Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic

by Jonny Steinberg

  “A store serves as a club for the district,” Hunter writes, “the people gathering there to meet friends, gossip, flirt, and beg tobacco…Sitting in the corner of the store I listened to the gossip and joined in the conversation…I heard about the latest affaires; who had been beaten by their husbands, and why; who were pregnant; what sort of crops had been reaped; who was sick, and who had bewitched them. I kept a bag of tobacco which helped the conversation along.”

  Hunter’s book is written in the fashion of its times. The ethnographer views herself as a scientist: she seldom draws attention either to her place in the world she describes or to the relationship between her feelings and her observations. But one can of course tell a great deal about a writer by what her eye fixes upon and what it sees. And Hunter is clearly taken aback by what appears to be a paradox: Pondoland’s premarital world is sexually permissive in the extreme and yet sexual relations are highly ordered.

  Girls as young as eight, and boys nine, she comments with muted astonishment, begin to attend the weekend gatherings of the unmarried. “The young people of one small local district…gather in the evening in a secluded spot in the veld or in a deserted hut. They dance and sing, then pair off to sleep together. The couple lie in each other’s arms, but the hymen of the girl must not be ruptured. If it is, the boy responsible is liable to a heavy fine.”

  Hunter cannot shake off her surprise at how young the children are when they begin to partake in these sexual adventures. She repeats the point in the following paragraph. “It is certain that boys and girls [sweetheart] before puberty. One overhears such remarks as, ‘It is awfully good to have a girl to cuddle into these cold nights’ from boys of 12. By 14 boys are complete young bloods, cutting their hair in fancy patterns, sporting snuff spoons, and wearing their sweethearts’ beads.”

  A little later, Hunter notes that these childhood and teenage couplings are seldom kept hidden from the young lovers’ parents. On the contrary, she writes, “it has always been customary for young men to spend nights with girls in the girls’ own homes. This relationship…is marked by an exchange of gifts between his group and hers…The first gift from the man to the girl’s father is usually a couple of goats, now sometimes one pound, then comes a beast, and if the relation lasts for more than a year, sometimes another beast…The girl is supplied with beads and blankets by her father, embroiders a loin-cloth and sometimes also another blanket, and makes necklaces and anklets, and a snuff-box, for her lover.”

  The young age of sexual debut, and the openness of youngsters’ relationships to the gaze of adults, is not all that catches Hunter’s eye. So too does the alacrity with which teenagers play the field. “‘A boy may be loved by as many as six girls,’” an informant of Hunter’s tells her. “‘If he has many he cannot pay for them all, and then fathers will not have him…’ A girl may also have a number of lovers, and her father may receive [gifts] from them all. ‘A girl may have 12 or 13 boys come to her hut every evening. She will send away all but two or three, and then talk to one and send him, talk to another and send him, and remain with the third.’ Her rivals may call her isifebe (a voluptuary), but it is no disgrace to her to accept several lovers at the same time. The more skulls the better.”

  I HAD MET seven Ithangans in their eighties, including both of Sizwe’s grandmothers. Most were in their early teens when Hunter did her fieldwork. I set about to interview them all. At the beginning, I used Sizwe as an interpreter.

  At each encounter, Hunter’s book was vivid in my mind. I looked for discrepancies between her accounts and the ones I was hearing now. And of course they were there. It was not just the fog and nostalgia of the three-quarters of a century that lay between then and now. The respective contexts were different. Hunter listened in as young women gossiped freely. I was conducting formal interviews with elderly people in the presence of their grandson. Their narratives were sanitized and inhibited. Sex was discussed with heavy, awkward innuendo.

  I found opportunities to interview old people without Sizwe, using more appropriate interpreters. I hired a middle-aged woman and a stranger when I interviewed grandmothers, a middle-aged man for the grandfathers. In these new circumstances, the old people were transformed. Nothing stirs the vanity of an octogenarian like an invitation to discuss the days of his or her sexual prowess. Their narratives grew raunchy, their accounts of their sexual pasts suspiciously exhibitionist. Some told me that today’s youth were frigid, impotent, sexually shy, that they had lost the arts of love.

  But it was the discussions in Sizwe’s presence that remain most vivid in my mind. Here, the sex itself slipped into the shadows of innuendo and what came to the fore was the strict organization, and, above all, the strict visibility, of premarital sex. Hunter laid emphasis on the fact that penetration was strictly forbidden. But equally forbidden was secrecy, invisibility. There seemed to be a presumption among the old people we interviewed that the liaisons of those who stole away and coupled beyond the gaze of their peers or parents would end in intercourse, either by consent or by force.

  “At the weekend party,” an elderly Ithanga man named Peter Madikizela told me, “it is very important that the girl chooses her boy in front of everybody, and that everybody sees them go off together.” He spoke animatedly and in the present tense, even though the events he described were seven decades past. “And where they go is also important,” he continued. “Not behind a closed door. They must be in the forest, where the other couples are, so that if the girl feels uncomfortable she will shout and the others will hear.”

  And, of course, the sexual encounters of the “young men [who] spend the night with girls in the girls’ own homes,” as Hunter puts it, were monitored with equal scrutiny.

  “In those days,” Peter Madikizela told me, “all unmarried members of the household slept together in the kitchen. So a teenaged girl could not slip away for the night; it was noticed. If a boy wanted to spend the night with her, he must present himself to her father, and the three of them must all together choose the hut where the couple will sleep.”

  All of this monitored sexual adventure moved toward a fixed end: almost everyone was to marry. The young man who approaches his sweetheart’s father to spend the night hopes one day to tell the patriarch that his daughter has agreed to wed him. What begins as a parental monitoring of sex becomes a bridewealth negotiation between two families.

  The day before Sizwe first told me of how he and Nwabisa got together, we interviewed his maternal grandmother. I asked how her husband had courted her.

  “It took a lot of time for me to agree to marry him,” she began. “He had to visit several times to my homestead to ask me to be his wife. It took two years, maybe one and a half years, so that I could believe that this person needs me.”

  “Was he patient?” I asked.

  “He tried not to be patient,” she laughed. “At first he told me he needed me to come to visit him outside, at his home. I said no, I am a virgin. You need to come to my home, to my parents. So he came, and I made him go to a small rondavel and wait there. My father was already dead by then, so my mother and one of her brothers came to see him. He said to them, ‘I am here because your daughter invited me. She agreed that I am her lover.’ And then they nodded and said it’s okay if you pay us a goat.”

  It was into this rubric that Sizwe wanted to fit his relationship with Nwabisa. “You need to chase the lady from far away,” he told me when I asked why the first two years of their relationship were chaste. You must wait around long enough to gain allies among her relatives.

  Of course, it did not happen quite this way with Nwabisa. But as he told the story he maneuvered it as close to the grooves of the old rubric as it would go.

  The moment it was clear that Nwabisa was going to move in with him, Sizwe made the trip to her village to announce himself and to pay three goats. “I went to her place, to her family,” he told me, “because they must know me very well. Not meeting me in the town and knowing nothing a
bout me, only hearing rumors I am staying with their daughter. I must come. I must announce myself. That is how it must be done.”

  It was, of course, just a proxy, and a forced one at that, of how things were done in his grandmother’s times. For Sizwe came of age long after the organized visibility of premarital sex had vanished. The trip to Nwabisa’s village and the payment of the goats constituted no more than the faintest echo of what transpired between Sizwe’s grandparents. And yet the continuity is what he emphasized. “That is how it is done in our culture,” he told me stubbornly. “Things must be done properly.”

  WHEN DID YOUNG Ithangans begin sleeping together in secret? When did it start becoming customary for unmarried people to have penetrative sex beyond the gaze of their peers and parents?

  Most of the elderly Ithangans I interviewed told me that the tradition began to crumble in earnest some time between their courting days and those of their children. Surveys done in other parts of Eastern Cape bear that out. Hunter herself led a team of researchers who conducted a census in Keiskammahoek, about two hundred miles southwest of Lusikisiki, in 1950. She found that just over half of women between eighteen and forty-five had children out of wedlock, compared to 20 percent of women over forty-five.

  When I asked elderly Ithangans why the young started sleeping together in secret the answer I got puzzled me. For me it is surely a question of political economy. Three generations ago, life in places like Ithanga was organized around productive land. The pinnacle of adulthood was proprietorship of a peasant homestead, and a homestead unit consisted of a patriarch and his dependents. To live the life to which he aspired, an Mpondo man had to inherit land, cattle, and infrastructure from his father, and he would not inherit if he did not marry. The whole world thus arced into marriage, and in producing heirs within marriage; that is where everything was headed.

  When the economic basis of that world began to crumble, so too did the relationships it sustained. Today, most young men in Ithanga will not inherit productive land or find a steady job. Nor can they afford to marry. The very foundation of the world in which it made sense to save penetrative sex and procreation for marriage has long vanished.

  The old people I spoke to were of course acutely aware of such change. They told me incessantly that, unlike them, their grandchildren do not work the land and do not find jobs. But they refused to attribute the erosion of the visibility of premarital sex and the prohibition on intercourse to this. No, they say, it isn’t because the children could not find jobs or work the land. What happened, quite simply, was an explosion of unbridled desire; the young could no longer contain their sexual greed. So they rebelled. They broke every rule and stricture and ran off to have penetrative sex behind closed doors. And nobody could stop them.

  I asked Peter Madikizela, the elderly man who said that young men and women could only couple at parties if they remained in earshot, why youngsters started having sex in secret.

  “It happened because boys started deciding they were men,” he replied. “Girls decided they were women who can sleep with men. It happened when they stopped going off to the forest together and instead started coming inside. The young woman would secretly come to the young man’s room and knock on the door. So even if she screamed nobody would hear. She knew that. To get herself into that situation, it means she wanted to have sex with him.”

  “For generations and generations,” I said, “the youngsters went to the forest. Why did it change when it did?”

  “Because young boys started demanding their own rooms,” he replied. “They refused to sleep in the kitchen anymore. They wanted a door to close behind them, a door their parents were not allowed to go through.”

  “But why did this change?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We were defeated. The kids took over. They became ungovernable. They would just commandeer a room, move a bed in, and declare that it is their room.”

  IN THE STORY he tells of his coming of age, Sizwe began his sexual life as a typical young man of the 1990s, losing his virginity long before the prospect of marriage, moving from one girl to another. Then he meets Nwabisa. The 1990s narrative disintegrates and vanishes. He plunges into the depths of a world that died long before his birth and emerges with another story of himself, damp and old and somewhat disfigured, but good enough. It is the story of a young, virginal Mpondo man in pursuit of an old-fashioned bride.

  Why does he do this? What is his purpose?

  I put these questions to him. I told him that when I listened to him talking of himself I heard two stories, a modern and then an olden one. I did not think, I told him, that it was merely a question of “settling down,” of youthful exuberance giving way to adulthood. It was much more than that. He was sifting through the artifacts of his cultural inheritance in order to chart a course through the world. What was that course?

  It was a Saturday morning in late summer. We had taken my car to a deserted field. I had just given him a driving lesson, one that had left us both feeling a little fragile. We were now sitting on the grass, our backs leaning against the car. He listened intently, and said nothing for a while.

  “Yes,” he offered finally. “When Nwabisa moved to Ithanga I had other girlfriends, and at first I carried on with them. You know the word isishumane? The isishumane is afraid of girls. A man in Ithanga who has only one girlfriend, they say he is isishumane. He is scared of the women.

  “But then two things happened to make me stop sleeping with other girls. Nwabisa got so upset when I was cheating her. It was more than upset. She got thin. She got sick. I saw that there was this person I was making so unhappy. I could not be happy while she was so unhappy.

  “And then there is a second reason, maybe as important. It is about Jake. It is about that Jake has died and I have not.

  “I have noticed that these are very bad times if you have many girls. If, by this time, you are not HIV-positive, you are lucky. And so you must stop. At this very moment, if you are one of the lucky ones, you must stop to mix with so many people. I stopped.”

  We talked no more of it that day; the powerful clarity with which he had spoken had an unassailable air about it. It seemed rude to persevere.

  Yet as his words sat with me, so they bothered me, for they were not quite enough. That he had chosen monogamy because he lives in a time of AIDS and because he feels the pain of his loved one spoke powerfully of a man in whom little darkness resides, the sort one would wish all young men to be in the midst of a plague. But there was so much about him that his words had not explained. They did not, for example, account for why he chose to describe his beginnings with Nwabisa as an exemplar of a long-vanished style of courtship. The Mpondo men of the past may have abstained from intercourse before marriage, but, once they were wed, monogamy was not a virtue to which they aspired. Sizwe’s father and grandfather both had many extramarital lovers, as was expected of men of their times. His decision to be monogamous was thoroughly modern, and without pedigree in his world.

  As so often happened, he finally provided a satisfying answer almost by accident.

  We had gone to town. Pension day was around the corner, Sizwe’s busiest time, and he had a great deal of shopping to do. In the aisles of one of the large warehouse stores on the main road, hemmed in by wide shelves of potatoes and mealie meal that rise almost fifty feet into the air, we bumped into a young woman from Ithanga. She and Sizwe chatted for a while and I wandered.

  When I returned, the woman was gone, and there was a gray pallor about Sizwe’s face. He was struggling to conceal his irritation.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “It is nothing,” he replied, “but it is also not nothing. Nwabisa’s brother was in Ithanga looking for me this morning. I wish he had not come.”

  He paused for a while, his eyes wandering around the store, then looked at me again.

  “It can only mean one thing. He came to tell me that his sister has been living with me for a long time and still there is
no lobola. He came to say it is time for me to get off my ass.

  “It is bad timing. I have been saving for a long time. I am nearly ready to marry. Now the people see that the brother has to come to demand. It is a disgrace that the people see that.”

  Bridewealth, or lobola, is frighteningly expensive. Formal negotiations between Sizwe’s and Nwabisa’s families had not yet begun, but he could reasonably expect to be asked to pay an initial installment of cows and cash to the value of about twenty-five thousand rand. Few Ithanga men of Sizwe’s generation had full-time work. Of those who did, only the most fortunate earned the value of bridewealth in a year. Sizwe’s shop was doing well. He had been slowly accumulating his bridewealth. He had just bought two cows. He was almost ready.

  “Disgrace?” I said. “That’s a very strong word. Maybe a little too strong?”

  “It is not too strong,” he replied firmly. “In these times, the young people are living badly. A woman comes to stay with you a long time. You have one child. Then another. Then a third child. Still, she stays. You are not married. The children are not yours, they do not have your surname. They will not inherit your kraal or your rondavel. You are surrounded by people, but you are nothing, you are by yourself.

  “It is a disgrace. You are like an ox, or like a bull who has hundreds of calves that all belong to other herds: you are a beast who pushes the plow all day and then one day drops dead. You will leave nothing behind you except your corpse in the field.”