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  Although generalizations are difficult, most traditional African societies are promiscuous by Western standards....

  There is a striking analogy between promiscuity as a risk factor in humans and the “promiscuous” behavior of vervets. Typically, female vervets, unlike baboons, are sexually receptive for long periods … and during that time mate with multiple male partners, sometimes engaging in dozens of copulations on a single day....

  We are left to conclude that even if HIV/AIDS isn’t the result of some African having sex with a monkey, it has certainly spread because Africans were having sex like monkeys.

  This initial argument that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was the result of a base African sexuality was rounded off in papers like “The Social Context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa,” published by the anthropologists John and Pat Caldwell, which suggested the spread of HIV/AIDS was linked to societies where “virtue is related more to success in reproduction than to limiting profligacy,” and the fact that “polygyny exists on a scale not found in the Eurasian system.” It is useful to start with polygamy when discussing the HIV/AIDS epidemic because the reactions to this cultural practice and its implication in the spread of the epidemic provide a starting point for exploring understandings of the relationship between sex and HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.

  Polygamy has long been a point of concern when the world considers African sexuality—if indeed such a thing even exists. During the height of the British colonial project, it was thought that the “greatest struggle is not so much with heathenism and fetishness as with worldliness, unchristian marriages and polygamy.” The assumption made in anthropological assessments such as the Caldwells’ of the relationship of an aberrant African sexuality to HIV/AIDS is that polygamy institutionalizes an innate promiscuity that is central to the spread of disease. It is not difficult to see why earlier researchers came to this conclusion—especially considering the historical and anthropological bias favoring the idea of the promiscuous African. It also reveals why many Africans initially pushed so hard against the idea that HIV was actually a problem. No one wanted to really answer the question: what does it mean if these historians and anthropologists are right? Unfortunately, both the unfounded assumptions about African sexuality and the pushback against these assumptions colored the debate and perhaps delayed the formation of an effective strategy to deal with HIV/AIDS.

  I didn’t originally intend to explore the role of polygamy in the spread of the epidemic, but it came up in a conversation I had with the prominent activist Samaila Garba, who runs Amana, an association of people living with HIV/AIDS in the northern Nigerian town of Kontangora.

  I first met Samaila when Doc and I passed through Kontangora on our way to the village where Doc had his clinic. Samaila lived on a busy street near the center of town, just behind the emir’s sprawling palace compound, where kids kicking a soccer ball scurried to the roadside every time a car or motorcycle buzzed by and people made slow progress in their amblings, stopping every five minutes to greet another person they knew. Residences were indistinguishable from storefronts—goods for sale hung from or sat on almost every available hook and flat surface. People blinked repeatedly when stepping from the shade of their dwellings into the harsh, hot sun. Samaila emerged from his low doorway slightly stooped, but soon unfolded himself to his true height. He towered over most people, and with his bald head, dark skin, and chiseled facial features, he appeared the emblem of seriousness, a distinguished look that vanished as soon as his face exploded into an enthusiastic, toothy smile.

  He was an unlikely activist. The son of a poor farmer, he had grown up in northern Nigeria with dreams of attending college and becoming, as he called it, a “big man.” But due to the relative poverty of his family, he was not able to continue his education beyond secondary school. Instead he became a schoolteacher and later, after some persuasion by close friends, a police officer. He worked instructing new recruits on the intricacies of the law, and sometimes went undercover to break syndicates of livestock thieves operating in the vast farm and grazing lands of the north. He certainly fit the part of a police officer—his imposing presence and assured movements, his gestures controlled and authoritative, his voice at once calm and commanding. And though police officers in Nigeria are much maligned for petty corruption, he was unapologetic in his love for his former profession. “Whatever they say about policemen,” he had told me when we first met, “I know it built my character. It made me strong. It taught me courage, and I believe that courage is what I brought along into this HIV/AIDS work that I am doing.”

  When next we met, it was at the Kontangora General Hospital, where the Amana Association had its headquarters. We met in a stuffy office that was filled with files detailing potential grants, stacked piles of community activism training manuals, and peer-counseling and testing brochures. Dust collected on an old, clearly unused computer beside which rested a picture of Samaila meeting the Queen of England. We took two plastic chairs outside to the shade of a large mango tree abutting the building, where a group of women, members of the association, sat across from us against the wall of the hospital ward, their legs stretched out on the dusty concrete before them, laughing and chatting as little gusts of wind made their headscarves ripple. Every so often, they glanced toward us and whispered.

  “In 2001 I did accept that I was HIV positive. I made statements as such in the public,” Samaila said, once we were seated. “It was quite a revolutionary thing to do in the north because nobody had done that before. It was very tough for myself and for the remaining members of my family. It affected my children. They became very despondent, first of all because their mother was lost. Then they were not happy at school—people were giving them a lot of headache. Their peers were giving them a lot of headache. They would tell them, ‘Your father is Mr. AIDS! Your father is Mr. AIDS!’ And my kids would cry their way back home. I found a lot of rejection from my immediate community. When I went for prayer in the mosques—even to pray in the mosques—people didn’t want to stand by me,” he said, still wounded.

  “But I also knew and I saw that people were misinterpreting the issue of HIV/AIDS. And I realized that the onus of removing the stigma lies on me and me only. I suffered the stigma and I realized the stigma was a result of misinformation.

  “People talked about HIV/AIDS, for example, as being a disease of the promiscuous only. People with wayward behaviors were being punished by God, infected with HIV/AIDS. That was the norm of the thinking among the population.” He coughed. “I certainly had relationships with many women before I got married to my wife—I wouldn’t call myself a saint in that respect. I was not the promiscuous type, running after everything in skirts—one fling in a year or something like that. But I wouldn’t say I was a virgin before I married my wife. It wasn’t like that.”

  He then told me that he was introduced to his first wife in 1990 by a good friend, a trader who had a shop a few streets down from his house. To visit his friend, he would have to pass his future wife selling akara (deep-fried bean-curd balls) on the street in front of her own house. I could see him, younger then, after work sauntering down the dusty road in his black policeman’s uniform with its bright red chevrons and short sleeves. I could see her, too—a young face framed by her headscarf, her hands moving skillfully to package the crisp golden snacks for her customers. I could hear the pleasantries exchanged between them as he passed, sure to slow his walk and linger a moment by her stand, alongside the clusters of customers holding money at the ready in one hand and turning up expectant palms in the other.

  “I would buy akara from her before proceeding to where my friend was staying,” he said. “That is where myself and the woman developed an interest in each other.”

  “What about her interested you? What made you fall in love with her?” I asked.

  “She was quiet, and I love that,” he said, smiling slowly. “She appeared to be somebody who was reserved. She wasn’t the noisy type. She wasn’t the garrulous type.
She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She was somebody who understood me very well. If I was in a bad mood, she knew the mood—I didn’t need to tell her—and she could pacify me, change my moods from bad ones to good ones by the understanding and the love that she showed to me. That was what made me to love her.”

  After a moment, he smiled again and added, “Another thing that made me marry my wife was that she refused to accept my advances. She was different from the other women who were so easy. Certainly, when you’re courting a woman in the north, it’s improper to enter a sexual relationship with her until you marry her. Any woman from a good family will not allow it, even if you, the man, certainly want.”

  He paused and then added as an aside, “We as men will demand that.”

  “But a woman from a good family wouldn’t accept that,” he continued, “because she thinks that if you have sex with her, you’re going to vamoose. That’s the normal thing. And yes, I was impatient to see her in my house. We courted for just about six months. Quite short! My friends were actually surprised that I had started falling in love, because at that time, I didn’t want things like marriage or women. Honestly, I had already passed the marriageable age. People wanted to see what kind of woman had been able to get me to that stage.”

  He certainly was a bit older, just over forty when first married—quite unusual for northern Nigeria, where people are often married younger, in their early or midtwenties.

  “I was regretting not marrying earlier, because life as a married man was more ordered for me. Certain things I didn’t discover single, I discovered them when I was married—some sense of responsibility, a certain sense of being able to save, of being able to lay down some things for a rainy day. I knew that I was now responsible for another person’s life. It changed me a lot,” he said, nodding deliberately before bringing his palms together and locking his thumbs. We were both quiet as we watched the evening steal across the fields beyond the hospital wall. The sun hovered just above the horizon far out to the west where the town ended abruptly against a mixture of farmland and scrub brush. The women lounging against the building had departed, leaving a scattering of peanut shells now being considered by a band of free-range chickens. “But I’ll also tell you that I married again in 1994.”

  A surprised look must have crossed my face.

  “Yes.” He continued, either unaware of or unconcerned by my reaction. “While I was with my wife, I married another woman.”

  He explained that while with the police, he had been transferred from his hometown to the neighboring state as an undercover investigative officer.

  “The police station where I worked was close to her house,” he said. “She always passed through the police station. I think she was going to her father’s house. I was working in the crime department, sitting by the window all the time, and I had the opportunity of seeing her. She caught my eye because of her beauty, very dark skinned and black, and very beautiful—very pretty woman. I one day decided to call upon her. One thing led to another—certainly when I first called her, it was not because of marriage—but one thing led to another and then I married her. I was told her husband had died, but I still married her.”

  “Was your first wife at all hurt by that?” I asked.

  He responded to my question almost before I asked it—as if expecting it.

  “Polygamy is not something strange to the two of them,” he said. “It’s normal. My first wife, she grew up in a polygamous family. Her father had three wives. Certainly no woman wants a rival, however much the culture allows, but it is accepted and my first wife accepted it in good faith. She was also sure that the bond between us was so strong that no other woman could take her place. And it was like that. My first and second wives accepted each other because it had to be like that. I also had a part to play by not showing preference to one or the other. Certainly within the heart of my hearts, the depth of my hearts, my first was the preferred wife, but it was never showed openly, because anything like that will bring conflict.” He fell silent. “I was with my second wife for six months, getting to a year, and she started falling sick,” Samaila said after his long pause. “And she died. She hadn’t got a child for me. We hadn’t been pregnant. We hadn’t even lived together for too long.

  “In the year 2001, my first wife fell very, very sick and was admitted in the hospital. Very luckily for me, the doctor in the hospital was a personal friend. We met most of the time at social gatherings. After my wife had spent three days in the hospital not getting any better, he told me, ‘Samaila, let us look for HIV. Let us do an HIV test on your wife.’

  “I said, ‘No. HIV is for other people. It is not for me. I do not believe that I am infected or that my wife is infected.’ He didn’t say anything that day but the next day he called me again and said, ‘Look, Samaila, HIV can come from anything. It can come from a blood donation. It can come from a blood transfusion. It can come from anything. So please, do your best and let us do a test. It is not the end of life.’

  “I do remember very well the test was done on a Sunday afternoon around two o’clock. It happened at Yauri at a private hospital, a run-down, ramshackle place. I remember a long bench with hospital equipment on it, and testing vials and needles improperly discarded. It wasn’t very neat. I remember the man who did the test at the laboratory was very short, very broad. He told the doctor. The doctor was shivering and washing his hands very fast. I knew something was wrong. He now told me, ‘This is what is happening. She is positive.’

  “My wife died soon after. I loved her very dearly until the day that she died.”

  He would later find out that his second wife’s first husband had died of HIV/AIDS.

  The story Samaila tells of his experience with polygamy and HIV/AIDS does not fit with the polygamy-equals-promiscuity paradigm. It is not the story of a sex-crazed maniac, the societal convention that allows him the ability to fulfill his boundless desires, and the disease that has come to expose how morally backward he is. Rather, it is the experience of a decent and honorable family man struggling to understand how this disease entered into his life. This is not to offer a full-throated defense of polygamy, a practice that sparks debate about the roles and rights of women in a given community; rather, it is to say that within the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one must be careful not to offer simplistic and moralizing conclusions about sexual relationships that exist outside of a certain familiar cultural context. The associated judgment only increases anxiety about the propriety of sexual practice and prevents valuable discussion that might increase understanding of the epidemic’s progress. As it turns out, there might be something about a polygamous relationship that speaks to a more generalized pattern of sexual interaction in Nigeria (and sub-Saharan Africa) that may indeed affect the spread of the epidemic, but it has nothing to do with an innate African promiscuity.

  Back in New York on a summer day so hot as to make even the most authentically Nigerian person wilt, I paid a visit to Helen Epstein, scientist, journalist, and author of a book on AIDS, The Invisible Cure. We sat beneath a large umbrella on the stone patio in the backyard of her Harlem row house, an ice-cold pitcher of water perspiring between us, and discussed the various theories of why HIV/AIDS has spread further and faster in sub-Saharan Africa than in other places.

  “It’s not that Africans are any more promiscuous than Westerners,” I remember her saying. “The average number of lifetime partners is about the same. It’s that the patterns of sexual interaction are different.”

  Patterns of sexual interaction matter tremendously in the spread of the disease. In the West, people tend to engage in sequentially monogamous relationships. In other words, each person has one partner at any one time, with very little overlap between relationships. In such arrangements, a sexually transmitted infection like HIV/AIDS can still pass from person to person, but the completion of one relationship and the establishment of another limit the rate at which it moves. In sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeri
a included—more emphasis has been placed on the idea of concurrent partnerships, sexual relationships that overlap in time. These overlapping relationships can create a sexual network that, as one study argues, “dramatically increases both the size and variability of an epidemic … the speed with which the epidemic spreads.” Thus it is likely that HIV/AIDS is more widespread in Africa not because Africans are any more promiscuous or weirdly sexual than other people, but as a result of the presence of sexual networks that allow for increased likelihood of exposure to and transmission of the disease.

  A polygamous relationship like Samaila’s, because it is so visible and culturally sanctioned, provides an easy and potentially judgment-free example of how concurrency accelerates the spread of HIV in a population. But not all relationships in Nigeria are explicitly culturally sanctioned, though they may still be affected by concurrency. While concurrency counters the idea of a more promiscuous African sexuality as being the cause of the epidemic, it does little to quell the anxiety about the moral quality of sexual relationships that are unsanctioned in this time of HIV/AIDS. These changing relationships are the subject of much agonizing in countries like Nigeria, where increasing urbanization and migration have weakened community control of sexual practice and inspired new ideas about the proper place of sex.

  “I know that people are beginning to embrace sex as a human behavior between two adults that you cannot avoid,” a young banker I know named Fatimah said to me during one of our many conversations. Her unconscious use of the word avoid perfectly expressed the tension that surrounds emerging attitudes toward sex in Nigeria. Many people I spoke with suggested that the proper behavior was waiting until marriage, a comment followed by the caveat “but body no be wood!”—in other words, humans are not inanimate objects and desire eventually wins.

  Fatimah always looked every bit the modern African woman. She always dressed very stylishly, multicolored scarves wrapped around her head, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and crisp black pantsuits with pinstripes or form-fitting dresses cut from traditional fabric.