When husband to 46-year-old Sabetha Kaonga, an ordinary Malawian woman from the border district of Chitipa died in 2004, she says her husband’s kinsmen decided to ‘start running her life’ as they wanted her to re-marry one of her brother in-laws.
A month after they had buried her husband, the village arranged for a special cultural rite where she had to choose the man to take over from where her late husband had left off.
Twelve men – all related to her late husband – lined up to take control of the bosom of their fallen relative amidst jubilant singing by a large gathering of villagers.
It was a mix bag; amongst them were her late husband’s brothers and cousins; some older, some younger than her while some were married others still single.
The mother of four, Sabetha was handed a spear, an instrument to be used to perform the cultural rite and a senior villager who gave her the spear wanted her to hand it over to the man she would settle for.
A cathedral silence engulfed the place as all waited with abated breath to see who she had picked.
When the gathering was pregnant with raw expectations, Sabetha Kaonga became the first woman to do a sacrilegious thing.
“To the shock and dismay of my husband’s kinsmen, I looked within the gathering for my eleven-year old first born son and he is the one to whom I surrendered the spear,” she recalls.
At this point, everyone started speaking at the same time in confused protest.
“This is sacrilege!” protested the man who had given her the spear, “she cannot act in contravention of our cultural traditions.”
Elderly women were asked to take her aside and force her to change her mind and perform the ‘right thing’ as what she had done was unfathomable.
“But I just could not do that,” she says because she never knew what had killed my husband.
Even when she had met the elderly women, she told them the same. They told her it was not a problem because her husband was bewitched.
“My husband had all signs and symptoms of a person not only infected with the virus that causes AIDS, but one whose immune system had dwindled and was hit with one after the other opportunistic infections,” she says.
Since her Tumbuka tribe, follows a paternal cultural traditional where a wife settles at her husband’s home Sabetha was thrown out from her late husband’s home leaving behind her four children as the custom demands.
Two months later Sabetha went to Nthalire Health Centre where she tested HIV positive joining close to a million Malawians who are HIV positive.
She is now one of very few women who have been able to help seeing out some cultural traditions like the one she was involved in called ‘Chaharo’ literary meaning ‘wife inheritance’.
This is amongst many African cultural practices African Traditional leaders moan has been lost to HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Paramount Chief Chikulamayembe of Malawi’s Northern district of Rumphi says Africa cannot categorically condemn all its beliefs just because of AIDS.
“If we let this pandemic dictate our future, then we are doomed to live in shame as we will become a people without identity,” he says.
He said unlike people in the West Africa has very rich traditions which for a long time has been looked down upon as heathen by the West.
“Therefore while we are fighting HIV/AIDS pandemic let us not give anyone chance to wipe out our beliefs in the name of eliminating AIDS,” he challenges.
Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika concurs.
He says HIV/AIDS wears many ugly faces and therefore it can be defeated if the approach and strategies lined up to fight it are multifaceted.
"The pandemic wears many ugly faces. It is a challenge to us in so many ways," says Mutharika.
President Mutharika said HIV/AIDS is a medical issue, an economic issue a cultural issue, as well as a political issue, which is affecting the country’s development.
Mutharika said Malawi is one of the few countries in Africa that have registered successes in prevention and management of HIV and AIDS.
"In two years the number of people on Anti-retroviral therapy has grown from less than 5,000 to over 75,000 and the incidence of new infections has levelled off and more people are coming for Voluntary Counselling and testing than before," he said.
"This implies that our campaign against this disease is successful," added Mutharika.
58 percent of the estimated 1 million infected are women and this highlights their exceptionally high vulnerability.
The overall levels of infection have remained constant for the last seven years at 14 percent national prevalence rate.
According to the National HIV/AIDS policy (2003), the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the greatest development threat and challenge Malawi is facing today.
The epidemic, which continues to spread, has affected all sectors of the society, resulting in substantial loss of national, community, household and individual productivity, and enormous increase in the burden among individuals, households and the community at large.
Church of Central Africa Presbytery’s Livingstonia Synod says there are a number of factors contributing to the escalation of the epidemic.
Socially, since Malawi has a number of ethnic groups, these tribes have cultural practices that significantly contribute to the spread of HIV, and pose a serious challenge to the efforts of not only government but also the Church to reduce the infection and mitigate the effects of the epidemic.
The negative cultural practices have been reflected in the HIV/AIDS Policy developed by the General Assembly of the CCAP, a grouping of 3 Synods in Malawi and 2 Synods in Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively.
A survey conducted by Livingstonia Synod’s Church and Society Programme in 2003, for instance, revealed that kupimbira – a cultural practice that allows parents or guardians to give away young daughters, sometimes as young as 12 years, to men as old as 70 years for marriage in settlement of debt owed by the girls’ parents to a man or prospective husbands – is covertly practiced amongst the Ngondes and Nyakyusas of Karonga, and the Lambyas and Sukwas of Chitipa.
Moses Mkandawire Program Coordinator of the Programme said the practice, like so many others that force young girls and widows to marry their in-laws, exacerbates HIV infection.
Sentinel surveillance data by National Aids Commission depicts 20% of women in the northern region of Malawi as infected, the second most infected region of the three regions in Malawi.
“Amongst these ethnic groups, women further lack complete control over their lives because of cultural influence,” says Mkandawire.
“These communities are steep in tradition and highly patriarchal,” he further moans.
He says Gender inequalities are very entrenched. Women are taught from childhood to be submissive to males. In conjugal relationships, women have virtually no control over their reproductive health.
Perhaps this explains why the HIV infection rate is higher amongst girls and women compared to boys and men within the same age group (NAC, HIV/AIDS Estimates and Prevalence, 2003).
Amongst the Phoka dialect of the Tumbuka tribe of Livingstonia in Rumphi there is a very deep culture of silence and secrecy. HIV and AIDS and sexuality issues are a ‘no go zone’ in any discussions.
“Polygamy is culturally acceptable and widely practiced amongst these communities,” says Mkandawire.
He says Non governmental organisations, Community based organisations, faith based organisations and some government agencies have declared war on all harmful cultural practices that are fuelling the spread of AIDS and they will fight tooth and nail to remove it from the face of communities.
He also pointed out that poverty also forces young girls and women to get into ‘marriages of convenience’, thereby exposing them to risk of HIV infection.
“Poverty, coupled with lack of assertiveness on the part of women, puts them at a weaker position as far as sexuality is concerned,” he says.
Because of this, he says women are exposed to a higher risk to HIV infection compared to their men folk.
“What makes the situation more difficult is that most women, especially in rural areas, are unaware of the existence of such inequalities, let alone the possibilities for change and merely accept the legitimacy of existing order,” he says.
And indeed Sabetha Kaonga said she realised very late that what she was doing was in fact in line with observations of are rights as firstly a human being and secondly a woman.
“I realised this when I joined a women grouping called Coalition of Women Living with HIV and AIDS,” she says.
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