7 - ‘Condoms Cause AIDS’

Summary

These things, you must understand, there are some things we just do not talk about here in Venda. That is why there is so much gossip. (Chief Rathogwa of Fondwe village, 28 December 2004)

In this final ethnographic chapter, I tackle an issue that has been raised implicitly and explicitly throughout this book: the ways in which people speak – and do not speak – about AIDS. This leads to a critique of the prevalent notion that South Africans are engaged in a mass act of ‘AIDS denialism’. To develop this, I again widen the lens of analysis to consider AIDS not just as a sexually transmitted infection, but as a source of perceived unnatural death. I argue that the complex social processes that create and maintain the avoidance of open conversation around HIV and AIDS must be understood in the wider context of conventions through which causes of death are, and are not, spoken about. By invoking silence, coded language, and obfuscation, ‘degrees of separation’ are constructed that create a social distance between an individual and the unnatural cause of another's death.

The construction of AIDS as a ‘public secret’ (cf. Mookherjee 2006) must thus be seen in the context of strategies that are intended to negotiate limited responsibility as opposed to a blanket denial of reality. What has been understood as ‘denial’ is, rather, a direct protest of innocence. Indeed, the public silence around AIDS demonstrates the very real acceptance of the problem and the seriousness with which it has been met. Nonetheless, the conviction that Southern Africa is gripped by macro-level AIDS denial has influenced policy makers profoundly and has been equated with the need for more peer education and empowerment programmes in order to ‘break the silence’ – the official title of the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference held in Durban in July 2000. In this chapter, I suggest that unless our understandings of the avoidance of open conversation are grounded in a more sensitive appreciation of the relationship between language and folk aetiologies, then the breaching of this public silence in the form of female peer-group education will continue to produce potentially counter-productive consequences.