Abstract
Michael Bolton never could have predicted that his 1989 hit “Soul Provider” would be sweeping sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, in reggae form. But Romain Virgo’s delightful cover is blasting in the matatus of Kenya, the bars of Malawi, and in markets all across Uganda. (Do take four minutes to look it up and listen on YouTube before you continue reading.) The aesthetic differences between the soft rock original and the new reggae cover are clear, but the interpretive difference is more difficult for non-Africanists to grasp. On the Continent, Virgo’s song isn’t heard as “Soul Provider” but “Sole Provider.” Allow me to translate: “I want to be the only man who gives you soap and lotion. The only one who helps your mother out when her maize supply is dwindling. I want to be the man who gives you the money you need for airtime, for bus fare to visit your sister in the capital. I want to be your sole provider.”
Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS is an ambitious and careful account of why gendered disparities in access to wealth make the “sole provider” relationship so elusive for young men and women across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Set in the high-HIV-prevalence province of Nyanza (where prevalence is over three times as high as Kenya’s other provinces), Sanyu Mojola focuses on the gender disparity in HIV prevalence during young adulthood. In populations with generalized epidemics (over 1 percent of the population), women between the ages of 15 and 24 are between 3 and 5 times more likely to be living with HIV than their male counterparts. Why? Sugar daddies (older men who shower vulnerable, young women with money and gifts in exchange for sex, infecting them in the process) have shouldered much blame, but new evidence from high-quality longitudinal studies in multiple contexts suggests that a) sugar daddy partnerships aren’t very common and b) girls who engage in them are no more likely to become infected than those who don’t.
Mojola offers readers a more rigorous and compelling explanation for this disparity; the basic formula is love = sex + provision. Methodologically, Mojola combines simple but elegant demographic techniques, in-depth interview data, focus groups, and her own ethnographic field notes to demonstrate that young women tend to partner with slightly older, providing men, who are both more attractive and more risky than their age-mates. She navigates this terrain keeping a balance among three analytic anchors: the numbers, the lived experiences of her respondents, and social-structural processes, including globalization, transformations of Nyanza’s labor market, and an overhauled educational system. Readers familiar with African contexts will nod along knowingly as Mojola expertly leads them through theparticulars of Nyanza, acknowledging both its typical-of-Africa and exceptional features. Readers unfamiliar with African settings couldn’t have a better guide than this insider-outsider, who leverages high-quality survey data (primarily from the DHS) to buttress findings from a year of intensive fieldwork, conducted in three languages.
Chapter One describes the scope of the gender disparity, identifies the puzzle, and provides a clear and frank explanation of the author’s methodological and epistemological perspective. Chapter Two swiftly dismisses stereotypes about survival sex and vulnerable women and takes on the transactional hues of relationships worldwide in a de-exoticized fashion. The consumption habits of modern African women, Mojola argues, are tied to a set of global processes; here she juxtaposes the habits of Luo women with the strange and expensive rituals by which Americans codify love, such as the annual exchange of shiny adornments during mid-February. Chapter Three zooms out to provide the historical and cultural context readers need to be able to think clearly about Nyanza today, including the typical characteristics of Luo culture, stressors to the fishing economy of Lake Victoria, marriage and partnership practices historically, and the onset of AIDS 30 years ago.
While Chapter Four might be the most demographic of all the chapters, it contains only a single table. Mojola focuses on how romantic relationships unfold among the Luo-Nyanza today and why HIV risk, front and center in Western minds, is actually secondary to her respondents’ more immediate concerns. Chapter Five on schooling will be a slap in the face for readers who believe our best tool for keeping young women HIV-free surely must be “education.” On the contrary, schooling inculcates a language of “need” in young men and women and exacerbates gendered differences in material needs. “Continual consumption requires partners with continual access to income. This ultimately makes intimate relationships with older, employed men, who have higher HIV-prevalence rates, more attractive than those with unemployed young men, who have relatively low HIV rates” (p. 6).
Chapter Six shifts away from the gender disparity to examine a tangle of factors behind the employment disparity in HIV prevalence among Nyanza-Luo women—women who work are far more likely to become infected than are women who stay home. Here, the unique features of Nyanza’s fishing economy make it difficult to apply Mojola’s insights about gendered economies to other settings. The book concludes in Chapter Seven with a brief but poignant statement about why a gendered and life-course approach to HIV prevention would be more effective than the individually focused interventions the global health community has been relying on. And we sociologists respond, “Amen.”
In order to achieve her novel interpretation of the mechanisms on the ground in Nyanza, Mojola must inevitably foreground some aspects of the HIV scene while spending less time on others. No book can do everything, but there are two aspects of argument I would have liked to see more of. First, although Mojola characterizes men’s epidemiological advantage as a stay and not a bye, I worried that readers unfamiliar with AIDS and Africa might fail to fully grasp how temporary the disparities truly are. Many populations experience a crossover in incidence (i.e., new infections) between the ages of 30 and 39, where men become the more vulnerable sex. Given her compelling argument for applying life-course perspective to HIV, I found myself wishing Mojola had given me more than a glimpse at life beyond age 29, if only in tables and graphs.
Second, the sex-ratio of HIV infections varies across contexts; this is a separate puzzle, but an important one. Why is the female-to-male infection ratio so much higher in Kenya (around 2.0) than in Zambia (1.2), given that love, money, and HIV are similarly organized in both places? Why is it even higher among the Kikuyu in Kenya than it is among the Luo? Do gendered inequalities in earning power predict epidemic severity at the population level? DHS data could almost certainly have been leveraged to explore such variation and push the argument about epidemiological consequences even further.
Love, Money, and HIV will quickly become required reading in subfields like gender/sexuality, life-course, and demography. Moreover, it will be an excellent book for teaching: grounded, gripping, counterintuitive, accessible, timely. All sociologists should read more about Africa, and this piece of beautifully written, culturally informed population research is an excellent place to start.