Sons and fathers/boys to men in the time of AIDS: Learning masculinity in Zambia

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 569-586

  Simpson, Anthony ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME; GENDER RELATIONS; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS;

AFRICA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; SOUTHERN AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WORLD; ZAMBIA;

EID: 25144505988     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070500202873     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. For an ethnography of the school, see A. Simpson, Half-London in Zambia: Contested Identities in a Catholic Mission School (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 2003).
2. The present focus on men is not to deny the importance of studies that have argued for the need to put women at the centre of analysis. Women bear the brunt of the multifaceted consequences of the AIDS pandemic; many are particularly at risk and in need of empowerment because of men's violence. Violence and the threat of violence increase women's inability to negotiate condom use. However, while recognising that men play a significant role in HIV transmission, there is no intention here to demonise them nor to pretend that they form an undifferentiated category free of contestation. Among recent commentators who have spoken of the need to change men are C. Baylies and J. Bujra, AIDS, Sexuality and Gender in Africa (London, Routledge, 2000)
3. and R. Morrell (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa (London, Zed Books Ltd; Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 2001).
4. The rate of exchange fluctuated during 2002, but averaged about 4,500 kwacha to the US dollar.
5. It has been observed that higher rates of HIV transmission in Africa are found in regions where circumcision is not practised. See A. Buve et al., 'Multicentre Study on Factors Determining Differences in Rate of Spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa: Methods and Prevalence of HIV Infection', AIDS, 15, supplement 4 (2001), pp. S5-S14. One estimate of people in Zambia living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2003 puts the adult rate (15-49 years) at 16.5 per cent, with a low estimate of 13.5 per cent and a high estimate of 20.0 per cent (UNAIDS/WHO epidemiological fact sheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections, 2004 Update).
6. L. Wacquant, 'The Prizefighter's Three Bodies', Ethnos, 63, 3 (1998), p. 346.
7. E. Colson, Marriage and the Family among the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1958);
8. E. Colson, 'The Father as Witch', Africa, 70, 3 (2000), pp. 333-58;
9. H.L. Moore and M. Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees (London, James Currey, 1994);
10. A.I. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet (London, Oxford University Press, 1939);
11. A.I. Richards, Bemba Marriage and Present Economic Conditions (The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 4, 1940).
12. See R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, Polity, 1995), p. 122, on the necessity to go beyond the mother and father in any analysis of how boys learn to be men.
13. C. Shire gives an autobiographical example from Zimbabwe in 'Men Don't Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe', in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 147-58.
14. A monograph that overcomes this shortcoming is R. Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
15. Meyer Fortes suggests that the birth of the first-born, especially the first-born son, marking as it does a father's irreversible transition to parenthood, draws his particular attention to the child in a relationship that entails ambivalence and ambiguity. 'The First Born', Journal of Child Psychology, Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 15 (1974), pp. 81-104.
16. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, p. 140;
17. Colson, Marriage and the Family, p. 240.
18. J.F. Ritchie, The African as Suckling and Adult, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 9 (1943);
19. H. Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa, The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York, Harper and Row, 1960);
20. J.L. Epstein, Urbanisation and Kinship: The Domestic Domain on the Copperbelt of Zambia, 1950-1956 (London and New York, New Academic Press, 1981);
21. and Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Papers (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Not one of the cohort or of their school contemporaries expressed any conscious memory of being weaned.
22. Colson, Marriage and the Family, p. 261.
23. Former students' wives were only taught how to perform the missionary position in the instruction they received immediately prior to marriage. While they were taught that a wife's correct position was below her husband, they were instructed to be anything but passive in their sexual performance. They had to demonstrate to their women instructors that they had learnt well how to please a husband by 'dancing' in bed.
24. A recent draft report based upon surveys, questionnaires and focus group discussions conducted in and around Ndola, on the Zambian Copperbelt and entitled Heads and Tails (n.d.) reported that men and women in all age-groups were 'somewhat reluctant' to accept the concept of gender equality.
25. For a discussion of the relationship between corporal punishment and claims of 'ownership', see M. Last, 'Children and the Experience of Violence: Contrasting Cultures of Punishment in Northern Nigeria', Africa, 70, 3 (2000), pp. 359-93.
26. Former students regularly based their claim of 'superiority' over women on men's supposed greater physical strength and greater intelligence and upon women's greater susceptibility to spirit possession. In addition they pointed to 'African tradition' which, they claimed, always gave men precedence over women, and to Christianity - especially the Creation story in the Book of Genesis - where, they stressed, it was clear that man was created first and thus should take precedence.
27. While some caution needs to be taken when respondents are using English as a second language (see Last, 'Children and the Experience of Violence', p. 367), the severity of many of the beatings described is evident.
28. C. Campbell has explored the manner in which boys in Natal first learn within the family to view violence as a socially sanctioned means of resolving conflict, in 'Learning to Kill? Masculinity, the Family and Violence in Natal', Journal of Southern African Studies, 18,3 (1992), pp. 614-28.
29. In surveys, 40 per cent of Zambian women have reported being regularly physically abused. See L. Heise, A. Raikes, C. Watts, A. Zwi, 'Violence Against Women: A Neglected Public Health Issue in Less Developed Countries', Social Science and Medicine, 39, 9 (1994), pp. 1,165-79. Comparable figures for other African countries were Kenya, 42 per cent, Tanzania, 60 per cent, Uganda, 46 per cent.
30. This taboo suggested a general fear of incest between a father and daughter. Affluent Zambian men who were in the habit of hugging 'big' daughters were often criticised by members of this cohort for adopting, in this instance, dubious 'Western manners'.
31. Although some of this respectful behaviour might well have been occasioned by my presence, I observed such conduct both from a distance and by chance, and it was a regular feature in some homes.
32. Colson, Marriage and the Family, p. 234.
33. Prefects at St Antony's, acting ultra vires, would also mete out corporal punishment, Simpson: Half-London, pp. 114-115.
34. R.W. Connell, Which Way is Up? Essays on Class, Sex and Culture (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1983) p. 18.
35. For similar observations on the links between excellence in sports and school work and the ability to attract girlfriends, see I. Niehaus, 'Towards a Dubious Liberation: Masculinity, Sexuality and Power in South African Lowveld Schools, 1953-1999', Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 3 (2000), pp. 387-407.
36. While boys accepted women as primary school teachers, at St Antony's students often questioned a woman teacher's ability to teach, especially in the senior grades. When girls were first admitted as day-scholars, some students and former students lamented that their school had been 'contaminated' by the presence of girls. See Simpson, Half-London, p. 28.
37. C. Heward, Making a Man of Him: Parents and their Sons 'Education at an English Public School, 1929-1950 (London, Routledge, 1988).
38. The absence of a child's reproach for the physical punishment received at the hands of parents has been described elsewhere. See, for example, P. Harvey, 'Domestic Violence in the Peruvian Andes'
39. and P. Wade 'Man the Hunter: Gender and Violence in Music and Drinking Contexts in Colombia', in P. Harvey and P. Gow (eds), Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 66-89 and pp. 115-37.
40. Colson "The Father as Witched', offers cogent arguments for the increase in accusations of witchcraft by children against Tonga fathers.
41. J.P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, Routledge, 1990), p. 140.
42. R. Parker, R.M. Barbosa, P. Aggleton, Framing The Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), p. 17.
43. I am writing about this elsewhere.
44. The claim of sexual experience - though not of having fathered a child - formed a central part of adolescents being granted masculine status by students at St Antony's. See Simpson, Half-London, pp. 133-34.
45. See also Niehaus, 'Towards a Dubious Liberation', p. 393.
46. For a nuanced analysis of relations between men and women in Northern Zambia, see K. Poewe, Matrilineal Ideology: Male-Female Dynamics in Luapula, Zambia (London, Academic Press, 1981).
47. There were other reasons too, not least among them the desire to achieve intimacy in long-term relationships. See A. Simpson, 'Courage, Conquest and Condoms: Harmful Ideologies of Masculinity and Sexual Encounters in Zambia in the Time of HIV/AIDS', in D.A. Feldman (ed.), AIDS, Culture and Africa (Gainesville, The University Press of Florida, forthcoming) on this and on the consequences of certain constructions of masculinity for condom use.
48. In their research, E. Lagarde et al., 'Condom Use and its Association with HIV/Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Four Urban Communities of Sub-Saharan Africa', AIDS, 15, supplement 4 (2001), pp. S71-S78, revealed that reported frequent condom use with all non-spousal partners in the Zambian Copperbelt town of Ndola was in the same range as in other urban sites in Benin, Cameroon and Kenya: 21-25% for men and 11-24% for women.
49. See A. Jacobson-Widding, Chapungu: The Bird That Never Drops a Feather (Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, 2000), for similar descriptions of a boy's relationship with his father and mother and of the ideal male personality type among Shona-speaking Manyika of eastern Zimbabwe.
50. Similar observations regarding gay Latino men and childhood experience are made by R.M. Diaz, 'Cultural Regulation, Self-Regulation, and Sexuality: A Psycho-Cultural Model of HIV Risk in Latino Gay Men', in Parker et al., p. 198.
51. See J. Holland et al., The Male in the Head: Young People, Sexuality and Power (London, The Tufnell Press, 1998), for the importance of performance in first sex boys and adolescents in the UK.