The North-West University’s (NWU’s) Prof Erhabor Idemudia recently broke ground on research that looks at African cultural practices that aid the spread of HIV/Aids and what can be done to curtail this. 

According to Prof Idemudia’s research, African culture is generally male-dominated, with women accorded a lower status than men. This means men are socialised to believe that women are inferior and should be under their control, while women are socialised to over-respect men and act submissively towards them.

The resulting unequal power relation between the sexes, particularly when negotiating sexual encounters, increases women’s vulnerability to HIV infection and accelerates the epidemic.

Gender inequality may lead to unsafe sexual practices

Prof Idemudia says women’s inferior status affords them little or no power to protect themselves by insisting on condom use or refusing sex. He says many women also lack economic power and feel they cannot risk losing their partners, and thus their source of financial support, by denying them sex or deciding to leave an abusive relationship.

He says entrenched ideas about suitably “masculine” or “feminine” behaviour enforces gender inequality and sexual double standards and leads to unsafe sexual practices. Abstinence and monogamy are often seen as unnatural for men, who try to prove themselves “manly” by frequent sexual encounters, and often the aggressive initiation of these.

Cultural practices have impact on spread of HIV/Aids

Prof Idemudia identified specific cultural practices that aided the spread of HIV/Aids and narrowed it down to the following:

• Negative attitudes towards condoms, as well as difficulties negotiating and following through with their use. Men in southern Africa regularly do not want to use condoms. Condoms also have strong associations of unfaithfulness, lack of trust and love, and disease.
• In cultures where virginity is a condition for marriage, girls may protect their virginity by engaging in unprotected anal sex.
• The importance of fertility in African communities may hinder the practice of safer sex. Young women under pressure to prove their fertility prior to marriage may try to fall pregnant, and therefore do not use condoms or abstain from sex. Fathering many children is also seen as a sign of virile masculinity.
• Polygamy is practised in some parts of southern Africa. Even where traditional polygamy is no longer the norm, men tend to have more sexual partners and use the services of sex workers. This is condoned by the widespread belief that males are biologically programmed to need sex with more than one woman.
• Urbanisation and migrant labour expose people to a variety of new cultural influences, with the result that traditional and modern values often co-exist. Certain traditional values that could serve to protect people from HIV infection, such as abstinence from sex before marriage, are being eroded by cultural modernisation.

“Cultural factors in Africa, including gender inequalities, wife inheritance and some sexual practices, need to change and be better understood if the fight against HIV/Aids is to be more effective,” Prof Idemudia concludes.

More about the researcher

Prof Idemudia is a full research professor (Social Science Cluster) at the School of Research and Postgraduate Studies, in the Faculty of Humanities on the campus in Mahikeng.

His research interests span four focus areas: the application of clinical issues (psychopathology, mental health, wellbeing and therapeutic interventions) in prisons; African migrants, refugees and other vulnerable populations; gender studies; and developing African-oriented intervention methods with the understanding of illness attributions based on cultural knowledge in Africa.

Prof Erhabor Idemudia.