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.
Well, I’m trying to get a schedule of conferences together for 2014, and have so far sent abstracts off to two of them
The proposal, or abstract is:
A new archaeology of
glass beads in southern Africa, 500-1200 CE
Robert Thornton (Anthropology, Wits
University, South Africa)
Jonathan Thornton (Art Conservation,
Buffalo State College, USA)
Our
experimental reconstruction of glass bead technologies, OLM, SEM, EDS, and XRF
studies of their internal structure, ethnographic evidence, and reanalysis of
archaeological materials, provides a basis for a radical reinterpretation of the
origin, trade, and production of glass beads in the archaeological record. According to the current standard
interpretation, glass beads were all traded into southern Africa from a few
sources in the Indian Ocean (‘Trade Wind’ beads), Egypt, and/or the Middle East,
and they were all either ‘wound’ (on a mandrel) or ‘drawn’ (as tubes from a
molten mass of glass). In addition, it
has been argued that beads constituted ‘wealth’ for class-stratified,
agro-pastoral societies. For instance, micro-structural evidence shows that
some (many?) beads were made of sintered powdered glass, not ‘wound’ or ‘drawn’.
Experimental reconstruction of possible
early pyrotechnologies shows that glass could have been manufactured from raw
materials plentiful in the southern African areas where glass beads are found,
and experimental reproduction of glass beads that strongly resemble
archaeological beads at K2, Mapungubwe, etc., show that glass and glass beads could
have been produced locally, possibly at many sites across southern Africa, and
probably were. Re-analysis of
ethnographic and historical evidence shows that beads in African societies were
primarily used in ritual and healing, rather than as wealth or currency. This leads to new understandings of
historical trade patterns and of social structures in first millennium African
societies implying, for instance, that Indian Ocean trade in glass beads was
multi-sited and reciprocal, involving societies structured around sacred sites with
ritual-technological specialisation, rather than (or in addition to?) class
stratification.
The second paper-to-be is proposed for the Association for Social Anthropology in Edinburgh, in June.
The proposal is:
Human sexuality and human origins: The occlusion of
sex and the exclusion of social anthropology from the human evolution debate
Robert Thornton, Anthropology, University of the
Witwatersrand
Summary
We must include a distinctly human sexuality with tool-making,
fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set that made the emergence
of Homo sapiens sapiens possible.The lack of an adequately anthropological
theory of sex has excluded social anthropology from debates on human origins.
Long Abstract
The emergence of the ‘human’ from hominidae, and of ‘human nature’ from nature, must surely have
involved the emergence of a human sexuality from a ‘natural’ sexuality. Paradigms rooted in Christian theology and
Darwinian evolution have precluded the conceptual separation of human
sex/uality from reproduction, and have therefore prevented social
anthropologists from engaging usefully with the human origins debate.A
distinctly human sexuality, however, can be clearly distinguished from the sex/uality
of other mammals by re-envisioning sex as a distinct form of social
action/agency, and by recognising that, for humans, sex and reproduction are different
forms of (social) action, even as they are often culturally conflated. Many
Enlightenment debates revolved around the utility and rationale for ‘marriage’
as a sort of proxy for human sexuality, even as they necessarily failed to
grasp the significance of the sexual. I
argue that the emergence of a specifically human sexuality, together with tool-making,
fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set, was one of the enabling
conditions for the emergence of humanity per se.If the emergence of a distinctly human,
culturally-configured sexuality can be seen as part of the original human skill
set, then sex (as social action) had already separated itself from reproduction
(and therefore natural selection).This
perspective allows social anthropology to re-enter the discussion of human
origins, and provides new perspectives on the relation between sex, religion,
and human evolution.
In the wake of the announcement at the 6th South African Congress and HIV & AIDS, I have been giving more thought to the question of why the prevalence in southern and South Africa has bee rising, rather than stabilizing or falling, as has been expected for some time. In front of Aaron Motsoeledi, the Minister of Health, and members of his department, and an audience of some 4000 ACTIVE HIV/AIDS prevention and treatemnt practitioners, Olive Shisana announced that prevalence was at an all-time high. Knowledge about HIV and how to prevent it was ALSO at an all-time high among the general population, but so was unprotected sex, and so was the number of concurrent partners.
Clearly, there is a large problem here, not just with HIV, but with our theoretical perspectives. We all believe--and so far it seems to be ONLY a belief--that knowledge and education and communication should have an effect on ‘behaviour’. Knowledge, education, & communication here mean what is taught in all the well funded and now nearly pervasive HIV/AIDS education and ‘communication for behaviour change’ interventions. They have not ‘worked’ in South Africa.
‘Behaviour’ here implies ‘sexual behaviour’, that is a set of human activities that are assumed to be ‘biological’, and more or less automatic. In other words, this set of human activities is not called ‘social action’, or ‘recreation’, or anything else that implies value, motive and meaning, but is rather termed ‘behaviour’. In this ‘scientific’ worldview, sex is a behaviour like blinking or walking. Just as we can be taught to turn the walk into dance, with careful instruction, we continue to assume that sexual ‘behaviour’, like walking, can be trained into something like a dance. The dance we try to teach the sexually inclined person is to put on a condom, or not to ‘dance’ at all. It is not surprising that it does not work much of the time. Indeed the question is, if and when it does work, why should it work at all?
The pervasive use of the term ‘behaviour’ (meaning sex and ‘sexual behaviour) means that for biomedicine and science, as well as for the ordinary man with his dick in his hand, sex is nature. It is ’natural’ behaviour. And yet, we wish to change it through communication and education, the very definition of culture.
But let me address one issue out of the many about why this is so difficult, and perhaps not possible at all.
One belief that almost all humans share--scientists, biomedical professionals, the religious, and the ordinary person--is the belief that sex is ‘natural’. They/we seem to believe this despite the fact that we also believe that it can be taught (or must not be taught--implying, of course, for the religious that is can be taught), and that it is ‘acquired by [people] as a member of society’, to use E B Tylor’s famous definition of culture. It is has to be taught, or can be taught, or should not be taught, then it is--by definition--culture, not nature. And yet, one of the most widely held cultural beliefs is that sex is not-culture, that is, it is ‘nature’.
The condom, however, is a form of dress. It is a ‘raincoat’, a ‘sweet wrapper’, ‘an umbrella’, a ‘rubber’, a ‘french letter’. Its use has to be taught. It is not by any stretch of the imagination ‘natural’. Its cultural nature is beyond doubt.
The problem in these terms, then, is how the condom as an item of ‘culture’ is to be integrated into a fact of nature. Can we make the condom ‘natural’ when it is effectively a form of dress (or decoration) that functions as ‘protection’, and whose use has to be taught. Alternatively, can we make sex into culture?
The manifest un-naturalness of the condom makes the first alternative unlikely, and probably impossible. It is never going to skin, and even if it were, putting on one’s own skin is not something that anyone would want to get used to. But can sex be culture?
In fact, it already is. It is the culture of science and of religious beliefs that makes us see sex as ’natural’, that is, as part of nature. Under these conditions, sex and condoms are never going to mix, and the very ‘science’ involves queers the pictures so completely that this combination of nature-culture is unlikely. As we see again and again, empirically, it is rarely observed.
It would be easier, then, to begin to understand sex as culture, to teach it as an ‘art’, that is, AS CULTURE. This involves valuing sex as a form of expression, perhaps not like any other, but at least a form that could be understood as cultural form rather than as ‘fact of nature’.
This re-valueing of sex would make it at least PLAUSIBLE that education and communication might have an effect of sex as social action and as cultural form, rather than sex as neurological reflex with a minimal bit of motor coordination required.
As it stands, condoms are refused by many because they involve getting ‘dressed’ just as one has undressed, and getting cultural in the middle of what (we firmly believe) is all natural.
It will be easier to revalue our belief that sex is ‘natural’ than it will be to make the condom part of nature. We know this because human cultures in many times and places have done precisely this. The Kama Sutra, for instance, and the other ‘Oriental' ars erotica,’ as Michel Foucault noticed (though not crediting his probable sources, as usual, since the insight is hardly original with him), is not equivalent to a ‘scientia sexualis’. But as the the art and graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and many other Ancient sources show, Foucault was entirely wrong that this was a divide between the East and the West. The Ancient world also had its ‘ars erotica’ as the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) clearly shows, and which is available to everyone, if not in their bookcase or bedside table, then on the Internet.
Global Economies, Gender and the DSK Affair
Prof. Robert Thornton
Anthropology
Wits University
4 July 2011
The most extraordinary aspect of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case is the remarkable similarity between DSK and his accuser: they are both global players. Each deploys gendered power in different ways within radically different but intimately linked frameworks. Far from being the exemplar of the powerful against the powerless, each shows agency in extraordinary ways.
Commentators have focused on the fact that they represent the polar opposites of global political and gender categories: a predatory and powerful male against a powerless and virtuous woman, one rich the other poor, Jew and Muslim, White and Black, European and African, French and American immigrant, a manager of vast wealth and a hard working cleaner who was there to pick up his tissues and wash his sheets.
The affair seemed to personify the great dialectical oppositions of race, class, and gender. What brings this affair to international notice, however, is not just their difference but that fact that both operated in global markets, each successful in their own terms.
DSK was the head of the International Monetary Fund, while the Guinean hotel maid was an international multiple fraudster. According to the reports in the press, she had faked her appeal for asylum status by memorising a tape that she had bought from a man who specialised in sad stories of abuse and trauma.
These were not just any sad stories, but stories that Americans, and American immigration officials in particular, would believe. Her story revolved around being a devoutly religious woman who had been gang raped by out-of-control African men in the violence-torn streets of yet another African failed state.
The apparent back story is that this is where terrorist train and hide from American forces, but where good women who fear god, but who can also change bed linen and run a vacuum cleaner, also live in precarious balance with the forces of evil.
In a continent where HIV/AIDS prevention programmes pour hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting sexual abstinence, a masculine gang had forcibly raped her. By seeking to escape this antithesis of morality and good government, and by bravely standing against the oppression suffered by all women, she stood out as a beacon of what is called ‘hope’. Except she didn’t.
Instead, it turned out that she was a strongly motivated and clever player in the global market. The story that she told the US Immigration office, that she had learned by heart off a tape that she had paid good money for, had been worth its weight in any currency she might deal in. She had asylum status in the wealthiest country in the world, and was making a mint.
She was not what she seemed: a poor hard-working African women without agency or power to oppose the forces of patriarchy, race and class that oppressed her. Instead, she had multiple bank accounts spread at least across the US, if not the world, and had received at least $100,000 into the US accounts in the last year alone. She had reported on her US tax return that she was the sole bread-winner for two children, (only one of whom turned out to be hers), and that her only income was from her job as a cleaner in a big hotel chain that catered for uber-wealthy clients like Domnique Strauss-Khan. She was cheating the welfare system for rent on a New York apartment, and a successful tax fraud. The female accuser has moved from a point of high virtue to someone that Americans seem to hate most: an illegal immigrant, a tax fraud, and a welfare cheat. Its all about the economy.
In fact, it turned out she had a boyfriend in jail in Arizona. He was a Wolof-speaker like her from Guinea to whom she exposed her plan on the telephone. Translated from an obscure dialect of Wolof, she assured him that she knew what she was doing with Frenchman, and that she expected to make a lot of money from the rape story. Her boyfriend had been caught trying to barter counterfeit fashion items, almost certainly made in China, for marijuana from Mexican drug dealers in Arizona. He was an illegal alien, and the prison recorded his conversations. All in all, this was an elaborate global deal involving people from most parts the world’s multiple economies.
A Times correspondent in France, Elaine Sciolino, commented after the new stories emerged that “Until today, it was white versus black, rich versus poor, man versus woman, Jew versus Muslim.” It seemed to reflect, in other words, the received wisdom about the standard categories of world conflict. Although these were also in play, what is perhaps more important is the fact that DSK as IMF primo represents that global public economy while his accuser clearly represents the other global economy: secret, mostly illegal, untaxed, mostly unobserved, dealing in drugs, fraud, money laundering, counterfeit goods and clever narratives that make it all work.
Both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser are part of opposite halves of the global economy. Their stories reveal its hidden double nature. The formal, public economy of the IMF creates as its dark twin in the unobserved economy that supports many people like the Guinean hotel maid, her children, and her boyfriend.
This is not just a story of rich and poor, white and black, macho male and guileless female. It is also a story of how the world really works as opposed to how it is supposed to work. When the accuser phoned her boyfriend to discuss how much money she could make off Strauss-Kahn, she was doing on a personal level what a Goldman-Sachs trader, or any banana-republic dictator, does on a daily basis: they gamble and deal with flows of wealth that span the globe, that knit its economies together, but also permit a range of economic practices that may be far from the norm, and far from legality.
Seen as a global player in the unobserved economy of drugs, fraud and cash, DSK’s accuser was a successful woman. She was making money despite her origins in a country that should have doomed her to poverty. Ironically, she is one of those who benefits most, as she is meant to, from the euro-socialist policies that Strauss-Kahn speaks for. That she does so fraudulently is built into the way the system actually works.
But the IMF is also accused by its many detractors of dealing very roughly with those who do not play by IMF rules. It imposes harsh penalties on countries that do not comply with its structural adjustment programmes. In some cases, those penalties drive people like DSK’s accuser all the way to New York where she can seek a kind of revenge on the chairman of the IMF itself. The IMF works at the level of states and complex institutions. DSK’s accuser works at the level of networks of hidden economic deals involving untaxed and unaccountable values and cash in an unobserved economy of a different sort entirely.
This has implications, too, for the way we understand gender. The political version of the gender story in this case is about the powerlessness of the female victim of male violence, the immigrant, the single mother, the black woman in the urban metropolis. When we are able to perceive the varieties of power that this woman is able to utilise, however, we also should be able to see how the realities of ‘power’ and gender is as multiple—or at least two sided—as the economies that DSK and his accuser participate in.
Gender here may indeed be less important that the social forms of gendered lives that oppose each other. Dominique is the pater familias supported by a loving wife and daughter. This is a powerful social form, not just a powerful ‘male’. This ‘domestic’ unit is opposed to the fatherless composite family that the woman supports with the help of a felonious boyfriend dealing global contraband and confidence stories.
Gender appears in this light far too abstract to comprehend the real struggles. It is the social forms of ‘family’ in which gender plays only a part that is far more important in the longer-term outcome of the alleged rape. A focus on the rape alone, like the focus on class, race and gender fail to illuminate much that is important. The small scale social forms of the ‘domestic’ and the daily life, as much as the global political economies in which they each participate, are as important as the grand categories of the usual social analysis.
In other words, the homogenising, binary concept of ‘gender’, like the concept of ‘the economy’ or ‘class’ obscures more than it reveals in an attempt to understand the DSK affair that concentrates so many of the grant dichotomies of today’s world.
To be ‘real,’ women need more than being assigned to the category ‘female’. The same is true for men. To be ‘real women’, in other words, women need what we call ‘flirtation’, and this is something that mere category of ‘male’ and ‘female’, or even ‘patriarchy’ and ‘the oppressed’ fails to generate. But more than this, it is hard to deny that the sense of danger, or of loss and gain as in a game, can be central to our sense of being who we are as ‘gendered’ selves. The fact that both DSK and his accuser are ‘predatory’, seeking gain with other’s loss, make this story even more compelling. While much has been written in the press, and said in conversation, about how ‘powerful men’ seem to need the predatory sexuality that seemed to be in play here, less has been said about how the ‘powerless’ deploy their own systems of predation. The fact that one is more successful than the other in long run is what makes class and gender the fundamental categories that they are, and we must not lose sight of the intricacies of the way they are played in the real world.
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.)
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.
