Female and child ‘husbands’: Rituals as HIV escape routes

Abstract

Discourses on the struggle against HIV and AIDS tend to portray African traditional religio-cultural rituals as ‘harmful’ and African people as passive and clueless victims. By focusing on middle-aged widows, this study explores the utilisation of traditional rituals as HIV and AIDS escape routes in outlying areas such as the rural Manyika-Gandanzara area. Informed by the phenomenological approach, the study seeks to answer questions: Are African rural communities passive beneficiaries of the top-down HIV and AIDS intervention strategies? What localised responses have the communities developed in order to ‘escape’ from HIV? Data used to answer these questions were inductively gathered through key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and observations in the Manyika-Gandanzara community. The findings of the study suggest that instead of relying solely on official government and donor-funded HIV and AIDS interventions, the Manyika-Gandanzara community has renegotiated sex-oriented widow inheritance rituals into asexual female-to-female and mother–son symbolic unions in its attempt to escape the disease.