By Craig Timberg, Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 29, 2006
MBABANE, Swaziland - This tiny kingdom's new anti-AIDS campaign arrived without warning one day in July, featuring a slogan both unusually explicit and dripping with implied accusations: Makhwapheni Uyabulala - Your secret lover can kill you.
Despite living in a country that has the world's highest rate of HIV, Swazis had grown accustomed to bland billboards suggesting that more condoms or a positive attitude toward the disease would curb its spread. These new ads were different.
By the time they disappeared two weeks later in a frenzy of controversy, they had sparked a passionate national debate about how best to combat a disease that, Swazis say, has pushed their country to the brink of collapse. And the ads forced many here to confront how freewheeling sex was fueling an epidemic of early death...
...Although polygamy is common -- the king has 13 wives -- even more common, Swazis say, are relationships in which men have only one wife but girlfriends also. Women often maintain several partners as well. A study by a Christian aid group, World Vision, reported in May that in several southern villages, roughly three out of five residents, both men and women, reported having two or more sexual partners in the past three months.
The word makhwapheni (pronounced "ma-kwa-penny"), which means "your secret lover," became the centerpiece of radio and newspaper ads on the order of Derek von Wissell, 62, a courtly, gray-haired former cabinet minister who founded the national AIDS commission in 2002. He grew frustrated with his agency's inability to curb a virus that had infected an estimated 200,000 of Swaziland's 1 million residents. Among adults 15 to 49, the rate was even higher, with one out of three infected.
Von Wissell concluded that the vague, unfocused public education campaigns common here and throughout Africa had failed. In this, he was persuaded in part by the research of Daniel T. Halperin, an AIDS expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development based in Swaziland, who in speeches and private presentations pointed to dozens of studies showing that condom promotion campaigns were having little impact and that it would be more effective to target the multiple, concurrent sexual relationships that fuel high rates of HIV...
...The issue of multiple sexual partners has rarely been the focus of anti-AIDS campaigns in Africa, both because of taboos against publicly discussing sex and because of a long-standing consensus among anti-AIDS groups that educational messages should inspire hope rather than fear, researchers say. Campaigns have been especially careful to avoid suggesting that people with the disease -- including millions of women who had sex only with their unfaithful husbands -- bear any blame for contracting it. The makhwapheni campaign cast that conventional wisdom aside in what von Wissell said was a desperate bid to force Swazis to take responsibility for protecting themselves, and their loved ones, from AIDS.
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