within the Anglican church in Uganda, calling itself the East African Christian Revival. Influenced by the Christian revival in England, the

movement began in the Rwanda mission and spread into Uganda, Kenya and ‘Tanzania. It involved ‘speaking-out’, declaring one’s personal

‘Salvation’ through Jesus Christ and public confession of sins (Robins 1975, 1979; Church 1981; Cattel 1992; Peterson 2001). Revivalists decried what they regarded as the tendency of African Christians to ‘backslide’, to pay nominal respect to Christianity while continuing to live in ‘unchristian’ ways, and they called for ‘true’ Christians to shed

practices such as polygamy, widow inheritance, the use of African medicines and ‘witchdoctors’, drinking alcohol and smoking (ibid.). ‘The Revival thus took up missionary rejection of all vestiges of indigenous belief and customs, ‘often exceeding the demands of mission teaching in these areas’ (Robins 1975:8). Salvation in Uhero past and present

In December 2002, out of a population of 399 adults living in Uhero (all but seven of whom were Christian), 98 said they were ‘Saved’, 64 women and 34 men. [The largest group of Saved people in Uhero are members of the Anglican church.'' Some became Saved in the 1940s

and 50s (when the original East African Revival reached western Kenya), others found Salvation during the time of the ‘Reawakening’, a re-emergence of the Revival in the 1970s (Cattell 1992). Salvation remains a strong movement in Uhero today. During the 1990s and up to the present day there have been many converts. While the majority of Saved men belong to generations who became Saved in the 1940s to the 1970s, most of the more recent converts are women. The first generation of Revivalists or “Saved people’ in Uhero con-

verted during the late 1930s and 1940s, when the Revivalist movement reached Kenya. ‘Their accounts of becoming Saved emphasised an overwhelming religious revelation, experienced during a time of

'' Salvation remains a largely non-schismatic movement (Robins 1979). Although the Revival began within the CMS, Revival fellowships today exist within several Protestant

denominations in East Africa.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 6]

personal crisis, which led them to ‘leave’ lifestyles they described as ‘sinful’. Men talked of how they used to ‘roam about’, spending precious wages on alcohol and women, arguing with their spouses and neglecting their children, until illness or a marital crisis led them to Salvation. Women too said that becoming Saved helped them to become

better wives and mothers. Saved people also constantly talked of the ‘sin’ of traditional practices such as polygamy, which, they said, lead to the devil; it is only through the continual cleansing of sin through Salvation that one can find redemption. A common poster on the walls of Saved living-rooms depicts the Saved worldview well; 1t shows two pathways of life, one towards hell and the other to the Eternal City.'” It is clear from these accounts that a strong sense of moral and social crisis led people to become Saved. Salvation offered a moral order and spiritual authority in a context of marital and family strife associated with labour migration and urban life. However, the Saved language of the redeemed and the lost, together with the tendency of Saved people to cut off ties with non-Saved kin, created tensions within kin groups and in communities (see Robins 1975; Cattell 1992 for similar tensions elsewhere in Uganda and Kenya). Who became Saved in the 1940s? As there is as yet no historiogra-

phy of Salvation among the Luo, this question is difficult to answer. From my own census data of Uhero and interviews of Saved people in the area, it appears that those who became Saved in the 1940s were well-off Anglicans, labour migrants who were well-educated and had good Jobs, but whether this economic success 1s partly a result of being Anglican and being Saved is difficult to assess. ‘Today, Saved people

continue to make up the local Anglican elite. However, many Saved women live in polygamous homes among non-Saved kin, while others are widows who live alone with their children or grandchildren. Like the first generation of Revivalists, those who converted to Salvation during the last decade talk of an overwhelming spiritual experience, in which they saw with great clarity the ‘sin’ of their previous lifestyles. Unlike earlier converts’ experiences, however, stories of recent conversion are

'* "These accounts resonate with Peterson’s (2001) analysis of conversion to Salvation in 1940s and 50s Gikuyuland. He argues that the Revivalists’ language of the redeemed and the lost was useful in addressing marital difficulties and troubled gender relations at a time when the development of rural capitalism, landlessness and poverty was creating heated debates about the moral and social order. Revivalism recreated order in the home and in marriage, the backbone of Gikuyu society.

62 RUTH PRINCE framed by the AIDS crisis. An acute sense of moral disorientation, together with intimate experiences of suffering in the family, seems to propel people towards embracing radical change. With its strict sexual morality, clear notions of good and evil, and confession of sins, Salvation allows people to cleanse themselves of ‘sin’ and begin a new life. Saved

people commonly blame Luo traditions such as widow inheritance for ‘bringing disease to the home’, and they argue that the death will continue as long as people follow tradition. “Luo traditions are not only dragging us backward’, as one Saved women told me, ‘they are killing

us’. Both Saved and non-Saved emphasise that Salvation 1s popular among widows in Uhero—in 2001, 35°%% of widows in Uhero were Saved—because it allows them to refuse lero. Salvation is a continuous struggle against sin

In Dholuo, Salvation is known as waruok, “to speak out (or declare) openly’, and Saved people are known as jowaro or jolendo, ‘those who declare’, jopolo, “people of heaven’ and jolony ‘people of modernity/ civilisation’. Such terms underline how much Saved identity 1s based on outward signs and on the polarity between heaven/earth and tradition/modernity. Saved people regard sin as a constant danger and the

way to heaven as a continuous struggle to live a Christian life. ‘This struggle requires constant declaration of one’s Salvation, ‘giving witness’

to one’s faith, which 1s confirmed through the Saved greeting ‘Praise the Lord!’. ‘Together with the Saved habit of greeting with a stiff hug

instead of a handshake, this declaration marks out the members of the group. Becoming Saved involves entry into a fellowship group (in Dholuo, /alruok, from lalore, ‘to discuss openly’). The term dalruok points

to the emphasis on sharing one’s sins openly; to ‘walk in the sun’ as opposed to the darkness of the past. Affirmation of ‘Salvation’ 1s also achieved through a dramatic change

in lifestyle. Becoming Saved means giving up polygamy, brewing or drinking alcohol, and smoking tobacco, and, in particular, a refusal to follow Luo traditions. Saved Anglicans in Uhero actively oppose any contact with ritual practices as well as with material objects that refer to the power of ancestors in their daily lives, such as spirit possession, dance and drumming, ritual healing, sacrificial offerings, objects, like clay pots, and certain medicinal plants, that are associated with spirits. These acts, objects and practices are described as ‘things of the earth’.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 63

Saved people regard them as threats to the following of a ‘clean’ (ler) Christian life, and describe them as ‘witchcraft’ (jwok) (see Kirwen 1993)."°

The salience of ‘witchcraft’ in Saved notions of ‘the things of the earth’ deserves our attention. In addition to the whole body of Luo traditions, ‘witchcraft’ includes all practices that are imbued with ancestral power: ritual sacrifice, libations, spirit possession and ritual healing, as well as the use of plant medicines for the treatment of illness. These acts and objects are not regarded as ineffective practices in which Saved people have no interest, but are real threats against which true Christians must struggle. ‘UVhus it is not that Saved people do

not believe in the power of ancestral spirits; rather they do not accept this power and seek to transcend it. ‘This ambiguity is expressed in the Dholuo verb ye, ‘to accept’, which is translated in the Christian context as ‘to believe’, but is closer in meaning to the original English meaning of belief as having faith in, or being committed to, something (see Good 1994). In opposing the practices of chike Luo, Saved Christians do not negate the continuity of the past with the present (which chike Luo assumes), nor do they negate its potential influence upon their own lives, but they actively struggle against this influence. Since all these practices are seen as connected with one another, none must be allowed contact with the Saved life lest the Saved self is jeopardised. Thus while many other Christians admit to (or even proudly embrace) following ‘the things of the earth’ and being ‘people of the earth’, Saved Christians adamantly refuse such connections. For them, all “backsliders’ are heathens and ‘follow the path of the devil’.

Salvation rejects not only continuity with the past, embodied in ancestral power, but also the continuity between one person and others and between persons and things that chike assume. Rather than

engendering familial growth and well-being through practices that open up the flows of life between living and dead and amongst kin, Salvation centres growth on a bounded self, which can enter into a personal relationship with Jesus. Yet these efforts to disentangle the person from compromising ties and relations, to define and detend one’s boundaries, are not wholly successful. Saved people are different

'’ For a similar rejection among Saved people in East Africa of indigenous customs and beliefs as ‘things of the devil’, see Robins (1975) for Uganda and Cattell (1992) for Samia, Kenya.

64 RUTH PRINCE in the degree to which they can follow Saved lifestyles. While those who live in Saved homes prefer not to socialise with non-Saved people and remain uncompromising in their daily lives, others must struggle to follow Salvation in homes where the people they rely upon and love are not Saved. Moreover, some of the practices through which Saved people create their fellowships on the one hand and define their boundaries on the other, such as drinking tea together and refusing to eat with non-Saved people, have much in common with “Luo ways’ of creating and marking social relations. In its emphasis on creating oneself anew through a radical break with past ways of being and doing, Salvation expresses the modern project

of self-making and self-betterment through rupture with and separation from the past (see van der Veer 1996). One creates oneself anew through disentangling oneself from relations, practices and habits that link one to the past. In doing so, the past is produced and perpetuated as other: an imagined ‘heathen’ past of ‘tradition’ and ancestral ties (see Green 1993; Keane 1996). ‘To declare oneself to be Saved requires constant reiteration of difference, and being Saved makes sense only if ‘the other’ is real in one’s daily life. ‘hus, like the Ghanaian Pietists Meyer describes (1999), Saved practice does not create a disenchanted life-world or modernity in Weber’s sense of Protestant rationalisation, but an enchanted polarity in which good and evil, one’s own and others’ practices are engaged in a constant struggle. Salvation, ALDS' and chira

In the past century, struggles between ‘good’ Christian and ‘bad’ heathen practices have been about personhood, morality, marriage, gender relations, kinship and the proper pathway to ‘progress’ or “modernity”. Today AIDS is making these struggles particularly acute, as the choice is now seen to be a matter of life and death. While Saved people argue that “Luo ways are not only dragging us backward, they are killing us’,

others, like Mary and MinGrace, accuse people of being ‘Saved in heaven’ but bringing ‘destruction to the home’. The Saved struggle against tradition helps us to understand Saved people’s often ambiguous stance towards chira as well as the biomedical discourse of AIDS. Saved people often argue that traditional practices

such as ero ‘bring illness to the home’ and they also constantly and explicitly reject chira: “This is just a traditional disease’, they say. At

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 65

first I interpreted such statements to mean that traditional practices such as lero spread HIV, and that chira is a disease of the past and not of the present, thus of irrelevance today. Further discussions suggested, however, that chira was regarded as a disease which could not affect Saved people, as they have ‘left’ the rules. When Saved people assert that traditional practices bring illness, it 1s thus not always clear whether they refer to a biomedical understanding of HIV/AIDS (which many are very knowledgeable about) or to a view that chira affects only those who follow the traditions. It seems that these different views coexist and may be drawn upon by the same people in different situations. ‘This suggests that rather than resolving competing understandings of the death of today, Salvation provides a moral regime with which to face it. In the next section, I explain why widow inheritance 1s for some so necessary to life and growth by exploring the pathway of Chike Luo or Luo tradition. Tradition

In Luo society today, there is, except for funeral ceremonies, little formal, explicit ‘traditional’ ritual.'* Instead, Luo tradition is prominent, in both everyday life and public discourse, in the form of Chike Luo, “Luo rules’ or ‘Luo ways’. Chike Luo are the ensemble of practices that should order everyday life and kinship relations, practices that include ways of cooking, eating, sitting, sleeping, sexual intercourse, building a home and dealing with death. Chike shape the relations between kin and link generative practices such as cooking, eating and sexual intercourse to broader transformative processes in the land and between living and dead. ‘he striking characteristic of Chike Luo is the extent to which they have been codified as ‘rules’ during the course of the past century. In this section, I summarise the development of ‘tradition’ as an explicit body of discourse during the twentieth century, which has been tied to various concerns (ethnicity and politics as well as identity and kinship). I then examine how tradition has become increasingly prominent as a discourse about morality and responsibility in the age of AIDS, as it is being elaborated as a body of rules regarding conduct. First,

'* This is unlike other East African groups (e.g. Green 1993; Kratz 1993; Sanders 9002).

66 RUTH PRINCE however, I will explain why I regard tradition, like Salvation, as a matter of faith. The transformatwe potency of ‘earthly ways’

While tradition in its reified form is as modern a phenomenon as Salvation, it is based upon and refers to a pervasive set of older ritual practices, which connect people to other living things, to material objects and to the ancestors. ‘These practices are embedded in kinship relations

and the sociality of everyday life, as well as guiding important events such as dealing with death. ‘The codification of these practices as ‘rules’ is transforming their nature and effects (Prince 2004). For the purposes of this paper, the important point is that the rules and the more implicit

practices that they refer to are considered to have vital potential to create life or to harbour death. For many Luo, ‘following the rules’ 1s necessary in order to engender or regenerate life and growth—that 1s, the well-being and continuity of people, animals and the land. Of particular significance here are practices referred to in Dholuo as ruwo (literally ‘merging’, ‘joining together’, ‘mixing’ or ‘sharing’). Riuwo designate moments of material contact, in which persons (or their attributes) join together by sharing substance. Practices of nwo relate the creation of substantial bonds between persons to transformative

processes such as cooking, eating, conception, fermentation, plant growth, rainfall, fertility and healing (Prince & Geissler 2001; Geissler & Prince 2006), and refer to what Jacobson-Widding describes as the practice of ‘creative communion’ (1990: 19) in East African societies.

Whilst rio refers to many different daily acts in which people come together, the most significant are practices of sharing food and sexual intercourse. While practices involving riwo concern seemingly mundane acts of daily life, they harbour a transformative potential that is central for the creation of social life. However, the creative capacity of contact in rizwo

is ambiguous. Transformations can be towards growth and life, but also towards death and decay. ‘Uhus there are many prescriptions and proscriptions regarding where, when and with whom riwo should take place. ‘Together, these prescriptions are known as chike (singular chih), often translated as ‘rules’ or ‘traditions’. Following chike produces the ‘order of life’ that structures social relations in Luo society and guides life transitions. Riwo and chike are thus central to Luo concerns about how things should be done in order to produce and sustain growth.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 67

Widow inheritance or éero is so central to current debates about growth and regeneration because to do lero 1s to follow chike. Practices of nwo lie at the heart of the transformation of the death of a husband

into new growth and life. ‘hus, a widow and her new husband (jater, ‘the person who takes’) should share a meal together and have sexual intercourse— both acts of sharing and merging referred to as riwo—and these acts should take place in a new house built for the widow by the new man (a house that, in its material make-up, embodies the gender complementarity and fertile potency of husband and wife). Sexual intercourse is here conceived of as a powerful and potent albeit ambiguous

life-force, part of much broader generative processes than biological reproduction and fertility. Its positive potential depends, however, upon

its enactment in the night place, at the right time (or in the correct sequence of practices) and with the right person; if done incorrectly, it can harbour illness and death. While riwo and chike may be about everyday practical matters such as sex, marriage, the home, childbearing and agricultural fertility, the productivity of this everyday life 1s dependent upon maintaining the proper relations between people, with the land and between the living and the dead. There 1s a reverence here for the potential in the social relation for creating and ordering life. This reverence resonates with the often described lack of division between secular and sacred in African cultures; divinity or its potential resides in the everyday and the social relation (Evans-Pritchard 1956; Lienhardt 1961; ‘Turner 1967; Devisch 1993; Moore, Sanders & Kaare 1999). While chike are hedged around by ritual prescriptions, there 1s little that is explicitly ritualised about them (the only explicit rituals are those conducted by Christian churches). Acts that I later realised are ritual acts (in the sense that they harbour transformative potential and have to be done in a specific way), such as slaughtering an animal for a funeral feast, are done in an everyday, even offhand manner, and rarely does anyone comment on their ritual significance. Among the dozens of funerals I attended, only very rarely did someone spontaneously explain that the animal’s blood ran into the soil ‘so that the old people can drink’. However, many people consider it essential during

funerals to slaughter a cow and let the blood run into the soil, and to share together in the funeral meal. Similarly, it 1s essential that a husband and wife engage in sexual intercourse and share a meal in particular situations, for example, during harvesting of crops, after the birth of a child, during the building of a new house or establishment

68 RUTH PRINCE of a new home, and after the burial of a family member. A widow cannot break the bonds of death and engender new life and growth in her home and among her children until she has been ‘taken’ by a new husband, that is, shared food and sexual intercourse with him. Even everyday interaction among kinspeople and with visitors 1s shaped by implicit principles regarding when and where and with whom cooking, eating, sitting, and sexual intercourse can take place. Such practices are normally not remarked upon by people in Uhero, or they are casually referred to as ‘this is just what we do’, but if later anything goes wrong (for example, 1f someone becomes seriously sick or dies), people begin to scrutinise the way in which things have been done. Whilst it may be that ritual acts were always done in an everyday and offhand manner (see, for example, Stam 1910), and indeed this may be a feature of ritual in Nilotic societies (see Evans-Pritchard 1956: 212), it is clear that in the past, ritual ceremonies were much more common, and involved more explicit acts of riwo, including sharing beer, sharing food, sacrifice and libations to the ancestors, and dancing (Mboya 1938; Hauge 1974).'? Ethnographic evidence indicates that some rituals persisted up until the 1970s, but that they were increasingly done in secret (Hauge 1974). That these rituals have disappeared is probably because of missionary opposition to sacrifice, drinking local brew, and dancing (ibid.). However, the continued significance of practices of riwo and chike suggests that whilst explicit ritual relating to divinity and the

ancestors gradually disappeared with the introduction and spread of Christianity, its underlying principles persist in more everyday, implicit ways of being and doing. ‘This may be because, as elsewhere in Africa,

European missionaries targeted what they saw as heathen practices such as sacrifices, libations, dancing and beer drinking, while ignoring other, less obviously ‘religious’ practices, as they did not realise these too were integrated into a wider but inexplicit ritual system (see Green 1993: 227 for a similar situation in ‘Tanzania and Bloch 1986: 26 for Madagascar). Thus it may be that the implicit nature of what was meaningful about Luo ritual allowed it to evade missionary and Christian attacks.

'? Evans-Pritchard observed among the closely related Nuer ‘a certain air of casualness and lack of ceremony about the performance of rituals such as sacrifice in the early 1930s (1956: 212).

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 69 The reification of the ‘Luo rules’: Luo tradition

While practices of rzwo and chike may have avoided direct missionary

attack, they have, over the course of the twentieth century, become increasingly objectified by Luo themselves and turned into a discourse of ‘Luo rules’ or ‘Luo traditions’. ‘This discourse 1s rooted in mission and Christian opposition to certain Luo cultural and social practices, which introduced a polarity between ‘Luo ways’ and ‘Christian ways’ and provoked nostalgia among some Luo for what have come to be imagined as the ways of the past (see Gohen & Odhiambo 1989), as well as in colonial codification, which created the ‘traditional’ African

society, rooted in supposedly unchanging traditions (Colson 1971; Lonsdale 1977; Peel 2000). Reifications of culture and ethnicity also became strategic concerns for Luo negotiating their status in the colonial

and postcolonial state (Gohen & Odhiambo 1989, 1992). Luo politicians such as Oginga drew upon arguments of culture and tradition to underwrite their authority to speak for the people. This codification of culture began with Paul Mboya’s 1938 handbook entitled Luo Ritgi gt Timbegi (Luo Characters and Customs)—written

‘to prevent our customs from being forgotten’ and to ensure that ‘our children know what is proper behaviour’ (1983: 7)—which stands as

a ‘canonization of the asserted culture and behaviour of th[e] new nation’ (Cohen & Odhiambo 1989: 34). The book was used for cultural education in primary schools in the 1950s. Recently republished, it continues to be used by Luo people as a resource about how to do things in the ‘traditional’ way. Later ethnographic accounts, such as the scholarly works of Ocholla-Ayayo (1976) are likewise used by Luo for practical purposes, for example in resolving issues of customary law and in settling court cases (see Cohen & Odhiambo 1992). Luo stories and proverbs have been collected (Mayor n.d. [1938]; Onyango-Ogutu and Roscoe 1974; Miruka 1994) and supposed Luo traditions described (K’Aoko 1986). Luo academics have also written books on ‘traditional’

Luo material culture (Ocholla-Ayayo 1980) and Luo historians have produced authoritative histories of the Luo tribe (Anyany 1952; Malo 1953; Ogot 1967; Ochieng’ 1974). A recently recorded series of audiotapes, in which an elderly man lists the genealogies of all Luo clans from their origins to the present day (Bonde Kadongo 1999), continues this

attempt to produce an unequivocal and stable record of the Luo past and contrasts with the production of genealogies through dialogue and negotiation among Luo elders (Blount 1975). ‘Tradition is hereby fixed

70 RUTH PRINCE and constituted as an object, a text and code of conduct, an equivalent to the Christian Bible and Commandments. Although, within this framework, custom and tradition are constituted as unchanging, the content and form of Luo tradition has been shifting, as 1s the case with other inventions of tradition in African societies (e.g., Kratz 1993; Gable 1995, 2002; Holtzman 2003; Sanders 2003). Thus, over the course of the last century, there has been an increasing concern with ‘Luo rules’ and with chira, the sickness that strikes as a consequence of not following the rules. If one compares Mboya’s 1938 text (and early ethnographies) to the recent traditionalist texts from the 1970s onwards (and particularly those produced in the 1990s, during the era of AIDS), one can discern a shift from a ‘thick description’ of customs to codified authoritative rules, numbered and listed like laws. Whereas Mboya does not mention chike Luo or the particular prescriptions and prohibitions (Aweche) that form them, and he mentions chira only in his chapter on the treatment of mothers and newborn children (see also Hauge 1974: 70), traditionalist discourse as well as ethnographies from the 1960s and 70s portray Aweche and chira as central institutions or ‘laws’ of Luo society, the defining characteristics of Luo culture (Ocholla-Ayayo 1976: 146; Abe 1981: 138). During his fieldwork in 1968-9 among Luo migrants in Nairobi, Parkin found that chira had become a dominant idiom of misfortune among Luo (it was known as ‘the Luo disease’), and that the focus on chia was producing a corresponding elaboration and hardening of the ‘rules’ of conduct ordering kinship relations and customary order (1978:

163). He relates this to the strains placed on marital and generational relations by labour migration and urban life, and to a concern with the lineage at a time when its cohesion was being threatened by the migration of men away from the rural home. He further argues that chira and the Luo rules were becoming important markers of Luo eth-

nicity in the urban and national context.'® During the course of the twentieth century then, chira and the “Luo rules’ have been undergoing a process of elaboration, tied to processes of urbanisation and labour

'® Parkin suggests that in the late 1960s, chia was not as prominent in rural Nyanza as in the city (1978). The prominence of chira in rural Nyanza today may thus express the urbanisation of rural spaces and of the rural imagination, and not at all an original rural adherence to custom.

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 71

migration, which has resulted in their dominant position today in the definition of Luo identity, ethnicity and culture.'’ Tradition today: a matter of life and death

Today, prescriptions and proscriptions of Luo rules, along with concerns

about chira, dominate contemporary traditionalist discourse and are prominent in the everyday life of people in the village. In the context of today’s death, these debates about tradition centre on matters of life and death. For traditionalists, chira and the rules express not so much a concern with ethnic identity as with personal and ethnic survival. They argue that ‘the death of today’ is a consequence of people leaving the traditions, which brings ‘confusion’ to social relations and results in sickness and death, and that the only way to avoid personal, social and cultural crisis is by ‘following the rules’. ‘Tradition is something

one must return to in order ‘to identify and water your roots’, as one exponent writes (Ogutu 1995: x1). The Luo community is in crisis: the crisis of identity, of purpose, of legitimacy or trust, of direction and of survival. ‘The challenge is to take a retrospective look at our roots in order to propel the community into tomorrow: an inevitable cultural renaissance (ibid.: 1995: 19).

The understanding of chira itself has shifted from a wasting of children’s bodies that points to a rupture in the child’s relations to being a wasting disease of adults, interpreted as an individual punishment for infringing the rules. ‘Thus chira is not always easily distinguished from AIDS in either cause or effects. Although AIDS is understood to come from

sleeping with an infected person whereas cfira 1s understood as the consequence of spoiling chike, the examples people give of spoiling chike

are usually improper sexual relations: ‘people move around too much these days and sleep with their relatives’ or ‘widows sleep with men at the bar and bring chira home’. And although chira is said to be a ‘traditional’ and ‘Luo’ illness, rooted in the home, the land and the past, whereas AIDS is a ‘new’ disease, which has come ‘from America’, ‘from

outside’, ‘from town’, and from ‘moving about’ (a term that implies

'” However, as the discussion of Salvation above underlines, not all labour migrants

embraced this elaboration of tradition. Debates about the position of tradition in modern Luo identity and the modern nation also dominated Luo politics in the 1950s and 60s (Parkin 1978: Cohen & Odhiambo 1989).

72 RUTH PRINCE sexual promiscuity), these are not hard and fast distinctions, as today chira is also said to come from ‘moving about’. While I cannot say whether the concern about chira and the rules was as prevalent in Uhero before the era of AIDS, certainly the pandemic has shaped and is shaping these contemporary debates about tradition, as the frequent sickness and death engender a search for meaning, a scrutiny of practice and a strong sense of loss and disorder, together with nostalgia for the imagined customary order of the past. Tradition as a moral discourse in the age of AIDS

During the 1990s there has been a proliferation of literature on “Luo rules’. Handbooks of custom with instructions on how to do things in the proper ‘Luo’ way, such as ‘faluo’ (“The Luo’) (Malo 1999) and ‘Chike Faduong e Dalane’ (“Vhe rules of the old man in his home’) (Raringo

2001), which lists 330 rules and promises a second volume, are available from bookshops and newsagents and warn readers of the deadly consequences of ‘leaving’ the rules. There is also a website, entitled “The Luo person’ (www, faluo.com), which includes a section on “Luo customs and traditions’, lists of ‘Luo rules’, and a chat room on how to engender ‘growth’ and avoid chira. Goncerns with chira and the Luo rules also dominate the Dholuo radio programme *Chike Luo’, which was broadcast weekly during 2001 and featured Luo ‘elders’ who answered listeners’ queries about the practices that could bring about chira and

how to avoid or remedy them. Here, the elders applied rigid and absolute rules and, like the print publications, claimed their universal, permanent and predictive validity to all Luo, urging their listeners to ‘let us leave breaking the rules so that we can live!’ and to write down the specific rules that they had themselves followed, so that their descendents could follow them. Interestingly, the discussants implied that young people striving for ‘growth’ were being ‘blocked’ by older people’s viola-

tions of rules: in their view, Saved widows who refuse the levirate and fathers in town who have not built a rural home obstruct the growth of their sons. Instead of the stereotype of elderly, rural traditionalists blocking the progress of young modernists, here it 1s elderly modern-

ists who obstruct young people’s return to the sources of growth of the past. ‘Traditionalist discourse argues for a reconnection to traditions that the previous generation neglected, and orientates itself against Luo who believe that the rules are heathen or ‘backward’, thus engaging in an

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 73

ongoing argument with Saved Christianity. A recent booklet written by a Yimbo scholar addresses the question of how one can “be a Christian,

educated, wealthy, et cetera, and still remain a Luo, in thought and practice’ (Ogutu 1995: 13). In a chapter on “Traditional beliefs in contemporary society’, the author deplores how Luo have left,

the norms of identity..., violated rules that are intended to govern individual behaviour. he consequence 1s that Luo cannot escape being attacked and killed by chira...'The worst hit are jonanga (the affluent families

or urban salariat) who deny that the rural base could be endowed with a sense of morality, law and order, and who quip that they are too civilised and modern to be guided by archaic Luo norms (ibid.: 13-14).

The following extract from the radio programme ‘Chike Luo’ (September

2001) suggests the heated debates about tradition in relation to Christianity, AIDS, ‘development’ and ‘civilisation’. At the same time, the answer give by the elder reveals the intimacy between the language of tradition and that of the Bible and the intricacies of their relation. Question: ‘What is the value of this program on Luo tradition? We are taking our people backward, we stop their development and keep them from knowing God and the civilisation of today!’. Answer: ‘God created the world...and the Bible we read, which is shared by all tribes. God, not Satan, gave us Dholuo [Luo language/culture]. Our culture says that one must make a home, the core of the rules. It tells us the rules of ours that we teach here in the traditional round hut. The person who breaks them becomes thin and like plastic, but if he goes for a test, it is not found to be AIDS. Dholuo says that leaving the rules brings thinness and diarrhoea [1.e. the illness chira]. Even if you went to Europe and studied, if you don’t follow them, every small child can tell that you will be growing thin. With the word of God, you may say the truth or lie, no one can know—you remain fat and only God knows. But if you spoil the rules you will see the consequences while you are still alive. Thus the rules bring growth to our families...and to the body. Some people neglect their body and only want the soul to grow...but God who gave it to you is wise and wants you to desire life. Rules are close to the Gospel, which says ‘Respect your mother and father and love your neighbour’ ...God 1s with us, and those breaking the rules are people whom Satan has given bad thoughts’.

Although Salvation constitutes tradition as its opposite, and traditionalist discourse likewise positions itself in opposition to ‘Saved’ ways, In practice most Luo, including self-proclaimed traditionalists, are Christians and those who ‘follow the rules’ see no contradiction between their Christianity and their desire to follow a supposedly older

74 RUTH PRINCE customary order. In fact, traditionalist discourse often draws upon and appropriates the language of Christianity and of Salvation itself. ‘Che elders on the radio programme Chike Luo describe following the rules as ‘following a clean [maler| path’ (ler, meaning ‘bright’ or ‘clean’, 1s

often used in Christian language to mean ‘holy’) and argue that the rules are not opposed to Christianity but are a way of life endorsed by God, ‘who created the world and gave us Luo culture’. ‘The notion of a rupture with a past figures in the discourse of tradition as much as that of salvation, although this breach is seen to be negative rather than positive: the Luo can only ‘save’ themselves by returning to the Luo rules. ‘Uhere are also similarities in Saved and traditionalist talk about sin and redemption. Some joUhero suggested that, given the confusion and social disruption that comes from following the rules half-heartedly, people should either leave the rules completely (that 1s, become Saved) or follow them absolutely. ‘This advice appears to draw upon a Christian rhetoric of conversion, entailing one or the other complete transformation in identity and way of life. As one young man said about his father (who returned home after 20 years in Nairobi with a copy of Mboya’s Luo Characters and Customs as a guide to building his home):

‘When he returned to the village he became a born-again Luo’. ‘To embrace tradition has today become a form of Salvation. The dynamics of tradition

Parkin’s argument, that the increasing focus on chira in the late 1960s was partly a response to concerns about seniority and gender relations in the context of labour migration and changing patterns of authority within the rural home (Parkin 1978), seems still apt today. ‘The shift towards an increasingly law-like application of chike and the focus on chira, with its emphasis on sexual conduct and women’s mobility, transforms chike to some extent into men’s rules regulating women’s conduct (although women can and do use these rules strategically too). ‘Today however, the reconstitution of tradition and its location in the ‘rules of

the home’ takes shape in the context of urban unemployment and a movement back to the rural home. Luo men find themselves reduced from breadwinners to economically peripheral household members and recourse to Luo tradition allows them to assert their authority. Although the rules often support the authority of senior kin over Junior and men over women, the elaboration of rules cannot be interpreted as a straightforward weapon of domination wielded by these groups,

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 75

as it is often senior kin and men who are blamed for their neglect of rules that then “block’ the path of junior kin and women. Moreover, young people and women also invoke the rules, not only because it provides moral direction, but also for strategic reasons. Asserting ‘this is chira’ sidesteps the individualistic discourse of AIDS and addresses the responsibility of kin for one’s situation. Invoking tradition makes sense because AIDS strikes at the core of family life and is experienced

as a threat to growth. The elaboration of the Luo rules is not only the domain of traditionalist discourse propagated in print and on the radio. Luo tradition exists as dynamic system also through its continual production in the everyday life of ordinary Luo. Many Christian JoUhero were very concerned about following the rules and following them in the right way.

Whereas much of the discourse of tradition embodied in the written word presents the rules as fixed sequences of actions that must be followed with no room for innovation, in everyday life in Uhero, people did different things and advocated different versions of rules. Indeed, the elaboration of Luo rules has reached such a scale (aptly expressed in Raringo’s (2001) collection of 330 ‘rules of the home’) that it is impossible not to violate some rule or other in the practices of daily life. ‘This is particularly the case today, as many die while still young, which messes up proper sequences between the generations and between

senior and junior in the home. ‘The rules criss-cross each other and invade every aspect of social life and kinship relations. ‘The lack of a solid consensus about the rules produced much uncertainty, confusion and anxiety among people in Uhero, as their more contextual and fluid knowledge of rules jarred with the much narrower interpretation of rules propagated by traditionalist discourse, and with their own search for a fixed and unambiguous customary order in an unstable and fragmented world. Negotiations between Saved and traditional pathways of growth

The picture I have presented so far 1s fairly black-and-white. ‘The moral discourses of Salvation and tradition seem to allow little room for negotiation between them. Yet there are many Saved women who live with husbands and families who are not Saved, and who must try to negotiate between their own Salvation and the desire of their families for growth through traditional ways. ‘This is possible partly because

70 RUTH PRINCE the boundary between traditional rules and everyday practice is often unclear, as the rules refer to particular ways of sharing food, cooking, and having sexual intercourse which are part of everyday life. ‘Thus, while Saved people loudly proclaim their distance from traditions, an observation of their everyday practices suggests that they occupy shifting ground, as in many situations they too seem to appreciate the potency of these practices for growth and life. The negotiations and compromises that Saved people often have to enter into are well illustrated by the following story of Rebekka, old Mary’s daughter-in-law. Rebekka is the first of Okoth’s four wives and the only Saved person in his large homestead. In 2001, ‘Tom, the eldest son of Rebekka and Okoth, decided to move

out from his father’s home and build his own home for his wife and children. Since building a home is at the core of the Luo rules, ‘Tom had to do this in the right way in order to ensure the future growth and well-being of his family. However, this meant that his mother, a Saved Christian, would have to engage in the rules too. While Rebekka would normally have refused to follow any of the Luo rules, in this case, she actively encouraged ‘Tom to build his home according to the rules. As she explained, she encouraged the project both because she wanted her son and his family ‘to grow’, but also because it would enable her to avoid being taken in the levirate in the event of her husband’s death. According to the Luo rules, if ‘Tom’s father should die before ‘Tom had established his own home, Rebekka would have to be ‘taken’ by another man and united with him in sexual intercourse in order to ‘open the way’ for ‘Tom to build his home. The relation between Rebekka and the jater would be necessary to allow ‘Tom’s relations to grow and bear fruit; if she refused to be taken, ‘Tom would not be able to build. However, if ‘Tom established his own home whilst his father was still alive, then, on his father’s death, his mother would not need another husband, as her son’s growth would have already been released. As Rebekka was beyond childbearing age, she would instead be allowed

to live in her son’s home, where he would build her a new house. Rebekka did not want her personal choice of Salvation to prevent ‘Tom and her other sons from ‘growing’; therefore she encouraged ‘Tom to build his own home.

While Rebekka often proclaimed that she had ‘left’ the rules and become Saved, in this case, 1t appears that she accepted the potency of following the rules for growth and well-being. ‘This implicit acceptance of the positive potency of following the rules is also evident in

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 7/

the attempts to negotiate between Salvation and tradition evident on the weekly radio programme, Chike Luo. ‘This programme was like a newspaper advice column; listeners wrote to the producer with their problems, which were addressed by a panel of Luo ‘elders’. Many of these problems concerned widows and éero. In one case a woman asked whether she could bend the rules of éero for her widowed daughter-inlaw. She did not want her daughter-in-law to be ‘taken’ by a jaier, but

she did want to follow the rules. Thus she asked if she herself could build a house for the daughter-in-law and thus ensure that she did not continue to live in the house she had shared with her dead husband. This act, she argued, would allow her daughter-in-law to avoid a new husband and thus the risk of HIV infection. ‘I don’t want tfero in my home as the world is bad with disease’, she said. However, the elder told her that this would be ‘breaking the Luo rules’: ‘AIDS does not enter into this’, he asserted, ‘Even if she has rings of (herpes zoster) around her waist, a jaler must take her and she must complete the rules of her husband’s death. This is clear Dholuo.’ While, in this case, the elder refused to contemplate any negotiation of the rules, in another broadcast a different elder seemed to reluctantly accommodate a new traditional rule. Uhis allowed a Saved widow to ‘follow tradition’ by sleeping in her church instead of with a new husband. Her daughter-in-law wrote into the programme asking if she too could do this when her own husband died. In this way, she argued, she would be following the rules (part of following the rules means keeping to generational sequence and order; thus 1f a mother-in-law 1s inherited in a certain way, this 1s ‘her rule’ and her daughter-in-law should do likewise). ‘he elder answered: “This is difficult. It means that if your husband dies, you will have to follow what your mother-in-law did and

go to sleep in the church. In that way, your follow her wisdom. But is that good? Really?’ (Chike Luo, KBC, September 2001). Meanwhile Saved widows commonly place Jesus in the position of the jaéer: ‘Jesus is our husband’, they say. ‘These examples are only a few of many which indicate that, in the context of AIDS, people are negotiating the form and content of both Luo tradition and Salvation; trying to regenerate growth after the death

of a family member while avoiding the risk of HIV/AIDS. Ogutu’s influential booklet on Luo tradition, quoted at the beginning of this paper, also tackles this thorny issue. Like many others, the author’s position 1s unclear. At one point he asserts that ‘any unorthodox alternative [to zero] will not do’ (Ogutu 1995: 25). Yet on another page, he argues

78 RUTH PRINCE that ‘culture is never static’ and ‘given that the majority of our people have converted to Christianity, our church elders should liaise with the traditional elders to determine how to inculturate widow cleansing practices by, for example, formulating special widow/widower cleansing prayer/masses’ (ibid.: 24). In the following passage, he appears to endorse the replacement of sexual with symbolic intercourse: lo be noted are cases where widow cleansing did not involve sexual intercourse like Mond hete (levirate wives who had already gone through cleansing), fim (a woman who had gone past menopause), et cetera. Such cases only required chodo okola (breaking banana fibre which widows tied around their waists until they were cleansed), tero kom (staying vigil on a stool in the widow’s house overnight) or ganda ndawa (a grandson passing a roll of tobacco to the widow). Such exceptional cases, and those where symbolic sex was performed like those of jambiko (lepers), janeko (mad spouse), and so forth, should be given the emphasis they deserve (ibid.).

Traditionalist discourse about éero is not, therefore, monolithic, and Saved people too may be more pragmatic than dogmatic about following tradition. While discourses of Salvation and tradition may offer radically different approaches to growth, in practice, many people seem to be searching for some form of creative compromise between them.

Improvisations of this kind underline that growth retains its vibrant potential, and they ensure the continued relevance of tradition and of Salvation in the age of AIDS. Conclusion

In this paper, I have shown that the divisiveness of debates between traditional and Saved pathways has a long history among Luo people. The emergence and popularity of Salvation and tradition as bodies of beliefs and practices were linked to processes of labour migration and urbanisation and to corresponding concerns about gender roles, marriage, family and morality. Salvation and tradition offered different responses to people’s experiences of moral and social disorder, which were tied to broader projects of constructing subjectivities and identities in modern Kenya, as well as to more intimate concerns with marriage, the family and growth.

It has become clear that tradition and Salvation as antagonistic bodies of rules and customs are tied to one another, and that they are equally modern phenomena. Salvation constitutes itself through a

CHRISTIAN SALVATION AND LUO TRADITION 79

struggle against ‘pagan’ African customs, while tradition has become increasingly defined by its ascribed ability to heal this rupture with the past. hus one 1s defined by its ability to overcome the other. The elaboration of tradition within Luo modernity has parallels in the literature on other African societies (e.g. McCaskie 1990; Green 1993; Gable 1995, 2000; Piot 1999; Peel 2000). However, unlike the overt, political performance of tradition in, for example, West African celebrations of cultural ‘heritage’, Luo tradition is concerned with intimate matters of everyday life: the body, sexuality and gender, which underlie marriage, family, growth and the social and moral order. Salvation too is concerned with matters of body and immediate, mundane, social relations: Saved concerns with sin and the devil focus on boundaries and separations from persons and practices that threaten bodily and thus moral integrity. Just as the public performance of sacrifice 1s less sionificant for the Luo traditionalist than the act of eating together, the Saved Christian 1s ultimately more concerned about whom she shares food with, than with theology. The ‘death of today’, which is so obviously about intimate relations between bodies and persons, is making struggles between Saved and traditional ideas about personhood and growth particularly acute, as the choice 1s now seen as one between life and death. However, the crisis of AIDS and the need to regenerate life and growth after death 1s also leading to negotiations between Saved and traditional pathways, some of which involve the creation of new traditional rules that accommodate Salvation. This suggests that, while the continued salience of Saved and traditional discourses demands their strict polarisation, in practice their separation makes possible a creative process of combining, borrowing and reformulating between the two (see Kratz 1993; Holtzman 2003; Sanders 2003). Because the death of today 1s creating many young widows whose future pathway, whether toward ‘heavenly’ or ‘earthly’ ways, 1s central to their children’s future and to family growth, the issue of widow inheritance 1s an area where these tensions and negotiations have become particularly explicit.

Clearly, the moral and religious imaginaries within which AIDS 1s understood and experienced are shaped by local cultural concepts, historical experiences and political-economic situations. However, this does not imply the exploration of yet another ‘cultural model’ of disease (as in AIDS 1s believed to be chiva) but an ethnography of an African modernity. AIDS and its social context in Africa should not be

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THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST: PARADOXES AND POTENTIALS IN THE REMAKING OF WIDOW LIVES IN UGANDA Catrine Christiansen Widowhood in East Africa is commonly depicted as a time of loss—the

loss of a husband and the father of one’s children, the loss of a provider and head of the home, and the loss of the man who, through bridewealth, had become the owner of the woman’s sexuality and with whom she had had a sexual life. Yet widowhood may also mean a break from marital life where the man dominated the distribution of domestic resources, although he turned out to be a consumer rather than a contributor, and where the woman had to comply with male sexual desires. For most African women living in patrilineal societies where a marriage constitutes an alliance between two persons as well as two lineages, experiencing one’s husband passing away does not end the marriage or

the alliance. As a substitute, another male in the clan of the deceased may enter a relationship with the widow and be responsible for her, the children and the material property. Such practices of another relative replacing the deceased husband are commonly termed widow inher1tance (Kirwen 1979, Cattell 2003).' Since the early missions to East Africa, Christian clergy have regarded widow inheritance as one of the local cultural practices that are incompatible with Christian teachings on marriage (Prince 2007: 86). Within the Christian landscape of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Pentecostal theologies, church responses vary between a total rejection of widow inheritance and the creation of a non-sexual relationship between the widow and the heir. The Catholic Church is open to the latter option, whereas ‘making a complete break’ with ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional’ practices has been a trademark of the

' Among the Luo, these practices are also termed leviratic. A main difference is that the offspring of a levir are regarded as the children of the deceased man, whereas

it is the heir who is regarded as the father of any children he may have with the widow.

36 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN Pentecostal-Charismatic wave (Meyer 1998). It is within this general antagonism between Christianity and tradition (Prince 2007) that widow

inheritance 1s being debated. The advent of AIDS has added new dimensions to the debate and equipped the churches with a powerful argument against the continuation of this cultural practice. In the Ugandan context, among the committed Christians as well as less religious men and women, there is growing scepticism towards widow inheritance. Men often refer to the fear of HIV infection, 1immeciate economic constraints, and the uncertainty as to whether a greater number of women and children in the long term will increase a man’s prosperity or his poverty. FKemale hesitations also refer to the fear of becoming infected with the virus and concerns that remarriage could involve additional expenses rather than extra resources. Some women not only voice concerns about widow inheritance, they also refer to Christian discourses of salvation to argue for widows either to remarry in a Christian manner or to remain ‘single’, with Jesus Christ as their ‘husband’. ‘The idea that mature women can be economically and sexually independent persons differs radically from the local gendered social positioning where women are by birth under the authority of their fathers until, by marriage, they come under the authority of their husbands—and, possibly later on, the latter’s heirs. ‘The widespread notion that women are unable to control their sexuality was, for instance, the basis for a public outrage in early 2007 when parliamentarians initiated discussions to decriminalise infidelity for women (in order to reduce the gender bias in the current law on extra-marital sex). This chapter explores a new opening for some Ugandan widows to remake their lives for the better. Most changes associated with AIDS have disempowered widows, in particular the care provided within the family sphere. Limited care for widows 1s often a sign of utter poverty, however, it is not uncommon for in-laws to accuse a widow of ‘bringing the disease into the family’ and then chasing her and her children off the land of the deceased husband (Christiansen forthcoming 2009b). ‘The

new opening is to some extent related to the economic scarcity and alterations in patterns of familial caring, and, moreover, to HIV prevention discourses and the gospel of Salvation. ‘The present analysis focuses on the connections between the discourse

of sexual abstinence and ‘trust in the power of faith’, and the ways in which some widows negotiate new social positionings for themselves, in particular the economic and moral authority of widows to ‘stay single’.

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 87 Based particularly on one case, the chapter explores the making of a new self that is not merely opposed to ‘tradition’ and male dominance, but appears to create an altogether new sense of womanhood in which the widow 1s ‘single’ though ‘married’ to Jesus, independent yet deeply engaged in social relations of dependence, and where only abstinence demonstrates that she 1s in control of her own sexuality. Faith, or spirituality, plays a key role in the motivations of these widows to take the initial actions to shift the trajectories of their lives. ‘They

draw on a certain discourse of faith, namely the Protestant theology of Salvation, and its sexual code of only permitting sex within marriage. It 1s significant that the HIV prevention campaigns have made the claim to abstain from sex an accepted position beyond the sphere of religion, and it 1s a blend of Christian doctrines, public health messages, and cultural practices that informs the emergence of this new social position for widows.

‘The present chapter draws upon ethnographic fieldwork among the Samia, who live in the south-eastern corner of Uganda.* With an emphasis on the social embeddedness of a widow’s choices and actions, one case will be presented in considerable detail, that of a widow I call Proscovia. ‘The case shows a woman’s efforts to fulfil her social positions and at times radical, spiritual ambitions without causing great conflicts with the people on whom she depends. ‘The chapter will attend to her marital life, the burial of her husband, and the remaking

of her life as a widow. The narration and the analysis both seek to strike a balance between the emotional aspects of faith and the more instrumental dimensions of the discourse of salvation. First, however, I discuss the local setting, Samia widow inheritance, HIV prevention, and Christian discourses.

* The author has carried out research among the Samia since 1998 and is deeply grateful to her local assistants and various officials who made the research possible. The author also thanks the Nordic Africa Institute, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen for research funding. Her sincere thanks also go to the many people who have shared their lives and experiences with the author. The names of all the individuals mentioned have been changed.

88 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN Setting the Scene

Since the onset of the epidemic in 1983, about one million Ugandans have died of AIDS (UNAIDS 2004). In 2005 approximately another million Ugandans were living with HIV—a high number related to the large-scale roll-out of antiretroviral drugs, as well as to an increase in the incidence of HIV (UNAIDS 2006). ‘The improved access to antiretroviral treatment may have contributed to life expectancy at birth having increased to nearly forty-nine years for males and fifty-two years for females (DHS 2006). Women on average live slightly longer than men, yet the increasing numbers of women who are experiencing the

transition from wife to widowhood are also due to a slightly higher mortality rate among adult males (9°%) than their female peers (8%), spousal age differences, and the fact that one in every three married women Is in a polygynous union (ibid.). According to the Demographic Health Survey 2006, among women aged 30-34, 4°% are widows, nearly

12° aged 40-44 are widows and in the older category of 45-49 years more than 17° experience widowhood (ibid.). Although this latter age group only makes up 2.6°0 of female Ugandans, it is notable that only 58.6°%0 are married, whilst 84.7°% of their male peers are married and merely 1.8°% widowed (ibid.). Women marry at lower ages than their male peers,’ and, as indicated above, more than one in ten 1s widowed

by the age of 40; in other words, women enter both marriage and widowhood at early ages. ‘The above figure of hardly any widowers (due to remarriage) also indicates that debates about social positioning ‘after married life’ refer primarily to the female part of the population. In other words, widowhood 1s a gendered issue.

The above-mentioned figures are based on national surveys, and although there is no local comparative documentation, it is estimated that in the Samia area the frequency of relatively young widows exceeds the national level due to widespread polygyny and a HIV-prevalence of about 10%, or slightly higher than the national level of 6-7°% (Director of Health Services, personal communication August 2005).’

> Amongst Ugandan females, 47% of the 20-24 years old are married (compared to 30° of the peer males) and 63° are married when they reach 29 years (compared to 60% of the peer males) (DHS 2006). * The relatively high HIV prevalence is linked to the constant flow of money and people in the border town and the fishing villages, with increased opportunities for transactional sex (Obbo 1993, ‘Talle 1995).

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 39 ‘The Samia location is a rural agricultural area bordering the shores

of Lake Victoria in the south with a semi-urban centre along the Mombasa-Kampala highway in the north. Since 1997 the area has been known as Busia District and 1s located in the borderlands of south-eastern Uganda and western Kenya. The Samia are part of the larger Bantu category known as Abaluya; they speak Lusamia and make up 70° of the 230,000 inhabitants of the district (Rwabwoogo 2002, Katahoire 1998).

The Roman Catholic Church takes up much space in the local Christian landscape, with well-educated and well-connected priests who preach to about half the population. ‘The other mission-based church,

the Anglican Church of Uganda, 1s locally rather poor in terms of personnel, buildings, and certainly in terms of collaboration within the church. Since the East African Revival of the 1930s, the Church of Uganda has experienced three internal movements of balokole, in Luganda literally meaning ‘the saved ones’ (see also Robins 1979, Taylor 1958, Gifford 1998). The first and second group call themselves Tukutendereza (the second also call themselves Abazukufu), these being tight pietistic fellowships of Christians who have proclaimed salvation and testify their sins in public (see also Peterson 2001, Prince 2007 for the Revival in the Anglican Church in Kenya). During the 1990s, the most recent movement, Abamwoyo (literally meaning ‘people of spirit’), emerged. The Abamwoyo differ radically from the ‘lukutendereza, as the theology and liturgy share qualities with Pentecostal-Charismatic

practice.” A charismatic movement began in the Catholic Church during the late 1970s and took firm hold of the Catholics in Busia District during the 1990s, yet its strength stagnated around 2001, and its influence in the local church is limited. Catholics who belong to the Charismatic revival call themselves ohwekaluhania buyaha, or ‘the revived people’.® Since the early 1980s, the area has hosted increasing numbers of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, which, in uncoordinated ways, pursue similar theological lines as the Balokole and Charismatic

» Emani Kali, meaning ‘strong faith’ or ‘hot faith’ in Kiswahili, could become a fourth revival movement within the Anglican Church of Uganda. It is very similar to the Abamwoyo in its theology and liturgical practice, the main difference apparently being that it has been started by an archbishop, 1.e. at top level of the clerical hierarchy in the church, whereas Abamwoyo started at the lay, grassroots level. ° The main difference between the local Protestant and Catholic versions of Charismatic Christianity is the question of whether a living human being can be certain of salvation in the afterlife.

90 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN fellowships in the mission-based churches, such as the personal com-

mitment to God, and adhere to a rather strict form of behaviour, including fidelity and refusal to take part in local ‘pagan’ practices such as widow inheritance. Roughly every fourth Christian belongs to a Pentecostal-Charismatic church. ‘The clear and often radical message

of a change in behaviour in terms of rituals, family life, and sexual behaviour provokes debates and changes beyond the circles of converts (see also Meyer 1998, Maxwell 1998, van Dijk 2000). Widow Inhentance, HIV Prevention, and Christian Discourses

When a married Samia man passes away, It 1s customary for his patrilineage to take care of the wives and children; abalekwa and abafirwe are the traditional terms used when referring to ‘people who are left behind’ or ‘people who have lost’. ‘The ritual process for inheriting the widow is called emisiro and begins with the slaughter of a white cock in the evening after the burial ceremony and ends with the ritual of esumini, where the widow brings a goat from her natal home to the in-laws and destroys her kitchen hut at the home of her husband (or another small hut that symbolises a kitchen hut). ‘Uhese funeral rites are comprehensive, and many widows never perform the final stage

due to poverty or the unwillingness of natal relatives to take part in the ritual performances. The initial ritual acts are regarded as signs of the widows’ respect for the deceased, the lineage as well as transitory acts preparing a widow to enter a surrogate marital relationship. As long as a widow has performed the ritual called omanjo, where on a starlit night she ‘sperms in the bush’, and this 1s witnessed by a fellow woman, she can be provided with an heir, or omukerami (cf. Whyte 1990).

The term ‘provided’ seems appropriate, since, at least traditionally, the widows themselves were not always involved in selecting the heir (cf. Cattell 1992). The heir (omukeramz) is traditionally a brother of the deceased, as is common among the patrilineal Bantu-speaking people of East Africa (Kirwen 1979, Cattell 1992), and he becomes responsible for the wellbeing of the widow, the offspring, and the material property.’ A married

woman’s welfare depends to some extent on her having produced

” See also a local Christian ‘collection of Samia culture’ (Nadongo 1993).

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 9] children, since they are the ‘products of the bridewealth’ linking her with her deceased husband’s lineage, and her children will be her main carers in old age (Kirwen 1979; Cattell 1992, 2003). If the widow 1s no longer of reproductive age and has a mature son, the son often becomes the heir. Otherwise, when the widow is young and is still able to produce children, the heir 1s expected to fulfil the widow’s reproductive needs. ‘This was a task he traditionally performed with joy, since

as the heir he would acquire respect for having several wives and an abundance of children (see also Silberschmidt 2004).° ‘Today people are well acquainted with burials for adult males where the pastor explicitly preaches against the traditional funeral rites consistent with widow inheritance. Pentecostal-Charismatic pastors tend to emphasise that 1t 1s demonic worship to sacrifice animals in order to say farewell to the deceased’s spirit and to commune with ancestral

spirits. “Since the Lord Jesus Christ gave his blood to revitalise the connection between God and human kind’, these pastors say, ‘any sacrificial blood must be for the Devil’. ‘The evilness of these rites, such as shaving off the hair, is manifested in the danger of becoming HIV-infected through sharing razor blades. he Catholic priests tend to focus on the indissolubility of the marriage between a husband and wife (especially if the man lived monogamously and the couple received the sacramental blessing), the heathenness of polygyny,’ and the integrity (or rights) of every woman. The spread of HIV through ‘sharing a husband’ (polygyny and fornication) and ‘sharing wives’ (widow inheritance and fornication) is often used as evidence for its non-Christian nature. Most Anglican pastors are Balokole, yet they share

historical linkages with their mission-based Catholic brethren and at funerals often strike a balance between positions against ‘shaving’ and ‘sharing’. ‘The clergy, representing different theologies and local churches engaged with various aspects of the faith, thus integrate messages from

HIV prevention campaigns into the Christian disapproval of widow inheritance practices. ‘The striking ease with which priests and pastors establish this continuity between Christian and HIV discourses, such as that concerning the razor blade suggests that ‘paganism’ and HIV are

° For barren widows, the relationship with the heir could be an opportunity to produce children and enter the social status of motherhood. ” According to the Catholic missionary, Michael Kirwen (1979), Catholic and Anglican missionaries in East Africa wrongly assumed widow inheritance to be a marriage.

92 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN conflated. While this integration does not change the content of the Christian preaching, as Geissler and Prince (2007) note from western Kenya, the HIV discourse lends ‘the Christian message new transtormational power’ (2007: 137).

kok Ok In the late 1980s, when the national HIV prevention campaigns began, the churches joined hands with the slogan ‘love carefully’. Although the Christian churches promulgated a ‘love faithfully’ slogan, the two campaigns promoted similar changes in behaviour encouraging each individual to abstain (from sex before marriage) or be faithful (to your partner) (Seidel 1990, Allen 2006). ‘This message has reached all corners of Uganda, so when asking young or old, men or women, Catholics

or Protestants, Moslems or traditional healers about preventing the spread of the epidemic, the frequent response 1s ‘We should all live with one partner only. If we just stay with that one, get married, and do not take on extras [lovers] then AIDS will disappear’. ‘Uhe immense focus on HIV/AIDS and on having one partner only has influenced sexual practices, such as the age at which sexual activity starts (Uganda Demographic and Health Survey 2001) and debates over cultural practices, such as widow inheritance. Moreover, these campaigns have significantly contributed to making talk about sex part of the public sphere (Parikh 2005). A particular perspective on sexual risks, as the anthropologist Shanti Parikh writes, has led to a situation in which “Uganda’s successful HIV/AIDS campaigns have inadvertently

sharpened the bifurcation between discussions of sexual risks and sexual pleasures’ (ibid.: 126). ‘The emphasis on sexual risk-taking was situated within a moral framework which admonished the individual to avoid infection by being ‘self-disciplined’ (Geissler and Prince 2007:

135) and having sex only within marriage. The campaigns ran at a time when Uganda was beginning rehabilitation after two decades of instability and when Pentecostal-Charismatic churches had begun evangelising. Although it would be incorrect to assume that the gospel of Salvation merely attracted people who wanted protection from HIV infection (or only to heal wounds of the years of instability), there 1s an important correspondence between the prescription to live as a Saved person and the moral responsibility placed on the individual to avoid HIV infection. It is through faith that a person can avoid risk-taking behaviour. In other words, the parallel spread of the HIV prevention

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 93 messages (especially when reduced to ‘Abstinence’ and ‘Be faithful’)

and the gospel of Salvation reinforced the relevance of each other: HIV infection became a danger to be avoided through ‘individual behavioural change’, and such change could best be achieved through faith and the proclamation of Salvation.

kk Ok In addition to the creation of an explicit public discourse linking Christian morals and sexuality, the epidemic has influenced the socioeconomic structures within which caring for widows takes place. First of all, the rising mortality rate among adult males has increased the percentage of widows, particularly of young widows. Secondly, by taking its heavy toll on people of productive age, families experience a loss of income at the same time as expenses for medical services and later for the funeral increase. Since these changes are taking place in a society in which living expenses have increased far beyond income from small-scale

agricultural production, where social mobility 1s narrowly focussed on formal education (Meinert 2003) and where unemployment rates remain at extremely high levels, formerly stable relations of assistance have become uncertain (Christiansen 2005; see also Cattell 2003, Weisner, Bradley, and Kilbride 1997). Widows seem vulnerable in relations of assistance because of their positions within the social structure and the quite frequent accusations from in-laws that the ‘widow was the one who went astray, so she killed the husband’. ‘Tense relations between in-laws and widows seem to be a frequent explanation underlying an absence of care, a reason widows may express confidentially in private, since they would never challenge in-laws directly concerning such cultural values as family solidarity. In addition to blends of Christian morals, poverty, and subordinate positions, widows may lack support because men are losing interest in becoming an heir; a tendency that churches do not seem to recognize.

The former tradition of strengthening one’s masculinity by adding women and children to one’s sphere of domestic responsibility 1s weakening (see also Silberschmidt 2004). Adult men and women alike refer to the burden, not the blessing, of being responsible for additional women and children. Given the dithculties for young people in obtaining salaried jobs or large plots of land, a ‘young home’ has rarely had time to accumulate wealth. Young widows with young children are especially considered burdens because of the economic costs of raising children

94 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN nowadays, with education, medicine, clothes, food etc. A great many

children may thus imply poverty rather than prosperity for a man. Moreover, since widows may well be HIV-infected, men often fear having sex with them, at least during the period immediately after the deaths of their husbands. Younger and older widows may thus suffer from the notion that ‘if you cannot even enjoy the woman’, as adults continuously reminded me, ‘why would a poor man take on that extra burden?’ ‘The men known to move quickly to inherit widows who are suspected of being infected are locally perceived to be drunkards, foolish and unaware of the sexual dangers. Maria Cattell also notes in her research among the Samia of western Kenya, widows likewise make distinctions as to whether a potential heir will turn out to be a consumer rather than a contributor to the household (Cattell 2003). In the Samia setting, the Catholic Church has for decades sought to replace the traditional heir (omukeramiz) with a ‘non-sexual advisor’ (omulindt).'° The omukerami 1s regarded as ‘the owner’ of the women, the children and the property, whereas an omulindi is expected to advise the widow on using the resources available to her. ‘The omulindi and the

widow must agree before he can sell land or withdraw school fees, for example, and he and the widow are not supposed to be sexually intimate. ‘he advisor relationship is also winning interest among the local Balokole, who reason along the same lines as the Catholics, namely

that this could be an attempt to avoid a sexual relationship between a widow and the heir without jeopardising the widow’s social security within the lineage of her deceased husband. However, Balokole agree mainly with the social security aspect of this altered practice, expressing widespread scepticism regarding the Catholic argument that these changes can lead to the abandonment of the contested funeral rites, e.g, shaving off hair and animal sacrifices. ‘Uhe Catholic argument, put simply, is that these rites are no longer required, since the relationship between the widow and the omulindi does not involve sexual intimacy. Instead, acts that symbolise intercourse are invented, for example, the heir sits on a chair while the widow ‘passes over the lap of the heir’ (cf.

Whyte 1990). She may touch his lap, but she is not supposed to stay there. In accordance with their Protestant traditions, Balokole churches '° "The Maryknoll missionary to East Africa, Michael Kirwen, suggests that in the 1950-60s the Catholic Church introduced ecclesiastically acceptable alternatives to the custom of the heir, one of them apparently being the current practice of nominating an omulind: (Sirwen 1979).

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 99D generally encourage the widow to refuse an omulindi and instead look toward a recognised Christian re-marriage. From a spiritual point of view, expressed by committed as well as more nominal Christian women, widowhood can represent a dangerous ‘in betweer” position 1f ‘one does nothing’. Especially when the husband was not a Saved person, the spirit of the deceased may return to the living wife with complaints that she has not performed all the rituals or that ‘he’ is annoyed with her way of living. One middle-aged Catholic widow explained that she had not performed ‘the rituals’ because she only accepted an omulind:. She had been used to staying without a husband, as the deceased had lived in Kenya for four years, only to return

in a coffin. She tried to protect herself from her husband’s spirit by ‘not playing sex with any other man’. Her in-law, also a middle-aged woman married to a brother who had also passed away, had performed the rituals to accept an omukerami. She produced a child with him and he moved into her place, but he then turned out to be a drunkard and she chased him away. Now she feared exposure to ‘bad things’ because she had started but not completed the traditional ritual process, and she was ‘only’ a nominal Catholic. In this situation, she doubted that either

the ancestral spirits or the Christian God would protect her from harm. The local catechist had visited the widows’ homes several times

to encourage them to recetve Holy Communion and commit themselves further to the Church. According to the widows, the catechist encouraged them to ‘finish the rituals’, 1.e. each to bring a goat from their natal homes to the mother-in-law (eszmini), pay ndobolo (annual

membership contribution to the Catholic Church), and a small fine (also to the Church). In other words, the catechist encouraged them to complete the traditional rituals and then to seek ‘full membership’, 1.e. to recetve Holy Communion. The first-mentioned widow was eager to receive the sacrament of communion and she was able to make the payments, but her natal relatives were Balokole and unwilling to contribute a goat to a traditional rite. ‘here are precedents in the local Catholic

Church to be more accommodating towards cultural practices than their Anglican counterparts, so that, for example, polygynous men sit on parish committees, and Friday is set aside for the parish priest to hold a Mass at second funeral rites. ‘The interesting point 1s not only the long-established practice within the local Church to accommodate some ‘culture’, but also the recommendation to the widows to carry out both ‘traditional’ and Christian rituals. According to the catechist, this procedure satisfies the ancestral spirits, including the spirit of the

96 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN deceased, and then afterwards the widows could leave these spirits behind and pray to God alone. The Anglican lay readers rarely ask widows to continue traditional rituals. Instead they encourage widows to leave behind ‘the ways of tradition’ and proclaim Salvation to protect themselves from harm that might arise from a failure to perform the traditional rites. Among the neighbouring Luo people in western Kenya, there has been a reification of ‘Tradition, and some agitators argue that the well-being and prosperity of the person, family and community might be ‘blocked’ if particular

traditional rites are not performed, including in relation to widow inheritance (Prince 2007: 86). Most Samia regard some traditional rituals to be essential on a certain existential level. For example, the spirit of a deceased husband must be told to leave the living behind, but unlike the Kenyan Luo, many Samia seem to believe that Christian faith and rituals can secure them against bad consequences. ‘This difference probably relates to the status of the pre-Christian religion in the context of evangelisation, urbanisation, cultural politics and political influence within the nation state. Whereas Luo culture has been promoted by Luo scholars and important politicians, and is connected with a history of Luo as urbanised labour migrants (Prince 2007), the Samia are comparatively marginalised outside the limited area of Busia District. Most Samia are proud of and interested in Samia culture, and many appreciate the fact, for example, that the Bible translation into Lusamia will soon be completed, though this seems to be guided by a pragmatic attitude towards ideas and practice (see Whyte 1997 on pragmatism among the Nyole, their northern neighbours). ‘The fact that tradition among the Samia is not promoted through politicians, radio programmes or public culture or codified in books seems to stimulate less explicit opposition towards the Christian HIV prevention discourse. As we shall see in the following, this is also the case with rites related to widow inheritance.

kk Ok Most Balokole widows ‘stay single’, meaning that the woman lives in a

house without a man with whom she 1s sexually intimate. It is common for these ‘Saved’ and ‘single’ widows to speak about Jesus as their husband in the sense that he is the carer, the provider, the one who guides towards well-being and alleviates suffering (see also Prince 2007). ‘Lo be ‘a wite of Jesus’ 1s to be a widow who has proclaimed

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 97 salvation and is active in the church. Based on a detailed case of one Samia woman’s experience of marriage and of remaking her life as a widow, the following sections will show how some widows draw on the discourse of sexual abstinence and ‘trust in the power of faith’ to negotiate new social positioning for themselves in a context marked by death, poverty, and mistrust. Inspired by one of the few studies on Samia widowhood in Western Kenya (Cattell 1992, 2003), the case study will present the social embeddedness of the woman as a wife, co-wife, mother, sister, and widow. In brief, Proscovia (b. 1956) 1s a daughter and sister within a wealthy family with strong bonds of solidarity, the mother of nine children, and

the second wife of Emmanuel Opondo. During her marital union she becomes a co-wife of Sarah (the first wife of Emmanuel), of a woman for whom Emmanuel becomes an omukerami, and informally of a much younger woman with whom Emmanuel later cohabits. ‘Uhe case takes

its point of departure in the death of Emmanuel and will discuss in turn Proscovia’s entry into and experiences of marital life as a wife, then to the events surrounding the funeral, her proclamation of salvation and refusal of an omukerami, and finally her life as a widow and a wife of Jesus Christ. Proscovia Akello: Her Life with Emmanuel Opondo

When Proscovia’s husband was on his deathbed, his first wife failed to come to the hospital. ‘he younger wife did not turn up either, but she had only produced one child with the husband, so Proscovia was not concerned much about her. ‘Three years earlier Emmanuel’s brother died, leaving behind three wives; Emmanuel became the omukerami or heir of one. Proscovia feared that this widow might spread AIDS to her family, since they were certain that her late brother-in-law had died of the disease, a notion confirmed when another brother-in-law died a year after inheriting the younger wife of the late one. Proscovia had prayed hard for her life to be spared so that she could raise her four school-age children. In fact she was praying when Emmanuel stopped breathing. She closed his eyes, asked God to welcome him into His Kingdom, and called for the nurse. ‘Then she went to the telephone booth to inform her brother, who was in a position to organise a vehicle to bring the body home. Emmanuel died on 6 January 2000.

98 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN At the hospital the nurses were stunned by her calmness. Conversing with me about her conjugal life, emotions at times spilled over, as when, on Valentines Day 2004, she narrated the beginnings of their relation-

ship. She was attending secondary school, and he was a teacher at the primary school across the road from her parents’ home. He was a handsome young man with a scooter, and he always made her laugh. They met in secret to talk, and she studied his behaviour. She knew she was in love with him. A year later she was pregnant with their first child. Her father, a respected administrator, was furious, since he wanted his daughter to obtain further education. Emmanuel agreed with her father that he would provide her with an education instead of a high bridewealth, though in order to come to a settlement with his prospective father-in-law he also gave him several cows. After Proscovia delivered their first child in 1979, she moved to the homestead of Emmanuel’s family in the village neighbouring her natal home. During the eight years that Proscovia stayed in the home, she gave

birth to four children, who all died around six months old, a repeated misfortune that she and her natal family suspected was a curse from her co-wife, due to jealousy that the husband was educating Proscovia. After the death of the fourth child, Proscovia requested Emmanuel’s permission to move away from the homestead into a small house on the premises of the nearby hospital where she was working, Emmanuel did not agree with her analysis of the situation or with her request to leave the homestead.'! Proscovia then alarmed her locally prominent brothers, who came to settle the dispute. Soon afterwards Proscovia moved from what she termed ‘the evilness of that home’. In ten years living in the nurse’s home, Proscovia produced five children; the oldest is now twenty-eight and his three younger siblings are 20, 18 and 16 years old respectively. ‘he last born, Cecilia, only lived for some months. While the children grew in numbers and age, the place became congested and she wanted to move. Emmanuel had by that time given up his teaching and begun drinking the local brew, and he impregnated a young girl, who then became the third wife. ‘The

'! Proscovia’s request coincided with severe disputes between her two mothers-inlaw, which led the second mother-in-law to return to her home of origin The first wife accused the second one of performing witchcraft that led her teenage sons to die—four died within five years, while three daughters were ‘untouched’. [he first wife convinced the husband to sell the deceased sons’ land because it was cursed.

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 99 husband’s continual production of children and taking on an additional wife made Proscovia worry that her two sons would have to struggle to inherit suitable plots of their father’s land. Furthermore, Emmanuel had started spending long periods without seeing her, and as she was losing patience with him, she straightforwardly asked him to allocate a piece of land where she could supplement her income with subsis-

tence farming and build a house for herself and her children.'* The request raised the longstanding disagreement with the first wife and the unease between Proscovia, her in-laws, and her natal family. ‘Through committed assistance from her influential brothers, she was allocated a reasonable piece of land where she could settle and cultivate.

Proscovia and her four children settled on the land in 1997. ‘That same year Emmanuel became the omukerami or heir of a deceased brother’s wife. Since the brother ‘grew slim’, the family is certain that he died of AIDS." Until this time Proscovia felt neglected when Emmanuel was only ‘playing sex’ with ‘outside women’, including the young woman he impregnated, yet his sexual relations with the widow affected her mind: she started praising God for sparing her life by not

letting her have sex with her husband. When he visited, she would cook nice food, wash his clothes, and make him feel comfortable, yet she always tried to avoid him at night. She never raised her voice or accused him of anything. However, she explained to him that, if he died before her, then she did not want to be inherited, since she had chosen him from the clan and did not want anyone else. Besides, she had sons and daughters, her natal family nearby, and through her hard work (employment and farming) she was able to live alone. He did not agree and argued that death is always an unexpected visitor.

When he became sick he stayed two months in her house, and when the sickness developed he was admitted to hospital. During the period of his sickness, he never brought up the issue of her fate after his death. She never raised the issue, as she had nothing to add. When Emmanuel died, he left behind two formal widows (for whom he had

'* A Samia husband is supposed to settle each wife and her children on a piece of his land. '’ Even though the complexity of AIDS symptoms bewilder people, when someone ‘with a sexuality’ grows very thin and no medicine works, the general idea is that he or she died from AIDS.

100 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN paid bridewealth), one woman with whom he had cohabited (no formal exchange with her family), one widow inherited from his brother thirteen children (aged 2-28), all produced with these four women. Love and Mantal Life in a (Christian) Time of Aids

Proscovia told a story about a teenage schoolgirl who falls in love with a married man in employment, and when their affections lead to her pregnancy, the next step is marriage. It seems like a rather common story of young women who are attracted to a married man, their relationship being kept secret until she becomes pregnant. In fact pregnancy often appears to be the turning point in deciding whether the relationship will be a temporary affair or develop into a formalised conjugal union.

Her narration of their conjugal life 1s also a story about the participation of their respective family members in their everyday married life, including their conjugal differences, their union clearly being an alliance between two individuals as well as between two lineages. In this patrilineal and virilocal context, her family members have given her extraordinary assistance in settling disputes with her husband and in-laws because the woman often moves a fair distance from her natal home and they may hesitate to interfere. ‘This is the case, for example, with Proscovia’s sister, Immaculate, who married a Gikuyu and has been living ‘deep in Kenya’, where only she herself can resolve the recurring tensions with her co-wives and husband. However, a sister

who marries ‘within’ a neighbouring village is often able to draw more on her brothers’ assistance, especially when bridewealth has been paid. In the private statement to Emmanuel about her refusal to be inherited, Proscovia emphasises her affective choice of him, not the clan, as her marital partner. According to the ethnographic work produced among the Samia on the Kenyan side of the border in the late 1980s, widows state that, since they did not have a choice of husband, they claim the choice of refusing any heir (Cattell 1992). Proscovia, on the other hand, declares that, because she made the choice to marry him, she should also have the choice to refuse a replacement. ‘These widows thus challenge patriarchal practices by claiming their authority in the age hierarchy and using a Christian discourse, either that they belong to Balokole fellowships (bid.), or by emphasising crucial aspects of a

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 101] Christian marriage, such as love and a voluntary union between two individuals. '*

When the husband hesitates to accept her justification, Proscovia states that her reproductive needs are satisfied (she has a good number of children), her old age is assured (she has sons and land), she is employed and hard working (implying responsibility), and her natal family will be supportive (give her social security). In this manner, she selectively draws on Christian values of marriage and on traditional forms of legitimation for accepting that a widow passed her reproductive

age need not enter into a sexual relationship with an heir. She probably hoped that Emmanuel would suggest that the oldest son should become responsible for the home, but Emmanuel shows no interest in the dialogue and instead pushes it aside by saying that they do not know who will die first. The story of Proscovia also illustrates a woman’s efforts to secure

her sons’ proper inheritance of land in a marriage in which she is on bad terms with her in-laws. Behind the local stories of widows who are

chased away from the homestead and the land are usually enduring disagreements between the widow and resentful in-laws (Cattell 2003). While the husband 1s still alive and the woman 1s fulfilling the role of a wife, she has better negotiating power than when she alone must deal with her in-laws: past struggles may easily become present-day obstructions. Moreover, the case exposes an interesting connection between faith and AIDS in respect of marital life in a society which accepts men having several sexual partners, as shown in the changes in Proscovia’s feelings from being sexually neglected by her husband to praising the

Lord for protecting her from sex with that very same husband. HIV infection 1s a danger which she, as a culturally well-behaved wite, can only avoid through prayers.

'* It should be noted that in 1999 Proscovia told me that she wanted to declare salvation, yet “her mister’ was taking alcohol, implying that he would not allow it. In this sense, her prospective line of argument seems congruent with those of the other Samia widows.

102 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN Proscovia Akello: Burying Her Husband

Hundreds of people gathered inside and outside the shelter constructed for Emmanuel’s Christian burial ceremony. Family members, neighbours, fellow church members, friends, and colleagues of Emmanuel (and Proscovia) had been informed of his death within two days via the local grapevine, the cell-phone networks, and a national radio station. They had come to give him a proper burial. Since Emmanuel and his lineage belong to the Church of Uganda, the Anglican pastor led the ceremony, while several Catholic catechists represented the church of the first wife as ordinary members of the congregation. The ceremony took the form of a mass, with readings,

preaching, hymns, and prayers. When the pastor had finished his obligations, a close family (male) member invited relatives and friends to make funeral speeches (obulorz). ‘These speeches constitute a central element of Samia burial ceremonies and are, as Cattell writes, a public platform where people make overt political speeches on a variety

of matters, including the circumstances of the death and what rituals—including those of widow inheritance—will be carried out (Cattell 1992). A brother of Emmanuel narrated his life story, beginning with

the marriage of his parents and concluding with his increasing bad health, which finally led to his death. After an uncle praised Emmanuel for his deeds for the family and the community at large, it was time for the official widows to speak. Sarah, the first wife, said that she was the first wife of Opondo,” with

whom she produced nine children, that she grieved for his death and praised him as a good man, who always took care of her. Now the time had come for someone else to provide her with such care. Proscovia also

started her speech by saying that she was a wife of Opondo and that she had produced nine children with him, five of whom had died while another four are still alive. She then continued by saying that, when Opondo was still alive, she told him that she had accepted marriage with him because of the love God benevolently revealed to them, and that she still thanked the Lord for showing them such merciful grace. Her rather prolonged speech led up to a punch line: ‘I have declared Jesus as my personal Saviour. Praise the Lord, Hallelujah!’ While the

' In a local public setting, a woman usually refers to her husband by the name he inherited from his father.

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 103 few balokole present started praising the Lord for the wonderful news that sister Proscovia had just spoken, the majority started muttering.

The third wife was not going to speak, as her relationship with Opondo was not seen as a formal marriage (no exchange of bridewealth and just one child), and a widow inherited from another brother is not given a place to speak. Hence Proscovia’s proclamation of salvation was the last word from the widows. ‘The speeches thus ended with amble space for the first person to speak after the widows, a Balokole brother

of Emmanuel, on the topic of traditional funeral rites and widow inheritance as evil worship. He condemned the family for performing the funeral rites. ‘This spurred a conflict between the Balokole and others, and since Emmanuel’s lineage and clan members (the hosts of the burial) belong to both sides the gulf, the discussions went on for quite some time. Finally an older, ‘not-saved’ brother of Emmanuel’s father claimed the authority to state that the funeral rites would be carried out. The Anglican pastor, who was Saved and disagreed with this decision, then led all the people in procession to Emmanuel’s burial site, lowering the cofhn, praying, and then covering the grave. Proscovia and her natal relatives stayed to take part in the meal, but left before the funeral rites began and before the men were invited to taste the amalwa (millet beer). When Proscovia and her four children reached the homestead of Proscovia’s mother, where they were going to spend the night, the old woman told the children to return to the burial site and participate in the funeral rites: “Uhis you must do, for he is your father’. Without their mother noticing, the three younger children sneaked out of the house, while the fourth, the oldest son, remained in the young men’s house. According to the two youngest

children, during the funeral rites they had their hair shaved, were requested to wear banana strings around their waists, had sacrificial blood smeared in their faces, and for several nights slept at the grave. To Christine, the youngest daughter, the strangest part of the rituals was the prohibition on passing through any homestead, but instead having to walk round. A Ciwil Speech on Salvation and Social Support

When Proscovia uses the platform of the burial speeches to make her salvation public, she 1s following a tradition of merging personal narratives (concerning the deceased) with the speaker’s political interests

104 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN on issues regarding land, clans, religion, local development, and governance. Conventionally the speakers are men. When women speak, they are often greeted with ridicule and defiance, especially when they explicitly refuse to follow traditional marital practices, since such female opposition is considered provocative (Cattell 1992: 325).

Female use of religious legitimation to articulate dissent regarding practices such as widow inheritance is nothing new in East Africa.

During the 1930s, women began to speak in public about marital discord, gender inequality, and resistance in order to follow various traditions, including widow inheritance (on Uganda, see ‘Taylor 1958; on Kenya, see Cattell 1992, Peterson 2001; on ‘Tanzania, see Larsson 1989). ‘The East African Revival movement provided the event and the language for women to engage publicly with the politics of family strife—particularly between spouses—and to express broad discontent with gender relations.'° Taking their point of departure in disclosures of private sin and cleansing themselves of family strife associated with witchcraft, female converts condemned practices related to marital life such as bridewealth, polygyny, widow inheritance, women’s inability to inherit land from their husbands or fathers, and unequal gender divisions of work and accountability in daily life (Peterson 2001, Larsson 1989, Robbins 1979). Based on a dichotomous world-view along the lines of Good versus Evil, the Devil allowed converts to put a name to the personal play of ‘immorality’ at home; conversion provided a morally feasible way of rebuilding domestic harmony (Peterson 2001: 482). Social life was likewise divided into the path of God in opposition to the path of the Devil, and generally being Saved (Balokole) meant breaking with both traditional and nominal Christian practices. Consequently the Balokole discourse of breaking with traditions and gender inequality introduced behaviour that, since the 1970s, has become more common with the rise of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches all over Africa (see e.g, Meyer 1998, Marshall-Fratani 1998, van Dyk 2000).

By the time of the funeral, Proscovia had just become part of a Saved fellowship within Church of Uganda or Abazukufu, which she knew well because her mother was one of the first members in the 1970s. A central criterion for membership 1s to live monogamously or

'® According to Peterson’s work among the Gikuyu in Kenya, inter-generational relations seemed as much at issue as gender relations, yet this does not seem to be the situation among the Bahaya in ‘Tanzania, where old women also converted in large numbers (Peterson 2001, Larsson 1989).

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 1Q5 ‘stay single’ as a widow or widower, and for this reason Proscovia could

not become a member while her polygynous husband was still alive. The Abazukufu is a fellowship that—contrary to recent PentecostalCharismatic churches—1s not actively engaged in fighting the spiritual battle between God and the Devil. Instead of delivering evil spirits from affected people, Abazukujfu are locally known as strict believers in Christian marriage patterns and argue powerfully against practices such as polygyny, bridewealth, and widow inheritance.

The orientation within Abazukufu may in part explain what made Proscovia focus her speech on marriage as a voluntary affective union between two people, rather than on marital relations as part of an intense battle between good and evil (see Peterson 2001). Yet, why did Proscovia not criticise widow inheritance or Emmanuel as a polygynous man who, in his later years, neglected his wives and children in favour of his daily alcohol consumption? Indeed, the scene was set for Proscovia to condemn his behaviour in the name of the Lord!

The answer could be in Proscovia’s later admission that she also became Saved as a means of protection from her in-laws’ witchcraft, a powerful witchcraft (work of the Devil’) that had worked on her as a young woman and she feared that ‘someone’ would ‘make on her’ again. By not applying the terminology of a God-Devil battle on her marriage and indirectly on the long-term strained relations with what she suspected were malevolent in-laws, Proscovia avoided openly provoking the latter, an act related to respect and the fear of inviting witchcraft. Her actions should be understood as part of cultural values where interactions with individuals whom you consider to have used witchcraft against yourself or someone close to you is ‘made smooth by courtesy and civility, often warmed by friendliness and hospitality’ (Whyte 1997). In addition to her fear of inviting witchcraft, by acting according to the cultural values of civility rather than Balokole norms of confrontation, Proscovia also conformed to the views of her prospective social security network: her nominal Anglican natal relatives. The balokole fellowships in eastern Uganda are firm social networks with internal assistance through prayers and compassion, but they do not encompass material resources of assistance such as land or money (Christiansen forthcoming, 2009a).'’ During her married life Proscovia

'7 In some cases Balokole convictions bring about changes in inheritance patterns in certain families that favour widows (on ‘Tanzania, see, e.g., Larsson 1991), yet the influence of these fellowships is restricted to members.

106 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN had relied on her natal relatives, and she was aware that becoming a widow would only make her even more dependent. Her brothers are nominal Christians who follow the cultural language of civility and their late father’s refusal that any daughter (or daughter-in-law) should be inherited. Her in-laws therefore knew that the family would refuse to accept the practice of omukerami in their case, and Proscovia did not

need to make her position explicit. Uhe brothers encouraged her to accept an omulindi, and some days later she did. ‘This is not to imply that Proscovia’s co-wife, Sarah, did not become Saved because she did not have access to any socio-economic networks other than her in-laws. ‘The first wife has lived in close proximity to her in-laws throughout her own married life and, according to Proscovia, their mutual relations are generally fine. Moreover, as children of the first wife, Sarah’s oldest sons have been allocated land near the homestead of their grandfather, where they have built homes and are farming

the surrounding fields. If Sarah were to break off her relations with her in-laws, she would be more vulnerable than Proscovia, whose sons have been allocated land at a distance and who for years have lived apart from her in-laws. Religiously Sarah 1s a Catholic who, according to Proscovia, attends Sunday mass but in times of problems consults abalesi or local medicine men. ‘Uhus the two co-wives have rather dif ferent histories of relations with their in-laws, different positions within the in-law family (including allocations of land to their respective sons), and connections to natal relatives. ‘heir respective backgrounds also seem different in terms of social status, education, and religious commitments. And as individuals they have diverse interests and ways of life (Cattell 2003). Summing up, in her speech at the funeral of her husband, Proscovia

managed to strike a balance between Lalokole notions of Christian marital life (which diverge from in-laws’ practice) and cultural values of civility (pleasing in-laws) while making her salvation public. An understanding of such courtesy must integrate a widow’s intentions to secure her and her children social support, which in this context 1s more certain within her affluent natal family network than within the poor Balokole fellowships. For Proscovia, her husband’s death and brothers’ support provided a space where she could pursue her long-awaited decision to become Saved and socially and sexually safe. Whereas women across East Africa in the early days of the Revival used the discourse of salvation to express critique of domestic life, Samia widows today attempt to find a third position between fulfilling social roles (e.g. com-

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 107 plying with decisions of one’s in-laws) and at the same time breaking away from these expectations (e.g. following their own faith) without provoking a conflict. ‘The combination of civility and creativity without causing conflict seems central in the creation of new positions for Saved widows. It is significant that at no point does anyone make any reference to, or even hint at, HIV/AIDS. The burial event becomes a testimony to the fact that there are social situations where the choice of sexual abstinence, as well as general refusal to follow ‘tradition’, can be justified by the discourse on Salvation. In other words, at times most people may think that AIDS caused the death, and fear of HIV infection is one of the considerations people now make about widow inheritance, yet this can be kept implicit and silent, because faith and the gospel of Salvation can ‘do the talking’. Proscovia Akello: Her Life as a Widow

The routines of Proscovia’s everyday life did not change much. She continued to work at the clinic, farm her small piece of land, perform most domestic work while the children were away at boarding schools, and spend considerable time with her natal relatives. ‘Uhe omudind did not come to her home with demands for food or sexual intimacy. ‘Vhis was

initially what Proscovia emphasised as a major change in the transition from wife to widow: she was now in control of her own resources. Beyond the domestic sphere, Proscovia devoted her faith and time to the Saved fellowship and to church work in general. When she attended the first Abazukufu gathering and gave her testimony, tears filled her eyes

and she had just let them pass. It had been so overwhelming for her to narrate her long time of coming to God: she had been born into a Christian family, and although her father had been a polygamist, he had also been an active Christian brought up ‘in a Christian way’, his wives being among the first local Christians to become Saved. Proscovia

was baptised as an infant, brought up with Bible studies, prayers, and Christian songs, and confirmed as a teenager. But then she had started distancing her life from God. She had become attracted to a married man and refused to listen to the advice of her parents. With time she became a second wife and therefore could not get married in church. Together her husband and herself enjoyed money, alcohol, late nights in the local bars, good food and clothes, and a great deal of happiness. But these worldly pleasures did not last long, and the marriage became

108 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN marked by jealousy, the deaths of many of their children, lies, fights, and with time also lack of money, too much alcohol, illness, and then the death of the husband. Before his death, but after she had accepted salvation, she had pleaded his forgiveness for all her wrongdoings and he had forgiven her. It was now, as a widow and a mature woman, that she could finally say that she had given her life to Christ. It was after a long journey, beginning with God but then drifting away from Him, and after so many wrong thoughts, feelings, and decisions, that she had returned to the path of Jesus Christ. Her fellow Christians had embraced her and prayed for God to forgive her sins and enable her to stay on the ‘night path’. Being a widow in good health and only around forty years of age, other Abazukufu encouraged Proscovia to enter a Christian marriage with

a ‘Saved’ man. She was certainly motivated to experience a Christian marriage—which 1s locally idealised as harmonious monogamy, love, trust, and ‘walking together’—yet she was concerned about what might happen to her children with her first husband. Although the new man might be willing to share resources, his relatives might not be willing to share with children who are not of their own clan. ‘To her it was clear that the risks involved for her, for the futures of her children, and for her relations with the in-laws of her deceased husband were so considerable that remarriage was not actually an option.

Having decided that she was not going to marry a Christian, Proscovia started to discuss with the pastor the process for her to ‘wed in church’ and to recetve Holy Communion. But whom was she going to wed? ‘The Lord Jesus Christ! ‘he pastor followed the normal procedures for a wedding announcement by announcing Proscovia’s intention to marry in church on three successive Sundays. Since no one objected to the ritual going ahead, during the service on the fourth Sunday the pastor gave her a golden ring to wear on her ring finger. ‘It was a wonderful Sunday when I became a wife of Christ’, Proscovia said; ‘it 1s somehow like the (Catholic) sisters, only I have a home and children of my own’. In addition to being given permission to recerve Holy Communion, Proscovia became a member of the Mother’s Union, the influential women’s group in the Anglican Church (Tinkasimire 2002), and was allowed to assume positions in the church. She soon became a key Christian in the parish church, with responsibility for various groups and activities, and she regularly made announcements during Sunday services. Through her devoted church work, she was given a chance

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 109 to preach the gospel, and she has become a cherished lay preacher in the parish. Proscovia was grateful for the chance to “come back to God’, and although she had reservations about church leaders and corrupt bureaucratic procedures, she rarely complained about the load of church work she was continuously being assigned. Nor does church work seem to have taken her away from family obligations. As a good daughter-in-law, she often passes by her mother-in-law to see how she is and invites her and her co-wife (her husband’s first wife) to her natal home whenever an occasion arises. As a good wife she asked her broth-

ers to cement over the grave of her husband. As a good mother she has cemented over the grave of the first child who died in her home on the land of the husband. However, the graves of the children who died in her father-in-law’s homestead are not cemented, and they are now difficult to find, as the area has now been incorporated into the fields. Besides being a tradition in her natal family to cement graves, it shows that the land belongs to her and her offspring. During the first year the Abazukufu fellowship was very important in strengthening her faith, sharing experiences in resisting the accusations of ‘other people’, and encouraging her to take on church positions, yet

over time she has become an irregular participant at the fellowship meetings. Her faith is now strong and she knows God is with her; as she said, “God has made many miracles in my life... when the district deleted me from the payroll I got back on the list and all my children are being educated’. She gave many examples of how her life is marked by grace, yet for her, faith 1s as much about cooling negative influences and thoughts: Salvation is helping me to stay on the right path. When I feel jealous, I pray to reduce it and control myself from not doing something. I fight feelings of jealousy, | don’t want to be a part of those ruamour-mongers, I don’t want to beat my children or anyone else, I don’t want to take alcohol, and I want to keep that home of mine stable and away from problems. As a widow I must be very careful...nowadays I only confide in Jesus.

A Protestant Blend of Salvation and Sexual Abstinence

Within the sisterhoods of the Ugandan Roman Catholic Church, nuns are perceived as women married to Jesus Christ, and each one wears a ring symbolising the status of a Christian married woman. In order to understand how this Catholic tradition has become part of an emerging

110 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN local practice in which Protestant widows can become ‘wives of Christ’, it is necessary to link notions of marriage with gendered social positioning and control over female bodies. Although the practice of performing a symbolic wedding is uncommon in the local Protestant churches

and could be viewed as an extreme element in the remaking of widows’ lives, the blend of widowhood and Catholic sisterhood brings clarity to understanding the creation of new social positions for Samia widows.

In a similar way to other Bantu people, a Samia female 1s born into a family in which her father is the ‘owner’ of her body until she marries a man who then becomes the ‘owner’ of her fertility and sexuality. In cases of pregnancy before marriage, payment to the girl’s father (not the girl) shows whom it 1s appropriate to compensate, and the exchange of bridewealth is a clear symbol of moving a woman from one man to another. Boys are also born into a gendered social position, yet the boy will grow up within the same lineage and become head of his own household. Whereas a female body ‘belongs’ to her father at birth and then changes to ‘belong’ to her husband at marriage, the trajectory of the male body with age 1s to become autonomous. In a society where

gender is such an important aspect of authority over one’s own and others’ bodies, or in other words, of interpersonal relations and social organisation, 1t 1s an apparent cause of concern for dominant men that they should be allowing some women to ‘escape’ male control of female activities (Parkin 1972: 71-72). Like the discussions David Parkin described amongst Girlama male elders in early post-colonial Kenya, where a few women had secured

an independent status through conversion to Islam and repaid their own bridewealth by working in urban Mombasa, the Samia discuss the ‘wisdom of giving women more “freedom”? (bid.: 71). ‘Uhe crucial

topics are about the ability of women to manage economic scarcity and surplus and with whom to satisfy their sexual needs. In fact, the two issues are often talked about as one because widows are frequently

accused of being prostitutes—earning money from sex—or of being ‘sugar-mummies., 1.e. spending money on sex. Widows who are particu-

larly prone to accusations of spending an economic surplus on sexual affairs with younger men have often had longterm disputes with their in-laws. When, for instance, one Catholic woman, who for years had been selling fish in a local market, became a widow, it did not take long for rumours to spread that she was ‘enjoying life too much’ and ‘taking advantage’ of a younger man. Her deceased husband was from

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 111 an affluent Catholic family who practiced the newer model of giving the widow an adviser, omulindi, and the widow had inherited much of the property. [he accusations were thus directed at her suspected use of her husband’s resources on a man ‘outside the clan’ for her own pleasure (she had ‘enough’ offspring) and the fact that the young man was ‘too poor to say no’ to these gifts. In other words, the widow’s behaviour was such that it could jeopardise the family’s resources and moral reputation.'® As one of her female in-laws stated bluntly: ‘she started to behave like a man...that could be the ruin of the family. We are just like men; when someone gets the chance, she becomes reckless’. It is exactly the threatening power of women’s sexuality that makes the uncontrolled sexual behaviour of wives “pose the greatest threat to men, the family and to the social order’ (Silberschmidt 1999: 165).

The question then 1s how does a woman create trust that she will wisely manage control of her body and domestic resources, and maintain moral respectability? Proclamation of Salvation is an obvious first step. According to local notions, such conversion involves a transformation of the person to become trustworthy, more like God Himself (Christiansen forthcoming 2009a). Salvation 1s thus perceived to enable people to be ‘self-disciplined’, 1.e. to leave behind their ‘funny ways’ and

become more consistent in their faith and way of life. In addition to the restrictions on behaviour in terms of staying away from places with

alcohol, cigarettes, dances, and traditional rituals, it is through one’s personal relationship with God that a Saved person can seek to control emotions, such as desires and jealousy, which could lead to sex and other ‘misbehaviour’. It is through the key communication tool with God, 1.e. prayers, that Proscovia can control emotions that could otherwise bring about problems. Personal firmness in shying away from temptation 1s

regarded as essential for mature, but not yet old, widows to stay in a Christian ‘no man’s land’ (Cattell 1992). Since Salvation only allows sex within marriage, for a widow to proclaim salvation implies sexual abstinence. ‘his may reduce the risk of advances from an omulindi, as he can expect a fierce struggle against satisfying his desires. Among the Samia for an adult ‘who has tasted sex to live without eating” 1s a well-known struggle. ‘he public discussions about the difficulties of

'® Such disputes are typically revived by the death of the husband and the distribution of his property to his natal relatives and to his wives and offspring, especially if the husband has left a will allocating a wife a higher share than in customary practice.

112 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN abstaining sexually are only indirectly related to widows, as this is part of the HIV prevention discourse directed towards young people, 1.e.

those who have not yet entered marriage and who are not supposed to have ‘tasted sex’. However, recognition of the personal struggle to abstain has strengthened both the cultural position that it 1s wise to restrict the sexual ‘freedom’ of widows and the more recent Protestant view that only Saved widows can sexually abstain. ‘he two perspectives lead to the paradox that the most legitimate way currently for a woman to control her sexuality 1s by not having an active sexual life. The decision by Proscovia to perform the symbolic act of becom-

ing a wife of Jesus should, I think, be understood as a fulfilment of her faith to move as close to God as possible for a woman who, as a mature Protestant with a range of social obligations, cannot become a nun. [The association with sisterhood signals that she 1s confident to have the strength to abstain and thus ensure her in-laws and her own family that she will maintain her moral respectability. From her perspective, this commitment has led her to become a devoted and trustworthy church worker, at the same time as she has improved her role as an attentive daughter-in-law and continued being present in her natal home. Furthermore, it signals to the omulindi that he should remain at a sexually safe distance. Given the high HIV prevalence, the omulindi would most likely hesitate to approach her until she had stayed healthy for three to four years after the death of the husband.'? Whether

or not Proscovia has undergone the appropriate HIV tests and thus knows her ‘status’ 1s information that she only shares with her closest friend. Her children do not know if she has performed the tests, nor do her mother or brothers. And the omulind: certainly does not know. The discourse of salvation allows Proscovia to prevent discussion about

her HIV status and instead she argues that it is at God’s command that she ‘stays single’. ‘The ring on her finger adds a powerful symbol to her identity as a truly Christian woman.

' "There is a widespread local notion that widows who have stayed healthy for 3-4 years after the death of their husbands are not HIV-infected.

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST 113 Conclusion

In a time of social change led by such negative factors as AIDS, poverty, and social mistrust, there 1s seldom focus on the options, the new openings, that may emerge for some people to realise goals that could change their life trajectories to the extent of impacting on their experience of self and more general notions such as womanhood. ‘This chapter has addressed exactly this topic by looking at the intersection of faith, HIV, sexual abstinence, and the ways in which widowhood nowadays can provide a space in which women can move closer to God. A focus

on widowhood in Uganda is a gendered discussion because women enter marriage and widowhood at early ages—nearly twenty per cent of women above 40 years of age are widows—whereas men prefer to remarry and thus maintain the status of husband. ‘The new social position for Samia widows shares characteristics of a ‘erammar of dissent’, as Derek Peterson (2001) interpreted the conversion of Gikuyu women to salvation in the early days of the East African

Revival. ‘There are certainly elements of opposition to traditional rituals and to male sexual domination of an heir, and the language is informed by a discourse of Salvation, yet whereas the Gikuyu women turned domestic problems into social criticism, Samia widows mix the critical stand of Salvation with cultural values of civility. Such a blend of ‘teasing and pleasing’ could be interpreted as 1f Samia widows were pragmatists who promote commitment to God and church fellowship and, at the same time, maintain social support located in the cultural values of kinship. However, I have argued for an understanding that the new social positioning 1s not merely opposed to ‘tradition’ or to

male behaviour, but instead represents an altogether new sense of womanhood. ‘This is characterised by altered notions of self: the widow is ‘single’, though ‘married’ (to Jesus Christ), and economically independent, yet deeply engaged in social relations of dependence. ‘These

dimensions seem to enhance female authority and at the same time to maintain social inclusion. ‘Uhe key paradox is that the potential for the woman to achieve control over her own sexuality 1s conditioned by the most striking restriction, namely that the only legitimate way for a woman to control her sexuality is by not having an active sexual life. ‘This particular intertwining of cultural values, the discourse of salvation and the discourse of abstinence, can thus support the cultural notion

that it is wise to continue to restrict female sexuality, as well as the Protestant view that only salvation can enable women to sexually abstain.

114 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN This chapter has argued that the gospel of Salvation and HIV prevention discourse of sexual abstinence are congenial to one another, which is why Churches and Christians can combine the two to argue forcefully against practices such as widow inheritance. What happens, then, when mistrust in one (or both) discourse becomes predominant? According to several Saved women (with husbands still alive), young widows should not ‘let themselves be fooled by fellow widows who say they can abstain for years. Instead they should know how to use a condom’. In their view sexual pleasure will in the long-term grow into desire that even the most devoted Saved woman cannot control. The crux of the matter is the shift from the focus on sexual risks (HIV prevention discourse) to sexual pleasure and from questions of what one

person ‘can’ control to what one ‘would want’ to control. The latter aspect raises a fundamental question of whether sexual abstinence is seen as a matter of faith or, turned upside down, is faith about sexual abstinence? Saved widows do become pregnant, thus providing the ultimate evidence that the rumours were true, and some defend them with precisely the view that to have sex on rare occasions with another man when one’s husband has passed away does not compromise one’s faith. Others, of course, argue that this proves that women are sexually immoral beings who must be controlled by a man. At this point, however, this does not amount to questioning the ‘power of faith’. Turning to the discourse of sexual abstinence from the perspective of HIV prevention, some Pentecostal pastors now express scepticism towards the ‘truth of abstinence’ and ‘immorality of condoms’. ‘They watch young members become infected and they consider changing to encouraging use of condoms in order to keep the members alive. ‘These pastors have started to critically question the abstinence discourse, and,

instead of turning to issues of ‘self-discipline’ and thus to the sin of the individual who cannot abstain ‘full time’, they invoke the doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’ in using condoms when one 1s having sex

outside marriage. If preachers and followers of Salvation shift from abstinence towards condom use, 1.e. 1f abstinence and Salvation are

no longer intertwined in HIV prevention, then what could be the implications for the social positions of Saved widows? ‘The creation of a new space for Saved widows who are (supposed to be) sexually abstinent with Jesus as their ‘husband’ might, after all, prove to be a temporary phenomenon.

THE NEW WIVES OF CHRIST Ilo References

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Cattell, Maria. 1992. ‘Praise the Lord and say no to men’: Older women empowering themselves in Samia, Kenya’. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 7, 307-330.

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——. forthcoming, 2009a ‘Ugandan Charismatic Christians Striving for Health and Harmony’ Uncertainty in Afncan Lwes, Liv Haram & Bawa Yamba (eds.), Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. ——. forthcoming 2009b. ‘When AIDS Becomes Part of the (Christian) Family: Dynamics Between Kinship and Religious Networks in Uganda’ in Carolin LeutloffGrandits, Anja Peleikis, Tatjana Thelen, Social Security in Religious Networks. Anthropological Perspectiwes on New Risks and Ambwalences, Berghahn.

Geissler, P W. & Ruth Prince. 2007. ‘Life Seen: ‘Touch and Vision in the Making of Sex in Western Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 123-149. Gifford, Paul. 1998. Afncan Christianity. [ts Pubhc Role, London: Hurst & Company. Katahoire, Anne Ruhweza. 1998. Education for Life—Mothers’? Schooling and Children’s

Survwal in East Uganda. PhD-Thesis no. 10, Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Kirwen, Michael GC. 1979. African Widows. An empirical study of the problems of adapting Western Christian teachings on marnage to the leviratic custom for the care of widows in four rural Afncan societies, New York: Orbis. Larsson, Birgitta. 1991. Conversion to Greater Freedom? Women, Church and Social Change in North-Western Tanzanis under Colonial Rule, PhD-Thesis, Uppsala University.

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116 CATRINE CHRISTIANSEN Robins, Catherine. 1979. ‘Conversion, Life Crises, and Stability among Women in the East African Revival’ in B. Jules-Rosette (ed.), The New Religions of Africa, New Jersey: Norwood. Rwabwoogo, Mugisha Odrek. 2002. Uganda Districts. Information Handbook, Kampala: Fountain Publishers.

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CONVERGENCES AND CONTRASTS IN MUSLIMS’ RESPONSES

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AIDS AND THE POWER OF GOD: NARRATIVES OF DECLINE AND COPING STRATEGIES IN ZANZIBAR! Nadine Beckmann

Discourses on AIDS in Zanzibar are embedded in a cultural logic associated with Islam and shaped by the island’s long problematic relationship with the mainland. Muslim values and norms are the dominant framework for discussing the spread and the impact of the epidemic in Zanzibar. I shall analyse how people struggle to translate such discourses into local practice in an effort to make sense of and contain the epidemic, and how AIDS has been used by religious groups in a political discourse opposing government policies that are perceived as having tolerated moral decay and compromised Muslim values and practices in Zanzibar over the past decades. AIDS 1s not just a biomedical problem; in Zanzibar, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the biomedical aspects are often outweighed in importance by the epidemic’s social and moral implications. Discussion of the disease here takes place with reference to the profound changes— political, economic, and social—that have occurred in Zanzibar over the past decades.’

' T would like to thank David Parkin, Paul Dresch, and Felicitas Becker for their comments on earlier versions of this text. * The data presented in this paper is derived from my doctoral research, carried out in Zanzibar over a period of fifteen months in 2004/5. My PhD thesis provides an in-depth study of the way AIDS is made sense of and managed in Zanzibar, with a particular focus on the lives of HIV-positive people before and after antiretroviral treatment. During fieldwork I was interacting with a wide range of different people, participating in a network of trading families mostly of Hadhrami and Omani origin who in economic terms form part of Zanzibar’s small middle-class. At the same time, I worked closely with HIV-positive people, many of whom were members of the Zanzibar Association for People Living with HIV/AIDS (ZAPHA+), the only organisation on the islands exclusively run by, and for, HIV-positive people. The majority of ZAPHA+ members belonged to the poorest sectors of society, were lacking secondary education, and many were young women, often divorced, separated, or widowed.

120 NADINE BECKMANN The world going down? Narratwes of decline

Zanzibar 1s an archipelago just off the Tanzanian mainland with a population of almost one million people. Officially, is has one of the lowest rates of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa; according to the only published survey, carried out in 2002, HIV prevalence is 0.6%.° ‘The islanders often explain this as a result of their Islamic way of life. Values such as gender segregation, modesty in dress and behaviour, virginity at the time of first marriage, shame and respect, and a ‘good character’ (tabia nzuri) are frequently mentioned when asked about the comparatively small impact AIDS has so far had on the islands. Nevertheless, fear of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Zanzibar 1s running high. ‘This is partly due to the epidemic’s close association with sexual transgression, but also to experience from other parts of sub-Saharan Africa where HIV rates skyrocketed within a short period of time.* The re-evaluation of gender relations, in general, and sexual behaviour 1n particular, has a paramount position in Zanzibari’s attempts to make sense of and deal with the threat posed by the new epidemic. AIDS is viewed as the most visible symptom of changing social relations and moral decline, a topic widely discussed in all social strata. The issue of moral behaviour predominates in public debates about AIDS; however, moral and cultural anxieties are intimately related to anxieties over social control, economic decline, and political depen-

dency. ‘hey respond to a fundamental sense of uncertainty about the continuity of Zanzibari culture and society, which 1s most vividly expressed in cross-generational and gender struggles: “These days the children don’t listen to their parents any more, and all people want is

> Results from voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) units, and the experiences of health care personnel and people working in the HIV sector, suggest a considerably higher number of unreported cases.

* Such fears are partly substantiated by HIV experts who anticipate a growing epidemic. It is difficult to put numbers to these claims, but according to a ZACP (Zanzibar AIDS Control Programme) survey in 2005, 2.3°%0 of pregnant women attending governmental antenatal clinics were HIV-positive. ‘Taking this as one among several indicators of increasing HIV incidence, combined with the fact that the majority of the population is unaware of their HIV status and thus unable or unwilling to take protective measures, an exponentially escalating epidemic is predicted (UNAIDS/ZACP 2006: 5).

This is further fuelled by the expansion of substance abuse over the last few years (WHO 2005). According to newspaper reports, the latest survey (2006) has shown an increase of HIV prevalence from 0.6% to 0.9%, a development termed ‘shocking’ by Chief Minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha (PlusNews 19.2.2007; Guardian 12.2.2007).

AIDS AND THE POWER OF GOD: NARRATIVES OF DECLINE 121

starehe (enjoyment) and uhuru (freedom), especially in the sexual sense,’

an older man laments. ‘Men have always tried to seduce women’, a young, unmarried woman says, “but these days men are wahuni kweli, really immoral.’ ‘African women Just want money’, a young man in return complains, ‘it’s their taba kupewa sikukuu, their habit to accept presents from men. [here’s no virginity these days, you can Just buy it from Saleh Madawa (the local traditional medicine dealer), boys and girls mix freely, and women can leave the house on their own, wanaranda (‘they cruise around’).’

While the genders and generations are clearly at odds, they unite in blaming outsiders for the moral decline: it is perceived to be caused to a great extent by external influences, including the political hegemony of mainland ‘Tanzania, the wave of migrants who bring in different

values and practices, and the introduction of mass media, which enables an unlimited exposure to knowledge regarded as corrupting to the basic values of society. Zanzibaris find sexually provocative music clips screened on ‘T’V and free access to pornographic material on the internet particularly problematic. A new style of music, bongo flava,’ has emerged, which 1s often blamed for the HIV problem, as are bars and guesthouses. ‘he new comforts and life-styles certainly appeal to many Zanzibaris, who strive for a share in the benefits of what they

perceive of as ‘modern’ life. At the same time, the importation of new life-styles and new desires presents a challenge to long-standing values and practices, and a pronounced sense of destruction of culture and of a threat to the islanders’ practice of Islam prevails.’ Discussed » Mhuni is translated as ‘vagabond’, ‘wastrel’, or ‘tramp’, but is often used to refer to a person who 1s badly behaved, and who changes lovers quickly and casually. ‘The word is derived from uhuni, ‘moral decline’, ‘decadence’, ‘immorality’. ° For an example of the intense moralising, blaming discourse surrounding AIDS targeting external agents, cf. the TOMRIC news article “Tourists [sic] Influx Sparks HIV/AIDS in Zanzibar’ (2000). ’ Bongo is a slang expression for the Tanzanian mainland, and for Dar es Salaam specifically, while flava is a Swahilicised version of ‘flavour’. Bongo flava is often mentioned

as endorsing the spread of AIDS through encouraging immoral behaviour, because many songs are about young people’s love affairs and the videos feature scantily clad girls dancing in a sexually provocative way. ® Such views about the erosion of society are partly supported by facts: drug abuse, crime rates, and publicly visible prostitution have been increasing over the past decade. Prostitution in particular has been of some concern to the authorities, and in 2004 a law has been passed that renders any kind of prostitution illegal. Although Zanzibaris conceive of their decline as a very specific local experience (and partly caused by the mainland), this experience is in fact shared very widely in mainland ‘Tanzania, and in the wider East African region. Cf. Becker & Geissler 2007, Prince 2007, Becker 2007.

122 NADINE BECKMANN with reference to these changes, AIDS becomes a metaphor of the negative consequences of modernity; as a result, the past becomes an important point of reference for the negotiation of moral values and social relations.”

Yet such narratives of decline are by no means new, and the current situation does not constitute a departure from a more stable past; rather, the past has become idealised, as the golden ttmes when Zanzibar was

an important trading entrepot and a centre for religious learning. In fact, moral norms must always have been hard to enforce in a port town which had been subject to external influences for centuries. Zanzibar is characterised by a high degree of social and religious diversity, with

Shirazi, [badhi, Shafii, and Sufi influences all playing a part in the Muslim community’s composition—indeed, precisely this cosmopolitanism 1s central to the concept of ustaarabu, ‘civilisation’,'° which is pivotal

to Zanzibaris’ view of their society and culture. Moral anxieties about immigrants’ influence are long-standing and ambiguous: slaves’ moral inferiority, for example, had to be asserted (cf. Glassman 1991: 289; Cooper 1980: 21-2) to control the potential threat arising from this economically crucial but socially disenfranchised population. Indeed, the question of who exactly is Zanzibari, and who

is an immigrant has been, and still is an issue of constant debate, both among the local population and among researchers working in the area;'' both categories have never been absolute. Several authors (cf. Nurse and Spear 1985; Prins 1961; Parkin 1994, 1989) point out the fluidity of concepts of identity such as ‘Swahili’, ‘Shirazi’, ‘Arab’, or ” People often talk about the ‘old times’ (zamani) when people were morally upright and trusted each other. ‘loday, materialism is perceived to have corrupted people’s minds, and stories and warnings about theft and violence abound. '° "The term ustaarabu is derived from the Arabic sta, ‘to remain’, but is mistaken by both researchers as well as local Swahili-speaking people to mean ‘Arabness’. Individuals who personify the attributes of civilisation—good character, a respectable family background, social and economic wealth, and a deep knowledge of Islam—were called mstaarabu. Under Omani rule Fair discerns an increasing need to become like an Arab to be regarded as a civilised urban citizen (Fair 2001: 43).

'' The major part of the population of Zanzibar is regarded as belonging to a cultural complex known as the Swahili-speaking people of the East African coast and adjacent islands, a society whose identity has been the focus of a lively debate in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Arens 1975, Eastman 1971, Salim 1985, Shariff 1973, Swartz 1979). Parkin points to the ‘paradox by which the Swahili-speaking peoples of East Africa see themselves as members of autonomous communities which emphasise their mutual distinctiveness yet draw on and also inform a chain of differential communal consciousness and custom spanning eastern Africa into the Indian Ocean and the Arabic-speaking Middle East’ (1994: 1).

AIDS AND THE POWER OF GOD: NARRATIVES OF DECLINE 123

‘African’ and describe the processes of ‘becoming’ Swahili or Zanzibari (cf. Fair 2001; Glassman 1991; Parkin 1989). Birth and descent, though

important, were not the only criteria for asserting one’s status among the ‘civilised’. ‘The accumulation of wealth, the adoption of Arab dress, manners and education, marriage, the integration into urban networks, or the gradual establishment as a patron constituted routes away from ushenzi and ujinga, the ‘unculturedness’ and ‘ignorance’ of the peoples of the hinterland, towards achieving ‘civilisation’ and ‘Arabness’ (Fair 2001; Glassman 1991). The controversial perceptions of identity among the residents of

Zanzibar became part of a broader debate on ethnic diversity and socio-economic inequality along racial lines in the 1950s, the decade of intensifying nationalist politics. Gompeting definitions of Zanzibar citizenship constituted an important element in the intellectual controversy

between the two mainstreams of Zanzibar nationalism: the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), which perceived the Indian Ocean seascape as an integrating factor, and the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), which considered Zanzibar as part of an East African landscape (Bromber 2002: 75-76, 67). The recent anxieties about immigrants can thus be viewed as the last permutation of a persistently tense relationship between Zanzibar and the mainland. Moral and cultural anxieties feed off on and serve as metaphors for these tensions. As a result, the notions of uzanziban (Zanzibariness’) and wislamu (“being Muslim’) are essentialised, and

AIDS becomes a metaphor for a longer-standing, broader threat to these basic values of Zanzibar society. While narratives of decline had already featured during the late nineteenth and twentieth century when people’s lives changed profoundly under the influence of colonial rule, in Zanzibar one event has fuelled the sense of cultural erosion significantly: the violent revolution that took place in Zanzibar in 1964, which led to the massacre and expulsion of an alleged ‘Arab’ and ‘South Asian’ minority of landlords.'* As a

'* Elections for the first independent government took place in 1963. The Afro-Shirazi Party, which emphasised notions of a Pan-African identity, won the majority of votes. But a coalition of the Zanzibar Nationalist Party, loyal to the British-backed Sultan and to the official Islamic notables endorsed by him, with the right-wing Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party formed the new government. On 12 January 1964, an insurgence led by the police overthrew this new government. Interestingly, John Okello, the military leader of the revolution, originated from the mainland himself. For a more detailed discussion of the Zanzibar Revolution cf. Lofchie 1965, Clayton 1981, Babu 1991. For issues of identity and party politics cf. Bromber 2002, Glassman 2000.

124 NADINE BECKMANN consequence, the chain of Islamic learning, well-established in colonial Zanzibar, was disrupted. Most of the ulema, the Islamic religious scholars, were Arabs, or had connections to the Middle East and an allegiance to Arabophone culture (Bang 2003), and were forced to leave the islands

in order to escape growing persecution. While Islamic learning was tolerated under the socialist regime, since the majority of the population practiced it, it was not encouraged (Parkin 1995: 205). Moreover, although he enforced rigid decrees on ‘public morality’ (including strict dress codes, a ban on alcohol, etc., cf. Askew 2006),

many perceived Abeid Amani Karume, the new president of the Zanzibar Revolutionary Government, as a hypocrite and a threat to Zanzibar’s Islamic identity. Until today, narratives about his rule are characterised by bitterness about his sexual excesses and atrocities committed in his name, and the stories about his sexual misdeeds are a prime example of the use of sexual licence as a metaphor for moral,

personal, and political corruption.'? His enforcement of marriages between ASP (Afro-Shirazi Party) leaders and Arabic and Indian women

and his alleged insatiable hunger for and rape of young girls caused particular indignation.'* Moreover, by banning locally important, identity-conferring Islamic practices, such as collective zikiri recitations and ziara pilgrimages to a saint’s or sheikh’s tomb performed predominantly by the ¢anka (sufi brotherhoods), by ordering the destruction of books on religion and traditional healing,'? and drying up Arabic and Islamic

teaching (Purpura 1997: 138-40), Karume was seen to undermine basic features of Zanzibari cultural and religious life. Only in the early 1970s with Aboud Jumbe’s presidency, Islamic learning again gained some ofhcial recognition as an important part of Zanzibari culture and identity (Purpura 1997: 141). Economically, the policies of successive governments since the revolu-

tion contributed to the decline of Zanzibar’s economic backbone, the

'’ There are numerous accounts of arbitrary beatings and detentions, and other atrocities committed under Karume’s rule, including accounts of killings and of torture in a Zanzibar prison (cf. Barwani et al. 2003: 109, 115, 181-7, 193ff, 217-25 etc.).

'* An older male informant recounted that he and other men of his age had signed numerous marriage contracts in order to protect young unmarried girls from

ot Atempting to eradicate the activities of wachawi and wapungan (witchcraft and spirit practitioners) and other local healers (waganga) he ordered the burning of all books belonging to healers and scholars (walimu) accused of practising witchcraft (uchawr) (Purpura 1997: 138).

AIDS AND THE POWER OF GOD: NARRATIVES OF DECLINE 125

clove industry, and its replacement with the morally suspect business of tourism. Shortly after the revolution, Zanzibar entered a union with ‘Tanganyika to form ‘Tanzania. Interest in the (then very lucrative) clove industry encouraged the ‘Tanzanian union government to intensify politi-

cal control of the islands, while depressing producer prices to redirect the profits into its coffers. From the mid-1970s, inept price speculation by the Zanzibari government combined with market changes to make clove production barely viable. Meanwhile, the Karume government’s emphasis on self-sufficiency translated into a refusal to supplement Zanzibar’s food production with imports. ‘The resulting food shortages were prolonged by failed economic experiments on the ‘Tanzanian mainland. ‘The same failures also led to shortages of fuel, hence of transportation between Zanzibar and the mainland (which was compounded by strict border controls). Over-control of the health sector, formerly in much better shape in Zanzibar than on the mainland, led to the closure of all private practices by the mid-1970s. The overall result was a severe decline in living standards and an unprecedented degree of isolation, which has been partly relieved by IMF-led economic ‘liberalization’ from ca. 1992.'° Since then, tourism has expanded rapidly. ‘The sector offers numerous job opportunities at various levels, and now accounts for about 23°%0 of the Zanzibar gross national product.'’ Simultaneously, a large influx of immigrants from the ‘Tanzanian mainland began, in the quest for work and a ‘better life’ (Autafuta maisha, lit. ‘to search for a living’), and Zanzibaris were slow in getting into the business.'®

'® At the same time, the decentralisation and the downsizing of government bureaucracy that formed part of the imposed reforms exacerbated the economic crisis in Lanzania; corruption escalated during the neo-liberal reforms, with stagnating salaries for civil servants and the amendment of the leadership code to allow for private capitalist activities. An upsurge of illegal imports, unpaid import duties and taxes, corporate tax evasion, and the informal privatisation of parastatals contributed to this development (Askew 2006: 29-30). '’ According to statistics from the Finance Ministry, tourism revenues increased from US$ 259.44 million to US$ 746.02 million in Tanzania between 1995 and 2004, as the number of overseas visitors increased from 295312 people to 582807 per year. he tourist sector has created almost 200000 job opportunities countrywide in this period (Angola Press 8.3.2006). Zanzibar earned more than US$ 55 million from tourism in the fiscal year 2004/5 (Xinhua 2.1.2006). '® T was frequently told that travelling between the islands and the mainland had been difficult even for ‘Tanzanians, as the traveller was required to hold a passport. This restriction has been lifted recently, resulting in a much larger influx of mainland, non-Muslim immigrants (cf. Parkin 2006: 100).

126 NADINE BECKMANN Most young men and women cite moral concerns as reason why work in the tourist sector 1s undesirable for the stricter Muslims: the selling of alcohol, the inevitable mixing of men and women in the workplace, and, for women particularly, the requirement to work without being able to wear Islamic dress (headscarf and babu, a long black coat worn on top of the normal clothes). Additionally, tourists’ demeanour and dress are perceived to have a detrimental influence on those who are in close contact with them.’ For many tourists, especially the many young, single travellers (both male and female), the ‘Zanzibar experience’ frequently includes a sexual adventure with one of the locals, and a whole group of young men, so-called beach boys or papasi (lit. ‘ticks’), meanwhile has formed that caters to the market of female sex tourism. These moral objections, though, conceal an array of additional reasons for Zanzibaris’ slow response to the economic opportunities offered by tourism compared to migrant workers from the mainland. Waiting tables and cleaning up after tourists (who are regarded morally inferior)

conflicts with the strong views of status and status-appropriate work still held by many Zanzibaris.*? Moreover, ignorance of English poses a significant barrier to Zanzibaris’ entry into the tourism job market when customer contact is required.*! Finally, mainlanders working as tourist touts or ‘beach boys’ had already cut loose from their families when they moved to Zanzibar, while young Zanzibaris find it harder to escape the close supervision by their families and wider social networks and are thus subject to much stronger social control.*” The image of tourism as morally corrupt business persists, but many of the younger ' Interestingly, this was different among Zanzibaris in Oman; here, Al-Rasheed maintains, Zanzibaris (both men and women) have been the first to respond to the economic opportunities from increasing tourism since the early 1990s. ‘They are held to be more open, less strict in a religious sense, and Zanzibari women have a longer history of employment than most Omani women (Al-Rasheed 2005: 103). *’ Although today often impoverished, memories of the ‘golden past’ when Zanzibar was the centre of Indian Ocean trade are still vivid, and an attitude of superiority over the ‘uncivilised’ mainlanders is sustained by many Zanzibaris. *‘' English had been removed from the school curriculum after the socialist revolution, and although it is now part of the course syllabus again, knowledge of English is low in Zanzibar, with even secondary school teachers often not being able to keep up a basic English conversation. ** Consequently, those Zanzibari who do work in disrespected positions in the tourist industry, e.g. as beach boys, or as masseurs on the beach, often move away from their home to a different part of the islands in the attempt to conceal their occupation from their family members and merely state that they ‘work in the tourist sector’. ‘Uhis 1s often accepted without much questioning, as they frequently contribute a significant amount of money to the family’s income.

AIDS AND THE POWER OF GOD: NARRATIVES OF DECLINE 127

Zanzibari generation have realised now that they have missed out on an opportunity to make a living and bitterly complain about the mainlanders ‘stealing their jobs’. As a result, the already existing tensions between the Zanzibari and the James Lwanga, youth worker, Campus Alliance to Wipe out AIDS (CAWA), 20 July

oe Freddie Mwenda, 21, 2nd-year economics student, 12 April 2005. ” Jenny Namutebi, 22, 3rd-year mass communication student, 20 April 2005. *° Bena Nansubuga, 23, 2nd-year computer programming student, 11 November 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 233 and affection for another by tangible and visible means: “If you don’t give a Ugandan chick anything, she thinks you don’t like her’.*’ In an open informal discussion about de-toothing amongst 20 male students, all of them complained that campus women were too expensive for them to manage and cited money as the biggest impediment to having a girlfriend. ‘The security guard at the hostel, himself a student, considered the length and cost he would go to in pursuit of a girl: The thing is, a girl can say ‘before I do that (sex) I want a home cinema system’ and you give it to her and she just runs. It happens all the time and the guy can’t do anything. But mostly you just keep going until you’re tired or the reserves are exhausted.*°

Given the financial limitations of young campus men, women have turned their attention to older, financially stable, successful and, frequently, married men. ‘hese men are often referred to as ‘twelve-month contracts’ as they are required only for the duration of the school year when lifestyle costs and demands are high. From these older men, some women have managed to extract university residence fees, living costs

and cars. Although this shows great resourcefulness on the part of Ugandan women, it is also the case that their ability to negotiate the terms of their sexual interactions with these men is compromised on account of what two male students referred to as the ‘unspoken rule’ that if a man pursues a woman with gifts and she allows him to by spending time with him, it is ‘assumed’ that sex will follow. Although some girls are able to take what they can get and then run off when reserves are exhausted, others do not manage to get out of the reciprocal sexual ‘obligation’, even though they may not want to have sex with the person who 1s funding their lifestyle.*? As one de-toother suggested, ‘most of us women who de-tooth don’t want to have sex, but *7 Jimmy Mutalya, 20 July 2005. *° John Ahabwe, 30, history student, 3 July 2005. *’ Other research supports the fact that the negotiation of sexual activity on the part of women is heavily compromised when the dominant sexual culture is transactional. However, the studies I have seen fail to acknowledge how huge an influence the transactional element is on the sexual behaviour of young people. At Makerere Campus it is easy to see that de-toothing is the biggest determinant of sexual behaviour, as suggested by Sarah Mayanya, an education policy worker at USAID, Kampala, Humphrey Asimwe, Youth Pastor at KPC, John Ekudu-Adoku, Dean of Students at Makerere University as well as many students. Studies which do recognise the importance of transaction for sexual behaviour and so HIV-prevention include Nyanzi et al., “Uhe Negotiation of Sexual Relationships’, Luke et al., ‘Cross-generational and ‘Transactional Sexual Relations’, especially 20-27. One study which considers the financial aspects of

234 JO SADGROVE if a government minister buys you a car, how can you run away from him? You have no choice but to have sex’. Having told me that she didn’t use condoms, I asked her whether she was afraid of contracting HIV and she told me that she never really thought about it, but in any case she'd rather die rich at 30 than poor at 70. Encouraging female de-toothers to talk to me about their experiences with sugar daddies was extremely difficult because, although people acknowledge the predominance of transactional sexual relationships, few want to publicly admit to de-toothing, not least because doing so will compromise their future relationship opportunities. ‘The three women who did speak to me talked about the discomfort and fear that the situation put them in: The most I ever got from a guy is a phone and 6 months rent (of 100,000

Ush per week). The guy was 10 years older and a banker. I never had sex with him but I was careful to choose the “company type’; those who want company. It makes you feel bad. You’re never sure; the person could attack you at any time. When he calls you, you have to run to him. You feel very uncomfortable.”'

When I asked Assumpta why she engaged in behaviour that obviously made her feel uncomfortable, she said that she did it because the man in question was persistent and because she didn’t like him and so saw no problem in using him financially. I spoke with one student, Albert, who was de-toothed (by a bornagain girl) to the tune of one million shillings (roughly £300) over a one-month period. According to Albert, the girl would call him con-

stantly, complaining that she had no money to service her car or to buy fuel amongst other things. After the month was over, she appeared

with a much older man and told Albert that he (the older man) was her boyfriend. ‘here are a number of interesting facts about this case. During the month-long courtship, Albert and his ‘girlfriend’ did not have sex.’ This is important for two reasons; first because the girl in

both boys in ‘affording’ sex and girls in negotiating safer sex is Amuyunzu-Nyamongo et al., ‘Qualitative Evidence’. °° Brigitte Kwera, 21, lst-year computer science student, 15 January 2006. *' Assumpta Nabossa, 22, 2nd-year law student, 10 November 2005. 100,000 Ush is about $55. ** According to many of the men I spoke to, the absence of sexual relations when expenditure is high is a sure sign that you are being de-toothed, although many men will hold out and keep spending, waiting for girls to ‘break’.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 239 question used her born-again status as a means of avoiding the sexual pressure entailed by ‘de-toothing’. ‘This points to one of the ways in

which the identity of being born-again can be manipulated and in many cases may offer a genuine platform from which girls and women

feel empowered to reject the unwanted sexual advances of men.” However as my own data suggests, 1t would be wrong to assume that born-again women are not having sex at all; rather it is feasible that the public declaration of a born-again identity offers the possibility of its manipulation and use in a situation where a woman wants to avoid sex. Secondly it draws attention to the fact that de-toothing is primarily about wethholding sex. Although mutual sexual relationships carry a heavy financial component, de-toothing is about extracting money on the promise of sex in the future. However, it is very difficult for women to maintain their position because of the implicit understandings of reciprocity which gift-giving invokes, and the expectations of men. Such

expectations are enforced by inherited, gendered authority structures which, from childhood, encourage women to ‘fear, respect and obey’ the demands of older men.* Whilst women are engaging in sexual activity with older men for material goods, they often have ‘campus boytriends’ to whom they are emotionally attached. One ‘campus boyfriend’ told me that he knew all about his girlfriend sleeping with an older man to fund her university lifestyle. ‘This was acceptable to him as he could not afford to fund the relationship and the money that his girlfriend acquired paid for them to go out together. ‘This is not an unusual attitude or scenario. ‘The real danger of such sexual dynamics is the multiple partner networks that facilitate the spread of STDs and HIV. First, many of the men who are engaging in sexual activity with campus girls are older, are more sexually experienced and so are more likely to have been exposed to HIV. ‘The

triangle of girl/campus boyfriend/sugar daddy ensures that if HIV is present it moves very quickly through the networks into the student community and/or to the family of the older man. Whether the sex in these relationships is safe is difficult to gauge. Literature suggests that

°° Marshall also considers the positive implications of a born-again identity for women’s control over their sexual encounters. Marshall, ‘Name of Jesus’, 232. ‘Two of my female respondents also suggested the same, as did some of the men who believed it to be an ‘excuse’ on the part of the women to keep them at bay. ** Christopher Sempa, 24, 2nd-year philosophy student, 20 July 2005.

230 JO SADGROVE it is often not, even when knowledge of safe sex is high.” My research suggests that amongst students, knowledge about and use of condoms is Inconsistent and, particularly since the national shortage began ten months ago, condoms are hard to acquire on campus.”° Born-agains and abstinence on campus

Amidst this risky sexual dynamic, Makerere, like the rest of Uganda, 1s undergoing a born-again revolution. Many students identify themselves as ‘born-agaim or ‘saved’, and increasing numbers are joining the trend. ‘This is in part the result of the promotional activities of churches via networks in their congregations around Makerere’s campus. People are very public about their born-again status and, with increasing numbers

around Makerere, they are often found discussing their theologies in classrooms, in canteens and in public fellowships around the university. Generally, they proselytise whenever they can. My detailed fieldwork focuses on a group of 25 Makerere University students from Kampala Pentecostal Church USPC). KPC is an Englishspeaking church, run by a Canadian pastor, in the centre of Kampala.*’

The theology of the preaching is very much centred on ‘values’ and is concerned with transforming individuals one by one, enabling them to bring healing to the city and the country, leading by example. As a result there is a strong behavioural emphasis.’® The core idea is of a Christian revolution based around Christian understandings of love, knowledge of which is discerned through the nature of a loving, personal

» “Knowledge of safe-sex behaviour and reported behaviour have little in common and the fundamental barriers to behavioural change lie within the economic and sociocultural context that molds the sexual politics of youth’, Hulton et al., ‘Perceptions of the Risks’, 35-46. See also Sekirime et al., ‘Knowledge, Attitude and Practice’, Okonkwo et al., ‘Perception of Peers’ and Rassjo and Dar] ‘Safe Sex Advice’.

°° On condom use at Makerere the only detailed study is now rather dated: Lule & Gruer, ‘Sexual Behaviour’. On condom availability on campus see ‘Abolish ‘Tax on Condoms’, New Vision, 7 September 2005. In early 2005, the Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students of Makerere University led students to demonstrate against, amongst other things, the use of condoms, showing top level suspicion and lack of support for condoms on campus. See ‘Makerere University in another Misguided March’, The Monitor, 17 March 2005. °’ For more information on the mission, funding, outreach, activities of KPC see www.kpc.co.ug and Gifford, African Christianity, 102-104. °° This is reflected in KPC’s mission statement: ‘An English Speaking Cell Base community Church celebrating Christ as each one reaches one, touching those around us with the love of Jesus bringing healing to the city and to the nation’.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 237 relationship with God. ‘There is a heavy stress on the aspect of social responsibility espoused by the gospel and the responsibility of Christians

to live out their faith in society. During my time there, as part of an annual cycle considering ‘Contemporary Influences on Society’, the preaching was structured around the subject of ‘Reflecting the Character of God in our Communities’, and focused on the role and duty of Christians to challenge ‘animistic’ and secular world-views. ‘his was done by examining in considerable theological detail the aspects of the

character of God and urging people to emulate and replicate them in their jobs, families and communities.*” Pastors at KPC are critical of churches that preach prosperity*® on the grounds that they encourage gift-giving on the part of members without being financially accountable.*' Pastors are also sceptical about deliverance ministries, which explain all misfortune in terms of spirits and the devil and represent a ‘quick fix’ rather than the transformative experience of an individual through a relationship with Christ.” Preaching on sexual behaviour was minimal. I recorded only three explicit references to the desirable model for the sexual behaviour of the youth; one during the Sunday service celebrating campus graduation, in which the pastor prayed that:

*’ Characteristics considered included God’s holiness, generosity and mercy, righteous justice, goodness, unconditional love, grace and faithfulness. ‘Uhe aim was to enable congregation members to understand the implications of these characteristics for both their individual and unique relationships with God and their daily lives. As Christ is truth ‘we must be a people of truth both personally and collectively...the standard 1s the character of God and the word of God and we must line ourselves up with these standards to ensure that private integrity makes us worthy of public office’. Pastor Gary Skinner, Sunday 24 April 2005. * Prosperity propounds the idea that ‘God has met all the needs of human beings in the suffering and death of Christ, and every Christian should now share the victory of Christ over sin, sickness and poverty. A believer has a right to the blessings of health and wealth won by Christ, and he or she can obtain these blessings merely by a positive confession of faith’, Gifford, African Christianity, 39.

*! KPC publishes its accounts every month. One member of KPC stated that she had chosen to go to KPC because of the fact that they are accountable and their accounts are audited professionally and published. ® The implications of such preaching may also discourage some from equating sickness and suffering with external evil forces. I believe that discouraging the idea of personalised evil agents will encourage people to take greater responsibility for their situations. One young American pastor preached ‘sometimes we give Satan too much credit. He only has as much power as we give him... We want to deliver people from sickness which may not be a spiritual demon inside you; it may just be a physical sickness’, Deliverance Praise Rally, 18 June 2005.

238 JO SADGROVE University students choose abstinence instead of condoms and will lobby the government for laws against pornography. Let every university student be able to stand against condoms in favour of abstinence. Let every university student stand for righteousness.*”

Another came during a Youth Bible Study: Sin is a big problem to God and Christians. ‘Uhe condomised culture 1s becoming normal but we stick to ABC—Abstinence, Be faithful, Christ!— as the answer. People pump it ‘it’s ok as long as you use condoms’. No!

the condom culture is not the kingdom culture.“

The promotion of abstinence as the ideal model for sexual behaviour amongst the unmarried is more commonly referred to during the big campus-based youth fellowship meetings run by KPC and, occasionally, in cell groups when questions of sexuality arise. It was KPC’s more circumscribed perspective on the devil, rejection of prosperity and, instead, emphasis on personal and social values and the responsibility of Christians to represent and live out their faith in the community that led me to focus my research around its members. Out of all the preaching I had heard in Kampala, it was this message that spoke most directly to concerns about encouraging personal, social and sexual responsibility amongst members, if not in the constant messages preached that emphasised responsibility, then in challenging the predominance of materialism, the motivator of much sexual behaviour, by decrying prosperity. The 25 students considered in this study are all residents of the most expensive student residence around campus. A basic level of familial financial stability can therefore be assumed for most of those who live there. The born-again students who are the focus of my research are comfortably off and well educated. ‘They are between 20 and 25 years old and undergraduate students at Makerere. ‘Thirteen are male and twelve are female. I met the students by Joining two of KPC’s cell groups as a participant-observer.” Having spent four months getting to know

*® Pastor Gary Skinner, Campus Graduation Sunday, 13 March 2005. ™ Pastor Chris Komagum, Youth Bible Study, 1 December 2005. » A cell is a group of 5-10 church members who meet every Wednesday night to talk and pray together. Every member of KPC is assigned a cell group on joining the church. Cell groups are open to people who are not born-again and in any meeting there are usually | or 2 members present who use the group as a ‘counselling service’ to discuss their current concerns. Each cell group is led by one of its members and the format follows a printed agenda with ‘ice-breaker’ questions to get people talking, a Bible

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 239 members through their cell groups, I then carried out in-depth informal

interviews to try to ascertain what it meant to them to say that they were born-again, how they understood salvation and the implications of this for the ways in which they lived their lives. I also attended the youth Bible study service and Sunday service at KPC every week and during the university holidays I occasionally joined in with other youth

groups at KPC.” I did try talking to members of other KPC groups as and when I met them around the church, but it was clear that the fact that they did not know me made them reluctant to discuss their faith and behaviour with me. Sexual behaviour, de-toothing and being born-again

With regards to sexual behaviour, eleven out of twenty-five respondents (four female, seven male) told me that they were, or had been, involved in sexual relationships since becoming born-again. Of the fourteen who said that they had managed to abstain since becoming saved, half had

become born-again when at primary school so, during their teenage years, had been under the influence of a religiously based abstinence message, and more importantly socialised amongst born-again peer groups who reinforced this message. I suspect that the age at which people became born-again affects their capacity and desire to abstain. Two of my born-again students and many of those who were not bornagain suggested that it is easy to abstain from sex if you have never had it, but almost impossible if you have, born-again or not. None of the born-again students who admitted to being sexually active were virgins when they became born-again. All the sexually active born-again

women and six of the men were in long term, committed relationships. One of the men had ‘backslid’ and left the church during his sexual relationship but was now fully committed again and abstaining.

Only one of the men reported casual sex once born-again and that had been a ‘one off’. Another of the men, at the time of interview,

text and then questions based loosely around the text to guide discussion. Generally the themes of these agenda are linked to those of the week’s preaching. © Aside from the cell groups, each year group at Makerere has its own fellowship group and there are groups for graduates and mature members of the congregation, which meet every week. [here is also a fellowship led by a pastor for all campus students and another for all secondary and university level youth. Both groups meet once a month.

240 JO SADGROVE had stopped worshipping at KPC as a result of his behaviour and the implied hypocrisy. One of the male respondents who admitted to having a sexual partner ‘for sexual satisfaction’ also had a born-again girlfriend with whom he was abstaining. All reported feelings of guilt at the times during which they had been both born-again and sexually active, although guilt alone was rarely enough to stop somebody having sex. All pointed to the theology of sin and repentance as a means of ‘getting back to God’. Four quoted the first half of Proverbs 24:16 ‘for a righteous man falls seven times, and rises up again’, saying that ‘it’s not about the falling down but rather the getting up again’. ‘This suggests that, amongst other things, theological messages about sin and repentance should be considered by anyone examining the impact of moral proscriptions of sexual activity amongst born-again Christians. Two people pointed to the fact that repentance has to be done ‘with a sincere heart’ for one to be forgiven, but the others did not qualify the notion at all, implying that, for some, the option of repentance after sexual acts undermines the strength of the abstinence message put forward by the church.” Among those who admitted to sexual activity whilst being born-again,

use of condoms was variable. Six members (four male, two female) said they used condoms ‘sometimes’, two suggested that they always used condoms (one female, one male), and three did not use condoms because ‘they are incompatible with the gospel culture’,* a direct citing from KPC’s preaching on condoms. One female respondent said that

she had used condoms during the first few months of her three-year relationship, but no longer used them because to insist on them would be to express her mistrust of her partner.” Regarding de-toothing, it was difficult to gauge the extent to which born-again women and men were involved in this economy and if so,

” Irrespective of punishment, there is a clear emphasis in preaching and amongst the attitudes of respondents on the consequences of sinful behaviour: pregnancy, STDs and HIV were cited as the consequences of sexual sin, alongside guilt. However, these are all known consequences of sex and knowledge of them seems to have had very little impact on sexual behaviour in wider society as already mentioned, suggesting that knowledge of consequence is not enough seriously to affect behaviour. #8 Alex Musoke, 24, 3rd-year mass communications, KPC Youth Leader, 10 December 2005. ® ‘The link between condoms and mistrust between partners is reflected in a number of studies considering condom use and meaning amongst young people in different parts of Africa. See FHI ‘Iringa Youth’, 28, Serikime et al., ‘Knowledge, Attitude’, 21 and Smith, ‘Youth, Sin’, 431.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 241 whether it was a factor in their sexual behaviour. It was much more difficult to get the women to talk openly than the men, and only three admitted to actually de-toothing whilst being born-again, although they denied having sex with the (older) men in question.°” Over half of the respondents suggested that born-again women de-tooth and often get men from outside the church to fulfil their financial needs: Born-agains can and do detooth. ‘They’re showered with gifts. Something

is inhibited in you so guys start giving things. When they give the girl gets used and defines it as the way things should be and then gets caught into having sex with them. Sometimes born-again guys over-assume that girls shouldn't expect as they’re holy, but they still have to. P've done it and so have my friends.”!

The perception is that being born-again does not exempt women and men from being implicated in the broader social dynamics of trans-

action. Rather, given that within the environment of KPC such an explicit material focus in a relationship would be considered as wrong and exploitative, such relating has to be kept secret. Four of the girls suggested that the self-esteem arising from their growing relationship with Christ meant that they no longer needed a man or money to be satisfied. ‘Two of them followed this statement with ‘but if my boyfriend has money, then why shouldn’t I have it?’ Irrespective of a shift in moral framework, there is still a feeling that

money is an important part of a relationship and that there is some kind of expectation of financial benefit on the part of the girl. Men also supported this idea. One respondent suggested that ‘Women who are saved don’t ask outright, but if you fail to provide for her (financially) she'll point out all the things you should do as a boyfriend but aren't,

then that puts pressure on you as you have to maintain it.’ Another said ‘Even my born-again girlfriend only wanted to see me when I had money. If you don’t have money, maybe a few born-again girls will be

content with you, but few’.

°»? Of women who were not born-again, and with the exception of three people, it has so far proved extremely difficult to encourage known de-toothers, identified by their friends and boyfriends as such, to talk openly about their behaviour. >! Christina Nambi, 25, 3rd-year community psychology, KPC born-again Christian, 21 July 2005. »? Zak Kimuli, 20, 2nd-year social sciences, KPC cell group leader, 27 July 2005. > Jimmy Mutalya, 15 July 2005.

242 JO SADGROVE The nature of relationships on campus and in wider society that relies heavily on gift exchange, in an environment where many are struggling to compete with peers both financially and materially, is pervasive and

powerful. Although perhaps over time the influence of certain bornagain environments in encouraging discussion and negotiation between often conflicting and influential messages may impact on the way that members evaluate the choices that they make, I believe that wider cultural attitudes of materialism will frequently outweigh any alternative discourse. As one born-again Christian suggested: Most of the origin of sexual promiscuity 1s in materialism—girls who want to maintain their status and relationship get involved in sex. When Christians discuss sex they just say ‘It’s bad. Don’t do it’, not emphasising how it comes about. I think sexual promiscuity will reduce if we spoke about that area of materialism.”* Public and prwate: accountability as a motwator of behaviour

One of the most interesting sets of responses was to the question ‘Why

does it matter how you behave once you are born-again?’ All but two of the respondents pointed to the issue of what they commonly termed as ‘accountability’. It matters how one behaves because ‘people are watching you—if you're saved you set a standard’, ‘you’re a role model’, ‘you’re a light in the world’, ‘the way you live out your lifestyle convinces others of what you believe more than your words’, ‘society judges you’, ‘it matters so you give a better example to others’, “society knows you’re born-again so there’s high expectations of your life and what you do’. ‘The relationship between one’s ‘saved’ status and the

need to appear accountable to society was one of the most dominant themes of the research. ‘Throughout the interviews, many talked of not wanting to be seen as hypocrites. The notion of hypocrisy 1s, as I understand it, closely linked to the question of social authority. No-one is going to listen to a born-again Christian’s proclamations about how they should behave and the need to give their lives to Christ if that person 1s

known to be saying one thing and doing another. But rather than this authority resting in an individual’s ‘integrity’, either living a life in line with being born-again or being honest about their shortcomings when their behaviour falls short of that lifestyle, it resides in the continuous ** Zak Kimuli, 27 July 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 243 public demonstration of the born-again life. Born-again authority 1s intimately tied to maintaining the image of being born-again. Although being born-again 1s very fashionable amongst young people and commands a certain amount of social authority, many people who are not born-again are viewing the trend with scepticism, and people are only too willing to voice their cynicism publicly. One of the KPC members talked of people who are not born-again as being more critical of the behaviour of born-agains than those who are. At least amongst the cell groups of born-again Christians there is a strong element of empathy and mutual support, a recognition of the fallibility of human

nature and a framework of Christian understandings of forgiveness and repentance within which ‘sinful’ activity 1s situated. Within born-again environments, however, there are other difficulties. The pressure to be accountable comes most immediately from members

within the cell group. One of the cell group leaders complained of the fact that in the discussions there was too much emphasis on ‘what a Christian should be’ at the expense of talking openly about what is going on in people’s lives and identifying problems ‘in a real way’. ‘This 1s primarily because group members are reluctant to lose face in front of their peers by admitting to behaviour that runs counter to the ideology of the church. It is far safer to focus on conceptualising the ideal Christian than to admit that individually one is falling short of that ideal. Another youth leader at KPC suggested that it is only once one person has come out and admitted having difficulty with, for example, sex, that other members of the group will also admit to having the same problems. Accountability, whilst being a potentially important motivator of behaviour, can also serve to shut down open discussions about how people are behaving. ‘his would prove counter-productive to HIV prevention, implicitly based on openness and honesty not only

about sexual modes of transmission but also one’s HIV status and previous sexual partners. Peter, a youth leader at KPC, summed up the complexities of the accountability issue: “People fear to be branded a hypocrite. You fear society knowing that you’re indulging. ‘This can make your behaviour

»°? Matthew Mulumba, 20, 2nd-year statistics student, KPC cell group leader, 14 July 2005.

244 JO SADGROVE secret. If I drink Pll drink in my own room. But if you have a basically positive life, the accountability factor encourages you.’ ‘The idea that in the face of a need to maintain public accountability, behaviour that fails to meet the required standards 1s pushed underground has obvious dire consequences for those who are considering HIV prevention. Jimmy, a born-again Christian who smokes, drinks and is sexually active, stated that for many a large part of becoming involved in born-again circles relates to the implications for social status and identity. He suggested that for people ‘who don’t want to be associated with anything bad—smoking, drinking—they may as well become born-again’. For Jimmy this is not least because being born-again gets people entry into an increasingly significant social network, improves one’s Job prospects (an increasing number of jobs are advertised for born-again Christians, under the assumption that born-again Christians are more honest and trustworthy), and generally provides a social status, identity and ‘place to belong’. Jimmy himself sees no contradiction between his own born-again status and his self-proclaimed addiction to alcohol and cigarettes: Most born-agains don’t drink and smoke. If I have to be seen to be a born-again, I have to be seen not to drink and smoke. When I’m with born-again friends I don’t want them to know I drink and smoke so I act like I don’t.’

One respondent talked of the ‘mask of salvation’: ‘we all put up the mask of “I’m saved and holy” which 1s a hie. ‘That (salvation) 1s one thing and your life 1s another’. The mask of salvation is maintained in a large part through the constant projection of the image of being born-again: ‘walking the walk

and talking the talk of salvation’ and so, as a born-again Christian, fulfilling the expectations of both those who are born-again and those who are not in words and, ideally, actions.°? The recognition of the social role that ‘talking the talk of salvation’ plays in maintaining the ‘mask’ of salvation makes it extremely difficult to assess the relationship between what is said and what 1s done by those who use such talk

°° Peter Musisi, 21, 2nd-year civil engineering, KPC youth leader, 19 July 2005. 7 Jimmy Mutalya, 29 July, 2005.

°° Paul Kiwanuka, 24, 3rd-year social sciences, KPC born-again Christian, 15 December 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 2495 to communicate and consolidate their identity as born-agains. ‘This 1s particularly likely to be the case in group discussions at which other born-again peers are present and accountability structures are in place. In attempting to examine the relationship between religious identity and sexual behaviour, it is crucial to recognise this difficulty. Linking the two worlds

Ugandans wear masks. You can’t know what they’re thinking. When they

get Born-again they just get better at hiding the sinning part.” Ugandans wear a mask—they’re not open—we’re too much concerned with appearances.”

The significance of image, appearance and peer-group influence are recurrent themes that link the dynamic of de-toothing with that of being born-again by acting as influences that motivate behaviour. Both groups referred frequently to the idea of peer-group influence. For those who were not born-again, this was described as peer-group pressure;

the pressure to ‘keep up appearances’ by staying ahead of the commodities race; having the most up-to-date mobile phone or the most fashionable clothes. ‘Uhis is exemplified in the aggressive avariciousness

of de-toothers; many of whom are not badly off, as the fact that they lived in the most exclusive hostel on campus suggested, but who seem to have a ceaseless desire for bigger and better things, seemingly at the expense of their own health.®' For those who were born-again, peer group came up more frequently as a check on the behaviour of members through ‘peer-group accountability’. ‘This accountability 1s fostered and maintained by the presence of cell groups, a busy social schedule for

those who wanted to join in at the church and an encouragement for members to fellowship together and check up on each other’s welfare outside formal church meetings. Both groups are heavily motivated by appearances; amongst de-toothers, the promise of sexual transaction enables the individual to sustain an appearance that is configured and

»’ Christopher Sempa, 20 July 2005. °° Sr Cothilda Nalugwa, 27 June 2005. °! One student told me that he knew girls who changed all the furniture in their room every term. He went on to suggest that ‘First you want what others have, then you want what they don’t have’, Michael Mudimba, 22, 3rd-year mass communications student.

246 JO SADGROVE communicated through the possession of luxury goods. For the bornagains, the ‘content’ of appearance is based around the received moral teachings of Pentecostalism: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t have sex outside marriage, don’t judge others and turn the other cheek. In general discussions with Ugandans about the importance of image, I was told ‘Ugandans care about the way they look. If you want to be successful you have to look and act successful’.°*? When trying to understand notions of hypocrisy and why there seemed to be, outside born-again circles, little public condemnation of what I understood as dishonesty, I was told that ‘it’s not bad to lie as we’re lying to maintain the image.’®’ ‘This goes some way to explaining the unflinching way in

which born-again Christians who had told me that they were sexually active would conceal the truth from their peer group without appearing to be too concerned about the implicit dishonesty and hypocrisy of their position. As long as they were not discovered to be lying or hypocritical, it was acceptable. he prime focus was on maintaining public image, so continually cementing and inventing oneself as a bornagain Christian and thereby ensuring peer-group acceptance. A consideration of the sexual dynamics on campus, recognising the importance of peer groups and public image, enables one to examine

the impact and influence of broader social dynamics on the interpretation, appropriation and application of religious messages. More than this, it demonstrates that religion can provide an interesting and illuminating way into an examination of cultural change by pointing to recurrent themes that endure and condition a response to outside ideas, in this case Pentecostalism. Implications for HIV prevention

The concern with outward appearances, the strength of peer groups who determine what type of outward appearance 1s acceptable, the importance of material goods and an emphasis on the display of success carry significant implications for an understanding of the dynam-

ics between Pentecostal religious identity and HIV prevention in a way that may not be evident at first glance. As well as pointing to the °? Christopher Sempa, 8 November 2005. °° Sr Cothilda Nalugwa, 6 November 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 247 importance of contextualising any behavioural study, it also points to the need to evaluate closely a complex and interrelated set of dynamics, all of which affect the impact of behavioural messages on the part of religious organisations. It is not as simple as the existing literature on Pentecostalism and sexual behaviour suggests it to be. At the outset of this study, I had hoped to be able to draw attention to the distinct ideological component of different churches and to explore how different theological emphases and messages might have different behavioural impacts. ‘This is important because of the heterogeneity of Pentecostalism and because different ideas and philosophies do correlate with different behavioural effects, as a quick comparative glance at different cultures demonstrates. However, the difficulties are numerous. First there is the problem of the born-again discursive style: the evidence that we have regarding how people respond to particular theological messages 1s provided in the way that people talk about how they apply those messages in their lives. However, given the nature of the ways in which people talk about their faith and the social roles that such talk plays in ensuring peer group acceptance, it 1s difficult to tell whether theological messages are determinants of behaviour or post-factum explanations or legitimisations for behaviour. Does the theology of repentance actually encourage the born-again Christian to ignore teachings about abstinence and to have sex? Or 1s it the case that, having admitted to having sex, to cite a theology of repentance is a way of explaining/legitimising behaviour, or a way of situating sex fully within the born-again Christian context by talking about it in the born-again language? Even if we could somehow get beyond that, there remain a multitude of variables at an individual level that affect behavioural impact, for example: whether a person 1s in church to listen to what is said and so hears the message; whether there 1s

any kind of uniformity in how groups of people might understand and interpret such messages; whether the message is internalised and made a point of reference in behavioural decisions; and what other influences it 1s countered against. [his makes attempting to analyse the distinction between different types of church and how such distinctions may distinguish the behaviour of members extremely difficult, but it

is still important to think about how this might happen and how we might provide evidence for it. If we recognise the importance of peer influence and the content of that influence drastically changes in terms of discourse, social environments and the messages one Is receiving,

248 JO SADGROVE then it seems at least possible that there will be a behavioural effect, although it may take a long time for it to happen and such an effect may take unexpected directions. There is a limited amount of evidence from a minority of members of KPC that demonstrates that it is possible for people to make counter-cultural moves in which image as a born-again is sacrificed in the interests of a different concept of honesty where what is said reflects what 1s done; where ‘truth’ is not conditioned by the need to maintain image and ensure peer acceptance. On different occasions, three of my respondents had admitted to their cell groups that they had been recently sexually active. | was not present at the time of these confessions, but they were attested to by other members of the group. Although this may not seem like a huge move, the sin of sex is one of the sins that ‘can’t be talked about’, because ‘culturally it is too taboo to talk openly of those things’.°* However, the cultural and Pentecostal proscriptions on openly talking about sex were less powerful than the desire to be open; even the risk of damaging one’s image and isolating oneself from one’s peers did not act as a deterrent, as has seemed so often the case amongst the born-again Christians with whom I have spoken. Although perhaps with scant evidence, I can see little social advantage in openly admitting to such behaviour and this in itself represents a shift in attitude and behavioural motivation, however slight. When I asked why these people had been open about their struggle, they reported that initially they had done so in a bid for the support of the group through prayer and advice, invoking the ‘counselling’ aspect

of the cell group that many of my KPC respondents had referred to. One of them, Andrew, a youth and cell group leader at KPC, told me that, a year after the end of his sexual relationship, he continued to refer to this period in his ‘salvation’ to encourage his peers to open up. He suggested that ‘no kid will open up until I tell this story, then all the other kids open up about their struggles with sex’, echoing some of the evidence discussed in reference to the role of accountability. Andrew talked about the need ‘to create a place where someone who feels they've messed up can come back and feel “that’s where I belong”. He wished to demonstrate to his peers that if he could ‘fall’ and get up

°F Alex Musoke, 10 December 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 249 again and keep going in salvation, then so could other group members.” By being open about his behaviour he was fulfilling his obligations as a leader to act as a strong example to others. ‘Through these confessions

of sexual behaviour we can see once again the importance of “being an example’ for others to follow, if not by managing to continually maintain the standards of a saved lifestyle then in demonstrating that one can struggle with the temptation of sex and still come back to that lifestyle. Given the fact that a person’s admission of struggling with sex

is reported as encouraging others to open up about their own sexual behaviour, leadership that facilitates this kind of discussion is obviously important. If this type of leadership can continue to be fostered at KPC, a leadership that at some level challenges the importance of keeping up the born-again appearance, then this would allow for a more open discussion of sexual behaviour—a discussion not confined by the public-image aspect of born-again discursive style. ‘This would

enable a greater understanding about the levels of sexual activity amongst born-agains and about how motivations to sexual behaviour are situated in relation to born-again Christian beliefs and identities. I see this as a positive step for HIV prevention both in its challenge to prevailing mentalities that privilege the level of appearance and in demonstrating greater openness about sexual activity. There are other aspects of the born-again lifestyle that have negative implications for HIV prevention, closely linked to the question of leadership that encourages ‘open discussion’. Aside from what 1s, in my

opinion, the most dangerous aspect—making sexual behaviour secret in the interests of maintaining image—another example includes the esteem lost by adherents who fail to maintain the high standards of behaviour required. One cell member reflected that being a born-again ‘makes people aware of their weaknesses and where they fall short of God’s hopes for them’.®® Undermining of esteem can lead people to

* Andrew Kiggundu, 3rd-year social sciences, KPC youth leader, 3 February 2006. Admittedly Andrew has a strong, secure position amongst KPC’s youth ministry so his image and status as a born-again Christians is well established and speaking openly about sexual ‘indiscretions’ that happened over a year ago will do little to damage his reputation now that such behaviour is in the past. At the time of his indiscretions he had been doing fieldwork for his degree, away from KPC, a fact to which he attributes his fall from grace; it was the absence of the accountability structures and the lures of a different peer influence that led him to his troubles. °° Erica Namutebi, 22, final year economics student, KPC born-again Christian, cell group discussion, 29 June 2005.

290 JO SADGROVE behave more recklessly; to ‘backslide’ into a life of ‘sin’, particularly sexual sin, because they do not believe they are worthy of God’s love. Perhaps more significant for the purposes of this study, backsliders have spoken about estrangement from their born-again peer group as both catalyst and effect of their backsliding. ‘The loss of the peer group reportedly acts as a catalyst because it signifies a removal of accountability structures. One cell group leader at KPC described a period of backsliding that lasted for a year before he returned to KPC: I was living in a hostel with loose, cool people. I didn’t care much. Noone knew me. Often when [’m tempted I can’t do things cause of the position ’m in. That guards me a lot cause of the accountability factors. There no-one knew that I was saved so I let my salvation lay low and talked the talk and walked the walk of a normal campus guy.”’

Peer group loss is compounded by backsliding because backsliders seemingly come to idealise the peer group as succeeding at living a saved life where they themselves could not. One student who described himself as a KPC backslider talked of his experience of attending his cell group during a time period in which he was sexually active: I felt so bad. I openly confessed about the sex but then I felt like I shouldn't

be here; that I’m too ugly for this society. A friend told me ‘you’re not alone, others are doing the same thing and just keeping quiet’. People don’t want to talk about sex, in church or out of it. You’re just made to think that it (sex) is not a possibility for anyone in the group.”

Once the element of social support and accountability are lost over a period of time, it is difficult for backsliders to come back to born-again circles. Another of my respondents, in talking about the consequences of sexual activity suggested “those who have sex have guilt—you can’t go

to fellowship or church as you’re wrong.” This is why the testimonies of people who can openly admit to having struggled but managed to °” James Mukasa, 23, 3rd-year economics student, 10 December 2005. His reference

to ‘talking the talk and walking the walk’ of a campus student speaks again to the suggestion that ‘identity’, either as a born-again or a campus student, 1s communicated and conferred by assuming certain types of social behaviour which are dictated by the group with whom one is choosing to identify. This is why the peer group is so important; because it 1s the group collectively who define what is publicly acceptable and so set behavioural codes and standards for other group members to aspire to. °8 Robert Mutebi, 9 March 2005.

Katherine Nakazzi, 21, 3rd-year social sciences, KPC born-again Christian, 26 July 2005.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 251 come back to a life of salvation are crucial, as is an environment in which people are encouraged to admit to the difficulties that they are having. The social impact that such open testimonies can have on the esteem of members who are struggling with similar problems in terms of solidarity is significant. But because appearance and image are also

sienificant, such public admissions about sex remain rare. A more common experience is that reported by seven born-again Christians who had ‘fallen’ back into a ‘worldly life’ (described as more reckless

than the one that they had lived before their being born-again) as a result of the disappointment that they felt at their inability to live up to the standards set. Here we see again that the peer group remains central to the question of esteem surrounding the issue of backsliding by representing a standard of born-again life to which the backslider feels unable to attain.

Finally, in a country whose HIV policy 1s increasingly focused around abstinence, it 1s necessary to say something about the role of the born-again movement within what 1s effectively a secular campaign telling people to abstain. I am sceptical of the government abstinence campaign because, in my experience, it fails to recognise the motivations behind sexual behaviour and closes down open discussions on sex, as the earlier comments of Mrs Museveni demonstrate. Although this accusation can also be levelled at born-again Christian groups that campaign for abstinence, the Christian campaign is strengthened by other aspects. A born-again church like KPC offers a social environment and value structure within which abstinence messages are situated, supported and make sense as part of a broader ideological and social context. Dropping the abstinence message into the campus context of transactional sex, without the provision of alternative social options or without challenging the importance of materialism, will do little to affect behaviour when it 1s heavily conditioned by other more powerful dynamics. Another of the strengths of the born-again campaign 1s that the social environments in which members spend most of their time are full of people who are aspiring to the same end, who have similar values and can be supportive of one another. Again this comes

back to the importance of peer influence. Another of the common answers from my respondents, when I asked them how they managed to maintain their commitment to born-again life in the face of such a strong and contradictory university environment, was that it is all in the company one keeps; ‘bad company corrupts good morals’. ‘The

252 JO SADGROVE importance of being surrounded by like-minded, supportive peers has been emphasised in numerous press reports on abstinence.” It can be seen that a complex interplay of theological message, cultural and social dynamics must be mediated by an individual in his or her interpretation and negotiation of the meaning of being born-again and its implications for behaviour and lifestyle. It 1s the combination of all of these dynamics—social environments, theological messages, prevailing socio-cultural influences, the motivations of the individual for attending—which affect a church’s capacity to influence the behaviour of its members in both sexual and other ways. Furthermore, as the matter of behaviour-change influence is more complicated than a church member simply being exposed to a strict moral code, it should also be recognised that even in churches that do place great emphasis on moral teachings, it is highly probable that other theological and social aspects of a church’s programme may undermine the morality

element. In the current literature, little attention 1s paid to distinct theological messages and how, analysed in a wider context, they may impact differently on people’s understandings and internalisations of the

behavioural component of religious faith. I hope that this paper may go some way to demonstrating the very real need for a more critical analysis of the link between religious belief and behaviour. If it is true that Pentecostals generally have lower rates of sexual activity, then it 1s crucial to try to understand more clearly how and why this might be the case. My own study demonstrates the powerful and pervasive influence of the peer group in driving sexual behaviour on the part of de-toothers, affecting how people talk about their sexual behaviour and in dictating how religious messages are received and mediated to define what is acceptable public behaviour for a bornagain Christian. It also proves important in creating environments in which people are less pressurised to get involved in sexual relationships by changing the ways in which people socialise and offering alternative

environments with a high accountability factor and the deterrent of ‘loss of face’ for those who wish to take advantage of them to curb their sexual behaviour. ‘This suggests that it 1s the social rather than ideological aspect of the religious organisation that make it effective at mobilising its members to behaviour change; at least it is at the social

” See for example ‘Happy to Have Abstained’ and ‘Abstinence is Real’, The Monitor, August 4-10 2005. Available on 10 September 2005 at www.monitor.co.ug.

‘KEEPING UP APPEARANCES’ 293 level that we can best provide evidence for and examples of change. Again it 1s important to remember that the type of change that results may have negative rather than positive implications, as is the case with the problem of ‘accountability’ and image in making sexual behaviour secret and so jeopardising HIV-prevention interventions. But understanding how social environments are determinants of behaviour increases the possibility of identifying and extrapolating information

which could be used to improve the success of secular HIV-prevention programmes. Even if this is not the case, an examination of the interpretation of religious messages by church members can prove a useful way of identifying and analysing the salience of certain social dynamics and values, recognition of which may enhance the eflectiveness of HIV-prevention programmes. Bibliography

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294 JO SADGROVE Luke, N., and Kurz, K., 2002. ‘Cross-generational and ‘Transactional Sexual Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa’. International Centre for Research on Women (IGRW) report. Available at http://www.icrw.organisation/docs/CrossGenSex_Report_90.pdf.

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HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY: SALVATION, GCOMMUNITY AND CARE IN A

NEO-PENTECOSTAL CHURCH IN DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA!

Hansjorg Dilger Introduction

I met Anonymous?’ for the first time in December 1999, for an interview on the premises of the Full Gospel Bible Fellowship Church (FGBFC), one of the biggest Neo-Pentecostal churches in ‘Tanzania. Anonymous

was then 41 years old. Born in one of the southern regions, he had completed his advanced education and found employment with the national government in Dar es Salaam. He declined to tell me his name, obviously fearing to reveal too much personal information that might be used against him later, especially with regard to his possible HIV-positive status. That Anonymous was very likely infected with the virus had been suggested by one of the church pastors, who was informed about my research on HIV/AIDS and social relationships and who actively supported my endeavours to carry out interviews with several members of the FGBFC.’

' Earlier versions of this text were presented at the Annual Conference of the African Studies Association in Washington (2005) and at the Colloquium (Baraza) of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida in March 2005. I want to thank the participants of these events for their constructive critique and inspiring remarks. Research in ‘Tanzania was funded generously by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Heinrich Boll Foundation. I am grateful to the Commission for Science and ‘lechnology and the National Institute for Medical Research in ‘Tanzania for their grant of a research permit. * The names of FGBFC members have been changed throughout the text. ’ For more information about the ethical and methodological challenges that shaped my ethnographic fieldwork on HIV/AIDS in different settings of Tanzania during repeated stays between 1995 and 2006, see Dilger 2005, forthcoming. Apart from the FGBFC, fieldwork was carried out in non-governmental organisations in Dar es Salaam and among kinship networks in the rural Mara Region on Lake Victoria that also extended into urban centres. Research among the Luo in Mara focused on the question of how the numerous illnesses and deaths resulting from HIV/AIDS have affected ritual and social practice, e.g. with regard to widow cleansing and burial, as

296 HANSJORG DILGER Anonymous joined the church in 1997, following a period of prolonged illness and shortly before his wife succumbed to tuberculosis and related infections. After the death of his wife—who came from the same region as he did and whom he had married in 1989—he did not remarry, but lived with his only daughter and some of his younger siblings who depended largely on their elder brother’s income. During this period he also became more actively involved in the activities of the FGBFC, and in 1999 was selected to become a section leader. In this function, Anonymous acted as a mediator between ordinary church members and the leadership, and was responsible for advising church followers about all kinds of problems they faced with regard to salvation.

He also became an assistant to one of the church pastors and helped him in the performance of his weekly healing prayers, especially when the pastor cast out evil spirits from the bodies of believers, who then started to shake and cry, and sometimes collapsed. Throughout our interview Anonymous emphasised that it was only

through his membership in the FGBFC that he had found peace in his lite and felt prepared for the possibility that he might be infected with HIV.* Recalling the circumstances of his wife’s death, he claimed that by entering the state of salvation he had surrendered all decisions about his life into Jesus’ hands, and that his future life-course depended exclusively on God’s power and benevolence. When I asked him what

he would do if he tested positive for HIV, he quoted the parable of Lazarus (John 11: 1-44) and said: It wouldn’t be a problem for me because I am saved (Sw: nimeokoka). Through my salvation I have obtained one thing: there will be a day on which I die, and this day lies in the hands of God. I read in the Bible that Lazarus resurrected from death. ‘Thus, even if somebody tells me that I am HIV-infected, I will accept that (nitakubah).... Over the last year I made use of [biomedical] medications only once. I am living solely because of my prayers and through my belief. If I feel sick, I start praying and then I get well again.

In this article, I show that Anonymous’s story and experiences do not present an isolated case in the histories of Neo-Pentecostalism and HIV/ AIDS in ‘Tanzania. Rather, they are part of the wider texture of social

well as with reference to relationships of care and support for those getting sick and dying from AIDS (see Dilger 2004, 2005, 2006). * At the time of our interview Anonymous was awaiting the result of an HIV test he had taken at the Muhimbili Medical Centre, ‘Tanzania’s largest government hospital.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 257

and religious practices and ideas through which Neo-Pentecostalism gives meaning and orientation to the views and actions of its followers in the trme of AIDS. By drawing on my fieldwork in the FGBFC in Dar es Salaam, I describe how this church has established a ‘nodal point’ of spiritual, social and moral guidance through which its saved members, who are often working and trading migrants from the rural areas, are integrated into a community of believers that is inextricably linked to

processes of rural-urban migration, the increasing disintegration of kinship bonds and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in ‘Tanzania. I argue that in this latter regard the history of the FG@BFC—and the attraction that it exerts on its fast-increasing number of followers—has become part of the rapid expansion of the Neo-Pentecostal movement in Africa in the context of modernity, globalisation and HIV/AIDS.

In the following I first give an overview of the literature on NeoPentecostalism and HIV/AIDS in Africa and show how the growing attraction of the FGBFC 1s linked to the way in which Neo-Pentecostalism is encountering the ruptures—as well as the opportunities and challenges—its members associate with globalisation, modernity and AIDS. Building on studies from other African countries (Marshall 1993;

Meyer 1998a, 1998b; Maxwell 1998; Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001; Gifford 2004), I demonstrate that the church is becoming highly attractive because of the social, spiritual and economic perspectives that it offers to its followers, and particularly because of the networks of healing and care that it has established under the circumstances of urbanisation, unequal gender relations and the AIDS epidemic. After describing how the church’s ideology of salvation has tied concepts of suffering and healing to a universalistic paradigm of the devil as well as to images of spirits and evil forces rooted in possession cults of ‘Tanzania, I show how, in the case of AIDS, such perceptions are further mixed with disease concepts that are adopted from biomedicine and public health campaigns. ‘This mixing of different epistemologies of suffering and healing, I argue, 1s not coincidental, but rather consciously employed by church leaders and church followers who allow room not

only for speculation and uncertainty, but also for the hope of being healed from lethal diseases such as cancer or AIDS (cf. Whyte 1997). In the final section I demonstrate that the FGBFC has established a tightly knit community of social and spiritual solidarity that 1s providing support for church members in times of need and crisis. While the church can thus be seen to function as a community of solidarity particularly for younger and middle-aged women who are most vulnerable

298 HANSJORG DILGER to the erosion of kinship networks and the growing hardships of urban life, it will also become evident that the ‘exclusive’ community of the FGBFC gives rise to even more social conflict and, at times, to the disruption of social and familial relationships in the context of modernity and HIV/AIDS in ‘Tanzania. Healing the wounds of modernity: globalisation, HIV/AIDS and the rise of Neo-Pentecostalism in ‘Tanzania

In recent years the rise of Neo-Pentecostalism in Africa? has been linked to the role that the movement plays in its followers’ attempts to deal with the social, economic, and spiritual drawbacks of globalisation and modernity (e.g, Meyer 1998, Marshall-Fratan1 1998, Maxwell 1998, Gifford 2004). Neo-Pentecostal churches not only offer moral and spiritual explanations on how modernity and globalisation, which are filtered through the growing integration of African communities

into the global market economy, and the introduction of structural adjustment programmes that have often increased social inequalities, have affected the lives of individuals and groups. ‘he movement also provides a pathway along which its followers act upon situations that are increasingly shaped by feelings of powerlessness and frustration: with its gospel of wealth and health, and the promise that one must ‘only’ follow the teachings of God and the Bible, Neo-Pentecostalism opens an—often only imaginary—escape from socio-economic hardships and exerts an immense attraction particularly in those parts of the world where the inequalities associated with globalisation are felt most strongly.

While several authors have hinted about the way in which NeoPentecostalism helps its followers to ‘inscribe [themselves] anew in the

context of a global modernity’ (Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001: 3), they have paid less attention to the healing prayers performed by these churches. In an article on Ghana, Birgit Meyer has argued that experiences of illness and suffering are indeed the primary incentive for individuals to convert to a Pentecostal church. However, she warns that continuing membership in a Pentecostal congregation could not

> By the end of 2004 the global community of Pentecostals had increased to 570,806,000 members (Barrett and Johnson 2004: 25). In sub-Saharan Africa alone there

were 41,100,000 Pentecostals in the year 2000 (Johnstone and Mandryk 2001).

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 299 be explained through the healing prayers of these churches, which are normally carried out through the individual and/or collective laying on of hands. According to Meyer, the main attraction of Neo-Pentecostalism is that people find a perspective in this movement ‘from which

they can grasp the changing world and act both upon the negative consequences and the attractive forces of modernity’ (Meyer 1998a: O1f., translation and emphasis: HD).

In the following, I argue that the distinction that has been made between the attraction of healing prayers on the one hand and other activities of Neo-Pentecostal churches on the other (cf., Gifford 2004: 81; Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001: 3f., 10) has to be modified for the case of the FGBFC. In ‘Tanzania, illness and bodily suffering are often part and parcel of the ‘dis-ease’ (German: Unbehagen) brought upon by the effects of modernity and globalisation on the regional, as well as on the individual level. How strongly perceptions of illness and suffering are indeed rooted in the effects that globalisation and modernity are understood to have on local life-worlds becomes most explicit with regard to the way HIV/AIDS—‘the modern disease’ (ugonjwa huu wa kisasa)—s being discussed among communities in urban and rural Tanzania.° In ‘Tanzania, where at the end of 2003 8.8% of the adult population was infected with HIV (UNAIDS 2004: 191), the presence of the disease is debated essentially with regard to the advantages as well as the disadvantages that ‘modern lifestyles’ are understood to have brought over the last two to three decades. While the structural reforms, introduced

° The following account is based on ‘emic’ reflections on the causal connection between HIV/AIDS, modernity and globalisation in Tanzania. According to my informants, the spread of HIV/AIDS in the country is linked to a perceived clash between ‘traditional’ kinship-based systems of production and reproduction, and their ‘modern’ counter-institutions that are symbolised by the valuing of money, the widespread acceptance of western-based science, and the ubiquity of an uncontrolled and excessive sexuality. It should be noted that this discourse on the negative consequences of modernity and globalisation—which is often contrasted with idealised notions of the precolonial past—is not an exclusively patriarchal rhetoric, but was shared widely by young and old women in my fieldwork sites. Equally, this discourse is to be understood as a form of social memory which has become a forceful instrument in the moral critique of the present (cf. Connerton 1989; Dilger 1999: 47-63, 2003: 32-34): historical accounts of eastern Africa have shown that moral struggles over the perceived decline of kinship networks—as well as the blaming of women for spreading sexually transmitted diseases—have been a part of community life in the region for decades, if not centuries (for the example of syphilis in colonial Buganda see Vaughan 1991: 129-54).

260 HANSJORG DILGER in the mid-1980s under President Ali Hassan Mwinyi and continued under the rule of Benjamin Mkapa between 1995 and 2005, had evoked

strong hopes among the population of improvements of their social and economic living conditions, it soon turned out that the ‘blessings of neo-liberalism’ were distributed very unevenly. It 1s impossible to delve here into the effects that structural adjustment policies (SAP) have

had on urban and rural populations. However, it can be stated that, while the SAPs were conceived originally as instruments for poverty alleviation, they have led to a rise of living costs in ‘Tanzania and an increasing impoverishment of rural areas, thus reinforcing migration to urban centres. They also triggered a decrease of formal employment opportunities in the urban centres—mostly occupied by men—and a stagnation of salaries, and thereby increased the pressure on women to engage in income-generating activities (cf. ‘Tripp 1997: 30-59). In the light of HIV/AIDS, the growing involvement of women in business and trade activities has led, according to my informants, to a growing emphasis on economic transactions in sexual relationships, as well as an increased blurring of gender and generational hierarchies, and a concurring ‘loss of respect’ between the sexes and generations. A morally conservative discourse on sexuality and gender relations has evolved that encourages submissiveness and decency in the sexuality of women and emphasises the importance of trust and moral integrity for the selection of sexual partners. On a more general level, the spread

of HIV/AIDS has been linked to the growing mobility of both men and women, as well as to their individualised aspirations for material success and social progress that are said to oppose kinship-based practices of reproduction and reciprocity and thus lead to a growing estrangement of migrating men and women from their families (cf. Dilger 1999, 2003).’ For want of anthropological or social science studies that explicitly analyse the interrelationship between the rise of Neo-Pentecostalism and the spread of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Africa, it 1s difficult to tell if the increase of HIV infection rates from the 1980s onwards—and the concurring conservative rhetoric on the ‘social and moral malcontents of modernity’—1s causally related to the rise of Neo-Pentecostalism

’ For similar discourse on the perceived connection between mobility, modernity and AIDS, and the concurring blaming of (young) women for spreading HIV, see Weiss 1993; Haram 1995; Setel 1999.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 261 during the same period.® However, against the background of studies that focus either on the expansion of Pentecostalism or HIV/AIDS it can be stated that the two phenomena are quite likely to be linked for essentially two reasons. First, anthropologists and social scientists have given very similar

explanations for both the spread of HIV/AIDS and the rise of the Neo-Pentecostal movement in Africa: as in the studies on Pentecostalism quoted above, AIDS researchers have ascribed the high infection rates

in sub-Saharan Africa to growing socio-economic insecurities in the context of globalisation, as well as to the structural adjustment policies introduced from the 1980s onwards, and the subsequent increase in poverty and the growing sexual and economic vulnerability of women (cf., Barnett and Whiteside 2001, Schoepf 2001). Secondly, the rapid growth of the Neo-Pentecostal movement in urban ‘Tanzania strikingly reflects, and at the same time reinforces, the ambiguities expressed, from an emic perspective, by the ‘lures’ as well

as the ‘malcontents’ of modernity. In the setting of Dar es Salaam, the FGBFC works in two contradictory yet complementary directions that give room to the ‘discomfort’ as well as the ‘attractions’ associated with these various aspects of modernity (Meyer 1998a: 51f.). On the one hand, the FGBFC’s gospel of prosperity and health matches the church followers’ desire to lead an increasingly individualised life defined

by aspirations for material wealth and the detachment from traditions and kinship networks, which are (ideally) replaced by the integration of the saved members into a global community of believers. On the other hand, the spiritual and social activities of the FGBFC are aimed at integrating those (who may also be part of the first group) who ascribe an increase in suffering and afflictions in contemporary Tanzania to the immorality and anti-sociality of individualised lifestyles that have come

® While there are some very interesting studies that establish a link between Pentecostalism and HIV/AIDS, they analyse the role of Pentecostal churches in the context of the epidemic mainly with regard to their preventative functions. Wimberley (1995) has shown that in Uganda, ‘salvation’ in a Pentecostal church has become a strategy for young girls to reject sexual offers by men and boys and to protect themselves from HIV infection. Garner (2000) described that in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, it is the Pentecostal churches in particular that could, through their approach of social control and their threats to exclude those members who act against the morals of their church, influence the pre- and extra-marital sexual behaviour of their adherents. Other religious denominations, on the other hand, were not able to bring about a change in the sexuality of their members—even if they represent, in their principles, no other moral values than the Pentecostal churches flourishing on the whole continent.

262 HANSJORG DILGER about through urbanisation and modernity. In this regard the FGBFC plays an important role in providing morally acceptable responses to the manifold tensions and ruptures that are understood—trom its followers’ point of view—as the shady sides of globalisation and modernity and that, according to them, have become the driving force behind the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the following I will show that the FGBFC counters and mediates the various ruptures, desires and needs triggered by modernity particularly through its ideology of salvation, as well as through its networks of

healing and support. At the same time, I argue that while the FGBFC followers may feel that some of the ruptures of modernity are being ‘healed’ by the community of the church, they are very much aware that the reconfiguration of their lives in the state of salvation may lead to growing ruptures in kinship networks and social relationships outside the protected community of the saved—and hence to even more social conflict and confusion in the context of modernity, globalisation and HIV/AIDS. Becoming ‘saved’ in the FGBFC'

The FGBFC was founded by Zachary Kakobe, now in his early 50s, who, after finishing college in Southern ‘Tanzania, played as a musician

in a local orchestra and, in addition to his work as a meteorologist, recorded dance music in his own studio. Kakobe, who 1s currently the Bishop of the church, received his calling in 1980 when Jesus appeared to him in person and told him to abandon his worldly profession and become a servant of God ‘who will bring multitudes to the Lord worldwide’. It took eight more years, however, before Kakobe undertook his

first crusade to Northern ‘Tanzania and it was only in 1989 that he officially established the FGBFC in Dar es Salaam. In the first years after the church’s founding, Kakobe wrote several letters to different international Christian organisations, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in the USA, asking for financial

support for his enterprise. However, there were very few replies and—as he never tires of recalling—he ‘never received a single cent’ for his newly established congregation. Nevertheless, despite a lack of financial resources and without the support of powerful international donors, the FGBFC grew rapidly over the following years and in 2000 the church claimed more than 120,000 members nationwide and had

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 263 established more than 500 regional and local sub-branches throughout the country.”

For the members of the FGBFC the church becomes particularly attractive because of its Gospel of Prosperity (neno la uzima) and, intimately related to it, the concepts of ‘awakening’ (wamsho) and ‘salvation’ (wokovu), all based on the FGBFC’s apocalyptic world-view and the understanding that the contemporary world is tightly in the grip of Satan who is spreading immorality, corruption and suffering. ‘The FGBFC’s main concern is consequently to take up the fight against Satan and his diabolic henchmen and to save humanity not only on a local, but also on a global scale (cf. Meyer 1998b: 52). On the other hand, the Gospel of Prosperity and the ideology of salvation are based

on the claim that while, everyone 1s born into a state of sin and is exposed to the immoralities of the world from early childhood, a person

can be ‘saved’ from perdition by becoming aware of the ways Satan exerts control over a person’s life. ‘Vhis moment of “becoming aware’ is called the awakening (wamsho) and it is not only the prerequisite for forgiveness for sins committed in a person’s former life, but also the condition for becoming a member of the church and being baptised. Finally, the awakening 1s the prerequisite for entering the state of salvation and escaping the control of Satan by dedicating one’s life to God by accepting and spreading the teachings of the Bible.

Once a church member has entered the state of salvation, there is no guarantee that he or she will be forever free from all kinds of affliction. Salvation is, as Gorten and Marshall-Fratani have argued, ‘an ongoing existential project’ (2001: 7), which requires engagement in church activities and healing prayers in order to ward off attacks by diabolic forces as well as a break with many of the obligations church members have towards their families and the abandonment of former (sinful) lifestyles such as consumption of alcohol or engagement in extramarital sexual relationships. It is only if these difficult conditions are fulfilled that the manifold promises of salvation begin to work in multiple directions. ‘hus, the gospel of health and wealth promises not only material success and progress for those living in poverty. Salvation

” The overwhelming growth of the FGBFC over a comparatively short time is also reflected in the multitude of international linkages that the church has established with Pentecostal congregations worldwide, e.g., in Nigeria, South Africa, India, the USA and Denmark (see http://www.fgbfchurch.org/).

264 HANSJORG DILGER also means the relief from all kinds of distress such as trouble at work or with the ‘Tanzanian bureaucratic systems, as well as from diseases such as infertility, cancer, high blood pressure or AIDS.

Considering that the FGBFC promises relief from all kinds of affliction, it does not come as a surprise that the church attracts those groups of people who are most strongly affected by urbanisation and globalisation processes, and by the adverse impact of structural adjustment policies on social and economic life in urban ‘Tanzania. It is striking to observe that most FBGFC members are young to middle-aged women who have migrated to Dar es Salaam in search of employment; others are small business entrepreneurs. ‘[o these women as well as to the male members of the church, most of whom have a similar social background, the FGBFC 1s appealing essentially because it offers hope and confidence in the context of urban life, which is experienced as anonymous and increasingly ambivalent. As Asonzeh Ukah has argued with regard to Lagos in Nigeria, Dar es Salaam has become in the eyes of its population ‘host to an amazing array of opportunities for the generation of wealth and pleasure’ as well as ‘a theatre of unimaginable pain’ characterised by ‘aggressive and distrustful, often faceless crowds, rabid violence, crushing poverty, disease and unemployment.’ (Ukah 2004: 417).

That there is legitimate hope of escape from urban chaos and poverty, and consequently a hope of healing from all kinds of afflictions and bodily suffering, 1s reflected, on the one hand, in the public testimonies of church followers who report on a regular basis that they have unexpectedly found a job or received a sum of money, that a woman who was diagnosed as infertile had suddenly become pregnant, or that a church member who was diagnosed with a fatal disease had

been miraculously healed. On the other hand, the promises made by the prosperity gospel have become embodied in the person of Bishop Kakobe himself, who went from being a member of the lower middle class to being the successful leader of an economically prospering mega-church which, according to its website, has become ‘one of the fastest growing churches in Eastern Africa’. ‘Evil can come in many shapes’: cosmologies of healing in the FGBFC'

The first contact most church members have with the FGBFC are the healing prayers performed by the church individually as well as col-

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 2635 lectively, which generally involve exorcising evil forces through prayers and the laying on of hands. ‘The individual healing sessions take place

on weekdays, under the guidance of one of the church pastors, either in a section leader’s house or in a room at the church’s headquarters. Collective healing prayers take place at the headquarters during the Sunday service as well as on special healing days and are always guided by Bishop Kakobe himself. While the success of the healing process is inevitably controlled by the mediation of the (mostly male) church leaders, the collective healing prayers carried out during the Sunday services provide evidence of how church members themselves are actively involved in warding off the attacks of diabolic forces. Under the guidance of Bishop Kakobe

and accompanied by the music of the church band, thousands of men and women jump up from their wooden benches, shouting away the influences of Satan and clenching their fists against their enemies. Some church members start to cry or speak in tongues; others are overwhelmed by the powers of their enemies and break down screaming. They are then lifted up by two or three of the church security personnel and brought to the Bishop, who exorcises the evil powers by praying and the laying on of hands. When I asked church leaders and members about the nature of the evil forces they are exposed to, it became evident that images of Satan and his demonic henchmen are in part rooted in the biblical scriptures and are similar to the idea of the devil as represented by the JudaeoChristian tradition (cf. Gifford 1994: 255f.). At the same time, however, the diabolic forces against which the saved FGBFC members are struggling in their everyday lives are associated with images of malevolent forces which Gifford (ibid.) defines as ‘typically African’ and which have their origin in Islam and the ‘indigenous’ religions of ‘Tanzania. Thus, the saved church members can be plagued by curses (/aana) that have been sent by mischievous relatives or by their respective ethnic groups. Other malevolent beings include witches (mchawi, pl. wachawn)

and spirits who can cause all kinds of misfortune including marital problems, trouble at work, infertility and even AIDS. In particular the images of spirits echo elaborate concepts of the pepo, jini or Shetani as found on the Islamic Swahili coast and as described, for instance, in the works of Linda Giles (Giles 1999). Some pepo are represented by specific animals, cats, for example, and manifest themselves through a possessed person with hissing sounds and cat-like cries. Others are the spirits of ethnic groups or of malevolent ancestors struggling

266 HANSJORG DILGER to gain control over their saved descendants and plague them with illness and affliction. Some are the pepo of strangers—often men—who enter the dreams of women at night and want to have sex with them. Another important category consists of those pepo embodying a type of behaviour considered immoral, such as the spirit of adultery and fornication. Finally, there are the pepo who embody different types of disease, such as the spirit of epilepsy or of cancer. What is common to all these pepo and jini 1s that they are all malevolent forces that have to be removed from the bodies of believers. ‘Thus, while the spirit world of the FGBFC displays striking similarities with the spirit worlds of possession cults along the coast or in Southern Tanzania, the FGBFC differs from these cults in that it defines the pepo not as potentially life-enhancing beings that have to be integrated into the life-world of the afflicted individuals (cf., Erdtsieck 1997), but as generally destructive forces that have to be removed from the believers’ bodies. Similarly, the spirits in the FGBFC are stripped of the complex ritual and social symbolism that characterises the appropriations of spirits on the Swahili coast and that is reflected in the elaborate ceremonies of possession cults which require careful attention with regard to the use of specific music, colour and offerings." The pain and suffering caused by evil forces are usually felt at that part of the body through which the fepo or jini have entered the person: if through the legs, this can lead to paralysis; if they have settled in the womb, a woman usually suffers from infertility. he main goal of the healing prayers 1s consequently to remove the pepo from those parts of the body they have ‘closed’ (kufunga) and to ‘open’ them again for their normal functions (Aufungua). Uhese descriptions of the healing process again echo understandings of illness and healing in other parts

of eastern and central Africa: by establishing a relationship between the application of external remedies (the laying on of hands) and the obstruction of passages inside the body, the metaphors of ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ are mediating the healing process and the removal of the pol-

' Tt is very likely that most FGBFC followers and leaders have a more differentiated knowledge about the spirit world than I am able to present here. Equally, it can be assumed that some church members deal with the effects of witchcraft and spirit possession in ways that the FGBFC (and they themselves) would publicly condemn. However, in the premises of the church these understandings and hidden ways of dealing with invisible forces gave way to more ‘standardised’ perceptions of evil forces which enabled the church members to adopt a rather pragmatic approach towards healing in the context of the FGBFC.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 267 luting force which has caused the obstruction of a bodily passage and bodily functions (Janzen 1978: 189). In the FGBFC it is consequently very common that at the Sunday services Bishop Kakobe calls on the church members to lay their hands on those parts of the body where they feel their pain and thus to initiate the healing process. ‘God can do the impossible’: the healing of AIDS

In comparison with other types of affliction, AIDS is exceptional in that it 1s perceived as a biblical disease sent by God himself as punishment for humankind’s sinful and immoral behaviour. ‘The logical consequence is that AIDS can also only be healed through God, 1.e., control over the success of the healing prayers 1s explicitly removed from the hands of the church leaders and from human beings in general. How strongly this latter aspect characterises the conceptualisation of HIV in the FGBFC was explained to me by Bishop Kakobe. By using the metaphor of an

ant, which is, he said, ‘still today a creation of God’, he referred to the powerlessness that characterises human existence despite (western) societies’ technical and scientific progress. By emphasising the fact that biomedicine still has not found an effective treatment for AIDS, Kakobe made clear that the only hope for the healing of the disease lies with God. He said: We [as a church] tell the people: it 1s true, the HIV-positive diagnosis 1s the doctor’s report, but men are not manufacturers of men, and man has even failed to manufacture those small ants you see. ‘here is no ant made

in Japan [laughs]....'' We say: ‘Okay, if men have manufactured cars, computers, radios, IVs, and so on—...definitely man should have been manufactured by someone who is more intelligent than men themselves,

and that’s the one we call God. And if God has manufactured man, then...God can do the impossible.... We tell the people: ‘There 1s still hope—if man has failed, then you can come to God and have something

from him, which man cannot provide. And through that, people with AIDS have new hope.

'' "The use of the image of the ant is not a reference to the HI-virus as might be supposed. Bishop Kakobe referred in this context to the assumed technical and material superiority of the west—and of car-producing nations like Japan in particular—that are comparatively powerless when it comes to questions of life, suffering and death. The image of the ‘ant’ can hence be seen as a critique of western modernity, which is said to have broken with the spiritual and religious roots of human existence.

268 HANSJORG DILGER

: ad itirNofis 7: esBleanew es 4Mees Phevi Date PO Fol lak 5 Oh ag7 Sree GG

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HANDOUT NO: VOL 1/1 Whether Bishop Zachary Kakobe ministers in Africa, Asia, Europe or America, the stor: remains the same. Signs and wonders manifest in an exceeding measure through the gifts a healings and miracles operating in his ministry. Moreover the gift of exorcism that has bees bestowed by God upon this man of God, is unmatched. With authority, he calls upon the nam: of Jesus Christ, and gives matching orders to the unclean spirits and they obey him in a matte

of a few minutes. Millions have been saved, healed and delivered in his ministry. Bishoy Zachary Kakobe is the Arch-Bishop of the Full Gospel Bible Fellowship Church, an indigenou:

church in Tanzania, East Africa. He pastors the headquarters church in Dar Es Salaam city which is one of the largest congregations in Africa, with about 20,000 members. From there hi oversees more than 400 branches of his church, and ministers worldwide. As he comes ts your city, surely you will be a recipient of blessings, just as these men and women recorded it this handout received their blessings.

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HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 269

That the hope for healing from AIDS does not necessarily conflict with the ‘knowledge’ that church members have with regard to the biomedical ‘facts’ about HIV is exemplified by the case of Consolata (28). Consolata migrated to Dar es Salaam with her family when she was seven years old. At the time of our interview she lived with her six-year-old daughter and some of her brothers and sisters in the house that her father had built shortly before his death. Consolata had been plagued by a broad range of illnesses from the early 1990s onwards and, after repeated treatment efforts at different hospitals and with various traditional healers, had been saved in the FGBFC.

Consolata was tested for HIV after she was chosen to become a pastor to be sent to the rural areas of ‘Tanzania to proselytise the ‘heathens’ of the villages. ‘The FGBFC wants only married pastors to be sent out, so urges prospective single pastors to have an HIV test at a local health institution and subsequently marry another pastor. When Consolata was found to be HIV-positive, she did not lose confidence in the healing prayers, as she knew that ‘everything becomes possible through God’. Her hope that she will be healed of AIDS is based partly on the observations she makes with regard to her own body: If you are sick, there will be many bodily symptoms. ‘his disease destroys the immune system, you have diarrhoea and you vomit all the time. Since I’ve been prayed for I haven’t become sick again. | am also eating more today: I can eat twice as much as I did previously.... | don’t have fevers, and these bouts of heat and paralysis haven’t returned. I don’t have colds

anymore. I believe that Jesus has already opened me. I only have to go for the test and have it confirmed.

Her hope is also based on the observation of other church members known to have been infected with HIV and who have—allegedly—been healed through prayers. She said: When I came to Kakobe’s church I heard the testimony (ushuhuda) of a church choir member who was infected with HIV. He had already become bedridden and was plagued by diarrhoea. he hospital tested him and found the virus. But then the church prayed for him and... when he went for another test, he was found to be negative! When I first met this man I was so sad that tears were streaming down my face. We all knew it was AIDS, even if we were not explicitly told this. But the miracle is that he 1s wearing his church uniform today and singing in the choir again. When I saw this my faith grew: there will be a day on which God performs miracles such as this one (Mungu anatenda mupza kama alwyotenda kwa yule).

270 HANSJORG DILGER In these two quotations it becomes obvious that church followers’ perceptions about HIV may be shaped by biomedical as well as by spiritual-religious concepts of disease and affhction. At the beginning of our interview Consolata spoke about the pepo affecting her. Once she decided to talk to me about her HIV diagnosis, however, her descriptions became more medicalised and she referred to the typical symptoms associated with HIV/AIDS. ‘Through large parts of our interview she spoke about HIV (wirust vya ukimwr) and AIDS (ukimwz), which destroy the immune system of the body. She mentioned typical symptoms of AIDS such as diarrhoea, vomiting, bouts of fever and loss of appetite,

and finally she said that she wanted to go for a medical test in order to confirm that she had been healed from HIV. As many members of the FGBFC seemed to switch easily between biomedical and religious interpretations of HIV, I asked them to describe

what it 1s that actually happens during the prayers: whether a spirit is exorcised or if it is the virus itself that 1s removed from the body. There were two distinct answers to these questions. For some of my interviewees, the relationship between the terms ‘virus’ and “fepo’ was a purely metaphorical one. Anna Mwita (38), who was herself infected with HIV, told me that these were simply two different terms referring

to the same entity and that the term employed depended mainly on the situation in which a conversation took place. She said: ‘I don’t see any difference between the two terms. It 1s just how you explain them. If you speak to a scientist about pepo he won’t understand you. If you speak about pepo on the premises of the church, people will know what you mean.’ Others, however, saw the relationship between fepo and virus as more complex and made it clear that Anna Mwita’s explanation was probably more an explanation addressed to me (the anthropologist, ‘the scientist’) than a widely shared explanation for the relationship between fepo and virus in the premises of the FGBFC. Some of my other interviewees argued that it was diffcult—and ultimately irrelevant—to ‘know exactly’

what happened at the healing prayers. Particularly revealing in this regard was a conversation with Bishop Kakobe who explained to me that, even according to the teachings of the church, HIV 1s a virus that exists as a biological reality. However, he continued, in some cases the virus may also be a transformed /epo that enters the body of a person and just ‘appears’ under the microscope as a virus. [hus, in those cases where the bishop or pastors were successful in casting out the demons of an HIV-infected person, not only would the opportunistic infections

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 271 associated with HIV/AIDS start to diminish but after some time even the virus itself—or, as others might prefer to put it, the pepo disguised as a virus—would disappear and become invisible to the microscopes at biomedical health institutions. When I asked Kakobe if he would then agree that every person who was found to be HIV-infected was actually possessed by a spirit, the bishop was, however, hesitant again and said that 1t was not as simple as I had expressed it. While he emphasised that he was still ‘doing research’ on this topic he explained that thus far he could say that one had to differentiate between the ‘normal’ viruses and the ‘more complicated’ viruses. [he complicated ones, he said, are the transformed pepo; the normal ones, on the other hand, do not have a deeper spiritual background: Sometimes the pepo will come on its own, it will inflict the body and remain in the body as the spirit. But sometimes it will not come like that—it will

come in some shape.... I mean, they look like normal viruses, but once you cast out the demons, the viruses will go. If you look at the viruses, they

are actually spirits—you cast the evil spirits out, the viruses will go.... HD: So every time someone has the virus it is actually a juni or a pepo? Kakobe: Yes, most of the times that we have seen— HD: What you saw— Kakobe: You know, the other time when we were laying hands—do you remember? Most of the times, if you lay hands, the people will shake, they will fall, and most of the people, when the evil spirits come out of their bodies...they feel much better. It 1s as if they were carrying some burden and that weight was tormenting them and giving them so much pain in the body and now it has gone. here have been such testimonies

and it has been that way most of the time. So, we really associate the viruses with the pepo.

As Bishop Kakobe remained hesitant about giving a definite answer about the nature of the AIDS healings, I concluded for myself that the question of finding out the ‘real’ cause of an illness—and particularly of HIV/AIDS—was probably the result of my own preoccupation with knowing what ‘really’ happened at the healing prayers, rather than a concern of the FGBFC members themselves. For them the healing process was less a matter of theoretical reflection on the abstract relationship between two allegedly distinct entities—the virus and the pepo, or the field of medicine and religion (cf. Good 1994)—but rather a pragmatic challenge that had to be acted upon and resolved in the daily practice of the FGBFC followers. What indeed mattered to the people of the FGBFC was, however, the outcome of the healing prayers. ‘hese outcomes became the subject

272 HANSJORG DILGER of multiple discussions and interpretations—interpretations that established a close analogy between bodily and spiritual health and were primarily based on observations made by church leaders and church followers before, during and after the prayers. If symptoms typical of

an HIV-infection disappeared, or if the virus could not be detected during a biomedical test after the healing prayers, 1t was assumed that the prayers had been successful and the miracle had been performed. If, however, symptoms persisted, the disease was thought to be caused either by a ‘normal’ virus or, if the church followers had not been firm enough in their belief and with regard to church teachings, a pepo that had to be fought with ever more spiritual fervour and expressions of religious dedication. ‘Your relates don’t gwe a single cent’: Kinship, care and the making of ‘good deaths’ in the FGBFC

It has thus far become clear that the healing prayers performed by the FGBFC constitute an essential attraction of the church. In this section, I will consider that the church also plays an important role in integrating its members into a tightly-knit spiritual community thereby countering—and at the same time reinforcing—processes of social and familial disruption that characterise their members’ experiences in the context of urban hardships and the AIDS epidemic. According to Ruth Marshall (1993: 218), Pentecostal churches in Nigeria propagate the ideology of a spiritual community which must be unified in order to survive in a ‘world of sinners’. Interestingly, this strong sense of community 1s not just a hollow doctrine maintained by the community of the saved against the outside world, but has become an essential building block for the social and spiritual praxis of Nigerian Pentecostals. Among the smaller neighbourhood groups in Nigeria in particular, a network of mutual care and support has developed, which helps church members in situations of need, initiates cooking services for the sick, looks after the children of bedridden church members and even collects money for members in economic need. Beyond that, several Pentecostal churches in Nigeria have institutionalised these services and

have established their own nursing schools, healing centres and even vocational training and marriage counselling centres, thereby gradually building an alternative to the poor social services of the Nigerian state (ibid.: 224f.).

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 273 In the FGBFC in ‘Tanzania, the network of social security has not been institutionalised to the extent 1t has been in Nigeria. However, an analogous system of mutual solidarity has been established on the level of the small neighbourhood churches, comprising 20-30 members each, that provides help and support for members in times of need and plays an important role in the context of AIDS. Underlying these acts of informal solidarity 1s the idea of a ‘spiritual family’ that 1s promoted by the FGBFC and that was formulated by Bishop Kakobe on the occasion of the ‘First National Conference of Pentecostal Churches in ‘Tanzania’

in August 2003. At this event Kakobe emphasised that the main aim of the meeting was to allay former tensions that had characterised the relationships between individual Pentecostal congregations in ‘Tanzania, and especially the position of his own church within the national Pentecostal community, for more than a decade.'? On the other hand, Kkakobe defined the spiritual community of the FGBFC in opposition to the ‘worldly family’ and said that the latter often took a critical stance towards their saved relatives, and sometimes even actively tried to make them depart from the path of salvation. In order to ward off these attacks, the community of Pentecostals had to distance themselves from their families of origin and enter into conflict with those who most aggressively distracted them from leading a moral life. Consequently, the community of the church had to build a new, spiritual family to which their saved members belong and which was to disperse any doubts they might have about the righteousness of their path. ‘The members of the FGBFC themselves described this moment of

community-building in a very similar way, yet emphasising also the ambiguity of this process. Many were aware that membership in a Pentecostal church implies a high potential for intra-familial conflict, stemming both from unsaved relatives and from the church followers who persistently urge their families to give up their ‘dark’ and ‘sinful’ ways. [his latter aspect is reflected in the experience of Anonymous who, before his salvation, had been the family breadwinner and had contributed considerably to the fulfilment of ritual obligations in his home village. While, after his salvation, he rejected involvement in any '* While no detailed account of these tensions—which are rooted in the history of the wider Pentecostal movement in ‘Tanzania as well as in the specific history of the FGBFC—can be given here, it should be mentioned that rumours circulating persistently in Dar es Salaam have explained the success of the FGBGFC through the alleged alliance of Bishop Kakobe with witchcraft and other satanic forces.

274 HANSJORG DILGER ritual requirements, which he designated as ‘superstitions’, he has not fully broken with his family and still provides them with some material support. At the same time, however, he exerts strong pressure on his family, which is economically dependent on him, to become ‘saved’ in the FGBFC and to give up some of their immoral and sinful lifestyles. When I asked Anonymous about the relationships with his relatives, he said: Before I was saved they received me well. Whenever I arrived in the village, they ordered alcohol and food. But after I had been saved they were not very happy. [| My relatives] saw that the things I had done previously no longer existed: the drinking of alcohol and all.... After I was saved

I started to teach them [about salvation] and it took about three years until my mother was saved. But in the beginning they saw that I was lost for them (nimepotea).... For instance, the ritual requirements (matambvko) and the traditional feasts (sherehe za mila): these are things I rejected.... However, when it comes to food and clothes, I help them. HD: Do your relatives depend on you? Anonymous: Yes, they depend strongly on me (wananitegemea sana) because

back home I am their leader (Avongozz). ‘They don’t [have paid] work. I am the only one who helps and supports them."

How strongly family relationships may be additionally strained in the context of AIDS was explained by Ernesta (48), who was infected with HIV and whose account reflected the negative experiences of other HIV-infected women who experience conflict with their rural families once their illness becomes known (cf. Dilger 2005: 94-177). Ernesta had almost no contact with her home village in western ‘Tanzania after she was saved in the FGBFC in 1996. Although she would like to visit her

mother more often—and said that she would prefer to return to her mother’s home if she were to get seriously ill-—she recalls her father’s

behaviour and how he chased her and her grandchild from his house during her last visit. One reason for her father’s behaviour was, Ernesta

mused, that he consumed considerable amounts of alcohol and that his actions had become increasingly unpredictable. On the other hand, '’ "The case study of Anonymous shows that the membership in a Pentecostal congregation does not contribute inevitably to the complete severing of kinship ties between non-saved and saved family members. While media reports and popular discourse in lanzania are explicitly concerned with the social, cultural and political ruptures that are attributed to the rise of Pentecostalism in the country, the actual practice may be more complex. For an intriguing analysis of how Pentecostal churches have been woven into the ‘traditional’ political and social structures of village life in rural Uganda, see Jones 2005.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 2795

she ascribed her father’s violent behaviour to the fact that two of her younger sisters—who had already died—had also been infected with HIV and that he chased them from his house, too. She said: I am living here in Dar es Salaam because of my father. He 1s very violent (Aah). He drinks a lot of alcohol and if he gets drunk he shouts at you: ‘Go away from my house, sleep outside!’... He did the same thing with my sisters. Even if you can hardly stand on your feet, you will sleep outside in the banana fields... HD: He chased your sisters away? Ernesta: Yes, they died of this same illness and he chased them away: ‘Go away! Why are you sick? Have I sent you to get this illness? You yourselves wanted to get this disease.’... One day I visited the village together with my grandchild. We slept in the banana fields, although there are many wild animals out there. The child says that she doesn’t want to go back anymore...

Against the background of experiences like Ernesta’s, other FGBFC members described how, parallel to the loss of ties with their worldly families, they were building new relationships in the FGBFC, which often seemed more reliable than the ones with their worldly relatives." The small home churches in particular were described to me as networks of support that flexibly and quickly reacted to the needs of their individual members. Especially in cases of serious illness the charitable acts of other church followers, described as ‘duties’ or ‘shifts’ (gamu) imposed by the FGBIFC members, went far beyond immediate acts of

caring or nursing. Consolata recalled how a female church member had been dying from AIDS and how her home church had collected money for a small house and even arranged for her burial: There was a sister in our home church who was infected with HIV. In the final phase of her illness she couldn’t even walk.... We took care of

'* T am aware that the following statements may be somewhat biased in that they reflect a predominantly positive perspectives on the caring and supporting functions of the FGBFC home churches. While there may be certainly very different experience with the reliability of the FGBFC network—and members who had travelled to Dar es Salaam from other regions of the country indeed emphasised that the network of solidarity established in the Dar headquarters was an exception rather than the rule—the approach of my multi-sited fieldwork did not allow for a more detailed insight into the failures and ruptures of care and support structures in the FGBFC. For a more elaborate discussion of the dilemmas and ruptures associated with care in context of AIDS NGOs or within family and kinship networks in rural and urban ‘Tanzania, see Dilger 2004, 2005, 2006.

276 HANSJORG DILGER her and prayed for her. I even did the cooking and fed her meals.... We collected money for her and built a small house for her. HD: Didn’t her relatives help her? Consolata: No, but after her death they took the house and now they live in it.... If you are a member of this church and you die, we, the people in the church, collect money for the coffin and the shroud—everything until you are properly buried. Your relatives don’t give a single cent...

Consolata’s statement illustrates that the FGBFC often does more for members dying from AIDS than provide for their basic material, social and emotional needs. ‘The church followers also make sure that the death of their members 1s transformed, in the eyes of the dying as well as in the eyes of the church community, into a ‘good death’. Beyond the proper burial, a good death implies that the dying members who succumb to a supposedly sinful and stigmatised disease are close to God before they die. As Frederick Klaits (1998: 111) has argued with regard to an apostolic church in Gaborone, this closeness to God 1s symbolised by the advance knowledge of one’s own death—or the death of others—which 1s perceived by the church community as a ‘blessing’ and as ‘a sion of a particularly good death’. ‘This aspect was also expressed by Anonymous who recalled the way his wife died. While in our interview he never explicitly mentioned that his wife might have died from HIV,

he remembered how he had received a sign for her approaching death in a dreamlike vision, thus dispersing any doubts others might have had about his wife’s (and consequently his own) moral integrity at the time of her death. ‘The members and the leadership of the FGBFC were involved in his capacity for accepting the transitory nature of human existence and his wife’s death as a consequence of the ‘love of God’: My wife was treated at different hospitals in Dar es Salaam, but nothing helped her in the way the prayers of the FGBFC did.... When her death approached I had already learned how to pray and I cried to God. During my prayers I obtained something—I don’t know how to name it, but word was given to me that I should read in Jacob, 4: 14. There I found the following verse: “You don’t know what tomorrow will be. What is your existence? Your existence 1s like the flood which 1s visible at one

time and disappears at the other.’ ‘These words terrified me, but I thanked God because he teaches us to thank him for everything. I had slept, but suddenly I saw this date—the thirtieth. I asked God: ‘What does this date mean?’ He did not reply and my wife died at this same date—the thirtieth | had dreamt of. ‘hus, even

' "Thus quoted by Anonymous.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 277 if she died because of tuberculosis, or I don’t know what else, I know in my heart that she died through the love of God. She died through her own strength. Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how the Full Gospel Bible Fellowship Church has responded, as well as contributed, to the pressures that globalisation and modernity exert on urban life in ‘Tanzania, first with regard to the healing of various diseases and afflictions, and second with regard to the challenges that rural-urban migration and socio-economic hardships present for the continuity of social relationships and the reliability of kinship and community networks. In the conclusion I redirect my focus on the centrality of healing for the current practice of Neo-Pentecostal churches in eastern Africa and describe why the paradigm of healing that is promoted by the FGBFC has become so appealing to the followers of the church, despite most members’ obvious ‘knowledge’ of the ‘biomedical facts’ about HIV/AIDS and particularly about the biomedical incurability of the disease.'® The first reason for the appeal of the FGBIFC’s healing prayers 1s

that they establish a striking continuity with the regional context of Tanzania and are partially rooted in the local life-worlds of the eastern African region. On the one hand, this becomes visible in the fact that affliction in the FGBFC 1s defined as an all-encompassing category that puts physical suffering on a par with other instances of distress that are likely to trouble every ‘Tanzanian at some stage of his or her life. ‘Uhis understanding of affliction and misfortune 1s, as social and medical

anthropologists have argued extensively (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]; Whyte 1990), a polysemous concept which makes no distinction between physical and non-physical forms of suffering and causally relates affliction and healing to the wider social and cultural processes in the affected individual’s environment as well as in society at large.

On the other hand, the concept of satanic forces promoted by the FGBFC links the church followers not only to the global community of Pentecostals and its universalised image of the devil as it originated in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. ‘The FGBFC’s concept of the devil is

'© At the time of my fieldwork, antiretroviral medication was not available in ‘Tanzania.

278 HANSJORG DILGER also based on—and composed of—abstract ideas of malevolent forces as they are represented by witchcraft as well as by diabolic understandings of the pepo and jimi on the Swahili coast. As Meyer has argued with regard to Ghana, the fact that Pentecostal churches in Africa refer to the same forces as ‘traditional’ cosmologies of illness and healing—albeit in an exclusively negative way—establishes a continuity between the worlds of the Pentecostals and the wider society which are in many ways thought to be irreconcilable. Drawing on the way in which the ‘Africanisation of Western Christianity’ came about in a Pentecostal church in Ghana, she illustrates how, despite the ‘diabolisation’ of Ewe religion through Presbyterian missionaries, “old gods and spirits, and also witchcraft, continued to exist as Christian demons under the auspices of the devil’. Meyer argues ‘for the need for scholars to consider also the negative incorporation of the spiritual entities in African religious

traditions into the image of the Christian devil as part and parcel of local appropriations.’ In this way, ‘the “old” and forbidden, from which

Christians [are] required to distance themselves, [remain] available, albeit in a new form’ (Meyer 2004: 455). ‘The second reason for the attractiveness of the prayers is the fact that the church is establishing an open and variable relationship between ‘localised’ and ‘globalised’ concepts of illness, affliction and healing which become condensed in the experience of the affected individuals and whose respective validity and power is in the more critical cases subject to an ongoing negotiation among the church leaders as well as the church followers. Particularly with regard to AIDS, the ideology of the FGBFC allows its followers to move freely between the church and biomedical health institutions, and even encourages its HIV-infected

members to make use of the latter in order to confirm their health status. In this regard, the church responds to the fact that many people in eastern Africa flexibly switch between different models of disease and affliction and make use of different types of treatment and healing, often varying considerably depending on social context, and over time and space (cf. Janzen 1978, Feierman 1981)."’

'7 Even among the FGBFC members most of whom explicitly condemn the practice of ‘traditional healing’ there are some who had made use of traditional healing before their salvation—and it cannot be excluded that they do not make use of it either secretly or will not at a later stage of their life should they decide to convert to a different religious organisation.

HEALING THE WOUNDS OF MODERNITY 279

However, while the church is comparatively open to the biomedcal system of disease and treatment (something not universally shared by Pentecostals), Bishop Kakobe 1s still not uncritical about the selfproclaimed superiority of western medicine and western modernity and makes clear that it 1s ultimately the church leaders—and, above all, God—who remain in control of the healing process and of the various actors involved. ‘Vhus, although Kakobe sends HIV-infected church members to a health institution to verify whether they have been cured, and while he also accepts the results of these tests as ‘medical facts’, he and the other church members subject the medical results to their own interpretation. In response to a positive HIV test, the church leaves open the possibility that the HIV-infected person has a ‘normal virus’ or has not yet managed to engage in a moral life as prescribed by the church teachings. If, however, the virus disappears, the reason for this success 1s more or less self-evident: has not biomedicine repeatedly emphasised that it has still not found a cure for AIDS? In this way, the church leaders—in close correspondence with the church followers, who often pursue their individual hopes and interests—are flexibly negotiat-

ing the uncertainties and questions that arise from the confrontation with lethal diseases such as AIDS, while at the same time warding off potential critics who would accuse the church of raising false hopes. The last aspect of the attraction of the healing prayers is that they are connected closely to processes of community-building and an informal practice of care and support that has been established at the level of the home churches and that is rooted in the church’s ideology of a ‘saved community’. While this practice of community-building 1s a gendered process that conspicuously reflects the fact that 1t is mostly HIV-infected

women that may be excluded from the support of male-centred kinship networks in rural and urban ‘Tanzania (Dilger 2005), community support in the FGBFC entails more than a simple replacement of the worldly family in the context of globalisation, rural-urban migration and HIV/AIDS. ‘The way church followers are being integrated into the world of the FGBFC is as much about the economic and social perspectives that Neo-Pentecostal churches offer to their saved followers as it is about their struggles for moral integrity in a sinful and morally

corrupted world; the creation of hope in the context of an epidemic that evokes feelings of despair and grief rather than a perspective directed towards the future; and finally about proper ways of dying from a stigmatised disease that, without adequate arrangements, would easily resist the church’s classification of a “good death’. In this sense,

280 HANSJORG DILGER healing prayers in the FGBFC represent more than the naive belief in the promise of being able to cure a lethal disease, or the simple resistance to ‘name a disease’ surrounded by stigma and denial. ‘hey imply a powerful reorganisation of the moral and social identities of saved believers against the background of an insecure and morally corrupted world that is increasingly tied into transnational networks and the forces of the global market economy. To conclude, religion in the context of AIDS 1s more than just a source of ambiguity in the ways in which societies in eastern Africa deal with the disease. Christianity’s role has often been described by policy-makers and social scientists either with regard to the stigmatising attitudes of churches or with reference to the charitable acts that are associated with Christian organisations in the context of the epidemic (cf., Dilger 2001: 87f£; 2005: 227-33). This article has argued that the ‘negative’ and the ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ dimensions of religion with regard to HIV/AIDS cannot be understood as separate or decontextualised aspects of the ways in which Neo-Pentecostalism

has established itself in eastern Africa. While the FGBFC seems to meet many of the conflicting needs and desires of its members with regard to healing and care, the processes set in motion by the church imply—by definition—a high potential for social conflict and often lead to further ruptures in the context of modernity and AIDS. As has become clear from the example of the FGBFC, Neo-Pentecostal churches in ‘Tanzania are manoeuvring their followers through the various threats and imponderability of urban life. In doing so, they create as much uncertainty, ambiguity and ruptures with regard to the nature of modernity and globalisation as they provide hope, fixity and moral

guidance in a world that to their followers has become unstable and insecure, and in the context of AIDS, dangerous and deadly. While church members claim to make a break with their individual and collective pasts—and indeed may become the trigger of social, cultural and family conflicts—the practices around healing and care established

in the FGBFC are echoing a vision of modernity that 1s obliged to western ideals of material success and individualisation as much as it is rooted in the histories of religion, healing and the valuing of social relationships in ‘Tanzania.

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bridge: Gambridge University Press. Wimberley, Kristina. 1995. ‘Becoming “Saved” as a Strategy of Control: The Role of Religion in Combating HIV/AIDS in a Ugandan Community. (From Backsliding to Manoeuvring: Adolescent Girls, Salvation and AIDS in Ankole, Uganda)’. Paper Presented at the Thirty-eighth Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Orlando, November 3-6, 1995.

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS: PENTECOSTALISM, HAIR AND SOCIAL DISTANCING IN BOTSWANA Ryk van Dyk Introduction

Pentecostalism, an increasingly popular form of Christianity in parts of Africa, is marked by the sense of spiritual superiority it fosters among

its adherents through an ideological emphasis on ‘breaking’ (Meyer 1998, 2004, Van Dyk 1997, Robbins 2004, 2007, Engelke 2004). As this literature demonstrates, the creation of a rupture with the past, traditions, social relations and nation-state projects 1s at the heart of much of the Pentecostal ideology. It appears to inform Pentecostal religious practices as leaders and groups have quickly become popular through their proclaimed access to superior powers to heal and to provide deliverance from ancestral curses and demons. This inspires the pursuit of a ‘breakthrough’ in personal or social circumstances to gain progress and prosperity (Maxwell 1998, Meyer 2002, Akoko 2004, Gifford 2004, Hasu 2006). ‘The healing practices of traditional healers,

the worship of the mainstream and former missionary churches, or the cultural policies of African nation-states are declared as spiritually inferior, superstitious and backward in many Pentecostal public messages. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS, the Pentecostal project of demonstrating spiritual superiority in creating a rupture was in many cases continued by leaders claiming to be able to deal with, or even cure,

the disease. Adherence to a born-again style of life is often promoted as the only effective protection (Garner 2000, Mate 2002, Pfeiffer 2004, Dilger 2007, Prince 2007). ‘The notion of Pentecostal spiritual superiority is linked to the moral project of ‘maturing in the faith’ as some Pentecostal leaders in Ghana would call it, or kukhwima, ‘ripening’, as the born again Pentecostals in Malawi say (see Van Dik 1998). This is the process of attaining a different and superior moral status that conversion or being born again entails. ‘he superiority achieved by conversion is one reason why in many Pentecostal circles young people can wield moral authority over

284 RIJK VAN DIJK people even if the latter are more senior in age than the Pentecostal preacher or leader (see Van Dyk 1992). As Joel Robbins (2007) has been arguing, the Pentecostal ideological emphasis on rupture, on a complete break with the person’s former life, is experienced by members as an important aspect of their identity. In his view, anthropology has a tendency to explain away this existential importance of rupture and break as it commonly stresses cultural continuities instead. While he argues for an anthropology that is engaged

with understanding ruptures and break, the question remains unanswered as to how the Pentecostal pursuit of discontinuity is translated into actual praxis. lo what extent can this spiritual and moral project embedded in Pentecostal thinking—‘being above the ordinary things’ as Ghanaian Pentecostals explained—hbe realised by Pentecostals in everyday situations?

This contribution aims to demonstrate that while rupturing and ‘breaking’ are part of the overall ideology, they are in practice translated in day-to-day situations in patterns of social distancing. Pentecostalism can be regarded as a ‘this-worldly’ religion (see Martin 1990), focused

on the immanent aspects of life and concerned with progress and prosperity, while it stmultaneously maintains a practical emphasis on keeping a certain distance from everyday life. ‘Uhis dialectic can be noticed in the way Pentecostals in Ghana deal with the issue of the gift. ‘hey commonly distrust and reject reciprocal relations outside Pentecostal circles as they find it hard to control the spiritual powers that gift-exchange may entail. At the same time, they encourage erft relations within their circles as signs of trustworthiness and spiritual control (Van Dyk 2002, 2005, Coleman 2004, Akoko 2004). ‘There are many situations in which this dialectic of distancing, keeping relations at bay, controlling, supervising and rearranging exchanges take place. These include important moments in individual lives where births, marriages, funerals, sickness and misfortune are concerned. In all such situations there 1s the deliberate creation of a distance that allows for a critical reflection of how things should be done, as distinct from custom or social expectations and obligations. There is a sense of a higher spiritual and moral ground from which customary social arrangements can be perceived, evaluated, accepted or rejected. This notion of social distancing 1s relevant in understanding the way Pentecostalism has become connected to class and 1s particularly significant for the way Pentecostalism relates to the creation of status, prestige, style and authority for the emerging urban, entrepreneurial

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 289 middle classes (Maxwell 1998, Meyer 2002, De Witte 2008, MarshallFratani 2000, Van Dyk 2003, Gifford 2004) and has helped these to move beyond the obligations and limitations of local relations. ‘This chapter explores this dimension of Pentecostalism in the Ghanalan immigrant community in Botswana. Issues of social distancing as a particular translation and negotiation of the ideological imperative of ‘breaking’ are relevant here through the ways in which these churches became connected to a business class of Ghanaian female entrepreneurs who operate hair salons in the country’s major towns. ‘This practice of social distancing gained pertinence because of the AIDS pandemic, which has special significance for that type of small business activity.

Both in relation to class formation and the AIDS scare, Pentecostal notions of spiritual and moral superiority shape identities and social relations. More specifically, these issues can be seen to surface in the use of certain objects and resources. In the context of Ghanaian-owned hair salons and the position of the Ghanaian owners/business women, the use and non-use, presence or absence of rubber gloves has become a specific marker of the different class positions and their ideological framing and legitimacy. In the context of the Ghanaian hair salons, the glove became an index of work and power relations related to the Pentecostal faith and the AIDS crisis. Studying this object (the glove) allows us to see how ideas of social distancing and superiority translate into actual behaviour. ‘This focus turns the process of how notions of

rupture and ‘breaking’ inform specific distancing practices open to anthropological scrutiny. The presence or absence of gloves

In studying the implications of the Pentecostal ideology on spiritual and moral superiority, some literature has focused on how the ideology ‘re-tunes’ people’s sensory modes (Meyer 2006: 20). It makes adherents perceive things differently, makes them aware of the (spiritual) powers that may be imbued in matters relating to the past, to custom and tradition. It makes people turn a blind eye to a range of aspects of cultural and social life, creating what could be called ‘social anaesthesia’.' This

' "The seminal article by Feldman (1994) that introduced the concept of cultural anaesthesia has been informative of the anthropology of the senses (see Seremetakis 1994, Stoller 1989) but seems to have had little impact beyond that particular field of

286 RIJK VAN DIJK indicates an aspect of an ideology that urges people to keep out of touch with the reality of others and no longer to see their plight. As Herzfeld (1992) argued, such social construction of indifference may lead to practices whereby people become far removed from everyday human face-to-face contact and thus lose a direct engagement with other people’s predicament. Social anaesthesia can inform or reaffirm class positions by ideological sensitivities and insensitivities, by specific notions of what it 1s preferable

to see, hear and touch and what not (Asad 1993, Chidester 1992, 2005, Verrips 2006). On the one hand, religious forms such as Pentecostalism may foster ideas regarding the social classes that have become involved in its circles of activity; on the other, these social classes translate these

ideas of social distancing into everyday social practices (see for an example in Nigeria, Smith 2001). In this contribution, I explore a kind of Verdichtung, a kind of condensation of such ideas and practices in situations revolving around just one single subject: the use of gloves. Consider the case of Kofi (a fictive name), a hairdresser from Ghana who in 2003 worked in one of the many Ghanaian-owned hair salons

in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. As I described in an earlier article (Van Dyk 2007), when I met him he was complaining bitterly about conditions at his place of work. Being in contact with Batswana (native inhabitants of Botswana, plural of Motswana) on a daily basis and working in one of the poorer parts of this otherwise prosperous

city, he was increasingly unsettled about the fact that his shop did not have a sterilising machine. In view of the country’s current HIV rate, the use of scissors, blades, needles and other sharp objects and utensils 1s problematic to every hairdresser. Sterilising machines have

been introduced into the hairdressing sector in Botswana and most salons that attract middle-class customers have one, offering protection to customers and staff alike. Some salons even advertise the fact that they own such machines on their road-side banners and posters. ‘The costs of such apphances are not large, but in the poorer areas they are often absent.

study. The problematic of the perspective opened up by Feldman is an assumption of culture in an almost essentialised understanding of the term. Cultural difference in his view is also lodged in the ways culture makes people unable to feel, to be nonempathetic towards the pain and suffering of the other. In his study of the Rodney King case, this means that, in his view, the white middle-class is marked by a primordial

and culturally based insensitivity towards the plight and predicaments of their fellow Afro-American citizens.

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 23/7 His complaint was stronger, and perhaps more desperate, when it came to the absence of gloves. In the view of many in the hair business, it 1s obviously vital to use gloves when flesh-to-flesh contact 1s unavoid-

able and when the use of sharp objects warrant the use of protective devices. In addition to the sharp utensils, the use of toxic chemicals, which as many hairdressers say ‘make the skin of the fingers run thin’, makes wearing gloves even more important. Rubber, or so-called surgical, gloves, have been introduced in various sectors in society, even comprising the practices of traditional healers (dingaka) where one can now expect to find boxes of gloves. ‘These are to be used when incisions are made on the skin of the client with razor-blades. When these incisions bleed, medicines are rubbed into them. Yet, despite the importance and popularity of the glove, and even more so despite his pleading to be given gloves to use, the Ghanaian owner of the shop did not provide them, Kofi explained. ‘Vheir absence

was indeed remarkable and indicated an important level of inequality between the worker, unable to afford relatively inexpensive gloves, and the female owner. A year later he died, and although the autopsy report was not circulated within the Ghanaian community, many of his co-workers suspected it had been an AIDS-related death (leaving open whether the absence of protective devices was to be considered as the main cause of death). This situation of gloves becoming central in the protection against HIV/AIDS as well as in the case of the hairdressers and the marking of class differences between owners and their workers 1s replicated in many situations. Another male hairdresser, Joseph (also a fictive name),

who worked in one of the Ghanaian-owned hair salons in the Mogoditshane suburb, explained how his use of gloves was again and again curtailed by the ‘madam’. Using a number of sets of gloves during the different stages of doing hair (rinsing, ‘relaxing’ 1.e. the application

of chemicals, cutting and shaving), he was told not to ‘empty a box’ (meaning a box containing 100 rubber gloves) unless he was going to pay for them himself. While complaining that the “owner never touches a scalp herself” (1.e. excluding herself from being exposed to dangers), he said that he had no other option than to ‘use the powder’, which 1s the washing powder he applies to be able to use the same set of gloves

over and over again. ‘After using the powder, I simply hang them to dry a bit in the wind, I will not buy them myself!!’ Confirming that he knew about the risks involved (not only the gloves

still being infected even after the use of ‘powder’, but also the glove

288 RIJK VAN DIJK becoming worn out and therefore likely to tear or develop holes), he blamed the owner for not ‘taking care of the staff properly’ irrespective

of the fact that the owner had attended one of the Hairdressers-ofthe-World-against-AIDS (a L’Oreal-sponsored information campaign) workshops that was held in this area some time ago. Some of the hair salons in Mogoditshane were still displaying the advertisements and posters that had been handed out during the awareness-raising campaign, the poster signalling the message ‘Your Hairdresser Cares’ and spelling out all the preventative steps that should be taken to make sure hygienic measures are in place.’ Yet the owners do generally not work their customers’ scalps directly; they employ a person as a shop overseer and deliberately keep their distance from their workers. While these awareness-raising campaigns may indeed be able to convey prevention messages, from the perspective of these workers—excluded from participation in such workshops as Joseph indicated—they did not reach the persons for whom the information was relevant. The limitation on gloves was compounded by the lack of sterilisation: although a sterilisation machine was present, it had broken down some time ago. The absence of gloves and other measures of protection such as sterilising machines are expressions of how the workers’ concerns and risks can become neglected by shop owners. The presence or absence of gloves also reflects underlying notions of the importance of touch, tactility, bodily contact and risk in the context of HIV/AIDS as much as they mark class positions. ‘Tactile regimes in their relation to class positions may be influenced by, and changed through, economic interests and pressures, and may be reframed by religious ideologies (Geurts 2002, ‘Taylor 1990, Geissler & Prince 2007, De Witte 2008). In the case of these workers, why were gloves absent? Why did the owner of the shop want to control this part of the contact

* Another organisation, PSI (Population Services International), is targeting hair salons in Zimbabwe for the purpose of introducing and distributing female condoms to women. ‘he organisation’s website reads: A novel approach used by PSI/Zimbabwe to increase awareness and distribution of the Care female condom capitalised on the relationships between Zimbabwean women and their hairdressers. PSI/Zimbabwe trained hairdressers in over 500 hair salons, which also served as retail outlets for the product. Many women in Zimbabwe visit hair salons on a regular basis and the predominately female environment of salons offer a unique setting for women to touch and feel the product and discuss issues surrounding condom use and negotiation. Over 52% of the 1.4 million condoms were sold through the hair salon network. http://www.psi .org/our_programs/products/female_condom.html.

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290 RIJK VAN DIJK between the hairdresser and his customers? Inexpensive as they are, why wouldn’t the owners want to provide them? Why would the owner be insensitive to the needs for protection of her workers and customers? Or do owners entertain specific views concerning the wearing of gloves and what this means in terms of their doing business in a highly competitive market? What kinds of sensitivities are imbued in the use of gloves in this context? Is the glove in itself a sign of insensitivity that the owner wants to avoid as it may jeopardise relations with customers? And importantly, what is the influence of the specific form of Christi-

anity this owner adhered to (as so many other Ghanaian owners do), namely Ghanaian Pentecostalism, in the creation and maintenance of a regime in which insensitivities are possible, morally justified, perhaps even pursued as part of its ideological project? Owners and workers in the context of Pentecostalism

There are two things to consider regarding the issue of the gloves in our cases: one, the workers are in most cases not member of a Pentecostal church, and second Ghana was (and still is) not as HIV/AIDS-ridden

as Botswana. [he presence of the Ghanaian migrant community in Botswana dates from the early 1970s when the first independent Botswana government was recruiting skilled personnel from other parts of Africa to serve in its emerging civil service (Van Dyk 2003). Ghanaian men were recruited as teachers, university professors, lawyers and doctors often bringing their wives and family. As the population of Botswana 1s small (around 2 million), the migration of Ghanaians was relatively small scale, yet their influence on civil society has been substantial due to their specific place in the society’s social hierarchy. The wives of the Ghanaian men began to open hair and beauty salons

as well as clothes shops and boutiques in the mid 1970s, recruiting personnel from Ghana who were skilled in producing complicated West-African hairstyles and in West-African fashion (for unskilled labour

as cleaners or ‘shampoo girls’, the Ghanaian owners usually recruited ‘locals’) (see Van Dyk 2003).

Introducing cosmopolitan yet African beauty styles to economically expanding Botswana, their enterprises proved popular and their owners joined a rapidly expanding and increasingly affluent middle-class in Botswana’s larger towns (for the significance of African hairdressing in relation to globalisation and transcultural exchange, see Nyamnjoh,

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 291 Durham & Fokwang 2002; Weiss 2005; Erasmus 2000; Ossman 2002). Ghanaian businesswomen form a dominant and powerful group within the Ghanaian migrant community and some developed relations with Botswana elites. The Ghanaian Women’s Association (Mma Kuo), formed in the early 1980s, was the precursor to the later Botswana Association

of Ghanaian Nationals. In addition, this group of affluent businesswomen was crucial in the establishment of four Ghanaian transnational

Pentecostal churches that found their way to Botswana in the early 1990s. Economic and spiritual interests were intertwined by the salon owners; Pentecostal pastors visited these businesses and offered prayers for their progress, prosperity and protection against witchcraft, jealousy and malign spirits (nteho or ‘consecration’) involving the ritual spiritual spilling of the ‘blood of Jesus’.

An important issue in this relationship between the salon owners and Pentecostalism is that Ghanaian personnel hardly ever join these churches. Practical reasons might contribute to their distance from Ghanaian Pentecostalism, remarkable as it is because so many within the Ghanaian migrant community are members of one of the Ghanaian Pentecostal churches. ‘These practical reasons revolve first of all around their pay. Hairdressers work long hours, seven days a week, as they do not get a fixed salary (apart from a ‘basic’ salary of around BP 250-300 (approx. €50)). They work ‘on a percentage’ of what their customers pay, leaving the lion’s share to the owner of the salon or the business. Hairdressers thus have to sacrifice real income if they want to attend church meetings. A second practical obstacle between Pentecostal churches and hairdressers such as Kofi or Joseph relates to the financial commitments these churches demand from their Ghanaian members (including ‘tithes’ of one tenth of one’s net income). Moreover, members are expected to dress in expensive clothes when attending church. Hairdressers may earn too little to meet all these expectations and therefore be recorded as not being committed or not being ready to accept the authority of the pastors.

In addition, there is the acceptance of the authority of the pastor in inspecting one’s moral standing in life. While the pattern of church membership between salon owners and their workers reaffirms class positions, an additional factor is that increasingly restrictive labour (socalled ‘localisation’) policies are allowing fewer foreigners to come and work in this relatively affluent society. Work in hair salons 1s ‘localised’,

meaning that only special conditions allow foreigners to work in the

292 RIK VAN DIJK sector. The implication of this is that workers or salon owners must make special arrangements to recruit labour from Ghana. ‘The recruited Ghanaian hair workers will always remain ‘strangers’ as their permits

are only renewed on a temporarily basis and easily run the risk of not being renewed at all. In cases where they lack work permits, their position will remain ambiguous, if not illegal. Pastors are therefore usually unsure of these workers’ status. Do they have ‘papers’? Is their status and identity known? Is their life history known? ‘Io which social and spiritual powers have they been exposed in past experiences while still in Ghana? ‘These are all reasons why pastors or prominent members of the Ghanaian migrant community are never eager to really associate with lower-class workers. The pastor’s authority may conflict with the authority the female salon owners wield over them. Interestingly, the owners’ power can be viewed as inclusion in a kind of extended family. When recruiting workers from Ghana, the owners usually make an explicit effort to travel

from Botswana to Ghana to look for suitable personnel in cities such as Accra and Kumasi. In the process of recruiting, they will talk to the families of prospective staff and negotiations often involve an exchange of gifts. This represents the idea that families entrust these young men and women into the hands of the owners and in Botswana these owners will refer to their workers from Ghana as ‘my boys and girls’. When Kofi died, the owner of his hair salon was not only obliged to arrange a funeral ceremony in Gaborone that would ensure a proper ‘future remembrance’ as required in diasporan Ghanaian funeral practices (De Witte 2003); she was also obliged to travel to Ghana to visit the family, present gifts and, above all, present the video showing how well she had created a respectable imagery of her ‘boy’ for future remembrance. Being constructed as part of an extended family, hairdressers are subjected to the way in which extended family should be treated from a Pentecostal perspective; 1.e. supervision and a critical control of responsibilities on the part of the Pentecostal owner. Whereas on the one hand the social and cultural obligation exists to be responsible,

Pentecostalism at the same time allows for the moral and spiritual legitimacy to be both in control (‘on top of things’ as the owners say) and distant at the same time. One important element in this distancing rhetoric of Pentecostalism 1s the extensive emphasis on the nuclear family, while the extended family is proclaimed a hability (Mate 2002, Van Dijk 2004). Believers are usually bombarded with messages that inform them about being careful with their relations with the extended

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 293 family, cutting obligations and relations of reciprocity as much as they can, or at least bringing reciprocal relations under extensive moral and spiritual control and scrutiny (Meyer 2002, Van Dyk 2002, Prince 2007). Accepting gifts from relatives beyond the confines of the nuclear family and giving gifts to distant family members 1s considered to be playing

with fire (Van Dik 2005). Emphasising the peril in such reciprocal relatedness, the widespread notion that what the Devil gives ‘can never be trusted’ makes people aware that the giving or receiving of gifts 1s never neutral as it may harbour spiritual entities that are demonic.

The effect of cutting ties with the extended family has profound ramifications at many different levels. Pentecostals cannot readily com-

mit themselves to the performance of all sorts of family-related customary rituals, such as those that take place in the context of birth and death, name-giving and marriages. Careful supervision should take place and the pouring of libations to the family ancestors, for example, are prohibited. While one might think this is mere ideology, in practice even Pentecostals cannot be seen to be insensitive to the demands, obligations or

needs of the extended family. The fact of the matter is that at home and in the diaspora, explicit ‘teaching’ takes place for Pentecostals on how to cut these ties. This severing of ties is expected in the context of marriage, funerals or name-giving ceremonies. Pentecostal teachings deal with how to withstand pressure from elder relatives, as well as to arrange one’s affairs to ensure that gifts are directed towards the church and God’s cause instead of meeting the needs of the family. In addition to the Bible classes and counselling sessions where all of this is discussed between pastors and members, there 1s also an extensive literature to inform Pentecostal members of the same. Here the nuclear family of the leading pastor 1s often portrayed as a shining role model of how social life should be organised, maintained and supervised. ‘The imagery of the modern believer being in control of his/her situation, planning for the future and struggling against uncontrollable demands

on family resources is a finely tuned but highly effective message. Obligations are translated as risks that ‘may destroy your family’ as one of the Gaborone-based pastors preached. ‘There 1s upfront training in distancing at almost every level of involvement in the church, Pentecostal ideology and everyday life. This Pentecostal ideology strengthens the owners’ responsibility for employees from Ghana, the obligation to incorporate them in a widely defined kinship pattern as ‘sons and daughters’, while making sure that

294 RIJK VAN DIJK their needs are controlled in a way that may not aflect the owner’s resources. In spite of the kinship idiom, there 1s not usually a friendly or convivial relationship between personnel recruited in Ghana and the owners, and sometimes distrust prevails. Beyond owners’ claims that their workers are ‘lazy’ or ‘cheating’ them, owners sometimes go as far as checking out the houses where workers live to see whether or not the workers are taking customers away from the shop by cutting their hair in their own homes. ‘Family’ is a liability and is not to be trusted, and complaints by workers usually go ignored. Although Kofi complained repeatedly and bitterly about the dangerous working conditions in his

hair salon and the poor living conditions in the place where he was staying (and which had been arranged by the owner), the owner turned a deaf ear to his complaints. ‘They were received much in the same way as Pentecostals are ‘trained’ to receive calls for help and attention from the extended family. ‘This 1s informed by an awareness of the dangers and perils of reciprocity and of extending obligations beyond the confines of the nuclear family (Van Dyk 2002, 2005). The owner did not do much about his complaints; gloves were not provided. ‘We have to teach them’

An additional factor in understanding the social distancing on the part of owners is the relatively late arrival of HIV/AIDS in Ghanaian society. Most owners had left Ghana for Botswana before AIDS became a serious issue. Overall, the HIV/AIDS infection rate in Ghana is much lower than in Botswana, meaning that it is the hairdressers more than the owners who find themselves in a position where they are confronted

with the seriousness of the issue. Ghanaian hairdressers tend to use the local shampoo girls as a kind of shield or go-between between themselves and the customer (Van Dik 2003). If shampoo girls find wounds, sores or scars on a customer’s head, they are the first to deal with this situation of potential danger as well as the embarrassment of asking the customers “to come back another time’. ‘This 1s tricky in the sense that every customer is a source of income in a highly competitive market and they may decide never to come back. Embarrassment must be avoided at all costs. Owners look sharply and critically into this because of the percentage system: a substantial part of their income is dependent on maintaining a happy clientele. Hairdressers may have

no other option than to deal with the head and hair of a person who

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 295 could be infected, often dealing with hair styles that require lengthy, intense and repeated contact with the head and skin. In a context of marked competition, gloves are a tricky issue. ‘They may signal, embarrassingly for all to see, that something is wrong with the head and the skin of a particular customer, that there is something that the hairdresser does not trust. Gustomers can be explicit about not wanting to be treated with gloves, with ‘rubber’ as some would say, to avoid any public embarrassment. What Erasmus (2000) has called ‘hair politics’ becomes in fact a politics of touching in the face of a liberal, competitive market where the fight for the customer is based on hard economics. Kofi never touched his customers with gloves because he suspected the reason for the owner not providing him with the items was that the limited market in one of the poorer areas in town where his salon was located required ‘real touching’. ‘The use of gloves would have meant even fewer customers and hence less

income. Similar negotiations of the use of ‘rubber’ in the context of a competitive market have been noted in the use of condoms by sex workers, for instance in the large cities of Malawi (see van den Borne 2005). Yet, unlike the condom, the glove does not seem to produce the kind of moral antagonisms that the large-scale introduction of the condom has brought about in Christian circles in the past, condemning it as providing a license for “sexual promiscuity’ (Taylor 1990, Amanze 2000, Pfeiffer 2004, Geissler and Prince 2007).

Discussing this issue with salon owners revealed that notions of superiority surfaced again in how they perceived HIV/AIDS as requiring them to maintain social distance. Often the answer given was ‘we have to teach them’, by which they meant that they have to sit down

with the customer and explain the use of the glove if he/she has a problem with their use. “You see,’ one owner explained, ‘we can teach them how to take care of their skull if we discover wounds and soars. We tell them they should apply Mercy Cream (a disinfectant cosmetic product that 1s imported from Ghana, RvD) and then we send them home and tell them to come back a week later!’ In actual fact, some of the hairdressers told me, this hardly ever happens as the owners are not that much involved on a daily basis with what goes on in the direct contact between the worker and the customer. As these hairdressers would say; ‘we are told to use gloves at all times. Customers cannot say “no” and the owners tell us we should educate them!’ Hence the use of gloves, irrespective of the actual reality of their usage, 1s enveloped

296 RIJK VAN DIJK in a discourse that places the owners in the superior position of being able to teach their workers and customers what 1s right, what is proper bodily care and how to negotiate the dangers of infection. At the same time, they ambiguously neither provide gloves nor enforce their use. This discourse on teaching ties in with the ideas the shop owners have of the moral status of their host society. ‘Uhere is a strong sense of the moral inferiority of Botswana society vis-a-vis their own Ghanalan ‘character’, of which the current AIDS crisis, in their view, 1s both a symptom and proof. ‘The promiscuity—the ‘joling that men in this society’ do—is strange to their Ghanaian ‘nature’ and their Christian morality, and a threat to the status and behaviour of their own men and husbands. ‘heir disregard for the moral status of Botswana society goes as far as discouraging their own children from developing friendships with local age mates and attempting to ensure that relationships

only develop with partners from Ghana. Control over the salon is rarely relinquished to ‘locals’, as the owners instead prefer to recruit such personnel and caretakers from Ghana. There 1s little confidence in local employees, who are often perceived as stealing and cheating, as slow learners and unreliable when it comes to keeping time. These anti-Botswana sentiments are not only encouraged by the government’s policies of localisation that jeopardise the position of foreigners and their businesses but are also strengthened by the AIDS

crisis. [The fact that Ghana and the Ghanaian community are less affected by AIDS is perceived as a consequence of their higher moral status and ‘superior character’. Knowing all too well that the most important way by which HIV/AIDS is spread 1s through heterosexual and unsafe sexual relations, the businesses they run have a moral flipside that does not confirm and even contradicts the higher ground the female owners wish to occupy. On the one hand, owners want to make it clear that in the businesses they run they are dealing with what they perceive as the ignorance of the local population in terms of the skills in doing hair, the treatment of body hygiene and care, and the handling of money and business affairs. In addition, this superiority also needs to transpire in dealing with the spiritual aspects of being placed in a competitive market.

There is an easy slippage in the manner in which teaching hau, beautification and body care relates to notions of how to teach proper prayers and spiritual protection. The salon owners receive spiritual protection through Pentecostal prayers and deliverance because they

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 297 stick, in their view, to a higher morality of conduct and a superior faith.

Many stories circulate among owners of how their businesses came under attack spiritually, through the actions of envious competitors. Hair can be taken from the salon to do magic tricks on the owners, something they would refer to by using the Setswana vernacular mutt. In some cases, owners explained how they had to fire some of their local workers because of the magic tricks they had been playing on the business, out of spite and jealousy. Hence reading the Bible while in the shop and ‘teaching our customers about the Bible while they sit in our chairs’ 1s part of an overall idea of how the superiority of the ‘blood of Jesus’ can be brought to bear in how AIDS and evil spirits can be held at a safe distance from the salon and its owner.

The paradox is that the salon and the business of doing hair is about enhancing a woman’s attractiveness, about sexuality, and indeed about competitiveness that 1s likely to cause envy and jealousy. As a Motswana journalist B. Seleke described in a recent newspaper article “The Forbidden Pleasure’ (The Echo, 7 June 2007): The last shampooing was followed by a very gentle, very relaxing, highly sensual head massage that we only wish for but cannot really afford. ‘The problem: I was in a public hair salon (one of the Ghanaian owned hair

salons in the African Mall in Gaborone, RvD) and the massage came from a stranger.... The thing is she had been washing my hair while I was dead quiet because you cannot really compete with all the activity on your head, then

suddenly it went quiet and all that was left were gentle hands swirling around on my head. ‘That was really nice, but it was also quite embarrassing. It felt like I was enjoying the forbidden fruit of something, it felt obscene especially since it was from a strange girl.

The salon owners make a profit from something they claim to distrust or to be concerned about as being part of a morally inferior society or way of conduct. ‘This 1s precisely why Pentecostalism and its moral and ideological messages are so important to these owners. They help to resolve this paradox whereby the ambition of taking the higher moral ground 1s potentially undermined by the nature of the business they are in. Pentecostal leaders educate their people too about style, consumption, beautification and the like but much as they emphasise success and prosperity in these matters, they also impart to their members that all of this should not run wild. heir message is one of control so that the demons of consumption, money, beauty and sexuality do not take

possession of the person but that the person remains in control of

298 RIJK VAN DIJK these matters. It is on the basis of these teachings that owners talk of the ‘character’ they show by dealing with the body and its beautification while controlling, customising and tailoring its public appearance. Many discussions are devoted to ‘what is being over the top’, or where a certain style ‘went too far’ as a true middle-class positioning is about knowing and understanding such limits of decency, appropriate style and dressing.

Pentecostal churches further support the salon owners’ notion that their middle-class position entails the control of social relations—to the

extent of rupturing them—through training, teaching and education. Pentecostal practices involve a range of fasting rituals in which so-called ‘dry fasting’ (no food or water) is perceived as the most important and

the most effective form of ‘pleasing God’ by controlling one’s body and one’s metabolism. By controlling bodily needs, total concentration on heavenly powers is aimed for. ‘The belly 1s considered the seat of ancestral powers that can be controlled by fasting. Fasting can change one’s circumstances and provoke a breakthrough in situations that bind a person and keep him or her under the control of the ancestral powers. It is for this reason that owners regularly fast in the hope that fortune will be maintained and heavenly powers will provide success and prosperity.

HIV/AIDS has not become much the focus of Pentecostal fellowship activities, although most of the churches subscribe to abstinence campaigns (however unrealistic this may be in the highly urbanised environment of Gaborone). ‘These abstinence campaigns feed into and support the desensitising paradigm crucial to Pentecostal practice. Abstinence confirms the overall idea that a true and genuine Pentecostal believer is indeed capable of controlling his/her social relations; s/he

is a modern individual to whom sexual lust represents Just another demon that must be controlled instead of letting it control oneself? In the Ghanaian context it is the image of Mami Wata that is iconic of what Pentecostals have in mind: the marine spirit, half-woman halffish, which seduces men into relationships and takes its victims to her marvellous treasures under the sea in exchange for one’s soul.

° "This is particularly the case with masturbation, which is perceived as another forceful demon the Pentecostal believer should be able to cast out. Pastors are approached by men who seek help in this regard as this demon appears hard to deal with.

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 299 In this context, the controversy about gloves demonstrates how a notion of middle-class superiority in teaching a society how to behave, how to control life and to be aware of certain dangers, spiritually and morally, removes itself from everyday practices. While providing education often enveloped in Pentecostal style and moral rhetoric, some owners do not supply gloves irrespective of maintaining and presenting a Pentecostal image of themselves. ‘he question is how the contradiction

between owners underscoring how the person from a Pentecostal perspective should be in control of bodily style and spiritual powers while ignoring or denying these controls to their workers can be interpreted. How can they reconcile being interested in educating their workers and customers, while they keep a social distance and turn a deaf ear to the complaints of their workers at the same time? Matters of choice

It would be erroneous to see Pentecostal ideology as being prescriptive.

In the emerging literature on the relationship between Pentecostalism and AIDS, there is a tendency to view Pentecostal messages as prescribing social behaviour (abstinence, being faithful to one partner) leading to an actual performance of that behaviour (see Dilger 2007, Mate 2002, Garner 2000). ‘This leads to some conclusions about how Pentecostals display more AIDS-awareness behaviour and therefore less risky behaviour patterns compared to non-believers or other faiths. Garner (2000) tellingly entitled his article on the subject matter ‘Safe sects’. Yet in many cases, such a direct and causal relationship between a prescriptive ideology and observable behaviour remains to be proven, as the prescriptive factor cannot be teased out of all that made people change their conduct (Prince 2007). While the prescriptive nature of Pentecostal ideology 1s problematic,

I was struck by the extent to which a notion of having to ‘educate’ people did not seem to imply expectations of any automatic change in behaviour at all. Interestingly, the notion of being in control of one’s life was more about being aware and being made to be aware of options and choices that lay ahead than of really implementing other behavioural styles. Certainly, in the Ghanaian understanding of becoming a born-again Pentecostal, there is the notion that this is about choice; 1s the person interested in becoming a convert prepared to ‘take Jesus’, in local parlance ja Jesu. This expression me fa Jesu (I have taken Jesus)

300 RIJK VAN DIJK means that the convert has made a conscious decision to join the Pentecostal faith. Pentecostalism raises awareness of the conscious choices

that have to be made; about which customary or traditional cultural rituals to follow, which places to visit, which relationships to engage in. And even choices are implied about whether one should be delivered and have a breakthrough in a certain matter or whether demonic forces

need to be suspected and any wealth is genuine and uncontaminated by ancestral curses. Pentecostalism is a realm of choices and choicemaking in which guidance, advice, competence, skills and training become critical, but where choice-making instead of superimposition is strongly maintained. here 1s no sense that one can become a Pentecostal Christian by birth as the moment of becoming born-again 1s considered the ultimate moment of ‘giving one’s life to Christ’. ‘The Pentecostal ideology and practice suggests a notion of the victory of choice over cultural conditions and prescriptions. A great deal of emphasis is placed in sermons, prayers and deliverance on participation in the domain of entrepreneurial activity on the market as a domain where choice can be played out proactively. ‘This amounts to a spirit of entrepreneurialism. Migrants are not expected to sit and wait for things to come their way, they are told not to adopt a begging attitude and are made aware of the fact that they can take control of their success and prosperity. Moreover, there 1s little support

for those that do not seem to take initiatives. ‘he dictum here 1s that ‘there 1s help for those who help themselves’. Much of this market ideology transpires in the role-modelling performed by the church leaders themselves. ‘The leaders can be interpreted as being experts in type-branding their charisma in such a way that it almost becomes a distinct commodity on a religious market (see Smith

2001, Hasu 2006, De Witte 2008). ‘These leaders do not perceive of risk and challenge as anything negative fer se, but regard it as the ultimate litmus test for divine and benevolent grace. After all, those who harbour the Godly sent powers will survive; those who are not under such benevolent inspiration are likely to perish. For the workers in hair salons, the glove indicates a more negative notion of choice. ‘The owners can exercise the choice not to care about gloves or consider their use from a strategic perspective when it comes to how to attract or keep customers. While the owners are encouraged

by Pentecostal ideology to become proactive by taking on the challenges that the local market has to offer, some of the real challenges and risks are left for their workers, allowing them little room to act. In

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 301 the context of AIDS, the presence or absence of gloves thus indicates different class positions in the challenges and risks that owners and workers are either engaging in or facing. The issue of gloves and the way in which they signal antagonistic economic power relations are usually not the manner in which their presence or absence in the context of AIDS 1s being discussed in the literature. Studies from the Southern African region suggest that the glove has become contested in connection with the politics of care (e.g. Henderson 2004; Lindsey et al. 2003). Gloves represent a de-humanisation of the AIDS sufferer as the glove comes to stand between the caregiver and the person suffering from AIDS and may even represent a withdrawal of care altogether in the pursuit of creating sanitised conditions in which chances of infection are minimised. Western-trained nurses would advise caregivers ‘to wear three pairs of gloves in handling patients’ (Henderson 2004: 48), an option which caregivers (usually a

patient’s relatives) find disheartening and difficult to follow. Lindsey et al. (2003: 495) write: Although the caregivers were advised on the use of universal precautions, very few caregivers heeded this advice. As one caregiver explained, ‘It is my daughter, I love her. I can’t wear gloves or other things. If I am

holding or nursing my child I love, putting a barrier would be lke I don’t love her.

Henderson (2004: 48) expands this by showing how special apologies and legitimacy have to be created to avoid flesh-to-flesh contact in a way that would usually have been normal and signal sensitivity: She (the caregiver, RvD) told Nkosinathi (the patient, RvD) that he should

not be unhappy in her request to now use gloves to wash him. It was not that she did not love him or that she found him offensive; wearing gloves was to protect herself from the virus. ‘The word she used in Zulu to refer to the fact that she did not find him offensive is a powerful one, ukunyanya. Ukunyanya connotes disgust or loathing and suggest uncontrollable and visceral responses to areas of life.

AIDS brings into relief a politics of care in which the object of the glove becomes an index for the complexities around contact and status positions. In the case of salon owners and hairdressers, gloves may be absent because of the economies of the market and competition, while in the case of the caregivers the gloves may be absent because of the economy of affect in a context of affliction. Hence, the use or non-use of the glove indicates different positions and constraints for withdrawing

302 RIJK VAN DIJK contact and creating social distance. ‘The absence of gloves in the case of caregivers can be regarded as meeting social and cultural approval because it signals a stance against such distancing, the wilful and deliberate abrogation of affectionate human contact. ‘The absence of gloves in the case of the hairdressers indicates an apparent distance on the part of owners to the fate of their workers as economic interests are more important and they do not want to hurt the feelings of their clientele. There is a clear and conscious reflection of the significance of objects regarding the mapping and marking of where social distancing occurs, can be permitted or should be abhorred. In the context of AIDS, the use or non-use of gloves has become an important consideration and a clear matter of making choices and being aware of the implications and consequences of such choices in terms of human affection or of economic interests. Interestingly, on the part of the owners, Pentecostalism does not ‘automatically’ relate to care, to the provisioning of care or of a social prescription towards taking care of the interests of their personnel. Instead, the issue of the glove indicates the limits of the faith’s capacity to prescribe certain styles of behaviour, also indicating how careful social science must be in linking religion to the provisioning of social security (see De Bruyn & Van Dyk (forthe.) for a critical discussion). While the Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in Gaborone organise Bible classes, counselling sessions and AIDS-awareness services for 1ts membership and is involved in certain faith-based organisations (FBOs) that organise education, the glove makes it painfully clear how far an idea of social care actually stretches. In fact, the opposite, namely that of social distancing, appears to be emphasised in the way Pentecostal ideology makes its influence felt. Conclusion and interpretation

In a recent critique of the anthropology of Christianity, Robbins (2007) argued that a major obstacle preventing this field from developing has

been that anthropology has persistently emphasised continuity over discontinuity and change (see also Engelke 2004, Hann 2007). Believers’ own understandings of the meaning and significance of rupture 1s thereby often reasoned away and re-interpreted as part of a broader stream of cultural change. In studying Pentecostal interaction with everyday living and working practices of hair salon owners, their involve-

ment with the faith and an AIDS-infected society, the present article

GLOVES IN TIMES OF AIDS 303 has indicated one domain in which discontinuities can be explored. ‘The glove allows us to explore how a Christian faith informs or legitimises fractures in the social by what I have called ‘social distancing’. ‘Vhere 1s a host of literature on Pentecostalism, also in the context of the study of AIDS, that emphasises the notions of ‘care’ and ‘security’. Ultimately, these studies argue, despite the Pentecostal emphasis on breaking with the past, Pentecostalism proves ‘good’ to society, for instance by prescribing behavioural change (see Garner 2000, Dilger 2007, Amanze 2000,

Hofer 2003, Swart 2006) or delivering counselling, healing or other forms of care. ‘This line of interpretation places faith in the service of reproducing society and thus socio-cultural continuity. At the same time, by exploring the particular case of Pentecostalism in the Ghanaian community in Botswana, we need to acknowledge that in addition to the care and prescriptions of behavioural change it provides, the faith does carry notions of discontinuity, disruption and social distancing too. At an ideological level, the faith’s practices are not inspired by a desire to reproduce anything from a cultural past, from what is considered traditional, primordial or cherished historical forms of religious belief and practice. It also provides legitimacy to the breaking of social relations in the present, and allows for a limitation or abrogation of a sense of community outside Pentecostal circles. As this translates into practices of social distancing, we notice how it may involve class interests, produce indifference, negate loss and suffering

and cause engagements with risk and danger (and therefore does not produce security at all times!) as 1s evident in the wilful absence of protective gloves. Similar to conversion and claims of radical personal change, these elements of Pentecostalism cannot and should not be explained away by anthropology by pointing at other and supposedly more relevant motivations, such as personal economic gain. While the absence of gloves may indeed be motivated by economic rationalities, as the workers in the hair salons indicate, this chapter has argued that ideological motivation and inspiration must be given a place too in why and how such risks and insecurities are deliberately engaged in by wealthy middle-class salon owners. Social distancing produces not merely stability but risk and vulnerability too. While AIDS is destroying the social life in countries such as Botswana, anthropology must allow for the reality of a Pentecostal model of engagement in which an ideology of discontinuity 1s translated into practices of rupture and social distancing. Faith inspires, in the context explored in this chapter,

a culture of discontinuity not only at an ideological level but in its

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ANTI-FRETROVIRAL TREATMENT: FAILURES AND RESPONSES

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LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND: CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF AIDS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN LOWVELD! Isak Niehaus

Over the past three decades South Africa has experienced the world’s largest epidemic of HIV and AIDS. By January 2007 an estimated 59.9 million South Africans were HIV positive, and another two million had died of AIDS-related diseases (Plusnews HIV/AIDS Barometer 2007). There are several reasons for the rapid spread of the epidemic. [hte (2006: 44) observes that diffusion occurred ‘across a long, muchpermeated northern frontier and through individual contacts in many sectors of a mobile, commercialised environment’. Moreover, he suggests

that the ‘structures of apartheid made the country and almost perfect environment for HIV? (did: 2006: 43). ‘These include the density of rural black populations; extensive labour migration between the rural and urban areas (Lurie et al. 2003); extremely diffuse sexual networks (Thornton 2008), pervasive social inequality (Gilbert and Walker 2002), high levels of sexual violence (Jewkes and Abrahams 2002), and the prevalence of transactional sex (Hunter 2002, Wojcicki 2002). State interventions have not stemmed the rising rate of infections.

The anti-apartheid revolts of the 1980s and transition to majority rule in the 1990s distracted the outgoing white government and its African nationalist successor from making HIV their chief priority (Schneider 2002). Moreover, President Mbeki has repeatedly challenged

conventional biomedical views. In an interview with 7ime magazine, he questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS, and claimed

that a virus cannot cause a syndrome (Karon 2000). He and South Atrica’s Health Minister have argued that AIDS is primarily a problem of nutrition and have repeatedly rejected data suggesting that AIDS is a major cause of mortality (Sunday Times 9/7/2000). Government ' T thank my informants, as well as my research assistants, Eliazaar Mohlala and Eric Thobela, for their help. I also acknowledge valuable comments by Felicitas Becker, Wenzel Geissler, Adam Kuper, Gonny Mathebula, Fraser McNiel and Jonathan Stadler.

‘To protect the identity of my informants, I use pseudonyms for my field site and all personal names. All non-English terms are in Northern Sotho.

310 ISAK NIEHAUS spokespeople initially described anti-retroviral drugs as lethally toxic, and only acceded to make them available through public health care facilities in 2004, after a humiliating series of confrontations with the Constitutional Court (Fassin 2007, Leclerc-Madlala 2005). ‘These geographic, social, economic and political factors have received

far more analytical attention than religious ones. Indeed, Garner (2000: 41) observes that despite the centrality of Christianity in the lives of most South Africans, religion 1s a ‘virtual foreigner’ to academic

literature on AIDS in the country. He is one of the few scholars to argue that people’s religious orientations might explain their proclivity or failure to engage in safe sex. But he shows that in KwaZulu-Natal

only Pentecostal churches have realised this potential. A change in sexual praxis follows on the heels of the ‘born-again’ experience, and Pentecostals are least likely to engage in pre- and extra marital sex. ‘The members of Pentecostal youth groups are not allowed to have boyfriends and girlfriends, and may only marry only other ‘born-again’ members. Pentecostal networks monitor romantic behaviour, and impose a threat

of discipline in case of sin. By contrast, sexuality is of marginal concern in the more numerous Mission, Zionist and Apostolic churches. ‘hese churches do not ask questions about the private lives of their members, and incidence of pre- and extra- marital sex are as high as among people with no church afhliation. Moreover, Zionist and Apostolic Churches, which often broke away from Mission churches due to resentment against missionaries’ attempts to change their African believers’ way of life (Sundkler 1961), have retained many religious and cultural practices that pre-date conversion to Christianity, such as polygamous marriage (Garner 2000). A more recent concern has been to record how churches attempt to alleviate the suffering of those afflicted with AIDS by sponsoring community based care, establishing networks of healing and support, and by rebuilding communities (Iliffe 2006: 105-8 and Dilger 2007). Fassin (2007: 257) suggests that Christian churches play an important role in the ‘local management of trauma’. ‘hose who are ‘born-again’ experence inner peace, and many persons living with AIDS find strength in the Zion Christian Church (ZCQ), South Africa’s largest church. Whilst I recognise that Christianity can potentially promote the reevaluation of ‘unsafe’ sexual practices and provide resources of healing and support, this chapter focuses more directly upon the manner in which Christian—specifically Zionist—discourses contribute to the

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 311 conception and labelling of AIDS as a social phenomenon in itself. ‘The information that I present draws on the results of intermittent fieldwork in Impalahoek (a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South

African lowveld) since 1990; and upon open-ended interviews that I conducted specifically on these topics with twenty-five informants with whom I am particularly well acquainted, during the course of 2006.’ At the time of fieldwork there were twenty-seven churches in Impalahoek

with a combined total of nearly 6,000 adult baptised members. But the distribution of church membership was very uneven. 75°% of the Christians in the village belonged to ‘Zionist-type’ churches, 16° to Pentecostal-type churches, and only 9°% to Mission churches (Niehaus

with Mohlala and Shokane 2001: 31-36). Local Christians regularly attend church and often consult home-based Zionist Christian healers in times of sickness. In addition, these churches undertake responsibility for funerals, and play an important role in framing people’s understandings of death. I have argued elsewhere that the intense stigma surrounding AIDS is due less to the condemnation of sexual misdemeanours than to the close association of AIDS with death (Niehaus 2007). In this chapter I seek to explain why Christian churches at large, and Zionist churches in particular, do so little to dispel this association. Central to the survival of the stigma of death among Zionist Christians is the identification of AIDS with Biblical leprosy. While the observer might expect Christian teachings to make closeness to death more palatable, in fact Christians tend to conceptualise AIDS as a new, deadlier kind of leprosy with all its overtones of divine punishment and horror. AIDS and leprosy relate in three areas. (1) Both conditions are seen

as forms of divine retribution for sin in a world that has gone astray morally. (1) Villagers see the bodies of persons with AIDS, like those of lepers, as tainted with death. In this conception the sick person occupies

an anomalous position betwixt-and-between the categories opposed categories of ‘life’ and ‘death’. (i) Like lepers, persons with AIDS are seen to be highly contaminating and are excluded from contact with

* Iam confident that my interviews captured a fairly broad range of opinions in Impalahoek. Six of my informants were prominent church leaders. ‘Their ages varied from 18 to 76 years, and they included unemployed persons, as well as builders and traders n the informal sector, teachers and civil servants.

312 ISAK NIEHAUS other villagers. Hence, the trope of leprosy crystallises and integrates many of the diverse and multi-layered local meanings of AIDS. following Sontag’s (1990) path-breaking analysis of the role of metaphor in biomedical practice,’ I suggest that this symbolic definition of AIDS as leprosy of a deadlier kind actually enhances stigmatisation and suffering.* It also promotes fatalism that might well impede the use of anti-retroviral therapy. AIDS and Discourse about AIDS in Impalahoek

Impalahoek currently has a population of about 20,000 Northern Sotho and ‘Tsonga speakers. During the era of apartheid the village formed part of the Northern Sotho Bantustan, Lebowa, and households depended upon wages earned by male migrants in South Africa’s industrial and mining centres. After the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Bushbuckridge became a municipality and was incorporated

into the newly constituted province of Mpumalanga. But although

more than a decade of democratic rule had passed, the area still displays many features of a ‘Native Reserve’, such as very high levels of unemployment, morbidity and mortality; and welfare dependency (Niehaus 2006). An epidemiological survey, conducted by health workers on common signs and symptoms of death, shows that AIDS was responsible

for a dramatic reversal in mortality rates in Bushbuckridge during the early 1990s. Until 1995 infectious diseases and malnutrition were the predominant causes of death in children, accidents and violence in young adults, and cardiovascular diseases in elders. But since then AIDS has become the major cause of death in all age groups.’ Kahn

> Few analysts have recognised the analogical relationship between leprosy and AIDS. For example, Sontag (1990) describes cancer rather than AIDS, as ‘the leprosy of modern times’. Volinn (1989) compares the objective biomedical aspects of these conditions, but her analysis does not encompass any consideration of symbolic meanings.

* There is a growing body of literature on the stigmatisation of persons living with AIDS in South Africa, and analysts identify various possible sources of stigma. These include the association of AIDS with sexual promiscuity (Mbali 2004, Posel 2005), witchcraft (Ashforth 2002), pollution (Delius and Glaser 2005), and with death (Niehaus 2007); as well as its concealable nature (Stadler 2003), and unaesthetic skin lesions (Deacon 2005). » From 1992 to 1995 to 1999 to 2002 deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and diarrhoea in the village of Agincourt increased from 71 to 546 (see Saloojee and Kahn 2005).

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 313 et al. (2007) calculate that from 1992 to 2005 life expectancy in the Agincourt area of Bushbuckridge declined by twelve years in females and fourteen years in males. HIV is rapidly spread in the context of a migrant labour system that obliges spouses to remain apart for extended periods of time and contributes to the frailty of conjugal bonds. ‘Vhe local economy of sex is marked by multiple sexual partners in diverse relationships, ranging from romantic love affairs in school to monogamous and polygamous marriages, long-term extra-marital liaisons, male-to-male sex 1n prisons,

and brief sexual encounters arranged in drinking taverns.° As elsewhere in South Africa, residents of Impalahoek see AIDS as a highly stigmatised condition. Out of a total of twenty-five interviewees twenty-four refrained from taking tests for HIV antibodies, saying that knowledge of a positive result might cause them to die sooner from stress, make nurses to gossip about their status, and provoke other villagers to discriminate against them. Close kin usually shield terminally ill persons from public view and vehemently deny that they have AIDS. They often deflect blame by claiming that the sick persons are victims of witchcraft. Villagers almost exclusively speak about AIDS in backstage domains (Stadler 2003). But even here, they also use euphemisms to avoid mentioning the words ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ directly. They would say that a person suffers from ‘germs’ (éwaisz), the ‘virus of pain’ (kukoana hloko), the ‘three letters’ (maina a mararo), or from ‘the fashionable disease’ (ke ko lwetst bja gona bjalo). Other expressions are that a person had purchased

a ‘single ticket’ (in English)—meaning to the graveyard, ‘was on diet’ (0 ya dayeta), or that ‘the dog had excreted on its chain’ (mpsya a nyele ketane, and cannot be untied). Health workers frequently portray such opinions and responses as due to a lack of awareness about AIDS. But it is more appropriate to

see them as an outcome of how different, and in particular official, discourses have constructed AIDS as a terminal disease: an inescapable death sentence.

° In a context of structured gender inequality transfers of bride wealth, gifts and money to atfhnes, wives and lovers distributed resources to the desperately poor. ‘Uhis is borne out by details on 42 deaths that my informants in Impalahoek attributed to AIDS in the early 2000s. Whereas the fifteen deceased men were amongst the wealthier of the poor, the twenty-seven deceased women were mainly unemployed.

314 ISAK NIEHAUS In the early days of the epidemic, during the 1990s, Non Government Organisations launched various sexual health programmes. Staff members gave talks on sexual hygiene to different constituencies, trained

teachers as sex educations and provided information and support to AIDS sufferers. Exhortations to use condoms were typically accompanied by the insistence that 1f you had contracted HIV, that was it, you would die of AIDS. In 2000, a Love Life Youth Centre, funded by the American Kellogs Foundation, was built near Impalahoek. ‘The Centre

aimed to promote a lifestyle of positive sexuality based on romantic love, being faithful, abstinence or using condoms, involving trappings of what 1s perceived as global youth culture in the process. It hosts motivational workshops, dancing, studio broadcasting, computer training, drama, basketball and volleyball. AIDS has become an important part in the curriculum of ‘life orientation’ classes in school. Each quarter, teachers at Impalahoek Primary School divide the learners into three groups for AIDS awareness classes: children between eight and twelve, older girls and older boys. Teachers do not mention sex to the younger learners, but warn them not to play with scissors, razors and pins; not to touch bleeding friends; and also not to inflate any balloons (condoms) they find lying around the village. ‘Teachers teach the older learners the ABC (to abstain, be faithful and to condomise) and demonstrate safe sex with stage props such as artificial penises. AIDS activists target high school learners for even more intensive propaganda and address them as often as twice a week. ‘The instructions are mainly about condoms, but the activists also mention the benefits of voluntary counselling and testing, of medication and a healthy diet. Well-meant as these efforts are, their initial insistence on the fatality of AIDS and their dependence on oft-mistrusted outside agencies heightened uneasiness about AIDS. Various conspiracy theories, blaming powerful outsiders for creating and spreading HIV, circulate in Impalahoek.’ These outsiders include Dr. Wouter Basson, head of the former apartheid government’s chemical weapons programme, and Americans

’ The allocation of blame to outsiders by means of conspiracy theories is a central motif in the politics of AIDS. For example, citizens of the United States blamed Haitian immigrants, and residents of Haiti blamed North American tourists for spreading AIDS (Farmer 1992). In Africa too the initial response of epidemic was to blame outsiders, such as American and European homosexuals, the laboratories of imperialist countries, immigrants, and refugees (Illife 2006: 80).

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 3195 whom allegedly manufactured the virus; white farmers who distribute HIV-infected sweet potatoes and oranges; and funeral undertakers and corrupt government officials who block cured for AIDS. ‘There are also occasional rumours that nurses inject patients with HIV, and that men purposefully infect others with the virus (Niehaus with Jonsson 2005). ‘Together, these health information campaigns and conspiracy theories single out AIDS for excessive propaganda, and create the impression

that the condition is somehow deadlier than other diseases. In their scale and urgency, AIDS awareness vastly exceeds public health care campaigns on malaria, tuberculosis, and family planning. Moreover, these campaigns have emphasised prevention, creating the impression that because the disease is incurable it is also untreatable and that little can be done to assist any person who 1s HIV positive. In fact, medical treatment for people with AIDS remains woefully inadequate. Initially a network of three hospitals and six clinics in the Bushbuckridge district screened pregnant women for sero-prevalence, provided voluntary counselling and testing on request, and treated the

symptoms of AIDS-related diseases. Only in 2003 did the Masana hospital (thirty kilometres away) begin to make the anti-retroviral drug Nevirapine available to AIDS sutlerers. ‘Two years later, HIV and ‘TB clinics providing antiretroviral therapies and comprehensive outpatient nursing services were established at the ‘Tintswalo hospital, within walking distance of Impalahoek. Here a support group called Rixile (‘the rising sun’) also assists patients in applying for disability pensions of 780 rand per month. Yet my observations during fieldwork suggest that the availability of effective medication and social grants have not greatly diminished the stigma of AIDS. Sick people generally shy away from the clinics and Rixile group, and only use drugs as a last resort. Medical statistics show that in August 2006, only 600 patients at the Tintswalo hospital received antiretroviral therapy (Moshabela 2006).° Those using anti-retroviral therapies remain extremely secretive about their status.

° Thomb (2006) estimates that by 2006 80 per cent of South Africans needing antiretroviral drugs were not getting them.

316 ISAK NIEHAUS Biblical Leprosy and AIDS

In addition to these public health messages and conspiracy theories, Christian discourse makes an important contribution towards reinforcing the perception that HIV is an incurable and untreatable condition. Health is a very prominent focus in the Zionist churches. Mission and Pentecostal churches, too, are deeply concerned with the material needs of the poor. For example, the Roman Catholic Church assists Mozambican refugees with donations of candles, food and clothes. The greater attraction of the Zionist churches derives from their ‘this worldly’ religious emphasis on pragmatically harnessing the divine

power of the Holy Spirit (Moya), and on the human body and its immediate life worlds (Sundkler 1961: 13, Gomaroff 1985: 159-194). Zionist churches aim to restore the original church and to serve as moral communities in the wake of social dislocation. Baptism, the wearing of uniforms, and divine healing are central practices in reconstituting the body. Sunday church meetings are marked by personal testimony, the summoning of the Holy Spirit, and by healing rather than formal

preaching. he practices of Zionist and Apostolic healers, who treat their clients at home, resonate with those of the diviners in indigenous

religious practice, but they see themselves as mediums of the Holy Spirit rather than the ancestors. ‘These healers pray for their clients, provide them with counselling, and administer remedies prescribed by the Holy Spirit. ‘The most common remedies were cooling with ash, permanganate of potash and holy water; cleansing with enemas and

emetics; and strengthening by means of steaming or tying brightly coloured yarn around the body. Unlike the Pentecostal and Mission churches, the Zionist churches incorporate established beliefs in the ancestors, pollution and witchcraft.

Ministers frequently acknowledge the power of cognatic ancestors to assist church members, and point to God’s commandment that one should respect and obey one’s parents. Yet they always regard the ancestors as subordinate to God. ‘The churches also emphasise the pollution

of birth, sex and of mourning. Mothers and their newly born babies are secluded for a period of up to two months. Zionists who are polluted by sexual intercourse are not permitted to attend church as this could weaken the power of ministers and prophets to heal. Churches also supervise funerals; requiring widows to wear mourning attire of the church; and conducting rituals to cleanse widows at the end of the mourning period.

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 317 Again echoing notions that pre-date the arrival of Christianity in Impalahoek, Zionist ministers and prophets perceive witches as a more

immediate source of evil than Satan (Kiernan 1984). ‘They do not imagine that witches enter into a pact with Satan, but see them still as persons motivated to harm by envy and resentment, who represent an independent source of malevolence. ‘The predominant Zionist response to witchcraft 1s a defensive one, and prophets use prescriptions from the Holy Spirit to protect church members against witches, and to heal the victims of witchcraft.

Biblical notions of disease and these older vernacular concepts of pollution, death and of witchcraft all form part of the interpretive framework through which Zionists and other Christians interpret AIDS.

Ministers and healers often identify AIDS itself, or at least the skin lesions of persons living with AIDS, as leprosy. I first became aware of this association in conversation with a local minister. “This disease was

there in the days of our forefathers’, he argued. “When you suffered from it they took you to Pretoria and kept you in isolation. ‘Then we called it leprosy.’ A school-principal told me that after her neighbour had developed full-blown AIDS, ‘leprosy appeared all over his body.’ Other informants posited a metaphorical relationship between these conditions, by saying that AIDS was like leprosy. This association is informed by Biblical notions of leprosy rather than by an accurate assessment of clinical evidence. ‘The Old ‘Testament often portrays leprosy or ‘unclean skin lesions’ (zara‘at in Hebrew) as a plague, sent by God as punishment for sin. Lepers, who were ritually

impure and bore a mixture of living and dead flesh, stood opposed to priests and Nazarites who were dedicated to God and avoided any contact with the dead. Lewis (1987: 607) writes that the Biblical leper ‘carried in his person a defiling taint which excluded him absolutely with any contact with holy things, even contact with clean people, even contact with the community’. ‘This contrasts with clinical leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease. Although clinical leprosy can be severely disfiguring (Ilhfe 1987: 214— 229), itis more curable and less infectious than popular images thereof suggest. Barrett (2005) describes leprosy as a chronic disease of the skin, eyes, Internal organs, peripheral nerves and mucous membranes. It does not always produce disfigurement, and multi-layered drug therapy can

render a patient non-infected in six months. He also points out that leprosy 1s ‘amongst the least contagious of human pathogens’ (zbid. 2005: 217). ‘Though its mode of transmission 1s still poorly understood,

318 ISAK NIEHAUS prolonged skin-to-skin contact with an active case 1s necessary for infection. Indeed, Biblical leprosy might not actually be Hansen’s disease. In colonial Africa, Christian missionaries took responsibility for the

treatment of lepers. In some parts of Africa, leprosy became central to the way missionaries projected powerful disease symbols onto the continent (Vaughan 1991: 77-79, and Silla 1998). In this mission discourse, the misery of the leper epitomised the need of Africans for salvation from themselves and their culture. Evoking biblical images of leprosy, missionaries thereby helped establish it as a maximal and very contagious illness in the minds of their African converts, and this representation of leprosy still resonates today. Elderly informants recalled that isolated cases of leprosy occurred in Impalahoek until the 1970s, and they described lepers as horribly deformed and badly ravaged persons, whose flesh literally rotted away whilst they were still alive. I saw a man with leprosy at the home of a diviner about forty years ago. This person’s whole face and arms were affected. His body looked like that of a frog and waters oozed out of his skin. It was a terrible sight. I could not eat in his presence. It was too sensitive for me. I might have vomited. A woman at Andover had leprosy. It was as if something had eaten her underneath the armpit. In the rainy weather she had a large, reddish, rash. She could not move around the village.

My informants also portray leprosy as highly contagious. For example,

a retired school principal and leader of an Apostolic church, told me of his encounter with of lepers on a train. In July 1971 I was travelling by train to my teacher’s college in Polokwane [then Pietersburg]. The train went via Pretoria. Late at night, at Belfast, they told us to change coaches. I desperately wanted to sleep and I forced open the door of a compartment where it said, ‘No Entry’. I found about twelve people standing in front of me. Some of them were without ears or noses. Some were without joints. Some of their fingers were just bones. All the flesh had fallen [off]. ‘They told me that they had been separated from the other passengers because they were suffering from leprosy. Uhen

a guard—who was a white man—came and chased me [away]. I went back to my own coach and just kept quiet. Only near Warmbad could I tell my friends. ‘hey said to me, “You'll be lucky to survive two months’. I immediately went to see a doctor in Polokwane, but he said that I was not yet affected by the disease.

Several symbolic links between leprosy and AIDS became apparent during fieldwork. Residents of Impalahoek present both conditions as

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 319 sions as God’s wrath; describe lepers and persons living with AIDS as exhibiting an anomalous mixture of living and dead flesh, and as being highly contagious. But they recognise AIDS to be deadlier than leprosy. Christians cite many Biblical passages, showing that leprosy 1s amenable to cure. A slave girl from Israel informed the Egyptian king, Namaan, that he could cure himself from leprosy by immersing himself seven times in the river, Jordan. Jesus, himself, healed ten lepers. By contrast, they always see AIDS as being terminal. Christians nonetheless hope that if people all over the world could repent, God might help doctors discover an AIDS vaccine.

Another difference is that initially the symptoms of AIDS are invisible:

It can take up to eighteen years before HIV dismantles the soldiers in your body. At first HIV is only in your blood and only doctors can see it. But leprosy is located outside, on your whole body, and everyone can see it. In the case of leprosy small pocks spoil your face and your skin.

The possibility of concealing AIDS only provides comfort to the afflicted. In villages where the secret powers of witchcraft are a standardised nightmare, the concealed generally inspires greater fear than

the transparent. A more in-depth description of the conjunctions between leprosy, AIDS and social ills recognised among Zionists (such as, but not limited to witchcraft and pollution) helps us to explain the persistence of the stigma that surrounds AIDS. Sex, Social Ills and Sin

Biblical leprosy 1s widely seen as a form of punishment for sin. A Zionist minister mentioned that God warned the Israelites that He would afflict those who did not follow His commandments with pestilence and disease. ‘he minister cited the Biblical example of God who made Miriam leprous after she spoke against her brother, Moses, for marrying a Cushite woman. Likewise many Christians argue that the AIDS epidemic might actually be a form of divine punishment. The notion of sin applied here is far wider than sexual immorality. As in the case of KwaZulu-Natal (Garner 2000), sexual morality is of marginal concern in Zionist and Apostolic churches in Impalahoek.

Church members are fairly open about heterosexuality: condoning teenage sexual exploration, accepting illegitimate children, and not allowing adultery to cause too much disruption (Delius and Glaser 2005).

Heterosexual intercourse has largely positive meanings as a means of

320 ISAK NIEHAUS procreation, pleasure, and of maintaining good health by ensuring a balanced supply of blood (Collins and Stadler 2000). Getting married and bearing children are also ideal attributes of adult personhood. Whilst villagers condemn sexual promiscuous women, they see celibacy and singleness amongst men as dishonourable, and are more suspicious of adult bachelors than they are of men with multiple lovers.” People here recognise several sexually transmitted diseases that, unlike AIDS, are considered amenable to cure. ‘hese include inauspicious sex that brings about an excessive mixture of substances. For example, if a woman had made love to several men, her lovers would absorb substances from each other’s bodies, via her. Should any man who had been

polluted in this manner come into contact with children, they could contract makgoma, and experience convulsions and shortness of breath. ‘They also include gonorrhoea (éoropo), syphilis (leshofela), and a condition

known as ‘shudder’ (/es22). ‘he latter 1s said to be generated by sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who Is in a dangerous state of heat (isa) because she had recently aborted or been widowed. Whereas men are extremely reluctant to speak about AIDS, they freely speak of their personal experiences of gonorrhoea, syphilis, and ‘shudder’. When contracting ordinary sexually transmitted diseases a husband is expected to tell his wife, so that together they could consult diviners to seek a cure. But in the case of ‘shudder’, which 1s potentially fatal, a man should also inform his uncles and aunts. Women tend to perceive sexually transmitted diseases as more shameful than men do, although according to a local teacher, women too have begun to now

speak about them. One key difference that accounts for the silence surrounding AIDS is its terminal nature. Villagers are confident that Christian healers, diviners and medical doctors can easily cure other sexually transmitted afflictions; not so with AIDS.

This absence of a cure for AIDS reinforces the perception of the epidemic as a divine punishment, not for sexual infringements specifically, but for a whole range of social ills. For example, a male Pentecostal preacher told me: In my opinion it [AIDS] is punishment from God that nobody can cure. I read in the Bible how God punished Pharoah and the Israelites when

” In other African countries, where the experience of structural adjustment has taken its toll, AIDS is also symbolic of moral and political decay. See Ingstad (1990) and Dilger

(2003) for informative discussions of the situation in Botswana and in ‘Tanzania.

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 32] they did not follow Him. God does not like the things we do. He does not like how this world is governed—this democracy and this president. God created heaven and earth and gave us rules to live by. A man must marry [a woman], have kids, and rule the family. But these days a man

can marry another man. Now women and children have rights. God does not allow a woman to control her husband. ‘The government permits everyone to do abortions. [hen one last thing, people campaign to be elected, but after they are in power they become corrupt. They eat alone and they don’t do the things they promised. We do things that are shameful. ‘That is why God is punishing us now.

A woman nurse expressed similar opinions, while focusing on a less patriarchal notion of order and disorder: AIDS is punishment from God. It is like Sodom and Gomorrah. We do evil and commit crime. God does not want us to kill another person. Exodus 20 says ‘Don’t Kill’. But we kill each other. There are too many rapes—some men rape young kids. ‘There is abortion. A girl can go to the clinic for abortion and pay 35 rand. ‘This is an evil thing. God will punish us like in the days of Noah. He will drown us all. We must come together and fast and pray to stop AIDS—like when we pray for rain. All nations must give thanks to God.

Religious discourses about sin shift the focus of concern from the trans-

mission of HIV in particular cases, to the ultimate and more general origin of the virus, which is placed with divine wrath at social disorder. In this respect, discussions of AIDS have become vehicles for express-

ing concern about moral and political decay in contemporary South Africa, and about the failure of promises of prosperity to materialise in the post-apartheid era. ‘he concerns expressed by these discussions are more diffuse than a mere focus on heterosexual promiscuity, and include reference to lawlessness, corruption in government, the erosion

of patriarchy, high rates of murder, rape, and also the legalisation of gay marriages and of abortions." ‘These concerns are underpinned by the fact that few households in Impalahoek have realised expectations of prosperity signalled by the end of apartheid. In 1990/1991 Ehazaar Mohlala and I conducted a social survey of 87 households, and thirteen years later we re-interviewed

all previously surveyed households. A clear majority of informants

'° See Hunter’s (2005) discussion of Zulu men, called isoka, who engage in multiple-partnerships with women. ‘The Northern Sotho term is monna nna (lit. ‘a man of men’).

322 ISAK NIEHAUS complained about worsening conditions of life. Despite drastic 1mprove-

ments in the provision of social welfare, unemployment amongst women had remained constant, and unemployment amongst men had increased from sixteen to forty-three per cent (Niehaus 2006). ‘These changes undermined previous expectations of gender relations. Many men could no longer become husbands, fathers and effective providers. [here was also a drastic increase in conjugal tensions, separations, and in acts of gendered violence (Niehaus 2005a). Moreover, criminal networks of young men now preyed upon vulnerable members of their own communities. My informants clearly recognise the prominent role of sexual intercourse in the transmission of HIV, but do not see sex as the only source of stigma and shame surrounding AIDS. ‘They emphasise that husbands might infect faithful wives and that mothers might transmit HIV to their babies. Whilst they perceive masturbation and homosexuality as immoral, they do not regard these kinds of sexual activity as routes of HIV infection (Niehaus 2002a). Contrary to biomedical knowledge a mineworker told me that some of his peers engaged in male-to-male sex on the compounds, precisely because they wished to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Moreover, in the cosmologies prevailing in Impalahoek, the person afflicted with misfortune, 1s not necessarily the one who transgressed a taboo. For example, when a woman bears crippled children it is often beheved that another member of her immediate family had transgressed a funeral taboo (Niehaus 2000b). Yet the fact that the person afflicted may not have caused the affliction does not take away from the abhorrence felt towards the signs of divine retribution. The Stigma of the Lwing Dead

The identification of AIDS with leprosy reinforces the perception that

like lepers, persons with AIDS are tainted with death. hey exhibit an anomalous mixture of living and dead tissue (Lewis 1987, Douglas 1991). Residents of Impalahoek refer to persons with AIDS as ‘living corpses’ (selopo sa gopela) whose bodies are literally decomposing whilst they are still alive."! '! This formulation is not unique to Bushbuckridge. Residents of Hammanskraal and Soweto reportedly describe AIDS as a ‘waiting room for death’ and HIV positive people as ‘dead before dying’ (Viljoen 2005: 70, Ashforth 2002: 166).

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 323 In the final stages AIDS is so dangerous. It is as if your flesh dies, whilst your body is still alive. Your flesh will just fall off and the bones remain. It is also as if there is no blood in your body.

The skin lesions or ‘black spotted marks’ of persons in the latter stages

of AIDS are the clearest indices of death. But there are also other indices of decomposition such as persistent diarrhoea, constant vomiting, coughing from tuberculosis, which indicate the loss of breath, aura, and life. Persons with AIDS are also said to develop swollen glands, mouth sores and fluffy hair, and to become darker in colour (considered a sign of blood loss or of rotting blood). Drastic slimming and boniness too are reminiscent of a corpse. My informants also spoke of the progressive loss of body functions and of reason.

I visited my former field assistant, Jimmy Mohale, only two weeks before his death. Jimmy suffered badly from tuberculosis, but explained to me that his paternal relatives had bewitched him. He developed this idea as a result of prolonged conflict with his own father. Jimmy, nonetheless, described his symptoms in the same way that outsiders spoke about AIDS. He complained of feeling cold, powerless and paralysed; and also of the inability to breathe, walk, or to see properly. The Jimmy that you did research with had only half a life. This life came from my maternal family. I only have ancestors on my maternal side. | am dead on my paternal side... People around here know me as being dead. ‘That is why I don’t have to be seen. You are speaking to a dead person.

Some of Jimmy’s friends suspected that he had died from AIDS-related

sicknesses. ‘hey observed that he had become extremely thin: that the texture of his skin changed; the right side of Jimmy’s face became swollen; and that his hair became patchy, greyish and straight. ‘One can say that he died before the actual death’. In local discourses AIDS is marked by a compression of time. Villagers do not elaborate upon the gradual progression from infection to illness to death, but portray even newly infected persons as tainted with death. The location of persons with AIDS in the anomalous domain betwixt-and-between the categories life and death evidently contradicts normal schemes of classification and provokes abhorrence (Douglas 1970). Nearly all my informants said that they felt more disturbed by a terminally ill person than by a corpse. Adults are sometimes called upon to identify the corpses of relatives at the mortuary, and regularly view corpses at night vigils to pay their last respects. By contrast, having to

324 ISAK NIEHAUS view dying people provokes great pity among observers. As one of my informants explained: I can tolerate a corpse, but not a person who is dying. When I look at such a person his agony will be transferred to me and I will feel his pain. I will be traumatised. I will also think about those who have to care for me when I’m in such a situation.

Villagers sometimes note that persons with AIDS resemble zombies (ditlotlwane). ‘Uhese are beings that are no longer alive, but not yet fully dead, and are owned by witches. In local cosmology witches first take

hold of the victim’s aura and then of different parts of his or her body, until they possess the entire person. However, witches deceive the victim’s kin by leaving an image of him or her behind. ‘The kin, believing that the victim is dead, will bury what they assume to be his or her body, but which 1s instead the stem of a fern tree, that had merely been given the victim’s image. Meanwhile, at home, witches transform their victims into zombies. ‘They allegedly cut the tongues of their victims, reduce them to a metre in size, hide them during the daytime, but employ them at night to perform the mindless tasks of domestic servants and unskilled labourers (Niehaus 2005b). ‘The very same symptoms that biomedical practitioners interpret as evidence of AIDS, Christian healers interpret as evidence that that witches are trying to transform the sick person into a zombie. The healers try to retrieve his or her aura (seriz) from the witches by beating drums, blowing a horn and by loudly calling out his or her name. ‘This analogy with death, or at least with a living death, is an extremely

potent source of stigma. In interviews, my informants explicitly stated that they feared undertaking HIV tests because they found the prospect of discovering that they had been afflicted with a fatal, incurable, disease too overwhelming. Most men said knowledge of being HIV positive would hasten, rather than delay, their deaths. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to be rude. If you test HIV positive you will lose your memory, thinking all the time about death and dying. People will not gossip about you because you screw, but because you are dead. They will take you as dead. They will take you as a living corpse.

We blacks are brought up to believe that death is a terrible tragedy. If they tell me that Iam HIV positive [ll think of dying. Pll automatically think that ’'m dead. I will see death in my mind and I will dream of a grave. Because people fear death so much they would not want to talk to me or even come close to me.

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 3295 Contamination and Exclusion

Throughout colonial Africa leprosy was seen as highly contaminating, and leper settlements were places of isolation where the Christian message was presented as the only sign of hope (Vaughan 1991: 77-99 and Silla 1998). At one stage South Africa’s famous prison, Robben Island, was used as a leprosarrum (Deacon 2003): it was seen as necessary to isolate lepers on a rock in the sea. A comparable degree of isolation, albeit not in camps, 1s now perceived as necessary in the treatment of persons with AIDS. My informants tended to over-estimate the contagiousness of HIV and AIDS. In addition to sexual intercourse, they believe, HIV could be spread by touching others; sharing eating utensils, cutlery and toilets; breathing the same air; nursing a sick person without using latex gloves; or by merely coming into contact with his or her germs, saliva and blood, especially if one has a wound. An archetypical story 1s of an elderly woman who had nursed her sick daughter and seven years later, died from similar symptoms. Residents of Impalahoek also dread the possibility that

HIV positive persons might intentionally set out to infect others. ‘They feel that in a similar manner as lepers were placed under quarantine; persons with AIDS should be excluded from social contact with the community and confined in-doors."” These associations, again, illuminate people’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of AIDS, or even to speak its name. In Impalahoek, corpses

are believed to release contaminating heat. Upon death, the breath (moya) and aura (seritz) of a deceased person, separates from his or her corporeal body. ‘These forces assume a dark, sorrowful form (called thefifi)

that pollutes any object, 1tem or person coming into contact with it. Evidently, the identification of AIDS as a slow, living death implies that their carers or visitors may be exposed to such dangerous processes. Followers of the different religious orientations in Impalahoek agree that pollution has to be avoided at all times when caring for terminally ill persons and also when burying a corpse. All terminally ill persons are secluded from other villagers. ‘This practice 1s observed with such

regularity that one middle-aged informant told me that he had never seen a dying person. “They always hide them away’. Only a select few people—usually a mother or a younger relative—are allowed to nurse, '* In Cuba and in Guantanamo Bay, quarantine was, indeed, adopted as a solution for AIDS (Hansen and Groce 2001, Farmer 2005).

326 ISAK NIEHAUS wash and feed a terminally ill person. These carers are expected to comfort and strengthen (phorola) him or her verbally. Even if the situation is gravely serious, they should never name the person’s disease; say that

he or she 1s about to die, or speak about topics that might upset him or her. A constantly burning fire usually indicates sickness in a household and nobody is allowed to enter the sick person’s room without the carer’s permission: especially not those polluted by birth, sex and death. Villagers signify death by means of symbolic reversals, such as turning the logs in the fire and placing their thick ends in the centre. ‘They always use euphemisms to announce death in the family. hese included saying that the deceased has been ‘taken by hyenas’ (éserwe ke phiri); ‘gone to the place of the ancestors’ (0 ze badimong); that the widow’s ‘house has fallen’ (0 wetse ke nilo), the ‘water had dried up’ (meetse a pshele), or sun had set’ (dikeletswe ke letsatsi). Such talk resonates with the manner in which villagers avoided direct reference to AIDS.

Concomitantly, at the Zionist funerals that I attended great care was taken to avoid pollution. Kin immediately take the corpse to the mortuary, where it 1s thoroughly washed and cleansed. ‘The bereaved family then observe a weeklong period of mourning. They pitch a large

tent in the yard, and the entire household sleeps outside their home to show grief and sorrow. Members of the bereaved family observe various prohibitions. ‘They abstain from sexual intercourse, stop work-

ing in the fields, and refrain from touching children. If a member of the family was not at home during the time of death, he should enter through the main gate facing backwards. Each evening before sunset neighbours and church members visit and console them. At sunset on the Friday of the week of mourning, people fetch the corpse from the mortuary and place it inside the home. Here widows— who had previously been exposed to the dangers of death—prepare the corpse for a final time, and sprinkle ash on all windows to minimise its heat.’ At sunrise ministers conduct a funeral service at their home and a hearse then transports the cofhn to the graveyard. Young men usually place items such as blankets, walking sticks, cups and plates, which had been polluted by the aura of the deceased, in the grave. Throughout the proceedings the widow’s head is covered with a blanket.

Finally, the attendants return to the home of the bereaved family. At

'’ As residue left when the flames of a fire had departed, ash is seen as the opposite of heat, and is used as a cooling agent (Hammond-Tooke 1981: 145).

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 327 the gate, men sprinkle everyone who entered the yard with water—both on their front and back—to cool them, and a burial society serves all attendants with food. After the meal, Zionist healers sprinkle all members of the bereaved family with holy water, and cleansed the yard and all rooms of the house

with a mixture of water, milk, ash, and salt. ‘This is done to ‘tie the spirit’ (hlema moya) of the deceased. However, widows are still perceived

as polluting and have to observe a yearlong mourning period. In the case of persons dying of AIDS, relatives take extreme care to seclude them. I gained the impression that this is done not so much to protect the sick and vulnerable person from others, as to protect others from the danger of contamination that he or she presents. A teacher frequently tried to visit the terminally ill sister of a colleague, but was always told that she had been taken to relatives, elsewhere. ‘Meanwhile’, he said, ‘she was right there in the house.’ Isolation 1s also self-imposed. Whilst visiting Lewis Ngoni, who operates a small store, I heard Christian songs faintly being sung in the house next door. Lewis told me that his neighbour, whom had AIDS, hardly ventures outdoors.

She would not open the door, even if one of her neighbours knocked. Only her mother visited her. Carers greatly fear contaminative exposure, and avoid using any of the same items as a person with AIDS. A cup, I was told, could be infected with AIDS germs from the sick person’s mouth sores. Givens Thobela took almost two years from school to assist his frail grandmother in caring for his maternal uncle. Givens fed and cleansed him, and because his uncle was lame, Givens had to push him in a wheelbarrow to the nearest clinic, a kilometre away. Because neighbours gossiped

that Givens had contracted AIDS, and he asked a nurse to explain to them that she had issued him with latex gloves. Patients with AIDS are seldom hospitalised for more than a few weeks, and are obliged to use clinical services on an outpatient basis. But even in these situations, therapeutic consultations are often very secretive. Lakios Rampiri, a telephone exchange operator at the nearest hospital, recalled that his neighbours woke him very late one evening,

and asked him to take their sister to the outpatients department by car. They had covered her head with a blanket, as if she was a widow at a funeral. ‘Io Lakios this secretive behaviour indicated that she was actually afficted with AIDS. Funeral parlours sometimes wrap the corpses of AIDS victims in plastic

bags, and warn family members not to open these, nor to prepare the

328 ISAK NIEHAUS corpse. At the funeral of those who had died of AIDS, ministers and kin seldom announce the cause of death. ‘They often conduct the funeral service early in the morning, even before sunrise, making it impossible for many mourners to attend. Conclusions

The post-apartheid South African state has built its legitimacy partly on providing social services long denied to its black population. At the same time though, government is under pressure, in the face of persistent economic difficulties, to follow the prescriptions of ‘structural

adjustment’ and neo-liberal reform. As Comaroff (2006) argues, this implies that states divest themselves of many responsibilities they had previously assumed. Religious organisations then often play an increasingly important role in the provision of social welfare. However, as this chapter has pointed out, these religious interventions are not without their limitations. All churches, Mission, Zionist and Apostolic hold views on sex that are rarely conducive to creative attempts to make sex safe in the presence of AIDS and also contrib-

ute more directly to the stigmatisation of the victims of HIV and of AIDS. ‘Though these churches are not alone in portraying AIDS as a terminal condition without hope, the Zionist churches discussed here tend to conceptualise AIDS as a new kind of leprosy, and associate it with sin, death and with contaminating pollution. The analogy with leprosy provides several insights into the negative cultural baggage of AIDS. One of the most important of these 1s that it forces us to shift the focus of our analytical attention from sexual modes of transmission to the intrinsic meaning of AIDS-related diseases and their symptoms in specific social settings. (See Ingstad 1990

and Morgensen 1997). Mbali (2004: 115-6) and Posel (2005: 139) convincingly show that President ‘Thabo Mbeki’s denials of AIDS are a reaction to racist renditions of Africans as “promiscuous carriers of germs’ who display ‘an uncontrollable devotion to the lust of sin’. ‘These international representations often perpetuate colonial constructions in which European nations were differentiated from ‘sexualised others’ in the colonies (Stoler 1995: 134-5). Certainly, non-elites also find such racist renditions offensive. However,

African nationalist concerns do not weigh quite as heavily in their consciousness. In South African village settings the constellations of religious

LEPROSY OF A DEADLIER KIND 329 meanings discussed above are a far more likely source of stigma than sexual promiscuity per se. The conception of AIDS as a polluting and dangerous condition in betwixt-and-between the categories of life and death, is a more likely reason for the prohibition against direct forms of speech and the seclusion from other villagers. ‘These meanings have important consequences for efforts to stem the spread of the epidemic. In their classical study of patients in a leprosarilum in Louisiana, Gussow and ‘Tracy (1977) show that in addition to therapy, de-stigmatisation was an essential strategy to healing leprosy. Patients did not merely respond by ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1971), but actively struggled to overcome the onerous burden of stigma through cultural redefinition. Patients formulated an alternative theory to remove leprosy from it’s hitherto status as a maximal horrible sick-

ness, constructed it as ‘mildly contagious’, and changed its name to ‘Hansen’s disease’. ‘lesting for HIV antibodies and using antiretroviral drugs makes little sense when patients consider themselves to be “dead before dying’. The struggle for hope against fatalism, hinges not only

upon political struggles for accessible medication, but also upon the symbolic redefinition of AIDS as a serious, but manageable chronic illness.

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SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING: RELIGION, HIV/AIDS AND THE MANAGEMENT OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA Marian Burchardt* HIV/AIDS, Religion and Counselling in South Africa

Is religion relevant for dealing with disease? In spite of his well-known refusal to give a definition of ‘religion’, Weber’s sociology of religion begins with the sweeping suggestion that religious or magically motivated action 1s a rational social practice, guided by the rules of experience, directed at this-wordly affais and aiming to enhance wellbeing and long

life (Weber 1972: 318). Moreover, Weber argues that the power of religious experts in interfering with people’s everyday life conduct 1s most directly realised through pastoral care and guidance. ‘This form of religious power to shape people’s care for wellbeing is currently reinforced through the emergence of faith-based health counselling in the context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. While for a prolonged period the religious response to AIDS was either limited to stigmatising discourses, blaming AIDS victims as sinners or characterised by insti-

tutional inertia, during the past decade or so religious activities have gained unprecedented dynamic. Religious organisations are now at the forefront in prevention campaigning and organising care and social support for the diseased; they are running countless support groups and provide medical, psychological, practical and spiritual counselling for people living with HIV/AIDS, their partners and families. Explaining the difficulties and failures of the South African struggle against AIDS, scholars have pointed to the specificities of South Africa’s historical trajectory (Fassin 2007), lack of political attention to AIDS, delayed comprehensive policies, and lack of funding for education and

* ‘This article is based on a paper given at the AEGIS European Conference on African Studies in Leiden/The Netherlands in July 2007. For critical and stimulating discussions of the text I would like to thank Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Daniela Vicherat Mattar, Felicitas Becker and Wenzel Geissler. Moreover, I am grateful to the religious activists of Khayelitsha and Gugulethu for sharing their experiences with me.

334 MARIAN BURCHARDT communication, public health institutions and public sector treatment (Nattrass 2004; Schneider 2002). However, even where institutions were in place, information available and levels of knowledge on transmission

and prevention rising, rates of infection did not appear to decrease. Moreover, despite the slow but increasing enrolment of AIDS patients on antiretroviral treatment regimes (ARVs), mortality rates continued to rise because of lacking patient competence and treatment adherence.

Information about medical facts and their behavioural implications alone seemed insufhicient to change HIV-related patterns of practice, which are more deeply embedded in culture, socioeconomic conditions and mute routines of everyday life than health experts believed. While counselling could have been a solution to these problems, its introduction was characterised by similar institutional inertias. Although AIDS counselling comprises a variety of forms and subjects, 1ts understanding in public health discourse 1s still largely limited to pre- and post-HIV-test counselling. In 1994, the National AIDS Co-ordinating

Committee of South Africa drafted a National AIDS Plan in which counselling was acknowledged as an important strategic component (Richter 2001: 149). Even though the Plan advised that counselling be implemented ‘across the continuum of care’, 1.e. prior to infection,

before and after testing, through the various stages of disease and after death, governmental efforts mainly crystallised around Voluntary Counselling and ‘Testing (VOGT). While by 2000 VC'T was widely

offered, remarkably little governmental attention was paid during the nineties to developing more comprehensive counselling services. Nineteen unevenly funded ‘AIDS ‘Training, Information and Counselling Centres’ (ATICCs) were established to cater for the counselling needs of the whole country, while the Lay Counsellor Project, founded in 1996, set the unassuming goal of recruiting, training, and employing thirty lay counsellors in each province. Only in 2000 the policy process concluded with a comprehensive plan for regulating training and standards (ibid.: 150, 153).!

' According to the 2005 South African National HIV Survey report (Shisana et al. 2005), 30.5°%o of the members of the adult population have done an HIV-test at least once in their life. Females were generally more likely to have been tested than males, as were married respondents compared to unmarried individuals. About 80° of all respondents were aware of a place where they could go for a test and a large majority of those who did test were satisfied with the services they encountered. However, the report does not allow for final conclusions about how successful VC'T’ campaigning eventually is. Many South Africans are being tested for HIV in the context of other

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 339 Compared to the standard repertoire of health education such as radio and ‘I'V broadcasting and public billboards—forms that represent some kind of ‘distance counselling’—counselling sensu strictu is based on the face-to-face interaction between the counsellor and the counselled subjects. It allows for a more profound inculcation of health messages and 1s often organised in a follow-up process, which deepens the educational effects and social control. Counselling thus ushers in two major changes: it intensifies education, and it amplifies the

range of problems perceived to require external therapeutic intervention. Because of their standardised format, it 1s almost impossible to address individual specificities through generic campaigns. Counselling, on the contrary, allows for the taking of these specificities into account and for defining individualised problems and solutions. By negotiating and objectifying this set of problems, the counselling process acts as a means of producing “HIV-positivity’ through a regulated ensemble of discursive practices. The need for counselling was reinforced by the increasing enrolment

of HIV-positive people on ARVs. Before enrolment patients enter yet another round of four counselling sessions carried out by professional or lay medical personnel at the clinics. ‘Uhe purpose of these sessions 1s to give patients the skills necessary for successfully living on treatment, and to educate them about AIDS: about symptoms, their meaning and how to react to them, bodily processes, the properties of their medicine, acceptable and non-acceptable side-effects and their treatment, oppor-

tunistic diseases, proper nutrition etc. ‘hese sessions are the production sites of “‘medicalised identities’ in which the medical meaning and practical requirements of living on HIV-treatment are systematically organised into the daily routines of chronically ill persons. However, it seems that rather than through governmental efforts it is in the religious field that the concept of counselling ‘across the continuum of care’ is increasingly being put into practice. One major reason for this is that with regard to the self-relationships that individuals are incited to establish in counselling settings, that is, to what Foucault termed “truth regimes’, and to the discursive techniques and vocational

medical examinations, specifically in the course of ante-natal exams for pregnant women

(34.1°%), and the 42.7% (ibid.: 83) who stated as a reason for getting tested that ‘they wanted to know their status’ might attach meanings to this statement that significantly diverge from simple conformity with the preventive and educative rationales that the campaign promotes.

336 MARIAN BURCHARDT identities of counsellors, there are a number of electiwe affinities between

the traditional religious practices of pastoral care and spiritual guidance and the more mundane concerns of medical advice. Against this backdrop, the aim of this article is to tease out these afhnities and to thereby capture how religious organisations contribute to the re-shaping of concepts of responsible selfhood and counselled subjectivity. I argue

that AIDS counselling is fundamentally concerned with producing, inculcating and disseminating new notions of moral responsibility and that its promotion by religious organisations 1s a response to the shortcomings of governmental programmes. [The analysis is based on guided interviews with HIV counsellors and participant observations, carried out in Xhosa-speaking townships of Cape ‘Town in 2006. Conceptually, my research is situated within the broader confines of a cultural sociology of public interventions and social technologies that seeks to identify the

mechanisms whereby human subjectivities and conduct are moulded and managed in relation to governmental techniques of power.’ The Rise of the Counselling Society: Therapeutisation and the Professtonalisation of Help

Sociologically, the idea of counselling, i.e. the voluntary search for advice that turns people into clients and help into control, 1s certainly far from new. What is new about counselling in modern society is that the circumstances under which people feel or are made to feel incompetent have multiphed. ‘The enhanced need for professional advice 1s a direct corollary of the growing complexity of modern social life. According to many theorists of modernity (see for example Luhmann 1997), much of this complexity is an outcome of the process of functional diflerentiation, popularly depicted in the phrase that ‘modern individuals know almost everything about almost nothing’. Hence the need for seeking

expertise in the vast field of experience where we know too little for making the ‘right choices’. Following Meyer, the modern concept of actor-hood 1s characterised by the cultural expectation enjoined upon

* Notwithstanding the significant differences between the various denominations and theologies, I am trying to advance a general argument, putting more emphasis on the common characteristics of the ‘subjects of counselling’ than on differences between practical and theological approaches.

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 337 all kinds of actors to situate themselves within far-reaching networks of counselling and expertise (Meyer 2005).° ‘The emergence of modern counselling therefore rests on the organisation of certain types of practices through professionalism, the corresponding construction of ‘experthood’, and thus on the differentiation of cultural knowledge. This knowledge is incorporated in ‘tool kits’ of habits and skills people employ as symbolic vehicles for persistently ordering action through time (for this concept of culture, see Swidler 1986: 275). Schutz and Luckmann (1979: 363) distinguish between common knowledge—knowledge that everyone has at hand for coping with the problems of lfe—and special knowledge that relates to specific problems. ‘The latter is only passed on to those who are professionally concerned with such problems through processes of secondary socialisation.

It would be futile to make a comprehensive list of all the areas of modern social life which counselling has re-shaped in one way or another.* Theorists of reflexive modernisation even suggest that this transformation through which social processes are increasingly mediated by widely distributed networks of technical expertise presents

the most distinguishing feature of modernity in its current phase (Beck/Giddens/Lash 1994). In relation to technologies of care for the wellbeing of bodies and souls, this transformation is expressed in the overall tendency towards *therapeutisation’. In the broader context of their

theoretical elaborations on the social construction of reality, Berger and Luckmann developed a concept of therapy, which 1s stripped of its more narrowly defined medical connotations to refer to a specific mode whereby the adherence of human subjects to institutionalised meanings and definitions of reality is secured (Berger/Luckmann 1969: 121). As an institutionalised method of social control, therapy ranges

from exorcism and pastoral care to psychoanalysis and myriad other types of pedagogical and problem-solving counselling. The critical dictum of ‘therapeutisation’ translates this concept into a sociological

’ The term modernity as an interpretive category is broadly taken to refer to diverse cultural configurations in which the quest for autonomy has been transformed into the generalised (expectation and) obligation to autonomy. ‘he close associations of modernity with functional differentiation and the reflexivity of social practice reveal that modernity and counselling (broadly conceived) are to some degree coextensive. * 'This list would comprise issues such as family and marriage counselling, dietetics, career counselling and household-level family planning. ‘lhe differences between counsel-

ling and education are often rather gradual than qualitative. [he increasing tendency within modern society to subsume people under diverse regimes of help and control has been famously captured by Ivan Illich (1996) in the notion of “expertocracy’.

338 MARIAN BURCHARDT diagnosis according to which we are witnessing a rising extent to which

people subject themselves to the regulatory and helping regimes of control by experts.

Importantly, within the domain of everyday life there is a particularly closely-knit and elaborated network of counselling relationships that focuses on health, psychic and spiritual wellbeing. Through these relationships the human body and soul are turned into objects of intensified efforts of knowledgeability, management, control and supervision. These efforts are triggered by a shifting focus of medical practice from ‘Iness’ towards a concern with ‘health’ and thus to preventive therapeutic strategies, health maintenance, health promotion programmes and chronic illness management (Moreira 2007). ‘The expansion of counselling practices around HIV/AIDS in South Africa articulates

these shifts. In the following section, I describe the involvement of religious organisations in the current social landscape of HIV/AIDS counselling. lighting HIV/AIDS through Religious Counselling in South Africa: A Phenomenological Sketch

The above arguments have mainly been taken to reflect recent Western developments. The fight against HIV/AIDS, however, has inadvertently

drawn some developing countries into the same dynamic, with the interrelated processes of globalisation, development and modernisation

and the ways people engage with them, being the principal forces of change. People in Cape ‘Town make routine use of the expert systems surrounding HIV/AIDS, and the more the self-reinforcing spirals of supply and demand expand the stronger the cultural expectation to seek advice from experts. The very meaning that popular discourse affords the idea and practice of HIV counselling, however, greatly varies and clearly exceeds the definitions of public health discourse. Grasping this

variety forces us to move away from the medical world of clinics, to ‘follow the people’ (Marcus) and tracing the diverse social encounters in which HIV-related issues are rendered subjects of intervention. In everyday life, people get in touch with HIV/AIDS counselling in various ways: On the one hand, it can take place in the context of prevention campaigns; for example many of Cape lown’s churches run youth groups meeting regularly under the auspices of a pastor or a church-afhliated youth worker and discussing AIDS in the broader context of intimate relationships, (unwanted) teenage pregnancy, abstinence

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 339 and fidelity, sexually transmitted diseases, and reproductive health. ‘The charity wings of churches or other faith-based organisations (BOs) use similar organisational forms within church or neighbourhood communi-

ties. Furthermore, family members of HIV-positive people often seek technical, practical and spiritual advice about how to deal with them from their pastors or other church-based lay counsellors. On the other hand, religious actors are also involved in pre- and post-test counselling. Within the South African slogan “Know your status!’ the exclamation mark signifies an ethical demand, turning the practice of testing into a dispositwe of truth (Hondrich 1988). ‘The act of handing over a small quantity of blood to be checked for HIV-antibodies in scientific labs as a practice revealing the truth about oneself 1s thus invested with moral significance that has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of life history. Encouraging people to get tested is part of the standard repertoire of I'BO counselling in Cape ‘Town. Rhetorically, these efforts are framed exactly through such claims to ‘knowing yourself’, and theologically underpinned by the declaration that while one might hide the truth from oneself, God knows it anyway. Counselling therefore translates the medical truth into a sexual truth, which much in the same way cannot be hidden from God. Prince and Geissler (2007: 144) argued that for the Luo of Western Kenya the Christian engagement with AIDS contributed to drawing sex from the darkness of the night into the daylight of discourse. ‘he same holds true for Cape ‘Lown’s Xhosas.

Pre-test counselling may take place in the FBO premises or at a person’s home. Many FBOs and churches also collaborate with local clinics by sending counsellors to test-sites. ‘The overriding purposes of these sessions are to prepare people for the test and to strengthen their conviction that they are doing the nght thing, whatever the result. ‘The test 1s followed by post-test counselling, which aims at advising people on how to cope with the results. ‘Uhis includes very strong psychological

but also spiritual and practical components. If the result 1s negative, people are encouraged ‘to stay negative’, 1.e. to take the result as an opportunity and to henceforth live a virtuous sexual life in religious as well as medical terms. kor married people, virtuousness naturally equals

marital fidelity while unmarried youth are invited to follow the path of salvation through opting for ‘secondary virginity’. If the result is » Most of the unmarried people who use religious test-related counselling services have already had sexual intercourse. Lhe practical, albeit theologically problematic,

340 MARIAN BURCHARDT positive, the need for assistance is usually overwhelming and not to be satisfied within a single session. ‘he first session is primarily dedicated to the psychological and spiritual dimensions of coping, to exploring together with the individual the psychological benefits of selective disclosure, and to preparing her or him to be counselled by others within their social networks. Post-test counselling sessions are therefore the first sites where the social life of H1V-positwity is being arranged. While for medical professionals the job of counselling is usually finished once the client has left, religious counsellors are intervening in the practical organisation of the daily lives of HIV-positive people in very different ways, as the following examples will demonstrate.

Throughout my field research I have been closely following the activities of Melisizwe,° a forty-one year old self-inspired religious AIDS activist from the township of Khayelitsha. Melisizwe, a former member

of the ANC’s military wing, converted to Pentecostal Christianity in the small neighbourhood church ‘El Shaddar’ in the mid 1990s where after a while he was ‘ordained’ as a lay pastor. The religious vocation to giving love and compassion and the need to connect his social and political activism with new objectives have later become the foundation for his choice of engaging in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. For a number of years he regularly organised HIV/AIDS information workshops with the help of some HIV-positive women from the neighbourhood. ‘The women, just as he himself, have received expertise on AIDS through training workshops in the local office of the ‘Treatment

Action Campaign (TAC);’ with these women he is also undertaking workshop tours through cities and villages in his native Eastern Cape Province at least twice a year. In January 2006 he founded an AIDS support group whose members meet once a week in a tiny community hall and transformed themselves into some of the most proactive contributors to the already vibrant scene of local civil society activism. In

construct of ‘secondary virginity’ is employed by many Christian counsellors as a specifically religious underpinning for their clients’ motivation to future abstinence. It 1s often connected to missionary efforts and placed within the evangelical framework of conversion where it makes sense as a corollary of the second birth that Evangelicals capture in the notion of ‘twice born Christians’. ° All personal names in this article have been changed. ’ The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is one of the biggest AIDS social movement organisations worldwide. It is primarily dedicated to empowerment, fighting stigma and spearheading the struggle for the universal provision of antiretroviral treatment (ARVs) through the public health sector.

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 34 | one of our meetings he passed me a copy of a newly produced flyer of his church community; not accidentally, the only non-sacramental service the flyer mentions 1s HIV counselling. In response to my question

of what he 1s actually doing when offering counselling, he recounted the following story:

One day, Sptwo, a friend from his church congregation, had been called to the house of his forty-eight year old mother because she had become seriously ill. His mother told him that in the course of the medical exams she had been tested HIV-positive. Suspecting her husband, a long distance truck driver, of entertaining sexual relationships with

other women during his long periods of absence, it seemed clear to her that it was him who had infected her. Spiwo decided to inform his older brother and his younger sister. His siblings are getting so furious about the alleged behaviour of their father and its consequences that they decided to ask him to leave the house once and forever as soon as he returns from his current tour. When their father is in fact being confronted with the situation on his return, he rejects their version of the story and instead accuses his wife of sexual infidelity during his absence, a stance fully supported by his own siblings. While Spiwo tried to mediate between his own and the father’s family, his own siblings were

not ready to compromise and the situation escalated. When Melisizwe eventually emerged at the scene the conflict had advanced to the point that both parties were unwilling to talk to each other. He was thus left with no alternative to talking to them individually. He recalls, (...) I said to the husband, man, you have to be honest to yourself and Jesus will forgive you. And then the daughter and the son, I said to them, who are you to judge your father, and also to the mother I said, yes, you are in pain but are you free from sin? We all have sinned. Nobody 1s free from sin. What you must do 1s you must feel the pain of the other. You must love the other. I said you have to talk and to listen to your husband, and the children, you have to be there for your parents. And so I prayed with them, I prayed with every single one of them. Then I organised a big party, with lots of food. ‘Chey all came together and everybody was crying. [he father 1s back in the house now and he promised to me that he will do an HIV-test and support his wife.

The story is remarkable both for its highly typical unfolding (it could

have been taken from a textbook on the social context of AIDS in South Africa) and outstanding resolution. For those involved it began when Spiwo’s mother fell ill, having had a serological test and an ensuing suspicion of having been infected by her husband. Since AIDS 1s

342 MARIAN BURCHARDT a communicable disease, the event of the mother’s illness opened a space for speculations about the past. ‘The mushrooming of speculations invariably transforms the biological entity of the virus into a social agent, producing patterns of blame and suggesting scripts for collective illness narratives such as the one above. While the fear of being abandoned and left with no means for survival often prevents women from being openly confrontational with their husbands or even from disclosing their own test-results (Burchardt 2007), Spiwo’s mother confided in her children.

The fact that eventually her children are pushing the conflict to the extreme appears to confirm that they were prepared to care for their mother’s livelihood. ‘This support and the relative negotiating power it affords her seem pivotal in ‘persuading’ her husband to subject himself to Melisizwe’s counselling efforts.

What was conspicuous about his way of narrating this event was his difficulty to verbalise of what his intervention eventually consisted.

For him just as for other lay counsellors who are not academically trained, counselling consists of a flow of speaking and listening. It 1s a mode of engaging with the other that remains within a pre-theoretical, practical consciousness in which a shared cultural knowledge and collective norms of sociality rather than psychological counselling models come to bear. In the above example, his assignment is to moderate the re-creation of trust and mutual support among family members in a situation of overt conflict.

Central to these conflicts is not merely the fact of suffering itself but competing claims to truth: the truth about the responsibility for the ailment, about intimate bonds, love and sex. Although Melisizwe might think that it was most likely the husband who infected his wife, his main objective is not to reveal this truth. Instead of staging a collective confession ritual, he persuades everybody to critically reflect upon himself. ‘The primary objective is foregrounding mutual obligations and duties that allow the family to stay together; here, HIV counselling is tantamount to family counselling.’ Through the individual conversations, and—in his view—the transformative power of prayers, he prepared

the family to accept that the best way of dealing with the illness is restoring supportive family relationships. ‘These agreements are then ritually ratified through the gathering as the practical enactment of the renewed family contract and their mutual forgiveness. In conversations

° On family conflicts in the context of AIDS in Tanzania see Dilger 2005: 94f-

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 343 with other residents of ‘Lown I, many repeatedly referred to Melisizwe as ‘a man of faith’. It seems that the power to effectively influence the conflict rested not least with the authority that being ‘a man of faith’ affords him.

It is evident that the object of HIV-counselling is not limited to affecting the psychological coping, knowledge, attitudes and practices of individuals. Often counselling attempts to interfere with social relationships, 1.e. family networks, or typically also intimate relationships between women and men. This latter case is manifest in the narrative of Nokubonga who works as an HIV-project coordinator and counsellor for the small health-service-oriented FBO ‘Phakama’. When Phakama was founded in 2001, Nokubonga began as a volunteer. Being a professional but unemployed nurse, she already had extensive experience and expertise in providing medical care. Later she improved her capabilities by participating in a training course for home-based caregivers, through the so-called DOTS? training for tuberculosis treatment, and eventually by becoming an AIDS lay counsellor through ATICC training in 2004. ‘The project started by sending a handful of caregivers to the local clinic where they would be referred to infected individuals or already bed-ridden AIDS patients to assist them with their daily struggle for survival. Later, they founded an HIV/AIDS support group and a more generic women’s support group. Nokubonga has since become

the director of the organisation. The role of personal faith for her work surfaces when she asks herself how she manages to deal with all the hardship that her work imposes upon her: ‘I am looking after the project, I am looking after those children who don’t get paid, all these things come back to me, and then I am busy with proposals. But God helps me because sometimes I ask myself, how did I go through here? But then I am a Christ believer’. Out of this religious inspiration she also decided to volunteer for ‘AIDS Response’, an organisation that aims to mobilise churches to engage with AIDS. Soon she notes the lack of activism within the Pentecostal field, and being a member of the Pentecostal “United Apostolic Faith Church’ herself she perceives it as her natural mandate ‘to start at home’. “Uhere’, she explains, ‘I also have to use the tactics from counselling and things like that, but

” The WHO-endorsed DOTS (Direct Observing Treatment Surveillance) Strategy is a labour-intensive part of the fight against ‘IB, based on the control and counselling of patients by regularly visiting primary healthcare workers.

344 MARIAN BURCHARDT in these churches it is easy for me because I use the bible. If they say “no, we don’t want to deal with that”, I go to the bible and ask, “what did God say about love?” ‘Then it 1s easy to capture them.’ Within Phakama, the quest for counselling emerges as the caregivers are increasingly struggling with patients who deny their disease and refuse to adopt the necessary ‘healthy lifestyle choices’. As a result, their health status rapidly deteriorates. In such cases, the caregivers inform Nokubonga and she visits them for face-to-face counselling at home. Being asked to describe the circumstances of HIV-counselling in greater detail she recounted the following incident: One day she was called by the support group coordinator to help her with a case, which apparently the coordinator felt incapable to handle. Pumzile, a man in his forties, seemed unable to come to terms with his anger at his infection. Convinced that he had been infected by his girlfriend, he had stated in various group discussions that ‘there is nothing wrong with sleeping without condoms because I am already infected’ while, as he notes, he ‘hasn’t been born with HIV’. His anger turns into a desire for random revenge by infecting others, which would at least give him the satisfaction of ‘not dying alone’. Subsequently, Nokubonga decides to visit him at home. She listens to him as he repeats his arguments to her and responds as follows: Then I said, listen, yes, it is alright. But tell me, when you think you give it to somebody, what do you think about your body? Your immune system is already low. So the more you give it to somebody the more you reduce your GD4-count. How can your immune system then fight the virus? [hen he says, ‘it doesn’t matter because I am already dying.’ Then I said, when did your doctor tell you that you are HIV-positive? And he said, ‘in 2003.’ I asked, how much time were you alive afterwards? And he says, ‘many years.’ And I said, so why do you want to kill yourself? ‘But Sisi, this girl gave this to me, and she is very healthy.’ (...) Then I said, maybe you didn’t get it from her! (...) And he just said ‘ya ya ya, Sisi.’ Then later he came to my office and said, “Thank you Sisi, thank

you very much. I love my partner and I won't spread this thing. From now on I tell my partner we must use this thing.’

Similar to the case of Spiwo’s mother, the issue of blame looms large within the horizon of Pumzile’s thinking. Even four years after discover-

ing his status and despite having received information and emotional support as a regular member of a support group, he is still haunted by questions of guilt. Although the relationship to his girlfriend has survived

the difficulties related to HIV-disclosure within the couple, it appears to be continually stressed by the shadow that his restricted future life

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 3495 perspective throws into the present. Previous to counselling, Pumzile saw himself as a ‘victim of AIDS’ whose past life circumstances were essentially defined by others and therefore beyond his own control. Through the comment that he has not been born with HIV he faithfully suggested that the harm has been done to him through events he was unable to affect. The structure of the relationship between social reality and individual agency of the past is being projected into the present and a radically shrinking future. Nothing of what he is doing with his life—save the wish to alleviate his despair by ‘sharing’ it with others—has any real significance since he is ‘already dying’ anyway. Death has completely invaded life and logically forecloses the possibility of constructing a subjective life project—auntil the experience of counselling. ‘Through the counselling conversation, Nokubonga provides Pumzile with medical information about the consequences of his sexual

behaviour, thereby directing his attention not to what he is doing to others, but to his own body. More importantly however, the mere fact that he is still alive is vested with a morality of hope, reconstructing a perspective for positive life projects that his fatalism had shattered. The counselling discourse articulates an ethical imperative to assume the responsibility for the possibilities which “the fight of his body’ offers him. At the end, Pumzile accepts Nokubonga’s advice; given the force

of his prior rejection to do so, this choice exhibits the radicalism of a personal conversion. In this section I have tried to show how faith-based HIV-counselling, far from being limited to test-related interventions, emerges as a highly flexible and versatile arrangement powerfully interfering with the

experience of HIV/AIDS and the ensemble of interpretive and ethical categories on which this experience is based. ‘This flexibility manifests itself in relations to the social relationships it attempts to aflect, the practical purposes and techniques, and significantly, the types of knowledge it incorporates. Faith-based counselling creatively intermingles religious knowledge with medical expertise and communication skills. All these skills and knowledge are acquired in trajectories of secondary socialisation to constitute a variously defined status of ‘AIDS experts’. The symbolic economy of the therapeutic enterprise thoroughly rests with the recognition of this status by the counselled subjects. Moreover,

in terms of the mechanisms that make counselling effective, in other words: that ensure that people do what the counsellor wants them to do, counselling interventions consist of complex mixtures of education, information, and persuasive talk. Melisizwe appeals to his client family

346 MARIAN BURCHARDT through the truth of the Christian ethics of love and compassion. Here, the fact that the family’s adherence to this truth is a precondition to the success of the intervention reveals the sublime but nevertheless forceful proselytising nature of Melisizwe’s approach. What Nokubonga places at the centre of the counselling interaction, on the contrary, 1s the knowledgeability of the client’s physical and sexual body and the objective possibilities for a positive life project through ethical sexual practice. In both cases, counselling works to enlarge the range of objects that are being enlisted in the therapeutic regime through the healing force of conversation. For Melisizwe, it is the whole matrix of familial relationships that needs cure, while Nokubonga’s intervention effectively serves to intensify the medicalisation of Pumzile’s sexuality. Regardless of the different empirical settings and practical aims, however, the informative, educational and persuasive aspects of counselling interactions invariably reflect a process of the inculcation and dissemination of concepts of moral responsibility for which faith acts as a symbolic lever. Melisizwe reinstates Spiwo’s family as a community of care, whereas Pumzile subjects himself to the ethical imperative of hope inherent in both, the knowledge he receives and the means Nokubonga employs to instil a sense of ethical selfhood. Very often, counselling is not a one-off encounter but rather organised as a follow-up process, while the practical issues largely remain the same or expand: adhering to the treatment regime and a healthy diet, abstaining from smoking, drinking alcohol and unprotected sex, building a supportive social network, overcoming lethargy by promoting self-activation, acquiring skills for economic security through employment, and above all, shaping a new identity. ‘This 1s the moment when long-term counselling relationships are established. ‘The case of Pumzile has already

given important hints as to how counselling may function to initiate transformations of the self. On the basis of this broader ethnographic picture it is now possible to gain a better theoretical understanding of the intrinsic relationships between religion and counselling, and of the ways religion and psychology are infused within the process of transforming ethical selfhood. Reformulating and specifying some of the comments

I made in the context of my discussion on ‘therapeutisation’, I argue that religion and health counselling converge in turning an enlarged notion of health into an objective of salvation. Faith-based counselling transforms the ‘therapeutic gaze’ into heterogeneous modes for people to scrutinise and act upon themselves, and thus into creative forms of ethical subject-formation.

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 347 Between Religion and Health: Post-religious and Post-secular Forms of Ethical Subject-Formation

People’s practices are guided by collectively negotiated meanings of

the situations within which they are placed. While under normal circumstances meanings are relatively stable, crisis of meaning and ontological security may arise from critical experiences such as HIV infection. ‘he counselling process may therefore be construed as the social space within which the meanings of disease, and of living with it, are established (Berger/Luckmann 1969: 166). In that aspect it bears remarkable resemblances to religion in providing the symbolic resources for making sense of subjective experiences. If the meanings of experiences are to persist in time they typically require the support of what Berger had called ‘plausibility structures’: social relationships with others who confirm and legitimate the ways we perceive, evaluate and act in social life and with whom we intersubjectively (re-)construct certainty by linking experience and expectation (Berger 1967). As a means to this end, the counselling relationship zmitates and partially replaces the religious community (Berger/Luckmann 1969: 169), while the specific case of religious counselling appears to combine the ‘benefits’ of both types of plausibility structures. However, since HIV infection is a chronic disease its ‘social treatment cannot be modelled according to Berger and Luckmann’s general sociological model of therapy as re-socialisation and re-integration into society (Gbid.: [21f.). It rather presents the special case of what the same authors have called ‘metamorphosis’: the construction of new identities and personal transformations that, compared to the rather soft shifts in the definition of subjective reality in everyday life, appear as all-encompassing (ibid.: 168). Gounselling relationships, just as psychotherapies, can be seen as the cultural ‘laboratories’ for enacting such transformations. Counsellors are the ‘significant others’ who lead clients into their

new reality by virtue of identification of the latter with the former. Counselling constructs the new subjective reality of the client through the objectifying force of language and conversation, especially since it draws on one of the most powerful reality-constructing techniques of conversation, the confessional practice (ibid.: 165). The historical archetype of metamorphosis, however, which all other secular forms of re-socialisation and identity formation qua therapy have imitated, 1s religious conversion (ibid.: 169). Conversion draws the individual into a process of personal transformation in which life 1s reorganised

348 MARIAN BURCHARDT by breaking with the past and projecting a radically changed present into the future. It thus creates new temporalities of life, 1.e. new linkages of past, present and future that closely resemble how social and temporal structures work to constitute new models of subjectivity in secular counselling settings. In this volume, Nguyen shows how conversion 1s mediated by confessional technologies, refashioning the self as

discourse in HIV treatment programmes. For understanding the relationships between religion and counselling in South Africa, however, it is important to note that the ‘experience of conversion’ as articulating personal transformation and ratifying it a tame (Martin 1990) is at the heart of the most significant aspect of religious change within African Christianity over the past three decades: the rise of Neo-Pentecostalism (Robbins 2004: 127).'° Personal transformation, the key notion around which Neo-Pentecostalism 1s organised (Martin 1990: 163), implies a step ‘that separates people both from their past and the surrounding social world’ (Robbins 2004: 127). Neo-Pentecostal discourse celebrates discontinuity and organises the importance of disjunctive experiences in and through rituals of rupture (ibid.: 128). Building on his findings in Ghana, van Dyk (2001: 226) even argues that completely breaking with the past and deliverance are seen as key elements in Pentecostalism’s ritual structure. In a more general and fundamentally conceptual sense, it 1s also this ‘step’ and its temporal implications that I would argue exhibits most strongly how religion has paved the way for the emergence of modern psychological forms of self-transformation. Within the sociology of religion, ‘Thomas Luckmann (1967) was one

of the first to emphasise the increasing importance of psychological counselling in providing individuals with a stabilising moral framework

in their search for meaning under the fragmented circumstances of

'° Many authors have stressed that the emergence of Neo-Pentecostalism in Africa can be explained by its capacities to offer to its followers the symbolic resources for understanding and acting upon the consequences of modernity (Gifford 1994; Dilger in this volume). Gifford emphasises that ‘here members find shelter, psychological security,

solidarity. (...) In this new world they can forge a new notion of self, for here they can begin to make personal decisions. (...) In this narrow sphere an individual can bring control, order and dignity’ (Gifford 1994: 531). Moreover, the Pentecostal gospel of wealth and health (ibid: 516) strongly resonates with subjective experiences of suffering and illness (for the case of Ghana, see Meyer 1998), whose objectified expressions it helps to shape. Neo-Pentecostalism can thus be construed as a mode of articulating the contingencies and uncertainties that ensue from African modernity in its various guises, and among which HIV-infection figures prominently.

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 349 modern social life. Following Luckmann, the rise of these kinds of regimes of advising people on existential issues reflects a shift of functions away from ecclesiastical institutions; but instead of viewing these cultural changes as simple reflections of the secularisation process, he underscored the religious function these new psychological practices fulfil, and accorded them the sociological status of a transformed maniJestation of the religious, a concept driven home in the famous notion of the ‘invisible religion’ (Luckmann 1967). A similar concern with the relationship between Christian religion and the changing forms of subjectivity 1s expressed within Foucault’s writings on the production of subjectivity, power, and the technologies of the self (Foucault 1982; 1988; 1993); that is, technologies ‘(...) that concerned the ways in which one should undertake the practical organization of one’s daily business of living’ (Rose 1997: 297). These processes are taking place within historical power relations, 1.e. at the intersection of practices of government and practices of ethical selfformation (Dean 1994: 147). ‘The encounter of the two Foucault later defined as ‘governmentality’, as ‘the contact between technologies of domination of others and those of the self’ (Foucault 1988: 19). With regard to the institutional arenas in which these processes unfold, Dean observes that ‘practices of the self” are manifest in activities of the ‘psy’ disciplines, social work, medicine, education, and established religion, as well as those associated with cults of self-liberation and self-improvement (Dean 1994: 153). In the context of his discussion of ‘pastoral power’, that is, a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world (Foucault 1982: 783), Foucault too draws our attention to the changing interrelations between religion and health. ‘Uhe increasing concern with health and wellbeing, he notes, should be understood as a shift in the objective of pastoral power, away from a salvation in the next world and towards the salvation in this world. Similar to Luckmann, he interprets this change in functional terms as a decline of ecclesiastical institutions and the concomitant evolution of new structures that work out the same problem with different instruments (Foucault 1982: 783). Accordingly, Valverde defined the governmentality-inspired study of moral regulation as ‘characterized by the common interest in analyzing post-religious forms of ethical and moral regulatory practices’ (Valverde 1994: viii).

The emergence of HIV/AIDS-counselling appears to reverse this situation, and therefore calls for reconsidering these theoretical

390 MARIAN BURCHARDT assumptions. I suggest that we conceptualise the relationship between religion and modern psychological counselling as an exchange in terms of two distinct discursive arrangements cross-fertilismg one another. In line with the propositions of Luckmann and Foucault, this involves the analysis of how the historical functions of religion have been appropriated and re-articulated by other, newly emerging institutional arrange-

ments, and how they have been changed in the course of this. With regard to counselling, three of these changes are quite obvious: firstly, the shift in the objective of expert interventions from other-wordly salvation to a concern with wordly ethics; secondly, the transformation of the instruments of self-scrutiny through the deployment of techniques originating in psychology; and thirdly, the changing character of the relationship between counsellor and the counselled individual. Within the South African struggle against AIDS, however, the situation has changed. Religion—instead of being replaced by a concern

with health—increasingly concerns itself with health by adopting psychological techniques. It thereby re-claims and re-appropriates the ‘subjects of counselling’ and refigures the ‘objects of salvation’.'' The rhetoric, the instruments, and even partially the objective of religious health counselling itself are now informed by psychological discourses of mental wellbeing. In addition to that, FBOs see these practices as parts of broader efforts to build a sustainable community life; even smaller township-based faith initiattves now make routine use of modern social work concepts and speak the language of ‘capacity-building’, “social capital building’, “community outreach’ etc. In fact, most counsellors and other church-based AIDS activists participate in training workshops where they are educated in how to counsel, run support groups, handle public relations and manage an HIV/AIDS programme according to the insights of management theory and organisational sciences. While tendencies towards institutional isomorphism are certainly at work, I do not suggest that religious AIDS work looks like that of NGOs or governmental agencies.'* With regard to counselling, I would rather argue that the specificities of faith-based approaches lie in a peculiar '' It has often been noted that within the broader historical context of African colonialism and post-colonialism religious institutions played a pivotal role in the delivery of welfare and health services to the general population, a fact that certainly holds for South Africa as well. I suggest that the societal significance of this type of religious engagement has been massively expanded with the arrival of the AIDS pandemic. '* The term ‘institutional isomorphism’ refers to the processes whereby different organisations are in their practices becoming increasingly similar, either through imitat-

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 351 mode of incorporating educative, medical, and psychological practices into the overall pastoral concern with shaping ethical selves. It 1s in this context that we can trace the emergence of fost-secular forms of ethical subject-formation through an analysis of how spiritual and psychological

aspects are intermingled through such practices.'’ In the remaining section, I take the analysis further by exploring how by progressively problematising everyday life practices and incorporating them into regimes of self-knowledge faith-based counselling acts as a process of

subject-formation. ‘To this end, I draw on the example of the FBO Izandla Zethemba" and the narratives of two of their counsellors and delineate the aspects of faith that undergird this practice.” From Despair to Eternal Life: Faith and the Responsibilisation of the Diseased Self

At the initiation of counselling processes, counsellors know about the typical problems of HIV-positive people but not about the specificities of an individual case. Since this is seen as a prerequisite for success, counselling unfolds as a series of self-revelations qua truth discourses by the diseased individual vis-a-vis whom the counsellor acts as the exterior memory of the confessional analysis. Counselling thus consists of successively eliciting personal information, mapping out general choices and measuring them against the particulanties of indwidual life situations. ‘Through these conversations individuals understand themselves through a regime of self-inquiry. Ideally they are followed by the subject embark-

ing on the pursuit of self-mastery and of the successful management of everyday life. ‘he role of the counsellor is to instigate this self-interrogation, mediating how people consider their choices. In this sense, she

ing and copying or through external pressures, such as cultural expectations, standards set by donors etc. (Powell/diMaggio 1986).

'’ T want to stress that the term does not imply assumptions about any kind of overriding secularisation processes of Christianity within the South African context. It solely refers to a certain type of reconfiguring the relations between religion and ethics through the professionalisation of religious care of bodies and souls via the incorporation of practical techniques that have been developed outside of the religious domain proper. '* Xhosa for ‘hands of hope’. ' "The empirical cases should be seen as reflecting two types of trajectories and corresponding social constructions of the ‘subjects of counselling’ among others; nonetheless they clearly depict quite typical ways of working out the typical social problematic of making moral subjects in the times of AIDS.

392 MARIAN BURCHARDT acts as temporary proxy of the patient’s conscience. She impersonates this conscience whose interactive construction is the condition sine gua non of ethical subjectivity. These structural patterns are clearly reflected in the cases of Sarah

and Martha who are working as HIV/AIDS counsellors for Izandla Zethemba, an FBO dedicated to AIDS work with close organisational ties to a Pentecostal church called Jubilee. he organisation has its base in the township of Gugulethu and 1s one in a series of -BO-type organisational offshoots the church has created over the years with the aim of optimising the management of its charitable activities. Since Izandla Zethemba engages in ‘outreach crusades’ on a regular basis, the organisation’s activities are well-known throughout the neighbourhood. As a part of the analysis of faith-based counselling processes, I identified two patterns of how faith and biography interact in shaping the professional practice of counselling. Sarah is a thirty-four year-old single. Having started her activities for Izandla Zethemba as a volunteering receptionist, she has gradually moved up within the organisation and is now employed as a project officer. She is coordinating many of the activities, runs two supports

groups and offers individual counselling. The fact that she is still a childless single at the age of thirty-four she sees as a major personal accomplishment in a cultural environment dominated by the patriarchal expectation to engage in heterosexual relationships and bear children. She closely associates patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality—polygamy and multiple partnering, in her view the modernised version thereof—with ‘backward tradition’. Against this backdrop, the

church is rendered a modern social space neutralising the negative forces of tradition and supporting her struggle for female autonomy. The idea of achieving autonomy through disassociation from backward ‘community values’ by joining the church strongly influences her way of counselling young women on how to organise intimate relationships:

as a form of self-inquiry about what they—as autonomous individuals—want to ‘achieve in life’.

Unlike many others who are volunteering for Izandla Zethemba,

Sarah has a high level of formal education. She graduated from university with a degree in communication and subsequently started working, first as a lay counsellor for domestic violence at the National Integration of Crime and Rehabilitation Centre, later as a telesales person and DJ for a local radio station. Not being restrained by family

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 393 obligations or the limiting implications of couple life, she finds fulfilment in pursuing a professional career. In telesales marketing, she 1s granted

the award for the best saleslady of the Western Cape and earns good money; she enjoys the ‘fame of some sort’ and to ‘get into places with press card and all of those things’ that working as a radio DJ aflords her. Until this point her life history might be neatly summed up in the notion of ‘success’. In 2000, however, her life changes when her sister falls ill and reveals to her that she is HIV-positive. ‘This critical experience might have triggered the idea that her individualised striving for personal autonomy through pursuing a professional career ‘was not

really me because I really felt empty on the other side’. In her narrative she connects the experience of her sister’s HIV-infection with the decision to join the Jubilee church. Her motivation to enrol in an HIV/AIDS counselling training upon a request from her church she describes as follows: And I had this passion (...). And I just, if I was counselling people, it was

something that I was feeling, it was something I was doing out of my passion. And you know, I think it was what God laid for me, the passion for other people. I didn’t know it was coming from God then. And then

this is how I got involved (...). It is just I joned the church you know and I had the skills with me and I knew I wanted to be something, and cause I’ve got passion for people and listening to people as well, people’s stories, which is so interesting, | knew that I had to do something.

Within her new working environment she draws on resources she had

acquired beforehand and commits them to a purpose that she construes through the rhetoric of religious calling. When speaking of the counselling process and her clients she continually stresses the need to explain ‘what 1s happening in their bodies’ and that one has to ‘keep options that people can decide for themselves’. Her clients are thus first of all subjects in need of education and knowledgeability as preconditions to

rationality and autonomy.

Similar to Sarah, Martha’s wish to become engaged with AIDS activism has been shaped by family experiences with HIV, in her case involving her cousin-sister and her brother. At that time she was working as a caregiver for HIV-positive children, an activity she perceived as psychologically stressful and exceeding her capabilities. While in this sense her professional experiences are rather seen through the frame of ‘failure’, in giving emotional support to her diseased relatives she feels a moment of empowerment. She remembers that initially because she

354 MARIAN BURCHARDT was ‘shy’ and ‘couldn’t speak’ she had been scared of being a counsellor until eventually ‘God said, go! ’m gonna put words into your mouth!’ Martha too interprets her inadvertent mental strength in the idiom of a calling. Starting from this incident, she enrolled for generic AIDS training and became a social worker. Later she participated in counselling training upon which she changed her metier. Her approach strikingly conjoins professionalised expertise with religious concepts and the knowledge of everyday life. While she notes in retrospect that she ‘counselled’ her cousin-sister, at the time she was actually using a type of skills she had never been trained in. ‘The following passage reveals more in detail how she frames the counselling relationship: I told her: ‘You still look beautiful and it’s not the end of the world.’ I don’t know from where did I get those words. And I said life goes on. But you must believe and trust in Jesus, you know. You'll see you'll have eternal life. And then she came with me to the church here. I introduced her to everybody, to every of my sisters, my colleagues. And she was one of our members then. [hat’s when | started, working on my cousin-sister. (...) I live with these people, my brother is also positive. So ’'m working at home too. (...) I give people hope. I give them strength. And I when I visit them, I am doing the home visit mostly, | comfort them and I sometimes do this what they call self-disclosure. And see how are they coping at home. And they eat, how do they eat. I make sure that they eat healthy. I always told them how to cook their food, you know (...). So I am doing quite a lot of talk. But (...) when I go to the home visit I am always excited. I don’t know, I am always excited. And I’m like friends with them. [hey are like my friends. I don’t say they are my clients, you know like I am doing a job and they must be so respectful to me (ironic voice). We're friends, we speak openly! We speak everything with me, you see, I’m free! I’m free so that they can speak everything. And I give them advice when they want to be advised. So I’m there for them. I am helping them, everywhere.

What does the passage reveal about the relationship between faith, counselling and ethical subject-formation? Firstly, in relation to the Other, the invocation of faith serves to delineate a space in which maintaining health through the rational management of everyday life, 1.e. the systematic and persistent orientation of practice towards a valued purpose, 1s rendered meaningful in the first place. Its primary purpose is

to overcome the typical fatalism, despair and lethargy of people after a positive HIV-test, now facing a subjective world of fear. It is in this aspect of ‘overcoming’, where religion—turning to faith—and psychotherapy—accepting the meaningfulness of life—converge to produce an experience of conversion. ‘Through faith and faith-based counselling

SUBJECTS OF COUNSELLING 399 HIV-positive people may thus move from despair to eternal life. ‘Vhis invoca-

tion flows from the counsellor’s prior experience of personal vocation. Secondly, while other types of counselling often draw on the inherent advantages of an impersonal consideration of the problems at stake ‘from a distance’, faith-based counselling establishes the improbable combination of skilled expertise with personal friendship. And lastly, the relationship involves the promotion and inculcation of a defined set of rational practices. Nonetheless the authority of the counsellor rests less in shaping actions than in shaping subjective wants, and is therefore bound up with the inevitably paradoxical assignment of fortifying the counselled subject’s autonomy by helping control.

In Sarah’s account, the objective of achieving autonomy through faith-based counselling sets relatively clear limits to indoctrination. In

Martha’s counselling model, on the contrary, the re-building of the counselled subject’s autonomy is premised on authority. She persistently stresses the importance of ‘not being too soft with them’ when ‘they don’t want to listen to you’, and of directing them to assuming responsibility for the ‘gift of life’ because “God didn’t create us to be wasted’. ‘he ideal outcome of this pastoral intervention 1s that clients replace despair with faith; this is underscored by her satisfaction that several

chents have experienced conversion in her church during the counselling process. Her clients are therefore first and foremost construed as subjects of pastoral supervision and monitoring.

With regard to the meanings of cure and salvation, her account reveals a non-reconcilable tension between the biomedical facts of chronic illness and the healing powers of faith. On the one hand, she contends that the primary goal of her work is ‘to see them completely cured’, ‘to go from positive to negative’, and closely associates this with the healing forces of prayer. On the other hand, she 1s at pains to reject any type of ‘herbalist treatment’ promising a cure for AIDS as unscientific and corrupt. ‘This tension 1s also implicit in Sarah’s narrative when she recounts how one client asserted she had been cured from AIDS. She responds: ‘I believe that Jesus can make miracles and heal you, but we should go and see your doctor’. ‘This statement spells out the problem of theodicy (why doesn’t he if he can?), uncovering the divergent, and sometimes conflicting, truth claims of religion and science, which Weber (1963) had famously addressed in his intermediate reflections. Since bio-medically AIDS is—still—an inescapable reality,

however, it also demonstrates that the power of faith for coping with AIDS lies in acting upon multiple uncertainties but also in its opposite:

396 MARIAN BURCHARDT in introducing contingency, and thus a possibility of salvation that biomedical discourse forecloses. ‘he specific problem of faith-based counselling therefore revolves around constructing models of intervention that incorporate the productive aspects of both, uncertainty reduction and contingency. By critically oscillating between these polar conditions, the therapeutic enterprise carves out a terrain of meaning and moral imperatives in which epistemology and ethics are collapsed in the process of subject-formation. In the absence of biomedical cure, the discursive arrangement of faith-based counselling guides diseased people in making themselves new kinds of subjects through subjecting themselves to a regime of knowledge and ethical injunctions; it thereby opens possibilities of salvation, which serve as recurrent motivators for engaging in rational modes of “conduct of life’. Life with HIV/AIDS in South Africa takes place in an environment of biosocial risks. Managing these risks requires the sustained exercise of individual authority over changing challenges. ‘lo the extent that the practices of counselling result in the successful translation of notions

of responsible self-hood into regimes of the rational management of everyday life; to the extent that people therefore reinvent themselves as masters of circumstance, these practices should be regarded as primary sites of cultural change. Within this process, religion 1s relevant not only because it 1s accorded an increased social relevance as an institution

that assists, advises, helps, and counsels, but also in that it provides a transcendent rationale and a motivational underpinning for ‘living positively’. ‘his reminds us of the numerous ways in which religion acts as a force for structuring the conduct of the wordly and daily business of living, and thus of religion as a force of life (Lebensmacht) that was at the heart Weber’s sociology. References

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at a Time of Uncertainty. Cambridge/Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 294-327. Schneider, Helen. 2002. ‘On the Fault-Line: ‘The Politics of AIDS Policy in Contemporary South Africa’. African Studies 61.1, 145-167. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1979. Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Band 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Shisana, O. et al. 2005. South African National HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and Communication Survey. Cape ‘Lown: HSRC Press.

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398 MARIAN BURCHARDT Valverde, Mariana. 1994. ‘Editor’s Introduction’. Canadian Journal of Sociology 19. 2, Special Issue on Moral Regulation, vi—xu.. Weber, Max. 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundnss der verstehenden Soztologie. ‘Tubin-

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THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM—CONFESSIONAL TECHNOLOGIES, ANTIRETTROVIRALS AND BIOSPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION IN ‘THE FIGHT AGAINST AIDS IN WEST AFRICA Vinh-Kim Nguyen Introduction

One of the central messages of this volume 1s that religion constitutes a powertul idiom through which social relations are managed, and that religion is not only central to how people understand an epidemic, such as HIV, but also how they respond to it. As the papers by Prince and others show, the core of this idiom is a compelling notion of the transformation of a flawed and suffering self into one that has been ‘saved’ by Jesus, or has returned to the cradle of tradition. [his is a powerful implement in the context of widespread suffering engendered by poverty and illness, and is all the more acute in the time of AIDS. ‘This chapter will explore the striking similarities between religious forms and mainstream AIDS prevention and treatment campaigns. Despite being carried out by a trans-national assemblage of AIDS activists scientists, philanthropists, therapeutic entrepreneurs, as well as humanitarian and development agencies (what has been called an AIDS industry), these campaigns are strikingly similar. heir standardisation is derived from three broad factors. Firstly, they share a common genealogy, as they

are descended from a handful of programs that were set up in the mid 1980s under the aegis of the WHO’s Global Program on AIDS. Secondly, agencies (such as UNAIDS), international conferences, global

science, and harmonising mechanisms such as ‘best practices’ help keep this potentially unruly and at times unlikely coalition coherent and ‘on message’—a trend that has intensified with the consolidation of funding flows through the Global Fund for AIDS, ‘Tuberculosis and Malaria and the US President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Finally, the actual tactics used are limited to a handful of technologies. Some, like HIV testing, condoms, and antiretrovirals are clearly uniform commodities; others, I will argue in this chapter, such as training workshops, counselling techniques, and self-help strategies are

360 VINH-KIM NGUYEN equally standardised, stable across different environments, and produce predictable outputs; in this sense I speak of them as technologies. A stalwart of HIV prevention 1s voluntary counselling and testing, or VCT. VCT harnesses a prevention technology, ‘voluntary counselling’, to a biomedical diagnostic technology (the HIV test). In this volume, Marian Burchardt points out how the forms of ‘counselling’ deployed by VCT programs introduce ‘culturally new models of moral responsibility’, mirroring those described by Ruth Prince in her discussion of both Luo neo-traditionalists and ‘saved’ Christians in Kenya. As Burchardt and Prince show, these models of moral responsibility, which echo the individualising tenets of neoliberalism, are linked to a powerful exper-

ence of conversion, one that in fact calls forth the self in a way that is deemed transformative. In this chapter I will focus more specifically on the technologies that bring about this experience of conversion in the context of HIV prevention and treatment programs. ‘These confessional technologies, ostensibly used to help people “come

out’ with their HIV positivity, in effect trained them to talk about their innermost selves in public. This was far from easy or natural for most but, over time, allowed some to gain fluency with disclosing innermost feelings, helping to change the way others related to them and over time their social networks. My argument is that these techniques, conjugated with access to antiretroviral drugs, targeted the self as substrate, and helped to fashion new social relations around an HIV-positive identity

and the ethical dilemmas—of care towards other and care of the self—that this posed. The dissemination of these biomedical technologies (self-help tech-

niques and pharmaceuticals) must be considered in the context of globalisation: the acceleration and intensification of flows of people and things, ideas and practices that in the famous formulation of David Harvey (1989) compress space and time. In this case, a global assemblage

of international institutions, activists, corporations, NGOs, and so on, have come together in response to the global AIDS epidemic and have channelled the dissemination of ideas, practices and drugs through a conflicted and evolving terrain of global and national AIDS policies. These have reformed international trade laws, defined new markets, opened up zones of dispute that concern access to treatment, the role of the State and international organisations in providing health care, the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ (Biehl 2008) of public health, and so on.

The local phenomena described in this chapter are thus global ones as well.

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 361 In this paper [ will draw on the notion of ‘moral economy’, as first developed by the English historian E. P. ‘Vhompson (1971) to describe price revolts subsequent to the introduction of capitalist land tenure, and subsequently used by James Scott (1992) in his ethnography of peasants in South East Asia. Both chronicled how the rise of a market economy was paralleled by a moral economy that constituted a form of resistance to capitalist relations. ‘he term has since widely used in economics and anthropology to point to the cultural dimensions of political economy. In relation to Africa, John Lonsdale (1985) used the term in his account of the Mau-Mau Rebellion in colonial Kenya to correct a decontexualised view of ethnicity as a driving force in political conflict (a trope all too common today in accounts of ‘tribal wars’ in Africa). Rather, Lonsdale argues, ethnicity 1s a tool used to combat the encroachment of capitalist-driven inequalities, to fashion a ‘moral economy’. Revisiting this term to show its continued relevance, Berman writes ‘In arguing out conflicts to redefine an accepted moral economy, Africans became members of self-conscious ethnic communities both larger in social scale and more sharply demarcated than what had existed

before. ‘his internal discursive political arena, through which ethnic identities have emerged out of multiple, selective imaginings of “tradition”, culture, and identity from European as well as African sources, 1s what Lonsdale and I have termed “moral ethnicity” ’ (Berman 2006: 9).

In this chapter I use the term to highlight how differing economic and cultural circumstances result in value being differently attributed. More specifically, the attempt to negotiate a ‘moral’ economy based on social relations can be seen as a tactical response to the introduction of a veritable ‘market’ for testimonials of HIV-positive people. For many citizens of developing countries, where the State provides little in the way of social security, social relations—particularly kin relations—constitute the only form of social security. It 1s kin that help pay for a prescription or look after an ailing family member. ‘This has been obvious for medical anthropologists ever since studies of sufferers’ patterns of resort revealed the network of social relations that fanned out from the ‘therapy managing group’ that shaped the suftlerer’s therapeutic journey based on economic, social, and cultural considerations. Being ill and poor, one must rely on one’s relationships—one’s family position and value—as well as on one’s ability to convince—often by any means necessary—to obtain the money for a medical visit or treat-

ment. These forms of negotiation and exchange, while focussed on therapy, constitute a moral economy of sorts against which the market

362 VINH-KIM NGUYEN for testimonials offered an alienating vision of impersonal exchanges of confessions for money and drugs. Confessional technologies are a lens through which these moral economies may more clearly be viewed. As I will explore later, the incitement to disclose, operationalised through the dissemination of these technologies, created a market for testimonials that confronted people living with HIV. As I will show, this market was from the outset entangled in overlapping moral economies that posited differing standards of valuing life, talk and social relations. Survival required skilful negotiation of these entangled moral economies and overlapping regimes of value. Nonetheless, by introducing a new language and set of practices for talking about the self, they exercised a kind of ‘therapeutic evangelisation’ that, ultimately, results in a biospiritual transformation

as access to treatment turns testimonials into flesh on the body of the ill who with antiretroviral treatment regain health. I will begin with an ethnographic account of a workshop conducted in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997. ‘The workshop was designed to develop counselling skills for people living with HIV (Gn order that they would become peer counsellors) and others who were already working with them; it was one of the first workshops (that has since been replicated many times) aimed at involving community-based groups in caring for people living with HIV. In this account I want to focus attention on the way in which these workshops deploy techniques designed either to get people to talk about themselves to others, with the goal of helping them to disclose their HIV infection, or to develop listening skills in order to better counsel those living with HIV. In so doing, my aim 1s to show how these techniques can be seen as confessional technologies, portable and machine-like in their ability to elicit both testimonials and self-awareness. Like all technologies, however, confessional technologies can encounter technical difficulties, have unpredictable effects and even be used to purposes for which they were not intended, as I will show in a discussion of how the workshop affected the lives of some its participants. In this case, the transplantation of confessional technologies developed in an American culture of self-expression and relative financial ease to a context blighted by poverty led to specific difficulties.

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 363 Warming-up

I want you to close your eyes, and to think of someone that you love very much—think of him, think of all the good times you’ve had together. Think of him, and tell yourself now ‘I’ve got AIDS. I’ve got AIDS. I’ve got AIDS!’. Think of him, and think of how you've got AIDS. Now, open

your eyes. [ake a piece of paper, and draw a heart. In that heart, write what is in your heart now, when you think of this person you love very much, and then give the paper to your neighbour on the right.

It’s early in the morning, 1996, the second day of a meeting of African AIDS NGOs, and ‘Theresa has been asked to do a ‘warm-up’ exercise for the group. Her delivery is dramatic, almost frightening. ‘Theresa 1s a project officer from the head office of a large funding organisation in Washington; she told me later she made up the exercise on the spot ‘to get people into the feel of things’. My neighbour, on my left, gave me a crumpled piece of paper which I never opened. I was so uncomfortable with the exercise that I didn’t fill out my heart. ‘Uheresa never did tell us what to do with the tiny hearts we all received; after about a year I mailed it back to the shy woman who had given me hers. I’m going to hand out six of these yellow post it notes. Now. Think about your work doing community support for people with HIV. ‘Take three of the post-its, and write a word which expresses what your fears are about this work. And take the other three, and write your motivations. Now, one by one, everyone should go up, share your words with the group and stick them either on the appropriate flip-chart: this one 1s for ‘fears’ and this one is for ‘motivations’.

One by one, the workshop attendants place their words on the flipcharts, reading them out as they do so. Fears Enough. ‘Tired. Suffering. Suffering. Fragility. Exhaustion. Powerlessness.

Suffering. Death. Inability to save from death. Patient confidentiality. Getting overwhelmed. Spiritual and physical suffering. Rejection by society. Lack of psychosocial support. My limitations. Support. Patient resources. Dying. Interruption. ‘Telling the truth. Contaminated. Lack of resources. Suffering. Difficulty to approach. Fear. Economy. Suffering. Pain. Limits. Rejection by others. Fatality. Money. Availability. Disease

without a cure. Propagation. Public’s ignorance. Pain. Not being up to it. Pain. Discouragement.

Motivations Compassion. Will to help. Vocation. Personal. Worrisome reality. Support. Pursuing an option. ‘To serve. Helping others. Overcome. Compassion.

364 VINH-KIM NGUYEN Useful. Knowledge. Solidarity. Gompassion. Fears. Anguish. Help. Love. Help save. Helping others. Overcoming sickness. I could be sick. Comfort. Help. Comfort. Support. Help. Despair. Abandoned. Suffering. Suffering. Love. Be useful. Suffering. Abandon. Spiritual need. Compassion. ‘To serve. Ignorance. Fear. Solidarity. Goncerned. Difficult situations. Contribution.

Regrets. Love. Hope. Discover myself. Friends who are affected. ‘To learn.

One of the participants was a friend of mine, a young woman struggling with her own diagnosis of HIV, her concern about her children, and an increasingly distant husband. Her post-its (Lack of psychosocial support’, “Spiritual and physical suffering’, ‘I could be sick’) appeared to express her experience of her condition in a way that she would never have put into spoken words. She remained silent throughout the workshop, except during the warm-up exercises which, as one facilitator noted, weren’t as ‘solemn’ as the post-it exercise. ‘These were games where a ball was thrown, or a form of musical chairs called ‘fruit salad’ was played, or songs sung. Nothing personal was involved. Asking, telling, listening

Being able to communicate about HIV was the principal goal of the workshop. Participants concentrated on learning ‘active listening’ techniques: how to ask open ended questions (such as ‘How does that make you feel?’), or reformulating a statement (‘when I fall ill no one will look after me’), or suggesting a response (‘you’re afraid of being abandoned?’), all while mirroring their interlocutor’s posture. All this was to build up confidence, in order to ‘reassure your interlocutor and prove to him that you are really there’. Ask the person you are helping how she is feeling. Of course, asking just ‘are you OK’ is not enough. ‘The person you are asking can answer with just ‘yes’ or ‘no’. You can ask her ‘how are you feeling?’. She can then answer that she is feeling well or unwell, and then continue to express herself. But it is better to ask ‘what are you feeling?’ ‘what are your feelings?’ ‘how are you emotionally?’ etc. And it’s even better if you can link each emotion or feeling she expresses to something precise: ‘how did that make you feel?’ ‘what are your feelings about that decision?’, ‘that’s a difficult situation to be in—how do you feel about that?’ etc.

It is preferable that the person you are helping responds by truly describing her emotions:

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THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 369 .

‘Lye

f

’ \ ts “5}:ee ee ae Be. 9] yyaweMCR ~pl = . ,yyt: me ? nsge pay ey . a ~~ =‘ >et 7} Ae oo Ne ry, / he iy . ae s — ¥ . >.< Ey h} n Mie 7 a Aen aS! Se ae Figure 9.1 Asking questions: AIDS self help group. —she should be encouraged to speak in her name, in the first person. Tor example: ‘they are telling me that I am depressed’ What counts is not what others say, but what this person trulv feels: avoid thoughts which interfere with the expression of feelings, for example: ‘T think I am exhausted’

‘I feel like Iam getting discouraged’ —it is preferable that the person be able to say ‘I feel very depressed’ ‘l feel full of hope today’

The workshop used a number of techniques which are widely used in training in international development programs as well as in private industry. In addition to the warm-up exercises there were ‘trust-building’ exercises, such as having one person stand in the middle of a circle with their eyes closed. She would let herself go limp, and allow herself to be tossed around and caught by other members of the group. Pairs or groups of participants practised their ‘Communication skills’ (the active listening techniques) using drills: ask nothing but open ended questions for three minutes, then switch. When the time is up, have each member debrief on what the experience felt like.

366 VINH-KIM NGUYEN Participants did role plays in front of the group in order to practice their interviewing skills. After each role play, the actors would be debriefed: ‘how did you feel during the exercise?’ And members of the audience were asked to observe the body language and the techniques used. Care was taken to avoid overt criticism of actors’ techniques; conveying an attitude of ‘non-judgementality’ was important. ‘The techniques employed in the workshop had themselves travelled from America, where they had initially been developed by social psychologists working for the US military in the wake of Second World

War. Initially developed with the aim of building cohesion within military units, they were subsequently refined in a quest to facilitate racial integration after Second World War, before being taken up by business schools to train future managers. Ultimately, they would

migrate to the counter culture movement (Lee 2002). When the American gay community began to respond to the AIDS epidemic in the mid eighties, these technologies were readily available and used in workshops for training outreach workers and peer counsellors to work with those suffering from, or at risk for, the infection. In the early years of the epidemic, AIDS organisations trained volunteers to work with people with AIDS: keeping them company, assisting them to negotiate doctor’s appointments and hospital tests, even helping in everyday chores. ‘These volunteers were called ‘buddies’. ‘The buddy system exists

to this day in North America and Europe, though the demand for it decreased first in the early nineties as social services adapted to the problems faced by people with HIV and even more after 1996 when the introduction of new effective combination therapies dramatically reduced illness and mortality of people with HIV. As the effectiveness of antiretrovirals became manifest, and the need for HIV companions in San Francisco and Brussels or New York and Paris declined, from 1996 the buddy model swept into Africa on a tide of rhetoric about ‘sharing experiences’. Asking questions that cannot be answered by a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ 1s a simple but powerful technique, but in the workshop it was difficult to get it to work. As became increasingly clear during the workshop, getting people to elaborate after being asked open-ended questions was difficult. Laconic answers proliferated. It was difficult to get participants to further develop their answers, even to the open-ended questions. ‘his frustrated Iheresa—in this case, because it meant there was little ‘material to work with’ in her training sessions. ‘The monotony of the answers were treated as ‘technical difficulties’. The nature of these technical

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 367 difficulties was twofold. First, the gaps, evasions, and circumlocutions resulted from participants’ reluctance to talk about personal difficulties. Kor them, talking would not solve problems that lay elsewhere, in the difficulties of their material circumstances and the social relations around them. Second, the techniques made certain assumptions about the relationship between asker and teller that did not hold in this local setting. The solution to this technical difficulty, as we shall see, emerged as a repertoire of strategies that sought to translate asking, listening and telling into a legible form of social relations. Translating empathy

The workshop stressed ‘attitudes that favour communication in the helping relationship’; one of which was empathy, which the workshop manual defined as follows: Empathy is neither antipathy nor 1s it the sympathy we may feel for someone who is dear to us It is trying to feel and think what the person we are listening to feels and thinks; it is trying to see the world from his point of view, AS IF we were in his place. But we must never forget this AS IF: because we are never in the other’s position Empathy is the attempt to totally understand the other, without referring to one’s own values

I had an argument with ‘Theresa about the meaning of the word ‘empa-

thy’. It seemed to me that the definition offered was not correct, that empathy was precisely not about the AS //. ‘Uheresa’s response was not semantic, but practical. She had joined the Brussels AIDS organisation

after her brother was diagnosed with HIV. She had encountered the term at a workshop in Brussels when she was training to become a counsellor on the Brussels AIDS help-line. She had learned the term in translation. he term, she told me, came from Roger’s psychology. The organisers of the Brussels workshop had themselves trained in America, at one of the original AIDS organisations in San Francisco. The point, she forcefully reminded me, was that something was needed

to ‘maintain boundaries’ so that counsellors would neither get overwhelmed with the emotional distress they would face, day and night, on the help-line nor respond defensively with damagingly judgemental statements like ‘why did you do that?’ Mobilising her own experience, Theresa translated empathy—a term she herself learned in translation—

3608 VINH-KIM NGUYEN into a set of practices for making sure the workshop participants would take home the AS JF. ‘The initial challenges in getting the workshop to ‘work’ were taken up subsequently by the participants as they returned to their communities and tried to apply the lessons of the workshop. Ultimately, the workshop did ‘work’ as the drills and exercised had smoothed over the hard edges, allowing a more seamless practice of translation. Cicely,

a robust church leader and health care activist in a northern town, organised her own workshop after she left ‘Theresa’s. She used the workshop to train volunteers in her neighbourhood association, the lmends of Life Associaton. ‘The workshop was translated into the national language, Moore. ‘The Mooré word they used for empathy, Cicely told me, translates back as ‘making other’s problems your own business’. ‘The

Friends also found the techniques useful, and had the added advantage that Cicely’s unflagging determination had netted them a substantial stock of medications from Europe. Cicely’s translation of empathy did not reflect the sense that ‘Theresa had given it, 1t was well adapted to the practical work of her volunteers. They did, in fact, make other peoples’ problems their business, by going around and doing home visits. But after all, Cicely pointed out to me, ‘in Africa, everybody sticks their nose into your business—what’s wrong if one takes advantage of it to do good?’ ‘The problem Cicely and her volunteers faced was that good deeds were measured in terms of relief from symptoms, and not in stories told. She too was able to use contacts that came out of the workshop to obtain medicines. But 1t was never enough, she told me. Cicely was able to translate both the vocabulary of the workshop, but more importantly, she was able to translate the social relations she constructed at the workshop into tangible benefit for her association’s clients. A confessional parish

For some participants, learning the techniques and applying them changed them and, through them, the social relations around them. This was the case of Jean and his group, the “Parish Companions’. At the workshop, Jean had had difficulty with the role plays, finding it difficult to act in front of the group. Jean was a catechist from a remote rural area, who had been identified by the Washington organisation that funded the workshop several months earlier. Washington had sent

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 369 consultants who had been charged with finding community groups that would be able to do ‘care and support’ work. Jean was the leader of a small group of catechists that performed home visits to people who were ul, presumably with AIDS. The ‘parish companions’, like others in their village, assumed that those who were persistently ill or bedridden, most often those who had come back from the city, were suffering from ‘the evil of the century’ (the local euphemism for AIDS).

They had been inspired to do this by the head of their parish, a young Italian priest who had become notorious in the region, and in the Catholic Church as far as France, as somewhat of an AIDS crusader. Father Giuseppe, as everyone called him, had developed educational tools—in the form of pamphlets and a game—which stressed that the

only way to be safe from AIDS was to be either celibate, faithful, or to use condoms. He was later repatriated to Italy. It was said that this was because he had not shied from promoting condoms. He told me he left Africa because his mother was ill. His departure left the ‘parish companions’ groups leaderless. ‘The arrival of consultants from Washington, charged with ‘strengthening the response to the epidemic’ though training was seen by Jean as an opportunity to ‘re-energise’ his group’s efforts. ‘The Diocese however seemed uninterested by the ‘parish companions’, who nonetheless continued to visit their charges without being completely sure what they should be doing. ‘The offer of support from the Washington consultants, who were impressed by the Companions works with the ill, was quickly taken up, and Paul, a ‘companion of the ill’ from another parish who was also a clerk at the Diocese, travelled with Jean to the workshop.

The presence of doctors, nurses, and other ‘people of the profession’ as they called professional health care workers intimidated both Jean and Paul at the workshop. Although both were literate, they had never pursued their studies beyond middle school and hence did not consider themselves to be ‘intellectuals’ like the others. On the first day of the workshop, Jean confided to me that he did not know how someone like him, who was not ‘of the profession’ and did not have any scientific knowledge, would be able to understand anything having

to do with such a medical topic. In the first few days, Jean and Paul were clearly uncomfortable, and their performance in the various role plays was wooden. But the workshop’s emphasis on drills and practical

skills appeared to pay off By the fifth and last day of the workshop, both Jean and Paul would confidently ask open-ended questions.

370 VINH-KIM NGUYEN ‘Their enthusiasm for the workshop increased with time. Washington

was eager to nurture their investment in the Parish Companions, and provided more consultants to ensure that Jean and Paul maintained their skills and would pass them on to their fellow Parish Companions. As they attended successive workshops, Jean and Paul changed. ‘They had left the first workshop with a mechanical ability to ask open-ended questions; by the third workshop, they summarised mock interviews with ease and had shed their previously stiff habitus to fluidly mirror the postures of their mock interviewees. The village where Jean lives lies in an arid region in the interior of Burkina Faso; the paved road ends 100 km before reaching Doumla. On the edge of the road which passes Doumla 1s a small wooden stand with a dozen recycled glass bottles of various sizes, which glow amber from beneath the parasol which shields them from the bright sun. As a petrol trader, Jean travels weekly to the nearest big town, which is also home to the Diocese, to purchase a barrel with which he replenishes these bottles. ‘These trips enable him to maintain a direct line with the Diocese, a link that also enhances his position as a catechist in the village.

Doumla, because of its position on the road, is an important village in the area. It even has a small primary care centre, statled by a nurse from the Ministry of Public Health. The dispensary is rudimentary, equipped with a few instruments for bandages and a tiny pharmacy that 1s most often empty. ‘With AIDS’, says Jean, “people lie ill in the family courtyard until the family can no longer afford to care for them’. Families will pitch in to buy medicines for ill family members; when family members continue to be ill despite the use of the medicines and family resources are exhausted, it is blamed on the ‘evil of the century’. Jean told me that he has seen cases of families who ‘abandon’ their ill-—not by casting them out, but by leaving them without food or even clothing—a clear

case of rationing scarce resources, and devoting them to those who are likely to live. ‘This 1s when the Companions step in, to visit and bathe the sufferer and ‘restore his dignity’. Jean was worried about the Companions becoming identified as an AIDS group—if that happened, their visits would carry the burden of stigma to their charges. In addition, in a village where everyone knows everyone, as well as the degree of relatedness between everyone, it might appear odd for Companions, who are not kin, to visit a sick person. ‘Uhis initial hurdle was sometimes a problem, Jean admitted to me, although it was not such a big problem most of the time because ‘everyone is used to Church

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 371 people going around and visiting ill people’. ‘he Catholic Church has been active in the region since the 1920s, when the first parish was established. ‘he Diocese still has dusty notebooks that provide a glimpse into life at the mission in its early years: details of visits to neighbouring villages totalling conversions by name and religion of origin, minutes of Parish meetings, report cards evaluating native catechists in training with comments such as ‘a good boy—hardworking, honest’, ‘serious’, ‘not bright but earnest’. As their home visits continued, Jean’s initial worries about stigmatising those he visited abated somewhat. When I recalled his concerns, he noted that ‘in a way it doesn’t really make a difference’, as everyone ‘knows already’. I had asked the question after the Companions had already had a year to use the open-ended questions they had learned. The public health nurse in the village, Ishmael, who had not attended the workshop but had learned of the new techniques from Jean, could barely contain his excitement when we discussed the results of the workshop. ‘It has transformed the dispensary’ he told me. Now that he had begun to ask open-ended-questions, ‘the patients are more at ease’. Formerly ‘laconic’, now, ‘they are talking’. I asked what they were talking about, what this meant. “They talk about their problems: money, family problems’. What difference has this made? “They have to confide, in a way they never confided to me before...it forces them to have confidence’. When I asked what this meant for their health, Ishmael pointed out that health is a ‘vast thing’, that even though there are still no medicines in the dispensary and the patients do not have the money to pay for medicines, they are ‘relieved’ that they have been able to share their problems: and that ‘counts for something’ too. ‘This trust might translate into patients coming for care earlier when they are sick, which means that their illnesses might be more treatable—assuming they could afford the medicines. Jean noted that the techniques had given the Companions ‘access’ to the ill that they previously did not have. “lhe families resisted’ home visits: now they are ‘brought around to gain confidence’. He told me of previously distant fathers who have become attached to him, and of a woman who confided intimate problems to him ‘which in our culture a woman would normally never confide to a man’. One hundred kilometres back down the dirt road, at the Diocese, Paul reported the same phenomenon. He even began using the techniques outside of his work with the Companions, 1n his regular job as the Parish Secretary. ‘Parish-

1oners come to see me about all sorts of problems, like establishing

372 VINH-KIM NGUYEN birth and death certificates, including deaths that have happened in Cote-d’Ivoire’. ‘These deaths in Cote-d’Ivoire trigger Paul’s suspicions, as ‘that 1s where the sickness comes from’, and this furnishes one of many

opportunities to ask more. Invited to confide in the parish secretary, the parishioners appear to do so willingly. ‘It helps them’, he said, and allows him to feel that he is doing a better job. Ultimately then, the deployment of these confessional technologies ‘in the field’ embedded them in pre-existing moral economies of asking and telling. For Cicely, this was an economy of minding other people’s business in order that help be sought out; for Jean and other trainees, it involved transforming themselves into ‘askers’ within a moral economy that had been shaped by pre-existing pastoral institutions. As we shall now see, the deployment of these technologies, with their incitement to disclose, ultimately made the ‘self’ the centre of a series of ethical predicaments. The moral economy of disclosure

When they returned to their community associations, many workshop participants set up discussion groups to encourage other people with HIV to talk about their affliction. I attended these groups regularly from when they first started, in 1998. In Cote-d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso however, in the first few years, the groups did not seem particularly successful. Very few men attended. Attempts to get participants talking were at first met by silence and, eventually, halting attempts at self-expression that more often than not were a litany of complaints that seemed devoid of affective content. But over time, the dynamic in the groups began to change. After awkward, embarrassed beginnings a more convivial atmosphere began to prevail. Previously laconic participants became voluble and animated. Gradually, the charismatic side of some of the participants emerged. Their narratives were frequently couched in an evangelical idiom, describing the process of being diagnosed with HIV as the beginning of a conversion-like process, the first step on a road that led to greater enlightenment and the adoption of a more responsible, moral life. ‘These

declarations were inevitably followed by exhortations to the audience to get tested. ‘These evangelical idioms disturbed many of the Western aid workers employed by the agencies that funded these efforts. ‘Thee workers had come to international AIDS work through AIDS activism

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 373 in the North, and many from the gay community. Needless to say, the moralising tone of message conflicted with aid workers’ personal values that stressed empowerment, sexual openness and tolerance. Initially, I suspected that that these evangelical idioms were either historical residues of the colonial period or a reflection of the grow-

ing popularity of Pentecostal Churches. I spent considerable time interviewing volunteers and adepts in religious organisations. Some of these organisations were responding directly to the epidemic in various ways: volunteering at the hospital, holding prayer services, providing emotional and material support; others were not so directly involved with the epidemic but concerned with affliction more broadly understood. Some spoke of volunteering to work with the ill and dying as a religious experience, while others expressed the desire to offer solace to those afficted. Gommon to all was a powerful sense that what was at stake was the way in which HIV reframed moral dilemmas and made experience available as a strategy for self-fashioning, and for transforming others. It is still not clear to me whether the parallels between the emerging ethic of care that emerged in these groups of people living with HIV and Christian models of pastoral care were historical or just a coincidence of form. After all, Christian models link the care of the soul to the care of others in a very similar way to how we understand control of a chronic, infectious disease. Increasingly, it seemed to me, this question was irresolvable and probably of lesser interest than that of what was at stake for my informants. Faced with the prognosis of certain disease and death—and little in the way of resources to alter that prognosis—what was at stake was how the good life was to be defined and how it might be attained. In this way, the moral dilemmas surrounding the HIV diagnosis (framed by popular understandings of HIV as a disease of sexual immorality) were transformed into ethical predicaments. Sufferers had little to work with—in fact, they had only themselves. Ethics was about attaining the goal the good life (no matter how damaged the prospects might seem) through self-transformation; ethics was about the care of the self and the relationship to others. Uhese circulating, global discourses about AIDS were taken up in local ethical projects that aimed at a good life through practices that took the self as a substrate for action. What these ethical predicaments share, perhaps, with evangelical movements 1s the way in which they make available instruments and strategies which individuals may take up to equip themselves to better navigate the moral economies—the differing regimes of value—in which they are enmeshed. In

374 VINH-KIM NGUYEN the era of globalisation and NGO discourses about AIDS, these moral economies are starkly juxtaposed making this task particularly acute for people living with HIV and AIDS in settings where the only source of solidarity is family. ‘Uhe market for testimonials, anchored in Western notions of self-help through confession, offered the best opportunity to gain resources that could help feed family and maintain one’s position in the kinship networks that, in the absence of a viable State, are the only available forms of social solidarity. Confessional technologies did much more than produce testimonials, however; they also were instrumental in turning people living with HIV into activists. More significantly, perhaps, they created a tissue of social relations organised around shared disclosure, in effect colonising the pastoral economy of asking and telling laid down by the Church and re-working it, in the space of AIDS organisations, to one where what was increasingly at stake was the self, and how to transform it to confront an increasingly precarious future. The chosen

The incitement to talk about the self that emerged in donor-funded workshops from the mid 1990s in Africa was a pragmatic one, informed by Western notions of how the epidemic was best confronted. It drew on a range of policies that sought “greater involvement of people living

with AIDS’ and notably their empowerment. ‘These goals could not be realised if people were not being tested or, if they were but were not comfortable ‘coming out’ as HIV-positive. Disclosing one’s status, being able to read and handle one’s feelings in dealing with a patient or counselling a stranger—all required a particular set of skills. ‘Uhe confessional technologies used to build these skills had to be translated so that they could achieve effects on the ground—technical difficulties that required some tinkering in order to be taken up in local moral economies characterised by poverty and uncertainty. Talking about one’s self—disclosing one’s status—worked to weave together a moral economy of disclosure where what was at stake was not so much uncov-

ering the truth of the self as finding how to orient one’s self in order to live the best life possible under these dramatic circumstances. Until very recently, in the absence of any real political or economic engagement to address the structural issues driving the epidemic, many local observers viewed these testimonials as only so much ‘theatre’—

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 379 performances devoid of authentic meaning, used only instrumentally. But this proved not to be the case, as these confessional technologies did not only produce testimonials. ‘The use of these techniques helped some of those in the first cohort of people living with HIV to gain a range of interpersonal skills that were not only self-transformative, but also transformative of their relationships. In short, these techniques also transformed social relations around those who grew fluent in their use, as the case of Jean illustrates. In addition, they produced a vanguard of AIDS treatment activists—in effect, a therapeutic evangelisation. As the supply of donated antiretroviral drugs increased from 1998, groups were increasingly faced with the gut-wrenching prospect of deciding who should get the medications. No matter how many donations they received, demand always outstripped supply. In a setting where poverty 1s endemic, and where the State provides little—af any—-services, any organisation offering even the most minimal services was quickly

overrun. [his was certainly the case of the HIV/AIDS groups where fear of stigma did not appear to be much of a barrier to a steadily increasing stream of would-be beneficiaries. Many of these individuals were already ill, or suspected themselves to be HIV positive because they had lost a spouse. The concept of triage was developed on the battlefield, as a way to most rationally use scarce treatment resources: those most likely to live are prioritised to receive care, while those whose prognosis 1s poor are left to die. HIV/AIDS groups were faced with a similar situation. They made the difficult decision of who should benefit from the hmited source of drugs by adopting a form of social triage. ‘Those whose continued health was most likely to translate into increased resources

for the group were the first beneficiaries. But how did the groups chose? ‘They reasoned that those who were most charismatic, most able to deliver effective testrmonials would be the best advocates for getting more drug donations. ‘These individuals were being identified mainly on the basis of their performance in the discussion and self-help groups, which were ideally suited to cultivating their testimonial skills. It was a subtle, implicit process, but it highhghted how the discussion groups, conjugated with the confessional technologies, were veritable social laboratories, safe zones where new forms of disclosure could be experimented with and made effective. Sometimes the decision as to who should get the drugs was more directly pragmatic. Prioritising access to drugs for beneficiaries who could be counted on to facilitate the group’s work in virtue of their

376 VINH-KIM NGUYEN professional position was an example of how groups used drugs to increase access. In one group I worked with, for instance, a conscious decision was made to offer a rare treatment to a customs officer because he would be able to facilitate further entry of medications—his wife, who was also positive, was initially not offered the treatment. ‘These strategic forms of social triage contrasted with the rhetoric that framed international donors’ aid, which was meant to target the most vulnerable members of society—not the most valuable. It also differs from patient selection mechanisms made through NGO protocols and medical practitioners. Over time, those who were gifted communicators also became those with the most direct experience with the drugs as they benefited first

from the trickle of antiretrovirals. Echoing the experience of AIDS activism in the North, these patients were often the most knowledgeable about antiretrovirals. Now, as drug programs expand, they are ideal candidates for assuming leadership roles in treatment literacy and expanded access program. South Africa’s ‘Treatment Action Campaign (several media profiles of its founder, Zackie Achmat, have made him the best known African AIDS activist in the North) is an example of an organisation that explicitly harnessed this process to identify and train future activists from the ranks of patients. Throughout Africa the inchoate strategies of other groups and activists amounted to a kind of implicit process of producing activists through access to treatment. While some individuals, particularly well versed in the social arts or

endowed with charisma, were naturally well suited to draw on the repertoire of confessional techniques to mobilise others, even those less-skilled were able to benefit from the drills, exercises, and training that proliferating workshops disseminated throughout the continent. It is in this sense that I speak of a ‘therapeutic evangelisation’ resulting from the dissemination of confessional technologies. Conclusion: words into flesh

As use of antiretrovirals began to expand in the early years of this century, therapeutic activists were necessarily the first in line. ‘The confessional technologies drawn upon on in this therapeutic quest were conjugated with the growing availability of antiretrovirals to fashion,

biologically and socially, therapeutic evangelists. he painful context of social triage in which access to antiretrovirals—or indeed treatment

THERAPEUTIC EVANGELISM 377 for any disease, let alone social support—is powerfully linked to the emergence of a sense of obligation to others, what I have termed ‘therapeutic citizenship’ (Nguyen 2004). In the era of scaled-up antiretroviral treatment programs and their incitement to adhere to medication, it is possible to see how this therapeutic citizenship is increasingly concerned with the ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1988). Indeed, this is most visible as the cycle of workshops has begun anew, still aiming to train people with HIV to counsel peers, but this time about the importance of adhering to treatment. With the goal of achieving “community preparedness’ and ‘treatment literacy’, confessional technologies are redeployed, this time

to incite to adherence and responsible sexual behaviour. ‘Adherence clubs’ and ‘community involvement’ workshops proliferate. Yet once again, these standardised technologies take little account of the differing regime of value which must be negotiated, nor the politics of triage that determine who lives and who dies. Nonetheless, they will produce new moral economies, such as some of those explored in this volume, that with HIV have increasingly link a pastoral relationship to the provision of antiretrovirals. In my examination of the workshop and its derivatives, the care of the self is more than just a survival strategy, a strategy for complying with antiretroviral treatment regimens or the imperatives of safe sex. It represents an attempt to deal with a threatening reality—a diagnosis of AIDS—in a way that nurtures existing social relations and forms of solidarity while leaving open the possibility of accessing desperately needed medicines. What is at stake, I have argued, 1s an ethical predicament: how to preserve the good life when it is under threat by a diagnosis that has the potential both to dissolve social ties (through the combined forces of stigmatisation and an individualised notion of misfortune) and the physical body.

It 1s perhaps no surprise, then, that Christianity, with its twinned concern for the care of the soul and the shepherding of others towards salvation, should dovetail so elegantly with AIDS control efforts that, in the current era of mass diagnosis and treatment, have made a quantum leap from the efforts described in this chapter. ‘he flotsam of conflicting moral messages (abstinence or fidelity on one hand, condoms on the other) nonetheless share a similar deep structure. Indeed, as this chapter and others in this volume suggest, even though the intersection of HIV

and religion in Africa has been the site of dispute and even outright conflict in the response to the HIV epidemic in Africa, religion and science are not estranged bedfellows. ‘This is perhaps clearest with the

378 VINH-KIM NGUYEN US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is a multibilion dollar program that is the largest-ever effort targeting a single disease, which has re-shaped the global AIDS industry and pushed an ever-expanding quantitative standardisation of AIDS control efforts. PEPFAR has mixed religion and science in myriad ways. American and African activists have criticised PEPFAR for pushing an unproven

prevention strategy at the behest of the American Religious Right. PEPFAR is now funding a massively expanded roster of ‘faith based organisations’ to work in AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa. Working in Mozambique, Kalofonos recently chronicled the emergence of ‘therapeutic congregations’ (2007) that explicitly link salvation to CD4 counts and antiretrovirals. ‘Therapeutic evangelism blends salvation and drugs, confessional technologies and confessions.

Discourses of empowerment and the testimonials elicited by confessional technologies have led to therapeutic activism and ultimately access to life-saving drugs. ‘Drugs into bodies’, the rallying cry of 1980s

US AIDS activism that militated against a complacent government and an uninterested biomedical industrial complex, has become the slogan of a new breed of evangelists. Gonfessional technologies begat antiretrovirals, and have transformed words into flesh. Bibliography Biehl, J. 2008. Drugs for all: the future of global aids treatment. Medical Anthropology 27(2):99-105. Berman, 2006. ‘he ordeal of modernity in an age of ‘Terror. African Studies Review 49(1):1-14. Foucault, M. 1988. ‘The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality, Volume III. New York: Vintage. Harvey, D. 1989. ‘The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Blackwell. Kalofonos, I. 2007. A Vida Positiva: Activism, Evangelism, and Antiretrovirals in Central Mozambique. African Studies Association Annual Meeting, New York. Lee, Laura Kim. 2002. Changing Selves, Changing Society: Human Relations Experts and the Invention of ‘[ Groups, Sensitivity Training and Encounter in the United States, 1938-1980. Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles. Lonsdale, John and Bruce Berman, 1992. Unhappy Valley: conflict in Kenya and Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Neuyen, V.-K. 2004. ‘Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics and Therapeutic Citizenship.’ In A. Ong and S. Collier, eds, Global Assemblages: ‘Technology, Politics and Ethics. London: Blackwell. Robins, 8. L. 2006. From rights to ritual: AIDS activism and treatment testimonies in South Africa. American Anthropologist 108:312-323. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thompson, E. P. 1971. “Phe moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’. Past and Present. 50: 76-134.

CONCLUSION John Lonsdale

As a consequence of mere chance, an unjust fate, personal failings or a malevolent spirit, the workshop on Faith and AIDS convened by Paul Gifford, Felicitas Becker and Wenzel Geissler met for discussion

a couple of months before the appearance of John Iliffe’s sombrely magnificent The African Aids Epidemic: A History.' But as good luck,

benevolent ancestors, a well-ordered academic society, prayer or a just God may perhaps—who knows?—have ordained, Iliffe’s book did not retrospectively demand of the contributors to the workshop, or its commentators, any radical revision of their approaches or conclusions. Workshop and book are complementary, not contradictory. Iliffe has set the broad historical context for the local insights that are offered in this collection. And he is concerned less with faith than

with medical science, the causation and sequence of viral spread, the changing character of epidemic, global and national high policy, the politicisation of HIV activists, and the relationship between caring agencies and the human rights of patients. Nonetheless, one of his main organising themes is the antithesis between biomedical and moralising, pre-scientific, explanations of disease in general as well as of AIDS in particular. The moralising side of this opposition was the main focus of enquiry at the Faith and AIDS workshop. It is with the deeply, and deeply contradictory, moralist views of Africans that this collection is chiefly concerned, as people have wrestled, as Iliffe also so movingly recounts, with issues of communal obligation, individual responsibility, and social stigma, under the eye of God, or gods, or of taboos, or imagined local traditions, at a time of death, pain, loss and impoverishment, full of questions about family duty that are infinitely deeper than the coincidental or causal connections between our workshop and the publication of Iliffe’s book.

The workshop organisers had kindly asked me to act as one of the day’s commentators. My own research on religion and politics in

' Athens OH, Oxford and Cape Town: Ohio University Press, James Currey and Double Storey, 2006.

380 JOHN LONSDALE contemporary Kenya had taken me into the mosques and churches of Nairobi a few months earlier, but the relations between faith and AIDS had not been one of my chief concerns. I was more directly interested in the conflicts and collusions between two sources of authority, secular and sacred, in the making of Kenya’s political cultures. It was this personal interest and experience that influenced me when I came to try to generalise from and contextualise the research papers that were presented at the workshop and some of which are now collected in this volume. What had struck me most when talking with politicians and religious leaders in Nairobi, and still more with taxi-drivers and matatu minibus passengers, was their sense of the loss of leadership authority in general or, at the least, of its exposure to an increasingly crowded and volatile market in authority. Kenyans were disillusioned with their new government, elected in 2002; their Anglican bishops had recently been lampooned for the offer of prayers for hire by one of their number; there was a general cynicism about many aspects of contemporary Pentecostalism; and there was a new edginess to the oppositions between Sunni and Shia Islam. These perspectives I took to the workshop on Faith and AIDS. There are two very different historical processes in which African authority has, typically, come under critical scrutiny. Heike Behrend’s paper on AIDS and the Catholic Church in western Uganda, which took up Victor ‘lurner’s insistence that one must historicise ‘crisis’, provides me with my entry point to the first such process. ‘This is a crisis of subsistence, typically of famine, such as has occurred, with different periodicities, throughout the many regional histories of Africa; the second was of much longer gestation and more narrowly modern if also more universally spread over the whole continent, as the consequence of colonial rule, world capitalism, population growth and urbanisation. Contemporary Africans are most conscious of the latter when they seek the causes of HIV/AIDS. But it may be worth a short digression to consider the former, in order to think comparatively about the specificity

of the moral and political dimensions of the AIDS epidemic. There are striking contrasts between the past moral crises of famine and the present crisis of AIDS. Famine crises occurred fairly regularly, almost predictably within each local context, in many parts of precolonial Africa, not least in eastern Africa. AIDS is a newcomer, and a silent one at that, giving neither Africans nor international health professionals any warning of its long incubation before, in Africa at

CONCLUSION 381 least, 1t was too late. Famine victims were typically the socially weak, the very old and very young, and often women rather than men. AIDS victims were initially the socially strong and mobile; and, only as the epidemic has matured and knowledge of how to protect oneself has grown, have its victims begun to approximate to the poor and weak typical of famine. In the past, African societies have stigmatised those who died in famine, blaming the dying for being too poor to fend for themselves, or too idle to attach themselves to a patron; but Africans have also tended to forget famine as a moral disaster in which it is as well not to remember failures in either kin obligation or contractual reciprocity. The AIDS epidemic has produced much the same stigmatisation, in face of the same terrible questions about responsibility for relatives and neighbours, although it appears that the inescapable duty of families to care for their dying members has been altogether more courageous in the time of AIDS than in previous times of death. But it 1s perhaps in the strategies of attempted recovery from crisis

that famine and AIDS are most to be distinguished. In the past the destitute saved themselves from famine, if at all, by various forms of submission: by clientage to a wealthy neighbour; or by pawning a daughter to a patron; or by pleading with afhnal kin, often of a different ethnic group; or, especially if one’s penury came from the loss of livestock, by accepting a less estimable form of subsistence elsewhere,

hunting or fishing, so that the poor survived by becoming ‘other’. These were, generally, individual or household strategies. In the time of AIDS it 1s possible to argue that now, at this mature stage of the epidemic, if not earlier in its history, strategies 1f not of survival, at least of prolonging life, may become more assertive, more collective. Now that generic antiretroviral drugs have begun to be made available, subject often to various testing and counselling regimes, dependent on the distributive eficiency and Justice of African states, John Iliffe has found it possible to detect the beginning of what he calls the ‘repoliticisation of Africa’—after the depoliticisation of the continent’s formerly assertive, nationalist, peoples by one-party governments—as vulnerable groups press their claims to be noticed and to receive care by means of organised forms of self-representation, often in the press, sometimes on the streets. How far such repoliticisation might prompt the reform of African states can only be guessed at, but the old Ethiopian kingdom periodically re-established its legitimacy by royal hospitality at times of famine; and

382 JOHN LONSDALE colonial governments too were at times forced by famine to revise their policies on internal trade and crop pricing.’ Will the increasing willingness of AIDS victims to overcome social stigma by asserting their rights to universal human esteem have a similar effect? ‘That would indeed be a silver lining to the present dark cloud. ‘The local studies in this volume do not as yet give very great grounds for that sort of hope. Indeed, the second, slow-moving, crisis of authority in the wake of the failure of Africa’s expectations of modernity suggests that popular

repoliticisation, with a reciprocal rebirth of facilitating rather than predatory states, will not be easy. I have two difficulties in mind. ‘he first relates to the polemical arenas in which people have tested arguments, opened their minds, and reached conclusions. ‘Vhe second concerns the hindrances that prevent individuals from seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as responsible adults, worthy to participate in such arguments. First then, authority, whether secular or religious or, in the precolonial

past, some amalgam of both, used to provide explanatory narratives that either satisfied individuals as justifications of their fate or else gave them a worldview within which to frame counter-explanations. ‘Today,

however, there are no widely held views, no large polemical arenas. The cleansing kings of ‘Tooro are no more (Behrend), but no more so are legitimately authoritative modern governments—as 1s clear from all the papers in this collection. ‘These local studies appear to show that a combination of great human suffering and the lack of any explanatory authority from above, whether biomedical or moral, has led to a localisation, and radicalisation—‘hardening’—of arguments about the causes of the epidemic, with a distressing potential for inhumane attitudes to AIDS victims (Prince). Islam is in any case inherently decentralised, and in East Africa 1s increasingly divided in its social attitudes (Becker). But East African Christianities also appear to be increasingly multiple, and with sharply differing theologies of social evil (Behrend, Prince).

* My comparative thoughts in this and previous paragraphs have been stimulated principally by John Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12-13, 36-37, 156-163, 250-259; idem, The African AIDS Epidemic, chapters 9 to 13; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in TwentiethCentury Malawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Richard Waller, ‘Emutai:

Crisis and Response in Maasailand 1883-1902’, chapter 3 in Douglas Johnson & David Anderson (eds.), The Ecology of Survwal: Case Studies from Northeast African History (London

& Boulder CO: Lester Crook & Westview, 1988), 73-112; David M. Anderson & Vigdis Broch-Due (eds.), The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty © Pastorahsm in Eastern Africa (Oxford,

Nairobi & Athens OH: Currey, EAEP & Ohio University Press, 1999).

CONCLUSION 383 It may well be, however, that East African religious thought has always been rather eclectic, as is common in oral cultures. Plural Islams and Christianities could be said to have conformed, therefore, to local religious traditions. ‘loday’s religious debates, however, seem to look for certainties that may not have been so urgently necessary in earlier times. East African moral thought, by contrast to religious thought, looks to have been always harshly unforgiving of behaviour that damaged one’s chances of an independent adulthood, typically achieved by marriage and the legitimate opportunity therefore to create a posterity. It is in the loss of access to productive land or of wage-earning jobs, the old and new social pathways towards adult growth and social maturity—and, in consequence, loss of the right to be heard—that many younger East Africans have suffered most in the past half-century. ‘The studies here collected, with one exception, do not deal directly with the class rela-

tions between wealth and poverty that differentiate African men and women as much as they do in other societies around the world. It can be argued, however, that all the papers address various ways in which concerns about social justice are expressed through the discourses that have developed around HIV/AIDS. Sadgrove’s paper comes nearest to a direct discussion of class, if in a very elite context. Her study shows that some ambitious, even potentially privileged, young women feel that they can ‘grow’ only by engaging in transactional sex with older, richer, men. It 1s with this reflection in mind that some Kenyan churches have come to see AIDS deaths not, as before, shameful, sinful, deaths but, rather, as unjust deaths, and HIV as a disease of poverty rather than immorality. Perhaps future enquiries may enlighten us further on such perceptions of social justice and its connection with disease. Another way of looking at the evidence might, however, suggest that, while we Africanists tend not to concern ourselves directly with questions of social differentiation and distributive justice, this 1s precisely

what East Africans are indeed arguing about in their own particular, moralising, gendered, languages of class. If, as 1t seems, earlier social conventions of honourable behaviour were framed around expectations of an orderly growth in respectability by men and women, culminating in fruitful marriage between them,’ then the moral stigmatisation that seems so prevalent can be seen as condemnation of an AIDS victim’s

* For this, see John Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapters 14 and 15 especially.

384 JOHN LONSDALE failure, all too often, to ‘grow’, to reproduce, to generate a social order,

and to deny such opportunity to their children. Social differentiation has, through epidemic, become all too literally anti-social. It 1s at this point that it becomes too easy for men to blame women for their predicament and for women to blame men. If women are to have greater power in negotiating their sexual relations, if men are to learn new ways to ‘grow’, there is a large agenda pending in the reordering of gender relations. Is this, one cannot help but wonder, still more of a challenge than the repoliticisation of Africa?

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Hetke Behrend is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Cologne, Germany. She has conducted intensive research in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria; currently she

is studying media in Africa, photography and video, and continuing investigating the relationship between religious change, violence and war in Uganda. She has been teaching as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, in the African Studies programme of North Western University, Evanstone, and at the University of Florida, Gainesville. In 2007, she was Senior Research Fellow at the IFK in Vienna. She is the author of numerous books and articles, her last publication on violence and the Catholic Church is “Witchcraft,

Evidence and the Localization of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda, in: The Making and Unmaking of Ditlerences, Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada (eds), Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006.

Nadine Beckmann is completing her PhD in anthropology at the University of Oxford and is currently a research fellow at the Department of Peace Studies in Bradford. Her work focuses on the ways life

with HIV/AIDS is managed in East Africa, and particularly in the islands of Zanzibar. Her doctoral research shows how the epidemic 1s embedded in local discourses on immorality and decline, and how HIV positive people negotiate everyday life in the face of a fundamental sense of uncertainty, caused by contesting messages, lacking resources, severe stigmatisation, and the newly available antiretroviral treatment. She is also working on a research project on concepts of biopolitical citizenship and social movements in response to HIV/AIDS, with a particular focus on ‘Tanzanian organisations for HIV positive people.

Felicitas Becker received her PhD in African History from the University of Gambridge, UK, and is now Assistant Professor of African History at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Her articles on the history of ‘Tanzania and of Muslims in East Africa have appeared in ‘Journal of African History’, ‘Journal of Global History’, ‘African Affairs’ and ‘Journal of Religion in Africa’. Her monograph, ‘Becoming

386 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Muslim in mainland Tanzania, 1890-2000’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Marian Burchardt 1s a researcher and doctoral student in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig/Germany. He graduated as a magister artium in sociology, political science, and media

studies at the same university. His main academic interests include cultural sociology, social theory, religious pluralism and globalization. His most recent publication is entitled ‘Speaking to the Converted? Religion and the Politics of Gender in South African AIDS Discourse’, Comparativ 5/6 (2007).

Catrine Christiansen is a research fellow in anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has carried out several periods of research in Uganda, and her interests include Christianity, social development, kinship, youth, and health. She has published articles on faith, AIDS, and social support practices, and co-edited Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthoods (2006). Her current research explores the roles

of Christian churches (Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Pentecostal churches) in local social development in Uganda, particularly in relation to other social institutions and notions of trust. Hansjorg Dilger is a Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. Between 1995 and 2006 he has carried out extensive fieldwork on HIV/AIDS and social relationships in ‘Tanzania, focusing on the dynamics of kinship and Neo-Pentecostalism in the context of rural-urban migration, as well as on the responses of national and non-governmental actors to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Dilger is current chair of the work group “Medical Anthropology” within the German Anthropological Association. He 1s also author of the monograph Living with Aids. Illness, Death and Social Relationships in Africa. An Ethnography (Frankfurt/New York: Gampus, 2005; in German).

Ryk van Dyk (1959) is an anthropologist working at the African Studies Centre, Leiden. He has done extensive research and published

on the rise of Pentecostal movements in urban areas of Malawi, Ghana and Botswana. He 1s the author of Young Malawian Puritans

(Utrecht, ISOR Press, 1993) and has co-edited with Ria Reis and Marja Spierenburg ‘The Quest for Fruition through Ngoma (Oxford,

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 387 James Currey 2000) and with Wim van Binsbergen Situating Globality. African Agency in the Appropriation of Global Culture (Leiden, Brill 2004). His current research focuses on the transnational dimensions of Ghanaian Pentecostalism and particularly on its relation with

the migration of Ghanaians to the Netherlands (Ihe Hague) and to Botswana (Gaborone). A recently published article “Localisation, Ghanaian Pente-costalism and the Stranger’s Beauty in Bostwana’ (Africa, 73 (4), 2003) deals with insights gained from this research. In addition, he is the editor-in-chief of the newly established journal ‘African Diaspora.

A Journal of ‘Transnational Africa in a Global World’ which will be published by Brill, Leiden, commencing in 2008. After studying history and biology, Wenzel Geissler turned to parasitology and started working in Africa, conducting research on intestinal worm infections. After some public health research, he then returned to study social anthropology and went back to the same East African field site for a second, ethnographic, field research, this time to study shifting understandings of relations and touch, memory and time, among the people from a western Kenyan village. Since 2003, he teaches social anthropology at the London School of Hygiene. His present research draws upon his double training in science and anthropology by studying medical science in Africa. Ongoing research projects include historical and anthropological studies of the practice of medical research in Kenya between independence and the present, and studies of collaborative clinical trials and their political economy and ethics.

John Lonsdale 1s professor emeritus of modern African history at the University of Gambridge, UK. He has published on the social and political history of Kenya, East Africa, and Africa. His current interests include Jomo Kenyatta’s life and thought, Kenya’s white settlers and decolonisation, and African nationalism more generally. Vinh-Kim Nguyen 1s a doctor and anthropologist. As an HIV physician and medical anthropologist, his research concerns the biosocial dynamics of HIV epidemics and their broader political consequences. In addition to its critical engagement with public health, his research speaks to broader debates in anthropology concerning globalization, the state, and the politics of humanitarian intervention.

388 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Isak Niehaus is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University.

He has done extensive fieldwork in South African rural areas on the topics of witchcraft, politics, sexuality and religion, and on the impact of HIV and AIDS. He 1s the author of Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld (Pluto, 2001).

After a first degree in Human Sciences, Ruth Prince studied social anthropology at UCL, London, and in Copenhagen. While her earlier work was broadly medical in orientation, studying medicinal knowledge and healing practices in western Kenya, her doctoral research explored, base don long fieldwork around one village, the making and unmak-

ing of social relations in western Kenya in the context of historical change and the HIV epidemic. Presently she is Smuts Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, Gambridge University; her ongoing project combines her interests in HIV medicines, and in evangelical Christianity, in a study of antiretroviral medicines, health care provision and faith in the lives of young people in Kenya. Her publications include the monograph “The Land is Dying’ (with Wenzel Geissler, berghahn publishers, in press).

Joanna Sadgrove [| am interested in the relationship between religion and society with particular reference to questions of sexuality and sexual

morality. A regional interest in East Africa has drawn my attention to the distinct ways in which the religious variable and its impact on people’s attitudes and behaviour 1s shaped by different social and cultural

dynamics and settings. | am interested in how conceptualisations of what is deemed ‘religious’ behaviour can better respond to incorporate the diversity of expression which occurs when values are carried trans-nationally by religious communities. | am currently working on a project which considers attitudes towards homosexuality across three contrasting provinces within the Anglican Communion.

Jonas Svensson has a PhD in Islamology at Lund University and 1s currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department for the Humanities at Halmstad University. His fields of research are modern Islamic thought, in particular concerning gender issues and human rights. He has also done research on the contemporary Muslim discourse on bioethics. His contribution to this volume is based on fieldwork conducted in connection with a project entitled Islamic religious education and social development in Kisumu, Kenya, financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

INDEX

abah wawantu (cannibals) 29 Allen, Tim 134 n. 39 Abamwoyo (people of spirit, Uganda) 89 ancestors, beliefs in 316 Abazukufu (saved fellowship) 104-105, Anglican Church

107, 109 in Kenya 58-59

ABC formula (Abstinence Be faithful, in Uganda 89 use a Condom) in AIDS prevention revivalist 60, 89, 94-95, 103

campaigns 6 saved fellowships (born again’) in Kenya 201 in 104-105, 107, 109 in South Africa 314 on widow inheritance 91, 96

in Uganda 92-93, 228-229 Ansuan Sunna (Tanzania) 167, 168, 171,

in Zanzibar 134, 140 176, 178 Achmat, Zackie 376 anthropology

activists, of AIDS treatment 375-376, continuity emphasized by 302

378 on rise of the occult 30-31

adultery of the senses 285-286 n. | Islam on = 128, 198, 201 on witchcraft 32-33 see also extramarital sex anti-retroviral treatments (AR'Is) Africa availability of 18, 21-22, 381 AIDS epidemic in 36 n. 9, 379, in Burkina Faso 375-377, 378

380-382 in South Africa 21, 310, 315, 335

authority crisis in 380, 382 in Tanzania 155, 159, 178-183 European perceptions of sexual in Uganda 88 promiscuity in 328 in Zanzibar 136 famines in 380, 381, 382 distrust of 179-180, 181, 185

health care in 20 anti-westernism

leprosy in 318, 325 in explanations of AIDS

politics in 3, 17 epidemic 36-37, 199-200, 209-210

religion in 3-4 in Islamic teachings 199

Christianity 4, 7-8, 32, 185 see also western medicine, distrust of

Pentecostalism 258-259, 278, 348 — anti-witchcraft movements 32, 40-41

n. 10 apartheid, and AIDS epidemic 309 traditional 4, 10, 14 123

Islam 4, 7-8, 185 ‘Arabness’, in Zanzibar 122 n. 10,

religious conversion in 227-228 ART/ARV see anti-retroviral treatments

repoliticisation of 381, 382 authenticity, Islamic search for

sexuality in| 128 n. 25 213-214 see also East Africa authority

The African Aids Epidemic: A History African, crisis of | 380, 382

(lliffe) 379 of AIDS counsellors 355

Africanisation, of Christianity 278 of ‘born again’ Christians 242-243

age of marriage of Islamic scriptures 213

in Uganda 88 autonomy, objective of 352, 355 in Zanzibar 140 awakening concept see “born again’

Ahmadiyya Islam, in Kenya

195 n. 5 backsliding, by Pentecostalists 249-251

Al-Rasheed, Madawi 126 n. 19 Balokole (Ugandan Anglican revivalist)

alcohol, Islamic teachings on use churches 89, 104-105

of 139 n. 48 on widow inheritance 94-95, 103

390 INDEX Bankwata (Central Muslim Council, Botswana

Tanzania) 168 Ghanaian Pentecostal hairdressers Barrett, Ronald 317 feelings of moral superiority Barth, Fredrik 215 by 296-297 Basson, Wouter 314 and protection against AIDS al-Banna, Hassan 195 n. 5 in. 290-294, 300-301

Bavaria, persecution of witches in 33 285-290, 294-296

Bayart, J. RF 22 boundaries

212, 214 practices 8-9

Becker, Felicitas 16, 199, 207, 211, dissolution of, through religious

Beckmann, Nadine 16, 21, 183, 199, and group identities 215

202, 204, 206, 207 boys, premarital sexual relations behaviour accepted of 204-205 accountability of, in ‘born again’ buddy systems, in caring for AIDS

Christianity 242-245, 246 patients 366

changes in Buganda (Uganda), persecutions of and AIDS prevention 5-6, 17, Christians and Muslims in 40

93, 240 n. 47, 253 Bunyole (people, Uganda), and AIDS

and social aspects of epidemic 33

religion 252-253 Burchardt, Marian 21, 360

and religious beliefs 227, 247, 252, Burkina Faso

299, 310 AIDS care in 370-371, 375-376 sexual AIDS counselling in 369, 371-375 and peer-group pressure 252 training workshops 363-374

safe 236 n. 35, 310 anti-retroviral treatments (ARs) Behringer, Wolfgang 33 Catholicism in 371 Behrend, Heike 15, 16, 211, 380 in. 375-377, 378

Berger, Peter 191, 337, 347 businesswomen, Ghanaian, in

Berman, Bruce J. 361 Botswana 291 Biblical leprosy, AIDS as 311-312,

317, 318-319 Caldwell, J. 128 n. 25

Bohannon, Laura see Smith Bowen, cancer, as form of leprosy 312 n. 4

Elenore cannibals, in Uganda 29

bongo flava music (Zanzibar) 121 capitalism, resistance to 361

‘born again’ (saved) care Christians for AIDS victims 1, 361-362 on AIDS epidemic 64-65 buddy systems 366

in Kenya, among Luos 60-65 in Burkina Faso 370-371,

in Tanzania 256 375-376

in Uganda 226, 230, 236 by Pentecostalist communities

accountability of behaviour 274-276, 279

of 242-245, 246 politics of 301

and AIDS prevention 107, in South Africa 310, 315

246-253 and use of gloves 301-302

and ‘de-toothing” practices Christian models of 373

234-235, 240-242 for orphans 144

among Samia 91, 104-105, of self 377

107-108, 111, 113 technologies of = 337

on widow ‘inheritance’ 50, 51-52, for widows 86, 93

94-56, 58, 62, 77 Catholic Church

see also Pentecostalism in Burkina Faso 371 experiences and motivations of ‘marriage to Jesus in 109

18-19, 227, 300 in Uganda 38-39, 89

Luos 74 and fight against witchcraft 40-41

INDEX 391] on use of condoms 6, 160 class relations 383 on widow inheritance 91, 94, 95—96 between hair salon owners and

Cattell, Maria 94, 102 workers 291-292 CD4 testing 146 n. 60 cleansing cell groups, in Pentecostalism 238-239 of widows see widows, ‘inheritance’ of n. 45, 243, 248-249 of witchcraft 43, 44

change Clinton Foundation, HIV/AIDS

behavioural Initiative 136 n. 41

and AIDS prevention 17, 93,240 — clove industry, in Zanzibar 125

n. 47, 253 CMS see Church Mission Society (GMS) and social aspects of Comaroff, Jean 328 religion 252-253 communities, in Pentecostalism

uncertain evaluations of 174-175 257-258, 272-277, 279

Charismatic Christianity, in condoms

Uganda 39, 89 availability of, in Kenya 189

chike (Luo traditions) 66-67, 71, 74 crisis in Uganda 229

Chike Luo (radio programme) 73, 74, female, distribution of 288 n. 2

77 suspected of spreading AIDS 37

chira (sickness as consequence of not use of 295 following the rules) 70, 71-72, 74, Catholic Church on 6, 160

choice 206-207

133 n. 36, 208-209, 211 Islam on 140, 177, 184,

and Pentecostalism 299-302 Pentecostal church on 114, 240

risky 18 stressed in AIDS prevention sexual abstinence as campaigns 206

by HIV positive persons 146-147 in sub-Saharan Africa 134

by widows 86, 87, 97, 107, in Tanzania 160-161, 176-177

111-112, 113-114 in Uganda 236, 240 Christianity in Zanzibar 142 in Africa 4, 7-8, 185, 278 confessional technologies, used in AIDS fight against occult forces 32 counselling 360, 362, 371-372, healing in 374-375, 377, 378 and modern science 13-14 confessions

by supernatural powers 35 of sexual behaviour 248-249

see also divine cures for HIV/AIDS of witchcraft 43

in Kenya 58-60 conspiracy theories, on causes of AIDS and Luo traditions 73-74 epidemic 314-315 responses to AIDS 183, 373 contagiousness of AIDS = 325, 327 in South Africa 310 contraception, acceptability of, in theology of, on sin and repentance 240 Islam 206

in Uganda 36, 89 conversion views of widow inheritance 85-86, in Africa 227-228 91, 94-96 experience of 348, 355, 360

see also “born again’, Christians; after HIV diagnosis 18-19, 372

Catholic Church; Pentecostalism; to Christianity Protestantism in Kenya 59 Christiansen, Catrine 16, 21 ‘born again’ 60-62 Church Mission Society (CMS) 58 coping strategies

male 155-156

circumcision of HIV/AIDS sufferers 18-19, lowering transmission rates of in Burkina Faso 377

AIDS 169, 198, 214 in Zanzibar 21, 140-150, 151

among Muslims in Kenya 201 Corten, André 263 citizenship, therapeutic 22, 377 cosmopolitanism, of Zanzibar 122

392 INDEX counselling disclosure of HIV status 374-375

AIDS related 347, 349, 351-352, discontinuities, Pentecostal emphasis

360 on 283, 284, 293, 298, 302-303,

in Burkina Faso 369, 371-375 348

training workshops 363-374 disorder and order, in religion 8 confessional technologies in 360, divine cures for HIV/AIDS 146-147 362, 371-372, 374-375, 377, divine punishment, AIDS epidemic

378 as 36, 131-132, 208-211, 311, 317,

in South Africa 334-335, 338 319, 320-321 faith-based 333, 335-336, dress codes 339-346, 350-351, 352-356 Islamic

and modernity 336-338 for girls/women 202-204, 215

and religion 346, 347, 348-350 see also veiling ‘crusades’ see witch hunters East Africa cultural anaesthesia 285-286 n. | bias towards 1-2 criticism, through ‘others’ 31

cures for AIDS reformist Islam in 192-193

divine 146-147 religion in 383

and healing powers of faith 355-356 Revivalist Christianity in 60, 89,

medical science’s inability to 103, 104-105, 107, 109

produce 13 Swahili-speaking people in 122 n. 11

perceived absence of 320 widows in 85 see also healing East African Christian Revival movement 60, 104

Danish cartoon affair 139 n. 50 economic development, in

inWaal, 177Alex economy De 17 moral 361

Dar es Salaam, Ngazija Mosque Zanzibar 124-125

de-stigmatisation, as healing and AIDS counselling 362, 372,

strategy 329 373-374

‘de-toothing’ 232-235, 245-246 education

by ‘born again’ Christians 240-242 about AIDS 5

Dean, Mitchell 349 and counselling 335

death Islamic religious 194-208 AIDS associated with 311, 315, and AIDS prevention 200-208, 322-324, 325, 329, 345 216-217

within Pentecostal communities on AIDS as punishment from

275-277, 279 God 208-211

death rates, and witchcraft accusations 33 and Islamic identities 215-216

decline narratives and modernity 213-215

and AIDS epidemic 9-10, 11 and objectification of Islam

in lanzania 162-163, 164-165, 214-215

183, 184 on stigmatisation of AIDS

in Zanzibar 133-134, 136, victims 211-213

138-139, 149, 150, 321 about sex, for girls 128, 185

in Zanzibar 120-122, 123, 131 effectiveness of faith-based AIDS

descent networks 15 counselling 345-346 devil, in Pentecostalism 277-278 Eikelman, Dale 191 diagnosis of HIV/AIDS Ellis, S. 3

conversion experience after 372 Emani Kali (strong faith, Uganda) 89

coping with 18-19, 155-156 n. 3

in Burkina Faso 377 emisivo (widow inheritance ritual) 90 in Zanzibar 21, 140-150, Lol empathy, translations of 367-368

Dilger, Hansjorg 12, 14, 135 empowerment of women 6, 86-87

INDEX 393 English language, in Zanzibar 126n.21 Ethnic Groups and Boundares (Barth) 215

300 ethnographies epidemics African 19 69, 70 of AIDS on Luo traditions entrepreneurialism, in Pentecostalism ethnicity 361

in Africa 379, 380-382 on Samia traditions 100 anti-western explanations of evangelical idioms, in AIDS

36-37, 199-200, 209-210 counselling 372-373

associated with death 311, 315, evangelical Protestantism, lobby in

322-324, 325, 329, 345 United States 6 controlling of — 132-133 378

conspiracy theories on 314-315 evangelism, therapeutic 362, 375, 376,

as divine punishment 36, Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 34, 68 n. 15 131-132, 208-211, 311, 317, evil forces 265-266, 277-278

319, 320-321 exclusion 7

and ethics 373 of AIDS victims 7, 325-326, and gender relations 384 327-328

and globalisation 360 see also stigmatisation and migration 260, 313 explanations and narratives of moral decline of AIDS 11, 133 9-10, 11, 133-134, 136, anti-westernism in 36-37,

138-139, 149, 150, 162-163, 199-200, 209-210 164-165, 183, 184, 321 of suffering caused by AIDS 3

and Pentecostalism 256-257, extended families, in 278-279, 285-290, 300-301 Pentecostalism 292-293, 294

rise of 260-262, 283 extramarital sex

social and moral implications and religious afhliation 224-225

of 119 in Tanzania 164

and transactional sex 235-236 in Zanzibar 128-129

views of see also adultery Christian 383

‘born again’ 64-65 Fair, L. 122 n. 10

as divine punishment 36, Faith Gospel 228 n. 12 131-132, 208-211, 311, 319, faith-based AIDS counselling 1, 15, 22

320-321 in Burkina Faso 369, 371-375

Islamic 131-132, 138-140, in South Africa 333, 335-336, 148, 165-166, 168-171, 178, 339-346, 350-351, 352-356

196-200 AIDS 11 reformist 137-139 faith-based healing 10, 13-14, 355 183-184, 185-186, 189-190, faith-based explanations of HIV/

by Luo traditionalist 71-72 in Christianity 35 and widow ‘inheritance’ Pentecostalism 258-259, 264-267,

practices 16, 50, 52 267-272, 277-280

women blamed for 131 Zionist Churches 316 see also individual countries in Islam 146-147, 211

and rise in witchcraft accusations and Quranic 171, 172

occult forces 31-32, 33, 34-35, family ties, in Pentecostalism 273-275,

38, 211 284, 292-294

of smallpox 33 famines, in Africa 380, 381, 382

Epstein, Helen 17 Farsy, Abdallah 176

Erasmus, Z. 295 Fassin, Didier 310

ethics fasting, in Pentecostalism 298 and AIDS epidemic 373 Feldman, A. 285-286 n. | and religion 351 n. 13 Ferguson, James 12

394 INDEX Foucault, M. 18-19, 335, 349 God

fundamentalism, religious, and AIDS as punishment of 36,

modernity 7, 11, 13 131-132, 175, 208-211, 267, 311, funeral rituals and practices 317, 319, 320-321 in Ghana 292 AIDS as trial of | 147-149 Islamic, in ‘lanzania_ 168 closeness to 276

in Luo society 67 healing powers of 211 in Samia society 90, 94-95, 102-104 ‘revenge of? 7

Zionist Christian 326-327 ‘good deaths’ 276-277, 279 Gospel of Prosperity 263, 264

Garner, Robert 225, 261 n. 8, 299, Green, Maia 31

310 group identities, and boundaries 215

Geissler, RP W. 92, 339 Gussow, Zachary 329 gender relations

and AIDS epidemic 384 HAART see anti-retroviral treatments commented on by women 104 hadiths, on sexual misconduct 132

rules about 74 n. 31, 209-210

in Samia society 110-111, 113 hairdressing, and risks of AIDS in Tanzania 162-165, 184-185, 260 infections 286-288 in traditional religious practices 10 Harvey, David 360

gender segregation Heald, Suzette 134 n. 39

in Kenya 202-204 healing 185

in Zanzibar 129-130 by de-stigmatisation 329 Ghana faith-based 10, 13-14, 355 AIDS epidemic in 294 in Christianity 35

Pentecostalism in 7, 12, 261 n. 8, Pentecostalism 258-259,

278, 284 264-267, 267-272, 277-280 300-301 inIslam 146-147, 211

hairdressers from 7, 290-294, Zionist Churches 316

and feelings of moral Quranic 171, 172

superiority 296-297 traditional and protection against gloves used in| 287 AIDS = 285-290, 294-296 in South Africa 316, 324 Giddens, Anthony 191, 215 in Tanzania 171, 278 Gifford, Paul 228 n. 12, 265, 348 n. 10 in Zanzibar 138 n. 46

cift-relations of witches 43, 44, 324 in Ghana 284 health, and religion 349 in Pentecostalism 293 health care Giles, Linda 265 in colonial Africa 20

girls in looro 37

chastity promoted for 202-203, 215, in weak states 16, 375

216 Henderson, P C. 301 n. 21 hyab see veiling initiation rites for 163 Hill, Z. 224-225 engaging in transactional sex 164 Herzfeld, M. 286

Islamic dress codes promoted HIV testing 18

for 202-204, 215 in Kenya 207-208

sex education for 128, 185 in South Africa 313, 324, 334-335

Global Fund for AIDS, ‘Tuberculosis n. 1, 339

and Malaria 359 in lanzania_ 158, 186, 256, 269, 279

globalisation, and AIDS epidemic in Uganda 136

360 in Zanzibar 135-136, 141-144,

gloves, significance of use of 285-290, 147-148

295-296, 299, 300-302, 303 Hulton, L. 236 n. 35

INDEX 395 Human Rights Watch 229 in East Africa 192-193 Hunter, Mark 321 in Kenya 195 n. 5 hypocrisy notions, in Uganda and science 14, 184

242-243, 246 in ‘Tanzania 167, 168-169, 176, 182-183

Ibn Majyah_ 132 n. 31, 210 and AIDS epidemic 170-171,

Ibn ‘Taymiyya 195 n. 5 178, 185

identities in Zanzibar 137-139 construction of 191-192, 216, 347 on sexual misconduct 128, 132, 198,

ethnic 361 209-210 of groups, and boundaries 215 on suicide 144

Islamic 192, 215-216, 217 and witchcraft 211-212 Pentecostal 235, 244-245, 284 see also Muslims

in Zanzibar 122-123 Islamic Call Organization 139 n. 50 Tjtthad (effort) 190 Ismailiyya Islam, in Kenya 195 n. 5

lliffe, John 17, 309, 379, 381 isolation, of AIDS sufferers 132 n. 34,

lich, Ivan 337 n. 4 325-326, 327-328 immigrants isomorphism, institutional 350-351 in Botswana, from Ghana 290-294, n. 12

300-301 Izandla Zethemba (‘Hands of Hope’, in Zanzibar 122, 125 South Africa) 352 The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Primary

Education (Odiwuor) 208 Jacobson-Widding, A. 66

indifference, social construction of 286 Jesus, ‘marriage’ to 87, 96-97, 108, indigenous religious practices, in African 109-110, 112, 113

Islam 185 Jumbe, Aboud 124

individual, and self 19

infertility, of widows 91 n. 8 Kabageny, Jacinta 34

initiation rites, in Tanzania 163, 165 Kahn, Kathleen 312-313 institutional isomorphism 350-351n.12 Kakobe, Zachary 262, 264, 265,

internal terror, in Tooro 34 n. 5 267-268, 270-271, 273, 279

‘invisible religion’ 349 Kalofonos, I. 378

Isiugo-Abanihe, U. C. 224, 225 Karume, Abeid Amani 124

Islam 14 Kassimir, Ron 40 n. 13 in Africa 4, 7-8, 185 Kenya and AIDS 16, 156, 165, 183-184, AIDS epidemic in 196-200 Christian churches on 383 as coping strategy for HIV/AIDS Islamic religious education

infected persons 146-148 on 189-190, 194-215

in Kenya 189-190, 194-215 in Kisumu 189, 198

prevention of 135, 185, 200-208 among Luo 49-51, 53-54,

in lanzania 165-166, 168-170, 64-65 183-184 and ‘widow inheritance’ 51-58, in Zanzibar 131-132, 137-139, 77-718 138-140, 148 AIDS prevention in, Islamic religious

on condoms 140, 177, 184, 206-207 education on 200-208, 216-218 dress codes for girls/women 202-204, Christianity in 58-60

215 ‘born again’ 60-65

see also veiling disillusionment in 380

identities in 192, 215-216, 217 Islam in 193-194

and modernity 190, 191, 213 Khadija (wife of Prophet Mohammed)

and search for authenticity 213 213-214 Kingwandu = 172-173 reformist 190-191 kinship relations, and illness 361-362

396 INDEX Kirkwen, Michael 91 n. 9, 94 n. 10 Lonsdale, John 361

Kisumu (Kenya) loss, laments about see narratives of AIDS epidemic in 189, 198 decline Islam in 193-194 Luckmann, Thomas 337, 347, 348-349 religious education 194-196 Luo Katee gt Timbegi (Luo Characters and

on AIDS epidemic 189-190, Customs, Mboya) 69

196-200 Luo (people, Kenya)

on AIDS prevention 200-208, AIDS epidemic among 49-51,

216-217 93-54, 64-65

on AIDS as punishment from Christianity among 58-60

God 208-211 ‘born again’ 60-65

on Islamic identities 215-216 Islamic views of — 200

and objectification of traditions 65-75, 79, 96, 133 n. 36,

Islam 214-215 208-209

and search for authenticity views of AIDS and widow inheritance

213-214 by 208-209

on stigmatisation of AIDS ‘born again’ Christian 51-52,

victims 211-213 94-56, 58, 62, 77 Kiwanuka, N. 224 traditionalist 52-53, 54-55,

Klaits, Frederick 276 57-58, 77-78 knowledge, types of 337

Kondo, Sheikh 139 Macguire, Meredith 215 Kwa Herm (Good Bye, song) 132 n.32 — madrasas, Islamic religious education

KwaZulu-Natal, sexual morality at 195-196

in 319-320 Makerere University (Uganda)

‘born again’ Christians at 236

Lagarde, E. 227 n. 10 sexual abstinence campaign at 230 land, inheritance of 101 transactional sex at 230-236,

Landau, Paul 4 240-242, 245-246

Latour, B. 7 malevolent forces 265-266, 277-278 Lay Counsellor Project (South Mami Wata 298 Africa) 334 Manichaean morality, in African lay organisations, in Catholic Church Christianity 8

39 market ideology, of Pentecostalism 300

300 age of

leadership, in Pentecostal Church 249, marriage

leprosy 317-318 in Uganda 88 in Africa 318, 325 in Zanzibar 140 AIDS as form of 311-312, 317, Christian 105, 108

318-319, 322, 328 in ‘Tanzania, South-Eastern 163

of 329 112, 113

de-stigmatisation as healing strategy ‘to Jesus’ 87, 96-97, 108, 109-110,

Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu) 31 in Zanzibar 140-141

Lewis, Gilbert 317 Marshall-Fratani, Ruth 235 n. 33, 263, in South Africa 313 martyrs, cults of | 40

life expectancy 272

in Uganda 88 masturbation, Pentecostalism on 298

Lindi region (Tanzania) n. 3

AIDS epidemic in 157, 158, Mbali, Mandisa 328

171-172, 179 Mbeki, Thabo 9

Islam in 161-162, 174-175 on AIDS 309-310, 328 sexual mores and gender relations Mboya, Paul 69, 70

in 162-165 medical science, and Christian

Lindsey, E. 301 healing 13-14

INDEX 397 medical systems 20 and AIDS counselling 362, 372,

medicalisation of AIDS 34, 35, 160 373-374 Islamic responses to 184 moral responsibility, models of 346, 360 in prevention campaigns 155 moral significance, of HIV testing 339

medicine moral superiority, feelings of, among

western Pentecostalists 283-284, 296-297 distrust of 37, 159, 160 n. 12, morality 179, 279 Manichaean, in African anti-retroviral treatments Christianity 8

(ARIs) 179-180, 181, 185 sexual, in KwaZulu-Natal 319-320

metamorphosis 347 Mother’s Union 108

Meyer, Birgit 31, 64, 258-259, 278, Movement for the Restoration of

336-337 the Ten commandments of God

migration, and AIDS epidemic 260, (MRITCG, Uganda) 36

313 Mtwara region (lanzania) missionaries Islam in 161-162 defining religion in Africa 4 sexual mores and gender relations in Kenya 58, 59 in 162-165 on leprosy 318 Museveni, Janet 230 miracles 45 AIDS epidemic in 157, 158

opposition to traditional rituals Muslim Reformists see Islam, Reformist

by 68-69, 163 n. 18 Muslims

modernity 12-13 and AIDS epidemic

AIDS seen as resulting from = 122, in Tanzania 156, 157, 166-168,

133 n. 36, 136, 259-260 183, 185-186

and counselling needs 336-338 in Zanzibar 21, 140-150, 15!

expectations of 174 in Kenya 193-194

and Islam 190, 191, 213 in Tanzania 161-162, 166-168, and search for authenticity 169, 174-175, 184-185

213-214 in Zanzibar 15, 124

politics and religion in 30 reluctance to work in and religious fundamentalism 7, tourism 126-127

11, 13 see also Islam

and rise of Pentecostalism 258-259, Mwanga (king of Buganda,

261-262, 348 n. 10 Uganda) 40

and tradition 59, 215 Mwesiye, Bob 37 and views of AIDS 79-80

Mohamed, Zuhura_ 161 Namugongo (Uganda), Catholic shrine Montesquieu, Baron Charles-Louis in 40

de 31 narratives of decline moral codes in Tanzania 162-163, 164-165, of Africans 379 183, 184 of East Africans 383 in Zanzibar 133-134, 138-139,

Moore, Henrietta 31 AIDS epidemic fitting into 9-10, 11

of Pentecostalism 224-225, 149, 150

237-238, 246, 297-298 in Zanzibar 120-122, 123, 131,

moral decline narratives 138-139

and AIDS epidemic 9-10, 11 National AIDS Plan (South

in lanzania 162-163, 164-165, Africa) 334

183, 184 nationalism, in Zanzibar 123

in Zanzibar 133-134, 138-139, neo-liberal reforms, in Tanzania 125

149, 150 n. 16, 260

in Zanzibar 120-122, 123, 131 neo-Pentecostalism see Pentecostalism

moral economies 361 Negazya Mosque (Dar es Salaam) 177

398 INDEX Uganda 35 248-249

NGOs dealing with AIDS, in cell groups 238-239 n. 45, 243, Nguyen, Vinh-Kim 15, 21, 22, 348 on condoms 114, 240

Niehaus, Isak 16, 20, 185 in Ghana 7, 12, 261 n. 8, 278, 284

Nigeria healing in 258-259, Pentecostalism in prayers 272 264-267

smallpox epidemics in 33 moral codes of = 224-225, 237-238, nuclear family, in Pentecostalism 246, 297-298

292-293 in Nigeria 272

Nuer (people) 68 n. 15 rise of =258-259, 264, 277, 348

Nungwi (Zanzibar) 139 n. 10

Nyanza province (Kenya), AIDS and AIDS epidemic 260-262, 283

epidemic in 189 social distancing practices of

occult 3 348

284-285, 292-294, 299, 303

objectification of Islam 191, 214-215 in South Africa 261 n. 8, 310, 340,

rise of 30-32, 33, 44-45 spiritual superiority claims of Ocholla-Ayayo, A. B. GC. 69 283-284, 296-297 Odiwuor, Wycliffe 208 in 'lanzania 12, 255-256, 260-263,

Oginga, Odinga 49 n. 2, 69 280

Oeutu, G. E. M. 71, 73, 77-78 in Uganda 12, 21, 89-90, 91, 92, OIC (Organisation of Islamic 226-227, 228 n. 12, 230, 236-240 Conferences), Zanzibar’s membership accountability of behaviour of 137 n. 44 in| 242-245, 246 Okello, John 123 n. 12 and ‘de-toothing’ practices

Oman, Zanzibaris in 126 n. 19 234-235, 240-242

omulindi (non-sexual advisors) 94, 112 see also ‘born again’, Christians order and disorder, in religion 8-9 PEPFAR (US President’s Emergency

Orientalism 156 n. 3 Plan for AIDS Relief) 229, 359,

origins of AIDS 160 378

orphans, care for, in Zanzibar 144 performances, and donor dependency 22

Otayek, René 193 n. 3 personhood, western and non-western 19 Peterson, Derek 61 n. 12, 104 n. 16,

Papua New Guinea, studies of occult 113

forces in 33 Piscatori, James 191

Parikh, Shanti 92 plausibility structures 347

Parkin, David 70, 74, 110, 122 n. 11, political power, and science and

128, 133 n. 36, 139 n. 51 technology 160 peer-group pressure 251-252 in Africa 3, 17

pastoral power 349 politics

Pentecostalism 6, 14, 19 of care 301

and AIDS epidemic 256-257, and religion 4, 16

278-279 in modernity 30

healing prayers 267-272, in lanzania 160-161

277-280 in Zanzibar, Islamic reformists

views on AIDS = 183, 298, 299 on 139

and AIDS prevention 114, 223-224, _ pollution 227, 243, 244, 246-253, 261 n. 8, avoidance of, by Zionist Christians 326

300-301 ritual 316

in Botswana, among Ghanaian and AIDS 133, 212 immigrants 290-294, 300-301 Posel, Deborah 328

and choice 299-302 Positive Muslims (South Africa) 210 communities n- 257-258, 272-277, n. 8

279 poverty, in South Africa 321-322

INDEX 399 power public and private domains, healing 35, 211, 355-356 intermingling of 15 pastoral 349 Purpura, Alyson 137

political 160 prayers quarantine see isolation groups, charismatic, in Western Qur’an

Uganda 39 on adultery (za) 198, 201

healing 258-259, 264-267 in Islamic Reformism 14, 176

for AIDS victims 267-272, on pre-Islamic practice of burying

277-280 girl-children alive 210 n. 9

prevention of AIDS 1, 4 Qur’anic healing 171, 172 and behavioural change 5-6, 17,93, Qutb, Sayyid 195 n.5 240 n. 47, 253

campaigns 359-360 radical religious movements 6-7 ABC formula (Abstinence Be Islamic see reformist Islam faithful, use a Gondom) 6, rape, Islamic religious education 92-93, 134, 140, 201, 228-229, on 204

314 Raringo 75

condom used stressed in 206 recruitment, of hairdressers in

medicalisation of 155 Ghana 292

Muslim participation in 170 reformist Islam 190-191 United States funding for 1, 229, in East Africa 192-193

378 in Kenya 195 n. 5

Christianity on 6 and science 14, 178, 184

‘born again’ 107, 114, 243 in Tanzania 167, 168-169, 176,

Pentecostalism 114, 223-224, 182-183

226-227, 244, 246-253, 261 and AIDS epidemic 170-171, n. 8, 300-301 178, 185 and hairdressing practices 288-289, in Zanzibar 137-139

294-296 religion 2-5

Islam on 135, 185, 200-208, and counselling 346, 347, 348-350

216-217 and discontinuities 303

in South Africa 314, 315, 338-339 in East Africa 383

in Tanzania 158-159, 160-161, and ethics 351 n. 13

170, 184, 185-186 and health 349

in Uganda 92-93, 134 n. 39, order and disorder in 8-9 228-230, 231 n. 20, 246-253 and politics 4, 16

in Zanzibar 134-135 in modernity 30 339, 360 social aspects of —§ 257-258

Prince, Ruth 13, 16, 92, 200, 208-209, and science 377-378

prosperity and behavioural change 252-253 Pentecostalism on 237, 238, 300 social security provided by 302, 328, gospel of 263, 264 350 n. 11 post-apartheid expectations of traditional African 4, 10, 14 321-322 and transformations of self

prostitution 348-349, 351, 359 in Zanzibar 121 n.8 Weber’s sociology of 333, 356 see also transactional sex religious affiliation

Protestantism and HIV/AIDS infection rates 224 evangelical 6 and sexual relations 224-226 ‘marriage to Jesus’ in 110, 112 religious beliefs, and behaviour 227,

theology of salvation 87 247, 252, 299, 310 PSI (Population Services religious congregations, and Faith-Based International) 288 n. 2 Organizations (FBOs) 15

400 INDEX religious fundamentalism, and Catholicism in, on widow

modernity 7, 11, 13 inheritance 94

240 109-110

remarriage of widows 108 gender relations in 110-111, 113 repentance, in Christian theology marriage by widows to Jesus

repoliticisation, of Africa 381, 382 traditions 90, 96

Return to Laughter (Smith Bowen) 33 widow inheritance 97, 99, 106

Revivalist Christianity Sanders, Todd 31

107, 109 Christians

in East Africa 60, 89, 103, 104-105, ‘saved’ Christians see ‘born again’,

rejection of tradition by 60, 352 Schutz, Alfred 337

Uganda _ 60, 89, 94-95, 103 science see also ‘born again’ Christians and faith healing 13-14

revolutions, in Zanzibar (1964) faith in 3, 160

123-124 and reformist Islam 14, 178, 184

ritual pollution/impurity 316 and religion 3/77/—-378

and AIDS 133, 212 Scott, James 361 rituals scriptures, Islamic 213, 214 on initiation for girls 163 secondary virginity 339 Islamic, in ‘Tanzania 168 secular modernity 30

riskiness of 17, 78 Seleke, B. 297 traditional self in Luo society 66-68 care of 377

missionary opposition to 68-69, transformations of 18, 19, 346,

163 n. 18 347-348, 360, 373

in Samia society 90, 94-95, and AIDS counselling 356

102-104 and religion 348-349, 351,

Zionist Christian 326-327 359

ruwo practices (Luo tradition) 66-67 self-restraint, religiously motivated 6

Robbins, Joel 284, 302 seniority rules 74-75

romantic love senses, anthropology of 285-286 n. |

in Islam 213 Setel, Philip 155-156, 159

among university students in sex education, for girls 128, 185

Uganda 231 sex tourism, in Zanzibar 126

Roy, Olivier 192-193 sexual abstinence rumours, about cures for AIDS 13 as choice

ruptures, Pentecostal emphasis on 283, by HIV-positive persons 146-147

284, 293, 298, 302-303, 348 by widows 86, 87, 97, 107, 111-112, 113-114

Sadgrove, Jo 7, 19, 21, 383 premarital 150

salvation 339-340 n. 5 Foucault on 349 Islamic religious education safe-sex behaviour 236 n. 35, 310 by ‘born again’ Christians

mask of 244 on 128, 201-202, 205-206, possibilities of — 356 215, 216-217

and prevention of AIDS by Pentecostalists 229-230, 238, infection 92-93, 107, 114 239, 298, 339-340 n. 5 Protestant theology of 87 in secular AIDS prevention

Pentecostal 263-264 campaigns 251

and tradition 55, 58-59, 62-63, sexual intercourse, in Luo tradition 6/7

73-74, 75-79 sexual misconduct, Islam on 128, 132,

Samia (Uganda) 87, 89, 97-109 198, 209-210

‘born again’ (saved) Christians 91, sexual promiscuity, European

104-105, 107-108, 111, 113 perceptions of 328

INDEX 401 sexual relations perceived contagiousness of 325, of ‘born again’ Christians 235, 327

239-240 and religion 310

extramarital seen as divine punishment 320-321 and religious affiliation 224-225 AIDS prevention campaigns in 314,

in Tanzania 164 315, 338-339 in Zanzibar 128-129 anti-retroviral treatments in

in KwaZulu-Natal 319-320 availability of 21, 310, 315, 335 open discussions about 92, 248-249, distrust of 185

250-251, 339 Christianity in 310

in Pentecostalism 225 Apostolic Churches in 310

premarital, of boys 204-205 Pentecostalism 261 n. 8, 310, and religious affiliation 224-226 340, 348

risks of 6, 101 Zionist Churches 15, 310

in South Africa 313, 319-320 on AIDS 310-312, 316-319, 328

in Tanzania 162-165, 260 funeral rituals and in Zanzibar 127-129, 150-151 practices 326-327

sexuality, female control over 113 poverty in| 321-322 sexually transmitted diseases 320 spirit possession 11, 265-266

Shee, Sheikh Ali 207-208 and AIDS = 270-272

Shia Islam, in Kenya 195 n. 5 ‘spiritual family’, idea of = 273 sin spiritual superiority claims, of AIDS as punishment for 319 Pentecostalism 283-284, 296-297

confessions of 248 states

and repentance, Christian theology failures of 15

of 240 weak, health care in 16, 375

smallpox epidemics, in Northern sterilisation machines, in hairdressing

Nigeria 33 salons 286, 288

Smith Bowen, Elenore (Laura Stewart, Pamela J. 33

Bohannon) 33 stigmatisation

Soares, Benjamin FE 193 n. 3 of AIDS orphans 144 social anaesthesia 285-286 of AIDS victims 133-134, 151, social distancing 286, 302 183, 211-213, 311, 312 n. 5, 381, Pentecostalist practices of 284-285, 383-384

292-294, 299, 303 in South Africa 312, 313, 315,

social justice, and AIDS epidemic 383 324, 328, 328-329 social relations, transformations of of famine victims 381

375 of leprosy victims 317

social security, of religion 302, 328, Strathern, Andrew 19, 33

390 n. 11 Streicher, Henry 40

social triage 375-377 subject-formation, ethical 351 sociology of religion (Weber) 333,356 — suffering

Sontag, Susan 312 AIDS-related 7

South Africa experiences of 3 AIDS counselling in 334-335, 338 traditional understandings of 277 faith-based 333, 335-336, Sufi Islam 167, 170 n. 38 339-346, 350-351, 352-356 suicide, Islam on 144

AIDS epidemic in 309-310, survival strategies 381

312-313, 333-334 Svensson, Jonas 15, 183

associations with death 311, 315, Swahili-speaking people, in East

322-324, 325, 329, 345 Africa 122 n. 11

conspiracy theories on 314-315

exclusion and isolation of AIDS taboo concept 8 sufferers 325-326, 327-328 Takyi, B. K. 227 n. 10

402 INDEX Tanzania and modernity 59, 215 AIDS epidemic in 155, 157, 158, and views of AIDS 79-80

159, 259-260 Revivalist Christian rejection of 60,

and narratives of moral 392

decline 162-163, 164-165, and salvation 55, 58-59, 62-63,

183, 184 73-74, 75-79

rural areas 157, 158 Samia 90, 96, 97, 99, 106 AIDS prevention campaigns in traditional African religions 4, 10, 14 158-159, 160-161 traditional healing Muslim participation in 170, 184, gloves used in 287

185-186 in South Africa 316, 324

anti-retroviral treatments 155, 159, in Tanzania 171, 278

178-183 in Zanzibar 138 n. 46 Islam in traditionalism 4, 14 and AIDS 165-166, 168-171, transactional sex

175-176, 178, 183-184 Islamic religious education on 204

Qur’anic healing 171, 172 and sexual abstinence campaigns 251 medicalisation of AIDS in 160 in ‘Tanzania 164-165, 172

migration to Zanzibar 125 in Uganda 230-236, 240-242, Muslims in 161-162, 166-168, 169, 245-246, 383

174-175, 184-185 see also prostitution

coping with AIDS = 156, 157 transformations

sexual mores and gender personal 18, 19, 346, 347-348, 360,

relations 162-165, 184-185, 373

260 and AIDS counselling 356

Pentecostalism in 12, 255-256, and religion 348-349, 351, 359

260-264, 280 of social relations 375

and AIDS 256-257, 277, transmission of AIDS

278-279 knowledge about 201

healing prayers 264-267 lowered by male circumcision 169,

political control of Zanzibar by 125 198, 214

politics in, science used in 160-161 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC,

Ter Haar, G. 3 South Africa) 340, 376

lero see widows, ‘inheritance’ of treatment of AIDS see anti-retroviral

therapeutic citizenship 22, 377 treatments (ARs)

therapeutic evangelism 362, 375, 376, ‘Turner, Victor 8, 32-33, 380 378

therapeutisation 337-338 Uganda Thomb, Arthur 315 n. 9 AIDS epidemic in 33, 34, 88, 93 Thompson, E. P 361 and religious affiliation 224-225

‘Tooro (Western Uganda) and transactional sex 235-236 AIDS epidemic in 34, 36 and witchcraft accusations 34, 35, and witchcraft accusations 35,37—38 37-38 Catholic Church in 38-39, 40 AIDS prevention campaigns in

and witch hunts 41-44 92-93, 134 n. 39, 228-230, 231

health care projects in 37 n. 20, 251

tourism and Pentecostalism 92, 246-253 in Kenya 200 Christianity in 36, 89, 91 in Zanzibar 125-127, 138, 151 ‘born again’ 89-90

‘Tracy, George 8. 329 among Samia 91, 104-105,

tradition 107-108, 111, 113 Islamic 191 Catholic Church 38-39, 89 Luo 65-75, 79, 96, 133 n. 36, Pentecostalism 12, 21, 92,

208-209 226-227, 228 n. 12, 230, 236-240

INDEX 403 accountability of behaviour White, Luise 37

of 242-245, 246 Whyte, Susan R. 8, 33, 136

and ‘de-toothing’ practices widowers, in Uganda 88

234-235, 240-242 widows

on widow ‘inheritance’ 91-92, care for 86, 93

94-96 in East Africa 85

witch hunting by 15, 40-44 empowerment of 86-87

condom use in 229, 236, 240 ‘inheritance’ of 16, 49, 50, 67, 85

university students in 7 Christian views of 85-86, 91-92, and transactional sex 230-236, 94—96 240-242, 245-246, 383 ‘born again’ (saved) 50, 51-52, widows in 88, 93, L1O-111, 113 94-56, 58, 62, 77 inheritance of 86, 90-92, 93-95, Islamic views of — 200

97, 99, 106 male reluctance towards 93-94 witchcraft in 29, 34 594-55, 57-58, 77-78 ‘marriage to Jesus’ 87, 96-97 traditionalist views of = 52-53,

Uganda Martyrs Guild see UMG in Uganda 86, 90-92, 93-95, 97,

Ukah, Asonzeh 264 99, 106 ulema 124, 213 women’s refusal of | 100-101

UMG (Uganda Martyrs Guild) 40-41,45 new social positions/roles of 21,

witch hunts by 41-44 86-87, 105-106, 110, 111-114

United States ‘marriage to Jesus’ 8/7, 96-97, counselling techniques from 366 109-110, 112, 113

funding for AIDS prevention and remarriage of 108 treatment campaigns 1, 6, 18, in Uganda 388, 93, 110-111, 113

229, 378 Wimberley, Kristina 261 n. 8

urban centres, Pentecostalism in 264 witchcraft ustaarabu concept (civilisation) 122 anthropological studies of = 32-33 ustadhs (Muslim pious persons) 130 n. 29 beliefs in, in Zionist Church 317 fight against

Valverde, Mariana 349 by Christians 15, 32, 40-44, 63 Van Dik, Ryk 7, 19, 348 by Qur’anic healing 171, 172

Vaughan, Megan 20 in Tanzania 172-173

VCT programs (Voluntary Counselling in Uganda 15, 38, 40-44

and ‘lesting) 135, 334, 360 in Zanzibar 124 n. 15 veiling and Islam 211-212 in Kenya 203 rise of 31

in Zanzibar 130 n. 28 and epidemics 31-32, 33, 34-35,

see also dress codes 38, 211, 324

Vikor, Knut 190 n. 2 in ‘Tanzania 172

virginity Uganda secondaryin 339 women 29, 34 value of, in Zanzibar 128 autonomy of 352

viruses, ignorance about 160 blamed for immorality of men 131

Volinn, Ise J. 312 n. 4 dependence of 86, 110

empowerment of 6, 86-87

weak states, health care in 16, 375 Islamic dress codes for 202-204, 215

Weber, Max 333, 355 life expectancy of, in Uganda 88

western medicine and Pentecostalism 264

279 103-104

distrust of 37, 159, 160 n. 12, 179, public speeches at funerals by

anti-retroviral treatments in lanzania 162, 260 (ARTs) 179-180, 181, 185 targeting of see also anti-westernism in AIDS education 5

404 INDEX in hair salons 288 n. 2 narrative of decline in 120-122,

see also gender relations 123, 131, 138-139

AIDS epidemic fitting into

Yamba, C. Bawa 33 133-134, 149, 150 nationalism in 123 Zanzibar politics in, Islamic reformists on 139 AIDS epidemic in 119-120, revolution in (1964) 123-124

132-133 sexual relations in 127-129,

coping strategies 21, 140-150, 151 150-151 government commitment in tourism in 125-127, 138, 151 tackling of 135, 136 n. 41 ZAPHA+ (Zanzibar Association for

Islam on 131-132, 151 People Living with HIV/AIDS) 119

reformists 137-139 n. 2, 133, 136, 143-144, 145, traditional 139-140, 148 146-147, 149

AIDS prevention campaigns in Zimbabwe, distribution of female

134-135 condoms in 288 n. 2

cosmopolitanism of 122 za (adultery, illicit sexual

economic development in 124-125 intercourse) 128, 132 n. 31, 198 gender segregation in 129-130 Zionist Christians

identities in 122-123 in South Africa 15, 310

immigrants in 122, 125 on AIDS 310-312, 316-319, 328

Islam in 124 funeral rituals and practices

Muslims in 15, 124 of 326-327 reluctance to work in zombies, terminally ill AIDS victims tourism 126-127 as 324

STUDIES OF RELIGION IN AFRICA SUPPLEMENTS TO THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA

|. MOBLEY, H.W. The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary. An Analysis of the

Published Critiques of Christian Missionaries by Ghanaians, 1897-1965. 1970. ISBN 90 04 01185 4 2. POBEE, J.S. (ed.). Religion in a Pluralistic Society. Essays Presented to Professor C.G. Baéta in Celebration of his Retirement from the Service of

the University of Ghana, September 1971, by Friends and Colleagues Scattered over the Globe. 1976. ISBN 90 04 04556 2 3. ‘TASIE, G.O.M. Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta, 1864-1918.

1978. ISBN 90 04 05243 7 4. REECK,D. Deep Mende. Religious Interactions in a Changing African Rural Society. 1978. ISBN 90 04 04769 7 5. BUTSELAAR, J. VAN. Africains, misstonnaires et colonialistes. Les origines de

l’Eglise Presbytérienne de Mozambique (Mission Suisse), 1880-1896. 1984. ISBN 90 04 07481 3 6. OMENKA, N.I. The School in the Service of Evangelization. ‘The Catholic Educational Impact in Eastern Nigeria 1886-1950. 1989. ISBN 90 04 08932 3 7. JEDREJ, M.C. & SHAW, R. (eds.). Dreaming, Rehgion and Society in Afniea. 1992. ISBN 90 04 08936 5 8. GARVEY, B. Bembaland Church. Religious and Social Change in South Central Africa, 1891-1964. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09957 3

9. OOSTHUIZEN, G.C., KTTSHOFE M.C. & DUBE, S.W.D. (eds.). Afro-Christianity at the Grassroots. Its Dynamics and Strategies. Foreword by Archbishop Desmond ‘Tutu. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10035 O 10. SHANK, D.A. Prophet Harris, the ‘Black Elyah’ of West Afrca. Abridged by Jocelyn Murray. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09980 8 ll. HINFELAAR, H.E Bemba-speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Relgious Change (1892-1992). 1994. ISBN 90 04 10149 7 12. GIFFORD, P. (ed.). The Christian Churches and the Democratsation of Africa. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10324 4 13. JEDREJ, M.C. Jngessana. ‘The Religious Institutions of a People of the Sudan-Ethiopia Borderland. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10361 9 14. FIEDLER, K. Christeanity and African Culture. Conservative German Protestant Missionaries in ‘Tanzania, 1900-1940. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10497 6

15. OBENG, P. Asante Catholicims. Religious and Cultural Reproduction Among the Akan of Ghana. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10631 6 16. FARGHER, B.L. The Ongins of the New Churches Movement in Southern Ethio-

pia, 1927-1944. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10661 8 17. ‘TAYLOR, W.H. Mission te Educate. A History of the Educational Work of

the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria, 1846-1960. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10713 4 18. RUEL, M. Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life. Reflexive Essays on a Bantu

Religion. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10640 5 19. McKENZIE, P. Hal Onsha! A Phenomenology of a West African Religion in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10942 0 20. MIDDLETON, K. Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar. 1999.

ISBN 90 04 11289 8 21. LUDWIG, FE. Church and State in ‘Tanzania. Aspects of a Changing Relationship, 1961-1994. 1999. 90 04 11506 4 22. BURKE, J. These Catholic Sisters are all Mamas! ‘Towards the Inculturation of the Sisterhood in Africa, an Ethnographic Study. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11930 2 23. MAXWELL, D., with I. LAWRIE (eds.) Christianity and the African Imagination. issays in Honour of Adrian Hastings. 2001. ISBN 90 04 11668 O 24. GUNNER, E. The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God. 2003. In pre-

paration. ISBN 90 04 12542 6 25. PEMBERTON, C. Circle Thinking. African Women Theologians in Dialogue with the West. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12441 1 26. WEISS, B. (ed.). Producing African Futures. Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13860 9 27. ASAMOAH-GYADU, JS. African Chansmatcs. Gurrent Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14089 1 28. WESTERLUND, D. Afncan Indigenous Religions and Disease Causation. From

Spriritual Beings to Living Humans. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14433 1 29. FAULKNER, M.R.J. Overtly Muslim, Covertly Boni. Gompeting Calls of Religious Allegiance on the Kenyan Coast. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14753 5 30. SOOTHILL, J.E. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power. Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15789 7 31. QLAFFEY, P. Christian Churches in Dahomey-Benin. A study of their sociopolitical role. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15572 5 32. WIT, H. DE and WEST, G.O. (eds.). African and European Readers of the Bible in Dialogue. In Quest Of a Shared Meaning. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16656 1 33. PALMIE, S. (ed.). Africas of the Americas. Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16472 7

34. WELCH, P. Church and Settler in Colonial