An Anthropologist in/of South Africa--Commenting on
Anthropology in/of South Africa and southern Africa, HIV, AIDS, sexuality and sex, artisanal gold mining, ‘stone circles’, traditional healing.
I recently heard the old saying "give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach him to fish, and he will eat every day".
But here's a good twist: "give a man a fish and he will eat; teach a man to fish and he will destroy the fish stocks, leading to extinction of fish and the collapse of the ecology." Maybe its just better to give a man a fish.
We live with these myths that mankind lives 'in nature' rather than makes nature. I think man, the species, has been around long enough to have not only shaped himself in the image of his own culture, but also shaped the world through his cultural choices and, amongst other qualities like love and peace, greed and bloodshed. Still doesn't make me a vegetarian, though.
On the first of September, we attended the reed dance in Swaziland. The Swazi reed dance is one of the main national 'traditional' holidays and ritual perfomances for the king. King Mswati II is in the middle of the line of older men, the emabutfo, 'regiment' of the king. There were something like 60,000 or more women at the ceremony. Whatever else this indicates, it certainly shows that is still a high level of support for the royal traditions in this, the last of Africa's absolute monarchies. There actually is a parliament, but it is entirely subservient to the king.
The women range in age from perhaps as young a 6 (although some of the princesses are even younger), up to middle 30s. The original idea of the reed dance was that this was a ritual in which virgins brought the king reeds, which in Nguni culture generally, are symbols of fertility and the origin myths that tell of the original human being emerging out of the reeds (umhlanga, 'a reed', but also the 'original stem or tribe').
The princesses got a great deal of attention, of course. They are the ones with the red feathers in their hair. Only members of the royal family are allowed to wear them. The royal family is very large, all of the king's many brothers and sisters, children of Sobhuza, and their children, of the lineage Dlamini wekunene, or 'great Dlaminis'.
In the run up to the Ummemo, Chief Kenneth and the people that I am working with in my project all told me that I must wear 'traditional clothing' this year. In the end, I conceded. It was a bit cold that day, so I wore a top cloth, too, although for most of the parading and dancing, almost all of the men were bare chested. Well, I WAS a bit more pale than most of the others too!
Unfortunately, I often get carried away by my ideas and express them in inappropriate places such as discussion and emails within the university. I never seem to learn that universities today ARE businesses, and take criticims very badly. At least that is true of my univeristy in many instances.
I currently am in a virtual group investigating the possibility of arranging classes in isiZulu, the Zulu language, for academic members of staff who don't already speak it. Zulu spoken as a first language by the largest segment of South Africans and as a second language by many more making it the most widely spoken language in South Africa. Most people at Wits university who are not Black do not speak it, though they often speak a range of other African languages such as Afrikaans, Shona, Swahili or others, or other South African languages such as Afrikaans (arguably also an African language).
Anyway, it soon became apparent that the University simply lacked the resources to offer such training to its staff. Curiously, the policy that staff should speak an African languages has been on the books for many years, but never implemented. The only option was for those who were interested to do the commercial course that one of the commercial units at the University offered. Commercial units such as the Wits Langauge School had been set up to take advantage of what was called "the University's brand", in business-speak, in order to commercialise knowledge; in this case, language teaching. The irony is that Wits staff could not affort the cost of the commercial courses offered for businesspeople. Thus, in discussion of the problem, I offered (again) a paragraph 'critique' of the way in which business models had infected the administration of the university. Other member of the university who were reading the discussion became upset that I was criticising the way the uniersity was run. Far from it: my critique was much larger than that, and simply used the university as an example of how the way the 'business model' and the idea of 'running it like a business' had overwhelmed critical thinking in many spheres such as politics, universities, churches, 'personal development ' (what I call "the Oprah Winfree effect") and even areas of kinship, sex, and other fields of human sociality. In the last year, we have even seen that running a business 'like a business' has run many of them onto the rocks of bankruptcy (AIG, Enron, GM, Chrysler, etc. ), not to mention whole governments such as that of Iceland .
Anyway, some years ago I had written a closely reasoned and rather long article on managerialism in the university and what I regard as some of its deleterious side effects. The article was done originally for a conference at Rhodes Univsity in 2004 on "re-inventing the university", and was subsequently presented, also, at a conference in Cambridge on 'Description and Creativity" (Kings College, Cambridge, convened by James Leach).
The whole article can be found at the following URL.
Abstract: This paper explains the current vogue of managerialism in University governance in terms of what I call the 'Economist's As-if'. It asks whether universities can, in fact, be run 'like a business' as if they were market institutions. I argue that universities can be run in this way, but this entails certain costs. Comparing universities to other human endeavours that can be run 'as if' they were market institutions such as sex, war, and families, I conclude that while this is possible, it is not morally desirable, and has certain deleterious outcomes. The reason for this has to do with the 'meta-knowledge' (implicit knowledge about how to gain and order knowledge) that universities embody.The aim of tertiary education should be to produce autonomous intellectual subjects who see themselves as citizens of a global community of knowledge and as masters of disciplinary ‘meta-knowledge’ which uniquely enables them to produce and evaluate knowledge, and to engage in critical conversation in the university, in the public domain and ultimately in the global community of knowledge.
This report gives the plan for the museum 'boxes'. The idea for the mobile museum boxes is from Kristy Stone, who is doing the development work on this, and is reponsible for the overall plan of this part of the project.
The next report will discuss the process of planning and beginning to build the isgodlo or 'Royal Kraal' for the chiefship.
With this note today I want to post references to my reports on the progress of the Emjindini Healing, Hertiage and Environment Centre (EHHEC). The second report can be viewed as HTML at
The size of the graphics has been reduced in this version to make it small enough to post, but if you would like a PDF version, or even copies of the pictures to print at a better resolution, let me know.
The EHHEC is a project funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) of South Africa. This money comes from the national lottery gambling board, and a certain amount of the proceeds are mandated to go to charitable organisation, NGOs and especially to development of the arts, culture, sport and heritage. This project was originally proposed way back in 2003, but it took a long time to get the funds, and to get the funds into accounts that were functional. With that more or less done now, the project is going ahead now in 2009, six years later! There is a lot of re-planning after such a long delay from the original conception, and this is reflected in the reports.
The basic idea is to develop a centre in a rural area where knowledge can be shared, displayed and interacted with by local residents, local 'tourists' and real tourists who might be interested in South African indiginous life ways and practices. It is situated in the precincts of the Emjindini chiefship, and is part of the functional institututions of the chiefship including the court, the Royal Kraal'. Chiefs in South Africa are recognised by the constitution, and are mandated to promote "development", and to promote and carry on the local traditional systems of government. This is fraught with conflict, but it seems to us who are involved in this project that a number of its institutions do work, and that they are worth supporting.
In addition, however, we are developing teaching and museum materials that will be able to 'travel' to other venues, particularly classrooms, corporate board rooms, government offices, or to lodges and other tourists venues for display and for teaching and learning about local Swazi culture. We are focusing first on traditional healing, local Swazi dance called Sibhaca, and traditional dress. These themes will be developed as 'boxes' with CDs, DVDs, paper documents, objects, pictures, and other materials that can circulate as needed. We hope to generate some income from this by, for instance, offering it to corporate events, or at tourist venues for a small charge. Students and interested youth are tasked with development of the materials, with appropriate assistance from the project staff, currently Kristy Stone from Wits University.
I want to ask a question that may seem obvious, but I, for one, don’t think it has such an obvious answer:
Does the fact/act of rape, or attitudes towards it, tell us anything about ‘attitudes towards women (as category)’?Rachel Jewkes, the author of the South African Medical Council study on rape, says this tell us something about
“ … the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women …” [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8107039.stm ]
As you might have guessed, I don’t agree.But perhaps I should just agree since this is hardly a unique personal viewpoint of Dr. Jewkes!(Aside from the fact that there is no ‘over the centuries’ in South Africa, and if there were, we wouldn’t know anything about it; or that South African masculinity is ‘predicated on the idea of being strong and tough’.Is that unique to SA?No.)
In other words, does the act or fact of men raping women tell us something about the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’, masculinity or femininity?If so, does it really say nothing at all about ‘femininity’ and speaks only to ‘masculinity’?does it not say more about the construction of ‘person’, ‘the body’, violence, the nature of coercion, or how humans seek (and often fail) to control one another in their own social lives?Is this simply something that can be fit into a binary classification?
Just to be really provocative (but seriously so) would women rape if they could? They (women) do, occasionally, when they can, it seems.Does it make any sense to ask “what if women had penises? (all else being equal)” Can ‘all else’ be ‘equal’ in this case?Would ‘women with penises’ be men? It seems not, though we have the studies like Foucault’s study of Herculin(e) Barbin as a worthy pondering of the subject matter, among others.
Asking question like this—rhetorical, as they are called—prejudges the answer, of course.Can someone guide me towards writing that might ask similar, peculiar (I think: anthropological!)questions like this?I mean really recent. Naturally authors like Marilyn Strathern, Herdt, Kulick, Gutman, Parker … can be assumed.
I do question the received wisdom of gender studies in particular. I just can’t seem to internalise the idea that gender is determinate, or that rape tells us much about gender. Sorry for that. I know many will disagree.
Of course, the author of this study is not an anthropologist (and sounds on the voice clip on the BBC webpage not to be South African) , and may just reflect a peculiarly English and medical perspective.Or does it?(The sociologists in South Africa certainly subscribe to the same views. )
It occurs to me as I was trying to get onto other tasks in house and garden this Saturday morning, that South and southern Africa has had an extremely disproportionate role in the history of anthropology. I am referring in particular to Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Max Gluckman.
[And thus not to the American tradition or the French, but to what was called 'British Social Anthropology'] And that this was particularly true of anthropology's efforts to deal with and to understand sex, kinship and conflict in particular.
Many, if not most [?] of Malinowski's most important students were South African; Malinowski had especially close relations with his South African students, too, although he did not work here. Malinowski did, however, have a long and very influential relationship with the kind of Swaziland, Sobhuza II, and helped Sobhuza formulate policy that resulted in Swaziland remaining the only relatively absolute monarchy in the world today. (Kenyatta, another of his students, was headed in the same direction in Kenya, but was diverted ...) Radcliffe-Brown began his career in South Africa and wrote one of his most influential pieces on 'The Mother's Brother' about what--it now seems to me--was the fact of the extreme fluidity and even strangeness of South African kinship systems. Max Gluckman's anthropology, and the basis of the Manchester School, came from South Africa. I think it would be fair to say, even, that Gluckman's anthropology was based precisely on his South African-ness, and that the Manchester School (including some of its most influential members from Victor Turner to John and jean Comaroff, who are, in any case, South African) was more or less South African anthropology written into global/British anthropology. This is particularly true of the his interest in the fundamental role of conflict in social functioning, and of the 'peace within the feud', among much else. One of his most influential writing, too, was about the Swazi incwala, effectively a rite of masculinity in the person of the [Swazi] king in particular and the role of women as wives, mothers, and witches in it.
Thus the anthropology of rape in southern Africa is a peculiarly anthropological problem, but one that has not been adequately theorised in South African anthropology, even though so much of the anthropological study of conflict and sex/uality owe so much to the southern African experience, ethnography and people.
Interesting? Well it seemed so to me. Where does this take us with rape?
There are a number of things that might be worth saying.
I think one of the keys is what I call the 'flat' structure of South African social relations. (I say 'social relations' since using terms like 'society' or 'social structure' is not quite right in this context.) South Africa is one of the youngest and most mobile societies in the world. No social 'structure' that still functions today has a history of more than a couple hundred years and the same is true for its social identities, ethic categories, racial categories and so on. I think this is even true of its system of gender.Along with this, is an extremely fluid and 'loose' system of kinship, marriage and family property transmission.
There is almost no property passed from generation to generation in families through inheritance (except for a few elite 'oligarchs'--White, Indian, & Black), and very little heritable property of any kind. Outside of the 'canonical' large business enterprises (e.g mining such as Anglo-Ashanti Gold, etc.) and parastatals, there is very little political hierarchy of any kind (that is, hierarchies in which the 'higher' exercise effective control over the real actions of those 'beneath' them, although there are status hierarchies in 'traditional', religious, class and racial terms.) This is true of kinship as well.
This results in almost no control being exercised by the elders over juniors.Although few would accept it (!), in my ethnographic and personal experience of marriage and gender relations in South Africa, there is even very little actual control exercised by men over women. It is the case, however, that there is a universal and powerful ideology that men should and do exercise control over women (This is called 'patriarchy', after early European kinship theorists such as Bachofen, Engels, Freud and many others.) The outcome of this is that men cannot, in fact, exercise the control over women that they believe they should do. Violence results not from excess of control, but rather from an effective lack of it, and the consequent frustration felt by many men who cannot realise their own sense of self.
I know of many cases, too, in which people do not know who their father is. In many cases, they are not even certain who their mother is, since wide-spread fostering, early teen pregnancies, and pervasive mobility often disrupt bonds between mothers and their children. Where mothers die young, or at childbirth, their relation to their children is obviously disrupted, and this is more common that it should be. (SA has one of the worst records of maternal mortality, and this has become steadily worse since 1994.)
The power of ideology also obscure the sociological vision of this society since it is believed by all, including the researcher (Rachel Jewkes of the Medical Research Council, in this case) that only men are implicated in this system, in which 'South African masculinity' and 'patriarchy' become cover categories to explain everything. In my experience, women are also likely to be violent in 'domestic' cases of conflict. They also express the view that men should exercise control and that they should provide; when they don't, or can't, women can become exceptionally abusive and violent.I have seen this is countless court cases in the traditional courts where I work, and in virtually every domestic relationship that I am familiar with in the course of my work.Men always and absolutely deny that they have been attacked violently by girlfriends, wives and lovers, but many men in the town where I work can show scars (usually on their faces) where they have been attacked and deeply injured in domestic 'quarrels'.
Incidentally, my ethnographic work over 10 years in a small South African town in eastern Mpumalanga Province is one of the least violent in the region, and one of the oldest and most established.
It seems to me, even, that the extent and pervasiveness of sexual networks functioning as social structure, that it is almost the case that the South African sexual network amounts to a vast and strangely integrated system of kinship, a sort of national system of 'kinship' in which sex (sexual relations) functions as a primary form of social relation.
All of this has a strong bearing the pervasiveness of rape in southern Africa (NB not just South Africa, although only SA is actually studied in depth in this respect; very little is known about Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe or Namibia with respect to sex and sexuality; Swaziland and Botswana, however, are better studied.)
17 May 2009
Just another day in the field. I looked like this after emerging from an exploration of an 'artisanal' or hand-dug mine near Barberton. The blood was from a bang on a rock in the tunnel. It bled heavily, and I managed to miss my shirt for most of it until I could wind my sweatshirt around my head to stop the bleeding and to protect my head for the rest of the crawl into the depths of the mountain.
Helen Epstein's 'AIDS and the irrational', (BMJ 2008;337; a2638; online 29 Nov 2008, p 1265-1267), framed as an open letter to the new director of UNAIDS, argues that much more attention should be paid to what she and others call 'partner reduction' strategies in AIDS prevention campaigns. Her main complaint is that UNAIDS and other agencies such as USAID do not focus sufficiently on this factor. She argues that while circumcision is also an effective but neglected method, both evidence and argument indicate that 'partner reduction' holds the key. She takes issue with the 'irrational' failure of UNAIDS and other agencies to take this seriously enough.
The 'irrationality' in the title refers to two things. First, the 'irrationality' of the UNAIDS policies toward AIDS prevention that are not always based on good science. They may be based instead on religious and political commitments of the UN's member nations, and on deeply held beliefs about what will work in AIDS prevention. The second cloud of references to 'irrationality' is her assertion that some of the UNAIDS policies contribute to the impression that sex, especially in Africa, is in fact 'irrational' and that only technical, bio-medical solutions will stem the tide of HIV in these populations. This is predicated, however, on the apparent evidence that "irrational beliefs about AIDS persist" in Africa such as beliefs that "traditional medicine is more effective that antiretroviral drugs," and the resort to witchcraft to explain and deal with AIDS infections.
The idea that African beliefs about sex and AIDS are 'irrational' is, of course, controversial. Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, rejected the hard evidence that HIV causes AIDS and that it is especially prevalent in South Africa in part because he believed that it implied that Africans were "irrational." Nevertheless, African beliefs about AIDS do appear to be irrational. Is there a better way to understand them?
One way in which southern Africans appear to be particularly 'irrational' is their involvement in long-term concurrent sexual partnerships. In some areas and age groups there is almost a one-in-two chance that any new partner will be HIV positive. Yet southern African men and women continue to have unprotected sex under these conditions, and do so with multiple partners. This is clearly "risky sex." In order to understand it, however, we have to examine more critically the notions of 'multiple partnership', 'concurrency', and 'risk'.
As Epstein points out, there is every reason to recommend "partner reduction", even to make it the central part of all HIV/AIDS education campaigns and interventions. However, UNAIDS prefers to recommend what Epstein calls 'needlessly overcomplex … combination prevention,' that is, multiple approaches including the usual ABC, VCT, treatment of other STIs, education, together with bio-medical research on vaginal microbicides, vaccines, and pre-exposure prophylaxis. A great deal of money has been spent on the bio-medical approaches despite the fact that none of them has shown much evidence of success. It is eminently clear that 'partner reduction' does indeed break up the AIDS 'superhighway' of transmission that a densely connected set of 'multiple partnerships' creates (Thornton 2008). The term 'multiple concurrent partners', however, directs our attention to small ego-centred groups rather than to larger social contexts. This can limit our vision.
In an email on 9 January, I was asked by a South African journalist, Helen Grange, to express some opinions about 'multiple concurrent partnerships', as these have been recently perceived. She is a 'senior contract writer for The Star newspaper' in Johannesburg. She asked four questions:
Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?
Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?
Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?
Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?
Here is what I said, for what its might be worth to others thinking about these issues. Journalist only use a sentence or two, if that, and there was much more to say about the questions she asked.
9/1/2009 Helen, OK. Thanks for the questions. I don’t have a lot of time this morning either, so let me make a few comments quickly, on the questions you are raised.
Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?
Yes, of course this has been corrupted. Whether we call it polygamy is a moot point. He is exploiting his political and cultural celebrity in a very directly sexual way. This is not ‘tradition’ in the sense that it comes from the past, or is particularly Zulu.
Polygamy is ALWAYS restricted to the powerful or wealthy since there is numerically one woman for each man. Polygamy is more of a political structure or strategy. Where is it widespread, that is, where powerful men dominate most women through marriage, and incorporate them into households as part of a system of political domination, then the main problem become NOT control of the women (who are looked after), but control of the large numbers of men who will never have opportunity to marry or have families of their own. They must either be incorporated into gangs run by the warlords who dominate the market n women, inducted into armies or regiments, and controlled by military discipline, or sent into battle in order to die. We see this in much of the historical and contemporary Middle Eastern societies, Somalia, Sudan, and so on.
In southern Africa the situation is less dire because married women have liaisons outside of polygamous marriages and thus the unmarried men have some access to goods and sex through this.
The women Zuma is ‘marrying’ are also exploiting Zuma, and marrying or having sex with him for the economic, status, and political benefits it can provide to them. This is not ‘patriarchy’ but mutual exploitation of advantage through establishment of sexual networks. In this case, sexual networks become in practice just another form of business deal or patronage system to distribute state-derived funds and other goods and money. We must keep in mind too that most of the current ANC political and business elites have been in sexual relationships with each other over the past several decades, including most if not all of the senior women. This is mostly based on hearsay and rumour, and you may not be able to report it, but just the well-known and marital relationships and ex-marriages that we know about establish the fact that the ANC elite is already a dense sexual network. In this they merely reflect a wide-spread South African pattern. Jacob Zuma stands out, however, in seeking to legitimate his sexual relationships through marriage. This probably makes it easier for him to distribute benefits to his followers through his wives.
Again, this is not unusual. King Mswati does the same thing for the same reason. Marrying many wives and using these linkages as ways to establish and maintain political and economic advantage through patronage is a pattern found in many, if not all, African political systems in central, eastern and southern Africa. It is not new; it takes a different form in a ‘democracy’.
The issue that this raises, however, is that should Zuma become President, there will be great pressure to accommodate his many wives, their families, and followers into some aspect of government patronage systems. This will place a great burden on the financial resources of the state.
The next step would be succession struggle among Zuma’s wives and children when/if we were to eventually relinquish the presidency or die early from AIDS. Thus, the issue is not really ‘polygamy as a cultural practice’. It is not. It is legal, of course, and has been practiced within African cultures in SA and the rest of the continent (as well as by Mormons, European royalty, etc…). It should be treated, however, as a form of political structure designed to distribute patronage from the centre and to form alliances that will support a powerful elite.
Q: Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?
It is hard to say. In southern Africa, as in West Africa, there are also ‘sugar mommies’, and in this respect, it is pretty equal opportunity. There are lots of wealthy women, or women with sufficient independent resources to support lovers. Although popular culture together with much of the professional literature and beliefs support the idea that men as ‘sugar daddies’ are a problem, this is hardly the case for men alone. The beliefs that this is a male phenomenon are probably not supported by fact, and are themselves a problem. Are they a ‘perversion’ of culture? No. Since polygamy is always about political and economic domination of sex and other material resources, the continuation of this in other political and economic forms cannot be called a ‘perversion of culture’. In earlier times this involved resources such as cattle a fields, and was tied to dominant lineages and what anthropologists call “family-property complexes”. It is more varied and diverse these days, and usually conducted with cash as the primary medium of exchange and wealth (not cattle and fields), but it is essentially a low-level political and economic system for distribution of wealth among followers.
This is probably what you mean by ‘materialism’. It is not a growing phenomenon except for the fact that the economy is now bigger (though currently shrinking somewhat).
Q: Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?
Again, this is not a characteristic of ‘modern culture’. Cultural and economic elites in all societies and through time have had greater sexual access and more “immunity” from social judgment. That’s life. The fact that he is a football star makes his life more visible to the press and to his fans, but it does not make it unusual, nor is it something new. What it says about ‘modern culture’ is that , according to the old adage “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”—“the more things change, the more they stay the same”! I think what is more relevant in this case is that media elites are seen to have multiple partners, and that these are concurrent partners. That is, they have multiple girlfriends (or boyfriends) at the same time, and that this is tolerated, even emulated, and held up as something to be copied and valued.
As we know this is one of the best ways to spread sexual infections, including HIV, but not only HIV. Since large numbers of southern Africans are also murdered as the result of jealousy and domestic conflict, and large numbers sustain both psychological and physical injuries as the result of their sexual choices, the damage is far more than it would seem. Jealousy does not disappear simply because everyone wants multiple sexual partners. That continues to exist, and leads to a great deal of unhappiness. AIDS is only one of the consequences.
Again, it is important to realise that this is not the province of men alone. Women exploit the ‘system’ for reasons that are partly the same as men’s, but also sometimes different. Both men and women have motives to be involved in multiple concurrent partnerships, and clearly both participate more or less equally. Women manage to control knowledge of it much more successfully than men, however, and men a motivated to publicise these liaisons in ways that women do not.
Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?
Yes. Of course alcohol is involved, but I doubt very much if the system of sexual networks and multiple concurrent partnerships would change in the absence of alcohol. Alcohol abuse may increase casual sex (though this is not necessarily true just because we believe it to be true), but it is hardly essential to the existence of sex in this form or any other.
I have no idea how to change drinking cultures, and doubt very much that this can be done at all. I don’t think the connection to sex is any greater than its connection to business, excess eating, golf, Christmas, or many other things.
In an email on 9 Januiary, I was asked by a South African journalist, Helen Grange, to express some opinions about 'multiple concurrent partnerships', as these have been recently perceived. She is a 'senior contract writer for The Star newspaper' in Johannesburg. She asked four questions:
Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?
Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?
Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?
Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?
Here is what I said, for what its might be worth to others thinking about these issues. Joournalist only use a sentence or two, if that, and there was much more to say about the questions she asked.
9/1/2009
Helen,
OK. Thanks for the questions.I don’t have a lot of time this morning either, so let me make a few comments quickly, on the questions you are raised.
Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?
Yes, of course this has been corrupted.Whether we call it polygamy is a moot point. He is exploiting his political and cultural celebrity in a very directly sexual way.This is not ‘tradition’ in the sense that it comes from the past, or is particularly Zulu.
Polygamy is ALWAYS restricted to the powerful or wealthy since there is numerically one woman for each man.Polygamy is more of a political structure or strategy.Where is it widespread, that is, where powerful men dominate most women through marriage, and incorporate them into households as part of a system of political domination, then the main problem become NOT control of the women (who are looked after), but control of the large numbers of men who will never have opportunity to marry or have families of their own.They must either be incorporated into gangs run by the warlords who dominate the market n women, inducted into armies or regiments, and controlled by military discipline, or sent into battle in order to die.We see this in much of the historical and contemporary Middle Eastern societies, Somalia, Sudan, and so on.
In southern Africa the situation is less dire because married women have liaisons outside of polygamous marriages and thus the unmarried men have some access to goods and sex through this.
The women Zuma is ‘marrying’ are also exploiting Zuma, and marrying or having sex with him for the economic, status, and political benefits it can provide to them. This is not ‘patriarchy’ but mutual exploitation of advantage through establishment of sexual networks. In this case, sexual networks become in practice just another form of business deal or patronage system to distribute state-derived fundsand other goods and money.
We must keep in mind too that most of the current ANC political and business elites have been in sexual relationships with each other over the past several decades, including most if not all of the senior women.This is mostly based on hearsay and rumour, and you may not be able to report it, but just the well-known and marital relationships and ex-marriages that we know about establish the fact that the ANC elite is already a dense sexual network.In this they merely reflect a wide-spread South African pattern.Jacob Zuma stands out, however, in seeking to legitimate his sexual relationships through marriage. This probably makes it easier for him to distribute benefits to his followers through his wives.
Again, this is not unusual. King Mswati does the same thing for the same reason.Marrying many wives and using these linkages as ways to establish and maintain political and economic advantage through patronage is a pattern found in many, if not all, African political systems in central, eastern and southern Africa.It is not new; it takes a different form in a ‘democracy’.
The issue that this raises, however, is that should Zuma become President, there will be great pressure to accommodate his many wives, their families, and followers into some aspect of government patronage systems.This will place a great burden on the financial resources of the state.
The next step would be succession struggle among Zuma’s wives and children when/if we were to eventually relinquish the presidency or die early from AIDS.
Thus, the issue is not really ‘polygamy as a cultural practice’. It is not. It is legal, of course, and has been practiced within African cultures in SA and the rest of the continent (as well as by Mormons, European royalty, etc…).It should be treated, however, as a form of political structure designed to distribute patronage from the centre and to form alliances that will support a powerful elite.
Q: Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?
It is hard to say.In southern Africa, as in West Africa, there are also ‘sugar mommies’, and in this respect, it is pretty equal opportunity.There are lots of wealthy women, or women with sufficient independent resources to support lovers. Although popular culture together with much of the professional literature and beliefs support the idea that men as ‘sugar daddies’ are a problem, this is hardly the case for men alone. The beliefs that this is a male phenomenon are probably not supported by fact, and are themselves a problem.
Are they a ‘perversion’ of culture?No.Since polygamy is always about political and economic domination of sex and other material resources, the continuation of this in other political and economic forms cannot be called a ‘perversion of culture’. In earlier times this involved resources such as cattle a fields, and was tied to dominant lineages and what anthropologists call “family-property complexes”.It is more varied and diverse these days, and usually conducted with cash as the primary medium of exchange and wealth (not cattle and fields), but it is essentially a low-level political and economic system for distribution of wealth among followers.
This is probably what you mean by ‘materialism’.
It is not a growing phenomenon except for the fact that the economy is now bigger (though currently shrinking somewhat).
Q: Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?
Again, this is not a characteristic of ‘modern culture’. Cultural and economic elites in all societies and through time have had greater sexual access and more “immunity” from social judgment. That’s life.The fact that he is a football star makes his life more visible to the press and to his fans, but it does not make it unusual, nor is it something new.
What it says about ‘modern culture’ is that , according to the old adage “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”—“the more things change, the more they stay the same”!
I think what is more relevant in this case is that media elites are seen to have multiple partners, and that these are concurrent partners. That is, they have multiple girlfriends (or boyfriends) at the same time, and that this is tolerated, even emulated, and held up as something to be copied and valued.
As we know this is one of the best ways to spread sexual infections, including HIV, but not only HIV.Since large numbers of southern Africans are also murdered as the result of jealousy and domestic conflict, and large numbers sustain both psychological and physical injuries as the result of their sexual choices, the damage is far more than it would seem.Jealousy does not disappear simply because everyone wants multiple sexual partners. That continues to exist, and leads to a great deal of unhappiness. AIDS is only one of the consequences.
Again, it is important to realise that this is not the province of men alone. Women exploit the ‘system’ for reasons that are partly the same as men’s, but also sometimes different.Both men and women have motives to be involved in multiple concurrent partnerships, and clearly both participate more or less equally.Women manage to control knowledge of it much more successfully than men, however, and men a motivated to publicise these liaisons in ways that women do not.
Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?
Yes. Of course alcohol is involved, but I doubt very much if the system of sexual networks and multiple concurrent partnerships would change in the absence of alcohol. Alcohol abuse may increase casual sex (though this is not necessarily true just because we believe it to be true), but it is hardly essential to the existence of sex in this form or any other.
I have no idea how to change drinking cultures, and doubt very much that this can be done at all. I don’t think the connection to sex is any greater than its connection to business, excess eating, golf, Christmas, or many other things.
