“You have brought the sickness:” HIV and a woman’s plight
By Lungi Langa
3 May 2010 | HIV/AIDS Awareness | AIDS Denialsm | Stigma
I was recently paging through a back-copy of the Big Issue magazine when an article titled Teen love gets more complicated, caught my attention. It told the story of a teenager who was born HIV positive. She found out about her status when she was thirteen years old.
Because she had been a sickly child, her mother knew every witch doctor around and took her to all of them.
Her father was also sick, convincing her mother that they were both bewitched, probably by one person. After her father died, the girl’s health continued to deteriorate until she was referred to a health facility where both she and her mother were tested and diagnosed with HIV.
The diagnosis finally reversed her mother’s view that the illness was linked to witchcraft.
While reading the article I tried to make sense of the mother’s state of mind. The belief she clung to for so long was a lie and now she had to make sense of it: they had not been bewitched, they were HIV positive. She also had to deal with her own diagnosis.
When I was growing up in Umlazi in Durban, it was not unusual to point out sick people and whisper that they had been bewitched. All of these “bewitched” people had similar symptoms. They had lost a lot of weight, their skin became darker as their illness advanced, they developed sores all over their bodies and got oral thrush. They walked around in a dazed slow motion and eventually had to be carried around because they could no longer walk on their own.
I knew many of these people and I could never understand why anyone would want to bewitch them when they had so little. After all, what did they have to gain from someone with so few possessions?
My failure to understand what motivated these bewitchings eventually lead me to a more scientific explanation for this disease. But the stigma associated with HIV still causes many to cling desperately to other explanations for their illness, including witchcraft. Transferring the blame to an outside force, something that is beyond their control, allows many to “cope” with an unexpected diagnosis.
In many communities HIV is still considered to be caused by a woman’s promiscuity. This dangerous assumption not only places the bulk of the blame on women but also enforces the misconception that only those who are unfaithful are infected, when often faithful women are infected by their unfaithful partners.
Whilst women may be disproportionately infected, it is widely agreed that their economic, physical and physiological vulnerability makes them more susceptible to infection than their male counterparts.
But for many women, blaming witchcraft offers a kind of safe haven. For them it is better to be a victim of witchcraft than to be accused of being a promiscuous, unfaithful wife who brought sickness into the family.
Sadly, blaming witchcraft to explain HIV infection in their families is unlikely to let women off the hook. Even if the husband’s family buy into the witchcraft argument, they are likely to continue blaming the woman, only not for infecting their son, brother or cousin, but for bewitching him. And when she falls ill herself, they may very well whisper that her “muthi” is turning against her.
