Abstract
Love in the time of AIDS is an astonishingly good book. For a massive book of 225 pages of text plus 35 dense pages of notes it is extraordinarily readable. Hunter engages the reader from the very first page and makes his subject unusually accessible through a cunning and carefully plotted organization of his material, collected over 12 years of fieldwork and writing. His subject is complex and simple at the same time. Simply put it is: how can we come to understand the extremely high rates of AIDS in South Africa?Hunter’s compelling answer is that to understand this we have to widen our analysis to the entire political economy of South Africa, and not merely political economy as focused on economic and political conditions but also, importantly, ‘the political economy and geography of intimacy’ (p. 3). And to do this it is not enough to consider the ethnographic present, it is also necessary to understand the history of the political economy and geography of intimacy in South Africa. This he proceeds to analyze for us on a broad canvas, yet with a meticulous eye for detailed historical evidence.
Hunter convincingly explains why the term ‘intimacy’ is preferable to ‘gender relations’ or ‘sexuality’ and argues that the entire landscape – the geography – of intimacy has changed in southern Africa.
The key changes, in relation to changing intimacies, are those regarding employment, housing and, more broadly, the ‘patriarchal bargain’ that underlay the rural homestead. Men won brides by paying ilobolo (bride wealth in the form of cattle) to the women’s families – the cattle being given to young men by their fathers. However, when the apartheid state forced rural African men into becoming migrant labour at the mines, young men earned – and paid – their ilobolo in cash from their own earnings. The patriarchal bargain continued – wives were committed to building up their husband’s homesteads by labouring on the land, seeing this as their dutiful and respectful (or obedient) response to the commitment their men had made to them, by paying them (their families) ilobolo.
But from the 1980s onwards – thus even before liberation from apartheid in 1994 – male employment decreased and men were increasingly forced to turn to low-paid casual labour. These were the years during which the anti-apartheid struggle intensified, but in the years after liberation, with Thabo Mbeki’s neoliberal policies, male employment nose-dived. As male employment decreased men found it increasingly difficult to pay ilobolo – and simultaneously the agricultural sector languished. Young women therefore began to leave the rural areas and come to urban areas in search of employment – and also in search of boyfriends whom, they hoped, would one day pay ilobolo and marry them. Very significantly, marriage rates in the KwaZulu – Natal region, and throughout South Africa, began to fall steadily, as male unemployment worsened.Marriage rates remain extraordinarily low in South Africa today.
Factories in new industrial areas were eager to hire under-paid young female labour in the 1980s and 1990s, but by 2000 the post-apartheid state’s neoliberal policies had allowed foreign goods (especially from China) to destroy much local industry. Vast numbers of female workers lost their industrial jobs – but they still had to pay rent for their imijondolo (shacks). More and more young women became financially dependent on a decreasing number of older (often married) men who still had jobs – and they gave these ‘boyfriends’ their love and emotional commitment in return for economic assistance. But young women were also sought after by jobless unmarried young men, who became their boyfriends too. A complex pattern of intimacy developed in which both young women and young men had multiple lovers – but (and this is important) these relationships, though they varied greatly in their importance to their subjects, were viewed as ‘girlfriend–boyfriend’ relationships – they were never seen as prostitution/sex-work. This is precisely why – as his informants explained to Hunter – young women declared that they did not wish to use condoms with their ‘main’ boyfriends, because they wished to show them love and trust. Exploring these subtle emotional relationships with skill, Hunter shows that young women tried to make even stronger claims on ‘main’ boyfriends by demonstrating such trust, hoping that this might lead to the wished for marriage relationship.
This vast canvas of transforming relationships is viewed from a particularly powerful location – Hunter lives, during his field visits, in a shack within an informal settlement in Mandeni, in the region with the highest rates of AIDS in South Africa. It is precisely within such informal settlements, where the population consists entirely of poor, usually unemployed, non-English speaking Zulu women and men that AIDS rates are the very highest in South Africa. And yet – in almost wilful disregard of this political economy of AIDS – the post-apartheid state’s response to the AIDS pandemic has been to put out AIDS information in English and to gear AIDS interventions in cultural forms that appeal to the growing middle class, but that alienate the dispossessed poor, who ought to be their target. Part of this sorry political story has been the state’s reluctance to allow the free availability of ARVs (antiretrovirals) to the millions whose HIV could be arrested by these drugs. Hunter describes the intense national campaign that was required to persuade the state to make generic ARVs widely available – but points to the fact that health equality remains a mirage in a country where there has been a tremendous growth of class inequalities after 1994.
This powerful analysis speaks to the South African context – but it does so with such a firm grasp of the crucial importance of the wider political economy to issues of health and even intimacy that its method and its conclusions speak much more widely to all contexts where the gap between the poor and the rich is widening – in other words, to just about everywhere today in the neoliberal global context. But it speaks particularly to the contexts of ‘developing’ nations where neoliberal policies still remain surprisingly unquestioned despite the growing inequalities and deepening vulnerabilities that they are so blatantly creating.
Hunter’s central contribution is his masterly analysis of ‘the changing political economy and geography of intimacy’ in which he vividly demonstrates both the dialectical relationship between political economy and gendered intimacy and the truth that both are always changing. African femininities and masculinities have changed radically over the last 50 years – and continue to change. Hunter’s magnum opus strikingly illustrates how the political ‘is the personal’ – but also the terrible costs and huge human suffering that result when this dialectical relationship is ignored by policy-makers. It is no accident at all – indeed it is with a dreadful sense of inevitability – that Hunter finds that those who are suffering – and dying – the most from AIDS in South Africa are impoverished young women. Across the developing world careful analyses increasingly show that it is the most vulnerable in society who pay the price of neoliberal ‘globalization’ – and, in most societies the most vulnerable are women, most especially the poorest women – because the neoliberal world-story is just as much about growing class divides as it is about gender hierarchies.
Hunter’s book deserves the widest possible audience – for its superb methodology and handling of its sources and materials as much as for its powerful and moving account of one of the worst public health disasters of modern times. It can teach students of ethnography and history how to approach their craft, just as it highlights the crucial importance of scholarly analyses that use the methods of gender analysis and political economy across the breadth of ‘development’ studies. I recommend it highly to scholars and students alike and hope it will find its deserved place as required reading not only for those interested in gender, sexuality and HIV/AIDS but also those wishing to understand how the South African experience of the AIDS pandemic can speak across disciplinary, area and subject boundaries to all those seeking a more just world. Most of us can only dream of writing a book as good as this one. But because we all benefit so hugely from this exceptional study, we all share in its triumph.