I’m actually going to a brothel, I remember thinking as my friend Doc and I drove to a truck stop about an hour west of his village clinic. He had set up services there for a number of sex workers patronized by the intercity truck drivers who stopped for a few hours’ rest. At the truck stop, fields of tall brown grass and low shrubs stretched outward from the junction and its impromptu settlement of zinc-roofed, mud-brick buildings. Around us large trucks rested as their engines clicked while cooling and their drivers propped themselves against their large tires or in the shade beneath their chassis. The men were almost catatonic from a full day’s work of driving. Their only motions were to raise plastic cups of water to their lips. Not too far away, a line of women sat silently against a low cement wall, some of them eating roasted corn, others fanning themselves against the heat.
“Those women are sex workers,” Doc said, thrusting his chin in their general direction.
The year before, during the Nigerian gubernatorial elections, I had interviewed a local Lagos politician about Nigeria’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. During our meeting in his dimly lit office, he had suggested that the disease was a problem of interstate truck drivers and female sex workers.
“For instance,” he had said, “a tanker driver is supposed to leave from Lagos all the way to Kano to deliver fuel. Because of the kind of person he is—he’s very promiscuous—he stops at Ore. He has a ‘friend’ in Ore, and let’s say he picks the HIV virus up in Ore along the way. He’s infected. From Ore, he now gets to Lokoja, where he’s also promiscuous. There he has unprotected sex with somebody, casual sex. He leaves. He has infected a community there. He gets all the way to Kano, where he has another show and a shot of it, casual sex again. He has infected someone in Kano. Then from Kano he heads back again to Lokoja and Abuja, and the person he had sex with is not available at that point in time, so he has sex with another person. A single carrier can do such damage. Along the routes of transportation, different cells and communities of infected people begin to spread.”
I found his words interesting because they seemed to externalize both the epidemic and its primary means of transmission—sex. By focusing on these groups of people that Nigerians traditionally consider promiscuous or of lax morality, he seemed to suggest that normal people with normal monogamous sexual relationships exist outside the reach of the virus. Or as one woman I interviewed, who had recently graduated from college, put it: “Everybody wants to believe that they’re very good and they’re too clean for all of that; that people that die of AIDS or have HIV are dirty people, people that sleep around or do rubbish and stuff, not our kind of people.”
“Some of them are positive,” Doc said about the sex workers. He had just started offering testing and counseling services to the women along with education on safe sex practices and free condoms. The previous week, he said, some of the women had tested positive.
As we stood watching, every so often a man would walk toward the women and the pair would disappear through a nondescript door in the side of a low cement wall. It was almost too perfect. It seemed that right before my eyes, this politician’s theory was being borne out.
I followed Doc across the street to that same narrow door in the side of the wall. He opened it and we stepped inside. Behind the door was a labyrinth of corridors open to the sky with smooth concrete walls broken at regular intervals by metal doors, some shut tight, others covered by limp and grungy curtains. At the end of one corridor, a youngish woman swept rhythmically, stopping every so often to slam the head of her broom against the ground and even out its bristles of stiff, dried grass before starting her motion again. Otherwise it was silent. I’m not sure what noises I expected, maybe even wished to hear in some realm of my imagination—heavy breathing, moaning, the universal indicators of illicit activity. But there was nothing. There was no intrigue here, no color, no vibrancy—-just a bunch of dark rooms, each with a mattress and neatly arranged personal effects at its base.
At the end of one corridor, Doc introduced me to two women he had come to know very well through his advocacy work. His words were quick and almost apologetic: “This is my friend. He has come to do research on HIV. Can he ask you some questions?” Then he disappeared into the maze of corridors.
My new companions sat down on low stools in the corridor, their backs supported by the cement wall. I took a stool facing them and stretched out my legs as they had.
One of the women puffed her cheeks wide before smiling at me. She was naturally radiant, the woman at the party who makes everyone feel comfortable and looked after. She wore a red and orange rappa (a sari-like garment) wound around her legs and torso. The knot holding up the fabric sat in the dead center of a bright red T-shirt stretched tightly over her chest. A black scarf covered her hair. Her companion was a darker-complexioned woman with wrinkled skin on her fingers, her exposed arms, and in the corners of her lips and eyes that made her look like the peel of a desiccated yam. She didn’t say much except to chime in for emphasis.
Our conversation began rather benignly with the usual pleasantries, after which the women shared with me their comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS.
“We were taught,” the first woman said at one point. “We went to lectures with the doctors, and they told us there is a tablet for it, but it cannot cure. This tablet can only subdue the various diseases. This is the worst disease we have in Nigeria. If you pregnant, then it will affect the baby.”
“The worst!” her companion agreed.
But things changed dramatically when, in an attempt to shift the conversation, I asked softly, “How many men do you see in a day?”
Immediately the woman wearing the red shirt changed. Her natural ruddiness paled. Her smile became synthetic. The second woman sucked in her teeth with disapproval. “That question has no answer,” she responded. “This is a road. Million of men can pass here in a day.”
“Why do you ask?” the first lady said. “There is no need of that.”
Why did I ask? It almost certainly doesn’t matter what the numbers are, except for what asking about them suggests. It has taken me some reflection to truly understand the significance of my question—indeed, my whole interaction with these two women—especially within the larger context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its relation to sex. The primary issue that has concerned me for some time is why I felt the need to start my exploration of the relationship between HIV/AIDS and sex with sex workers. With 35.6 percent of sex workers in Nigeria testing positive for HIV, there is surely some epidemiological justification for doing so, but if I am honest, there is something else at play, subtly expressed in my supposedly innocent question about how many men each woman was to see that day. It is the same sentiment that caused the politician to associate the HIV/AIDS epidemic solely with the sexual practices of prostitutes and truck drivers. It is the same sentiment that initially led some to look at the scope of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and suggest that if, as Susan Sontag has put it, “AIDS is understood as a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity,” then Africans must be more promiscuous and perverse than the general population. This desire to define a type of sex or sexuality that is more closely associated with HIV/AIDS, followed by an overt or implied judgment about the newly defined group, probably speaks more to society’s general anxiety about sex and sexual morality than it does to the practices of the group in question. This anxiety about sex has affected how we consider sexual relationships during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
From the time of its appearance, HIV/AIDS has been linked with the idea of an unnatural or morally transgressive sexuality. It divided the public into those who have HIV or are at higher risk of contracting the virus and what Sontag called “this disease’s version of ‘the general population’: white heterosexuals who do not inject themselves with drugs or have sexual relations with those who do.” The appearance of HIV helped to enforce the idea of a normative sexuality exemplified and practiced by white men and women, all sex outside of this realm receiving the label abnormal or, still worse, dangerous.
When HIV first appeared in homosexual populations in the United States in the early 1980s, it was thought that something intrinsic to gay sex was the cause of both the virus and its spread. The medical literature contained references to GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), which then morphed into the popularly used “gay plague.” In the late 1980s, massive efforts to educate the public about HIV/AIDS and strong campaigns by gay-rights advocates drastically reduced the presence of such dehumanizing rhetoric in the West. But rather than disappearing, the connection between HIV/AIDS and “weird” sex simply changed geographical locus as the extent of the sub-Saharan epidemic revealed itself.
The idea of African sexuality as Other in international dialogue begins first with accounts of Arab and Portuguese explorers in precolonial times. Themes of sexual aggressiveness, promiscuity, and strange sexual rituals addressed first in these early accounts have attached themselves to the sexualities of African and black peoples, coloring commentary on the subject for the greater part of the past millennium. Some have suggested that such accounts reflect the projections of European men from societies where the sexual experience was considered to be more strictly governed by explicitly understood social or religious convention, that the fascination and disgust with a perceived limitless African sexuality encountered on the frontier was the result of frustrated sexual expression at home.
More recently such themes have surfaced in the context of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic. For some both on and off the continent, the widespread presence of HIV/AIDS in Africa confirms that there is indeed something untoward about the way Africans approach sex. I am reminded of an encounter I had a few years ago while passing through London on my way back to Abuja when I decided to delay my onward journey by a couple of days to catch up with an old college friend. On a warmish spring evening, after dinner, we found ourselves in front of a nightclub discussing the only thing I seemed able to talk about—HIV. I was just explaining to my friend how prevalence rates in Nigeria—indeed, throughout much of Africa—had recently been downwardly revised, when the attractive young woman in a black blazer, skinny jeans, and heels standing in front of us turned around, a tad tipsy, and asked, “Isn’t HIV the disease that started because someone in Africa had sex with a monkey?” While that statement can initially be dismissed as the silly musing of an ignorant drunk woman, it does reflect a line of thinking that was found in scholarly literature about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Consider this observation by the medical anthropologist Daniel Hrdy—which might be considered one of the more benign explanations for the origin and spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa:
Although generalizations are difficult, most traditional African societies are promiscuous by Western standards....
There is a striking analogy between promiscuity as a risk factor in humans and the “promiscuous” behavior of vervets. Typically, female vervets, unlike baboons, are sexually receptive for long periods … and during that time mate with multiple male partners, sometimes engaging in dozens of copulations on a single day....
We are left to conclude that even if HIV/AIDS isn’t the result of some African having sex with a monkey, it has certainly spread because Africans were having sex like monkeys.
This initial argument that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was the result of a base African sexuality was rounded off in papers like “The Social Context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa,” published by the anthropologists John and Pat Caldwell, which suggested the spread of HIV/AIDS was linked to societies where “virtue is related more to success in reproduction than to limiting profligacy,” and the fact that “polygyny exists on a scale not found in the Eurasian system.” It is useful to start with polygamy when discussing the HIV/AIDS epidemic because the reactions to this cultural practice and its implication in the spread of the epidemic provide a starting point for exploring understandings of the relationship between sex and HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.
Polygamy has long been a point of concern when the world considers African sexuality—if indeed such a thing even exists. During the height of the British colonial project, it was thought that the “greatest struggle is not so much with heathenism and fetishness as with worldliness, unchristian marriages and polygamy.” The assumption made in anthropological assessments such as the Caldwells’ of the relationship of an aberrant African sexuality to HIV/AIDS is that polygamy institutionalizes an innate promiscuity that is central to the spread of disease. It is not difficult to see why earlier researchers came to this conclusion—especially considering the historical and anthropological bias favoring the idea of the promiscuous African. It also reveals why many Africans initially pushed so hard against the idea that HIV was actually a problem. No one wanted to really answer the question: what does it mean if these historians and anthropologists are right? Unfortunately, both the unfounded assumptions about African sexuality and the pushback against these assumptions colored the debate and perhaps delayed the formation of an effective strategy to deal with HIV/AIDS.
I didn’t originally intend to explore the role of polygamy in the spread of the epidemic, but it came up in a conversation I had with the prominent activist Samaila Garba, who runs Amana, an association of people living with HIV/AIDS in the northern Nigerian town of Kontangora.
I first met Samaila when Doc and I passed through Kontangora on our way to the village where Doc had his clinic. Samaila lived on a busy street near the center of town, just behind the emir’s sprawling palace compound, where kids kicking a soccer ball scurried to the roadside every time a car or motorcycle buzzed by and people made slow progress in their amblings, stopping every five minutes to greet another person they knew. Residences were indistinguishable from storefronts—goods for sale hung from or sat on almost every available hook and flat surface. People blinked repeatedly when stepping from the shade of their dwellings into the harsh, hot sun. Samaila emerged from his low doorway slightly stooped, but soon unfolded himself to his true height. He towered over most people, and with his bald head, dark skin, and chiseled facial features, he appeared the emblem of seriousness, a distinguished look that vanished as soon as his face exploded into an enthusiastic, toothy smile.
He was an unlikely activist. The son of a poor farmer, he had grown up in northern Nigeria with dreams of attending college and becoming, as he called it, a “big man.” But due to the relative poverty of his family, he was not able to continue his education beyond secondary school. Instead he became a schoolteacher and later, after some persuasion by close friends, a police officer. He worked instructing new recruits on the intricacies of the law, and sometimes went undercover to break syndicates of livestock thieves operating in the vast farm and grazing lands of the north. He certainly fit the part of a police officer—his imposing presence and assured movements, his gestures controlled and authoritative, his voice at once calm and commanding. And though police officers in Nigeria are much maligned for petty corruption, he was unapologetic in his love for his former profession. “Whatever they say about policemen,” he had told me when we first met, “I know it built my character. It made me strong. It taught me courage, and I believe that courage is what I brought along into this HIV/AIDS work that I am doing.”
When next we met, it was at the Kontangora General Hospital, where the Amana Association had its headquarters. We met in a stuffy office that was filled with files detailing potential grants, stacked piles of community activism training manuals, and peer-counseling and testing brochures. Dust collected on an old, clearly unused computer beside which rested a picture of Samaila meeting the Queen of England. We took two plastic chairs outside to the shade of a large mango tree abutting the building, where a group of women, members of the association, sat across from us against the wall of the hospital ward, their legs stretched out on the dusty concrete before them, laughing and chatting as little gusts of wind made their headscarves ripple. Every so often, they glanced toward us and whispered.
“In 2001 I did accept that I was HIV positive. I made statements as such in the public,” Samaila said, once we were seated. “It was quite a revolutionary thing to do in the north because nobody had done that before. It was very tough for myself and for the remaining members of my family. It affected my children. They became very despondent, first of all because their mother was lost. Then they were not happy at school—people were giving them a lot of headache. Their peers were giving them a lot of headache. They would tell them, ‘Your father is Mr. AIDS! Your father is Mr. AIDS!’ And my kids would cry their way back home. I found a lot of rejection from my immediate community. When I went for prayer in the mosques—even to pray in the mosques—people didn’t want to stand by me,” he said, still wounded.
“But I also knew and I saw that people were misinterpreting the issue of HIV/AIDS. And I realized that the onus of removing the stigma lies on me and me only. I suffered the stigma and I realized the stigma was a result of misinformation.
“People talked about HIV/AIDS, for example, as being a disease of the promiscuous only. People with wayward behaviors were being punished by God, infected with HIV/AIDS. That was the norm of the thinking among the population.” He coughed. “I certainly had relationships with many women before I got married to my wife—I wouldn’t call myself a saint in that respect. I was not the promiscuous type, running after everything in skirts—one fling in a year or something like that. But I wouldn’t say I was a virgin before I married my wife. It wasn’t like that.”
He then told me that he was introduced to his first wife in 1990 by a good friend, a trader who had a shop a few streets down from his house. To visit his friend, he would have to pass his future wife selling akara (deep-fried bean-curd balls) on the street in front of her own house. I could see him, younger then, after work sauntering down the dusty road in his black policeman’s uniform with its bright red chevrons and short sleeves. I could see her, too—a young face framed by her headscarf, her hands moving skillfully to package the crisp golden snacks for her customers. I could hear the pleasantries exchanged between them as he passed, sure to slow his walk and linger a moment by her stand, alongside the clusters of customers holding money at the ready in one hand and turning up expectant palms in the other.
“I would buy akara from her before proceeding to where my friend was staying,” he said. “That is where myself and the woman developed an interest in each other.”
“What about her interested you? What made you fall in love with her?” I asked.
“She was quiet, and I love that,” he said, smiling slowly. “She appeared to be somebody who was reserved. She wasn’t the noisy type. She wasn’t the garrulous type. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She was somebody who understood me very well. If I was in a bad mood, she knew the mood—I didn’t need to tell her—and she could pacify me, change my moods from bad ones to good ones by the understanding and the love that she showed to me. That was what made me to love her.”
After a moment, he smiled again and added, “Another thing that made me marry my wife was that she refused to accept my advances. She was different from the other women who were so easy. Certainly, when you’re courting a woman in the north, it’s improper to enter a sexual relationship with her until you marry her. Any woman from a good family will not allow it, even if you, the man, certainly want.”
He paused and then added as an aside, “We as men will demand that.”
“But a woman from a good family wouldn’t accept that,” he continued, “because she thinks that if you have sex with her, you’re going to vamoose. That’s the normal thing. And yes, I was impatient to see her in my house. We courted for just about six months. Quite short! My friends were actually surprised that I had started falling in love, because at that time, I didn’t want things like marriage or women. Honestly, I had already passed the marriageable age. People wanted to see what kind of woman had been able to get me to that stage.”
He certainly was a bit older, just over forty when first married—quite unusual for northern Nigeria, where people are often married younger, in their early or midtwenties.
“I was regretting not marrying earlier, because life as a married man was more ordered for me. Certain things I didn’t discover single, I discovered them when I was married—some sense of responsibility, a certain sense of being able to save, of being able to lay down some things for a rainy day. I knew that I was now responsible for another person’s life. It changed me a lot,” he said, nodding deliberately before bringing his palms together and locking his thumbs. We were both quiet as we watched the evening steal across the fields beyond the hospital wall. The sun hovered just above the horizon far out to the west where the town ended abruptly against a mixture of farmland and scrub brush. The women lounging against the building had departed, leaving a scattering of peanut shells now being considered by a band of free-range chickens. “But I’ll also tell you that I married again in 1994.”
A surprised look must have crossed my face.
“Yes.” He continued, either unaware of or unconcerned by my reaction. “While I was with my wife, I married another woman.”
He explained that while with the police, he had been transferred from his hometown to the neighboring state as an undercover investigative officer.
“The police station where I worked was close to her house,” he said. “She always passed through the police station. I think she was going to her father’s house. I was working in the crime department, sitting by the window all the time, and I had the opportunity of seeing her. She caught my eye because of her beauty, very dark skinned and black, and very beautiful—very pretty woman. I one day decided to call upon her. One thing led to another—certainly when I first called her, it was not because of marriage—but one thing led to another and then I married her. I was told her husband had died, but I still married her.”
“Was your first wife at all hurt by that?” I asked.
He responded to my question almost before I asked it—as if expecting it.
“Polygamy is not something strange to the two of them,” he said. “It’s normal. My first wife, she grew up in a polygamous family. Her father had three wives. Certainly no woman wants a rival, however much the culture allows, but it is accepted and my first wife accepted it in good faith. She was also sure that the bond between us was so strong that no other woman could take her place. And it was like that. My first and second wives accepted each other because it had to be like that. I also had a part to play by not showing preference to one or the other. Certainly within the heart of my hearts, the depth of my hearts, my first was the preferred wife, but it was never showed openly, because anything like that will bring conflict.” He fell silent. “I was with my second wife for six months, getting to a year, and she started falling sick,” Samaila said after his long pause. “And she died. She hadn’t got a child for me. We hadn’t been pregnant. We hadn’t even lived together for too long.
“In the year 2001, my first wife fell very, very sick and was admitted in the hospital. Very luckily for me, the doctor in the hospital was a personal friend. We met most of the time at social gatherings. After my wife had spent three days in the hospital not getting any better, he told me, ‘Samaila, let us look for HIV. Let us do an HIV test on your wife.’
“I said, ‘No. HIV is for other people. It is not for me. I do not believe that I am infected or that my wife is infected.’ He didn’t say anything that day but the next day he called me again and said, ‘Look, Samaila, HIV can come from anything. It can come from a blood donation. It can come from a blood transfusion. It can come from anything. So please, do your best and let us do a test. It is not the end of life.’
“I do remember very well the test was done on a Sunday afternoon around two o’clock. It happened at Yauri at a private hospital, a run-down, ramshackle place. I remember a long bench with hospital equipment on it, and testing vials and needles improperly discarded. It wasn’t very neat. I remember the man who did the test at the laboratory was very short, very broad. He told the doctor. The doctor was shivering and washing his hands very fast. I knew something was wrong. He now told me, ‘This is what is happening. She is positive.’
“My wife died soon after. I loved her very dearly until the day that she died.”
He would later find out that his second wife’s first husband had died of HIV/AIDS.
The story Samaila tells of his experience with polygamy and HIV/AIDS does not fit with the polygamy-equals-promiscuity paradigm. It is not the story of a sex-crazed maniac, the societal convention that allows him the ability to fulfill his boundless desires, and the disease that has come to expose how morally backward he is. Rather, it is the experience of a decent and honorable family man struggling to understand how this disease entered into his life. This is not to offer a full-throated defense of polygamy, a practice that sparks debate about the roles and rights of women in a given community; rather, it is to say that within the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one must be careful not to offer simplistic and moralizing conclusions about sexual relationships that exist outside of a certain familiar cultural context. The associated judgment only increases anxiety about the propriety of sexual practice and prevents valuable discussion that might increase understanding of the epidemic’s progress. As it turns out, there might be something about a polygamous relationship that speaks to a more generalized pattern of sexual interaction in Nigeria (and sub-Saharan Africa) that may indeed affect the spread of the epidemic, but it has nothing to do with an innate African promiscuity.
Back in New York on a summer day so hot as to make even the most authentically Nigerian person wilt, I paid a visit to Helen Epstein, scientist, journalist, and author of a book on AIDS, The Invisible Cure. We sat beneath a large umbrella on the stone patio in the backyard of her Harlem row house, an ice-cold pitcher of water perspiring between us, and discussed the various theories of why HIV/AIDS has spread further and faster in sub-Saharan Africa than in other places.
“It’s not that Africans are any more promiscuous than Westerners,” I remember her saying. “The average number of lifetime partners is about the same. It’s that the patterns of sexual interaction are different.”
Patterns of sexual interaction matter tremendously in the spread of the disease. In the West, people tend to engage in sequentially monogamous relationships. In other words, each person has one partner at any one time, with very little overlap between relationships. In such arrangements, a sexually transmitted infection like HIV/AIDS can still pass from person to person, but the completion of one relationship and the establishment of another limit the rate at which it moves. In sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria included—more emphasis has been placed on the idea of concurrent partnerships, sexual relationships that overlap in time. These overlapping relationships can create a sexual network that, as one study argues, “dramatically increases both the size and variability of an epidemic … the speed with which the epidemic spreads.” Thus it is likely that HIV/AIDS is more widespread in Africa not because Africans are any more promiscuous or weirdly sexual than other people, but as a result of the presence of sexual networks that allow for increased likelihood of exposure to and transmission of the disease.
A polygamous relationship like Samaila’s, because it is so visible and culturally sanctioned, provides an easy and potentially judgment-free example of how concurrency accelerates the spread of HIV in a population. But not all relationships in Nigeria are explicitly culturally sanctioned, though they may still be affected by concurrency. While concurrency counters the idea of a more promiscuous African sexuality as being the cause of the epidemic, it does little to quell the anxiety about the moral quality of sexual relationships that are unsanctioned in this time of HIV/AIDS. These changing relationships are the subject of much agonizing in countries like Nigeria, where increasing urbanization and migration have weakened community control of sexual practice and inspired new ideas about the proper place of sex.
“I know that people are beginning to embrace sex as a human behavior between two adults that you cannot avoid,” a young banker I know named Fatimah said to me during one of our many conversations. Her unconscious use of the word avoid perfectly expressed the tension that surrounds emerging attitudes toward sex in Nigeria. Many people I spoke with suggested that the proper behavior was waiting until marriage, a comment followed by the caveat “but body no be wood!”—in other words, humans are not inanimate objects and desire eventually wins.
Fatimah always looked every bit the modern African woman. She always dressed very stylishly, multicolored scarves wrapped around her head, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and crisp black pantsuits with pinstripes or form-fitting dresses cut from traditional fabric.
“Before, if you’d seen two people kissing, it would be a jawbreaker,” she said. “It was something that you shouldn’t do. People would go, ‘Oh my god!’ But now it’s normal—kissing in public is nothing. People having sex with different partners is a very common thing. I have my circle of friends, and I know how we behave, and I know how we talk. For some people, it’s actually very cool for them to talk about having different kinds of partners. I’m sorry to say it, but over here, all the guys, like ninety percent of the guys I know, go casual with sex. They have many partners. It’s something that is common. It’s something that is normal here. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Nigeria, a guy having more than one partner is something that is OK.”
The official national health survey reports that 26 percent of Nigerian men in both rural and urban areas report having multiple or concurrent partnerships. That is not an insignificant segment of the population and does suggest that concurrency may indeed have cultural roots. I suspect the percentage might actually be higher, given people’s tendency to underreport their sexual activity when asked. In fact, some studies have found that when the populations are sorted by age and gender, the number of men in concurrent partnerships rises to 77 percent.
“What about for women?” I asked.
“For here, a girl should not have more than one partner whether married or not,” she said. “But now I’ve noticed the trend is changing. It’s becoming more common. It’s only normal for a human being to want to have sex, and if you’re not getting it with your man and you find yourself in a vulnerable position, you’ll end up doing it.”
Only 2 percent of Nigerian females report having multiple partners, which reflects the fact that Nigeria is still quite a conservative country when it comes to female sexual behavior. Unfortunately—as is the case in most of the rest of the world—a woman who does not conform to the societal ideal of proper female behavior is quickly and negatively labeled. Thus this statistic is somewhat misleading, for it captures only women who actively seek multiple partners. In reality, many women involved with men who are in multiple partnerships are also in concurrent relationships. Therefore it is probably safe to say that the percentage of women in concurrent relationships—even if not by choice; for example, to avoid extreme poverty—may be close to the percentage of men.
“I’ve had multiple—if you would call two multiple—partners. That’s the most I’ve had,” she continued. “I was single, and then my ex-boyfriend decided to come back. He was like, ‘OK. I’m back. I’m serious now. I’ve got my life straight. Let’s do this. Let’s get married.’ I was there because I thought this guy was serious about me and I don’t have anyone, so why not? Let me give it a try and see what will come out of it. And I actually liked him before, so I thought, OK, maybe I’ll feel something for him. The other guy—it was just a very rare thing. I met him and we started talking, chatting, meeting. We became very close. We’re still very close. So one thing led to another and we had sex and we just liked it. We just enjoyed it. But then the guy is from Imo State, and he’s obviously a Christian. He could not take me home, and I could not take him home. It could not happen. His parents are very strong Catholics. My parents are Muslims. I’m Hausa. He’s Igbo. He’s from the south. I’m from the north. We knew it was not going to go anywhere, but we really liked each other. We enjoyed sex. We enjoyed talking. We were good friends.”
Fatimah’s views reflect a newer, more cosmopolitan philosophy of sexual interaction in which, according to Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye and Richmond Tiemoko, in their introduction to the book Human Sexuality in Africa, “‘shared pleasure’ has gained prominence over ‘life creation’ as amply demonstrated by worldwide declines in fertility and a growing youth culture.” HIV/AIDS plays a complicated role in understandings of this new and emerging sexual behavior. On one hand, for those in Nigeria who believe such new attitudes to be wrong, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS demonstrates a pervasive social corruption and thus necessitates a return to traditional ways of sanctioned sexual interaction as delineated by religion or local cultures. For the more progressive, HIV/AIDS has made clear to Nigerians that a world in which everyone waits until marriage to have sex, and once married, has sex only with his or her spouse, is fantasy. It has forced a discussion that reveals we are all having more of the “wrong kind” of sex than we would have initially wanted to admit and therefore are all more exposed to the virus. At the same time, it requires that we modify our notions of sexual morality. The newer HIV/AIDS awareness programs acknowledge this much. No longer can people legitimately preach that we should simply return to abstaining from sex, as our religious deities and cultural norms demand, in order to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, because it is becoming more apparent that such abstinence never really existed. To do so would be to deny the evidence and the truism that “body no be wood.” In a nod to the fact that many people are clearly having sex, we now have public health recommendations like the ABCs of Sex, first pioneered in Uganda: Abstain, Be mutually faithful to one partner, and use Condoms if you can’t do the first two. The last directive represents a monumental shift in the way we in Nigeria, with all of our religious predilections, think. Though there is still a cultural norm that condemns all sex outside of marriage, traditional sexual mores now have to share the space and in some cases do battle with condoms, which can be seen as defining a new threshold between legitimate and illegitimate sex. Good sex involves condoms, and bad sex, the kind that spreads HIV/AIDS, does not.
“Do you use condoms?” I asked Fatimah.
“I practice safe sex. Inasmuch as I want to have sex and enjoy it, I really, really try so hard to practice safe sex, ‘cause I’ve seen someone die of HIV, and it’s not a good experience for my family, for her family, and obviously for the way that she died. I wouldn’t want to put anyone through that. Pregnancy is not something that I’m scared of, because there are many ways to get rid of a pregnancy. But there is no way to get rid of AIDS when you get it. I can be pregnant and my parents might be mad at me, but my parents will forgive me. God will forgive me, and I will live to raise my child. But if I have HIV, I will be hurting my parents, because people begin to judge you, and that’s what I don’t want. I would rather not have that shame and painful death in the future. I would just rather use the protection.”
It is telling that at one point in our conversation, Fatimah told me, “Even if my husband ends up sleeping around, I’ve already prepared my mind on how to control it. I don’t want a husband who sleeps around without protection. I’m the type that would pack my husband’s traveling case with condoms inside. I was telling my boyfriend that if he has to cheat on me—and he was like ‘No! No! No! Stop telling me this. You’re trying to put ideas in my head!’—I was like, ‘No! If you have it in you, you will do it. I’m just giving you my own little conditions. Please, please, please, safe sex whatever you do. And don’t bring it near me.’ I’d rather handle the situation at hand. I’d rather tell him these are my conditions if you have to do it. ’Cause I know, sometimes we’re all human.”
A majority of Nigerians know about condoms, even if we do not always use them correctly or consistently. Ninety percent of people in urban areas and 64 percent of people in rural areas have heard of male condoms. You can find them in hotels and gas stations, in drugstores and even roadside kiosks. Nigerians have used over 900 million condoms since 2002, and that number will only rise. They are here to stay, and they are changing the way we have sex, but the relationship we have with them is complex.
“For example,” a driver I know named Obong told me as we sat at a brukutu joint where he had taken me for an after-work chat, “now, if I see you with a girl, I will now tell you, ‘Remember your bulletproof.’ I will now tell you, ‘If you see a big river—like river Niger or Benue—instead of you to sleep with this girl without condom, so it is better for you to use block, put rope on it, hang it on your neck, and jump inside river.’” He wrapped an invisible rope around his neck and then pantomimed tossing a heavy cinder block over the edge into a river, followed, after a short pause, by his body.
Obong returned to our coarse wooden bench beneath a flamboyant tree with its red blossoms and fanned himself slowly with that morning’s folded newspaper. His shirt bore dark sweat stains where it folded into the creases of his body. He was not an especially large man, but he joked about his growing potbelly and how the extra weight made him sweat a little harder. Around us sprawled a chaotic convention of bars and brothels connected to illegally rigged extensions from the power grid. Men sat in groups, holding bottles of Guinness stout or Star beer as they conversed loudly with one another. Ignored and unhindered, roaming goats gnawed the sackcloth walls of temporary buildings and nuzzled the ground for bits of rubbish.
“To commit suicide is better than you to go on that girl without condom,” he said again. “Because you should remember what is happening in the town. If you should go enter like that, it means you use rope, tie your neck like that, jump in river. From that you understand where you’re going.”
His dramatic endorsement of condoms reflects a sentiment that is remarkably widespread in Nigeria. However, while awareness about condoms and their role in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS is high, condom usage is despairingly low. Only 28 percent of sexually active Nigerians have ever used a condom during intercourse and, as expected, there is more condom use in urban areas than in rural areas. The question, of course, is why—if people know about condoms and their role in preventing HIV/AIDS, why are they not using them?
There are a number of possible reasons why people don’t use condoms during sexual intercourse, many of which point to the anxiety generated by the sexual experience. First, both men and women the world over agree that sex feels better without condoms. A number of studies suggest that this is the number one reason why people do not use condoms when having sex. This is probably as true in the United States as it is in Nigeria and throughout Africa. Furthermore, condoms can be expensive for the average person in Nigeria, who hasn’t much disposable income. Condoms are also awkward. They are awkward to buy, even in the passionately liberal New York City, as they make a bold statement about one’s sexual activities. This may be more true in Nigeria, where sex is not discussed as openly as in other places. A number of people I spoke with said shopkeepers cast disapproving glances in their direction when they tried to buy condoms. Some received sermons about the sinful nature of premarital sex. Worse, some women were propositioned immediately upon leaving the store. Condoms also break the flow of romance and passion. One young man told me that he thought guys don’t like to use condoms because putting one on gives both parties the chance to consider how sinful sex is. Another young man told me about a university friend who avoided that awkward moment, when the girl might say no while he was putting on the condom, by donning one before going out for the night. Then there are the rumors, the most pervasive and destructive of which is that condoms often break.
“That’s just it,” Obong said when I asked him what he thought about the idea that condoms are unreliable. He then elaborated. “I was on this assignment in the south, and there was this girl. She was just making phone call when I passed. She was in a wheelchair,” he continued. “All this wheelchair that First Lady used to dash people that cannot walk* That’s the wheelchair she were using, rolling it with her hand. If you see her, how she fat and sit on the wheelchair, you think maybe she look like somebody who has a baby at hand. She’s a pretty girl even though she’s paralyzed—keep herself very neat, with long hair. Since she sit down in the wheelchair, I believe that people doesn’t rush to her like these other beautiful ones that pass. See, when you see a beautiful girl, it’s not only you that see her; many people see her, but those who have money, they go on her. I was not with enough money to spend for all those kind big girls in that area. I now look at her in that way that if I succeed, it will not cost me a lot. Since she agree, I now come to her place later in the evening, since I have that appointment with her. And I just buy her little provision, buy her something in the leather,” he said, referring to plastic grocery bags that, for reasons I have never understood, Nigerians call leather.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well, I play with her. I was trying to touch her breasts, play—you know, in romantic way—for her to make a move so that she can allow me to do my aim of coming there. She enjoy me. And I fire her very well. Then I now realize that the taste of my coming to release was now not like when I start. I think you understand?”
I nodded. The condom was no longer in place.
“You know by that time you reach, at the point of release, it has no control at that time. Even if they point you gun, you think, you feel, let them shoot. But it’s only till when you come down from there you now realize that ‘Ah! So somebody is standing here with gun to shoot me!’ So I keep on till when I release. After I release, I now find out that the rope of the neck of the condom was on my prick. I now find out that the condom tear. I now ask her to check where is the remaining condom. I even put hand in her private part to look for it—whether the thing cut and go inside. Nothing. The condom tear and now fold as I’m seriously injecting. I now find that all my sperm has released inside her private part. I say, ‘Wow!’ I say, ‘Well, it has happened. It has happened. Since this thing has happened like this, any STD, surely if she has, I will take it. If it is STD—whether nah HIV or not—if God says I should take it, I will take it. If God says I will not take it, then OK.’” He shivered in remembrance of the moment.
“What did you do after the condom broke?” I asked.
He released a guarded smile and spoke slowly. “After that thing tear, I did not even care to use even the second condom I was having. I say, ‘After all, I already release into her.’ She let me know I’m fit. I’m a man; I fire her five times. I have to continue. I have to.”
What would you do at this moment? What would I do? Almost every sexually active person has experienced a broken condom. It causes an intense anxiety even as it generates a certain rush from exposure to the risk of pregnancy or disease. In my friend’s case, his feelings illustrate the larger dilemma and complexity of choices that people face in a time of changing moral standards and attitudes about sex. The belief that sex outside of marriage is wrong still holds sway even as we acknowledge that in practice we often ignore moral convention. Condoms are often seen as tools that enable sin or wrongdoing even if they do provide the benefit of protection against HIV/AIDS. But condoms also diminish sexual pleasure and are considered faulty. They raise the question: if certain kinds of sex are sinful and possible punishment in the form of HIV/AIDS awaits anyway, why mitigate the pleasure of the sin? Many people make that decision and forgo condoms despite the risks. For others the result is mental and emotional gymnastics that seek to take the sin out of sex and in so doing remove the threat of HIV as a possible consequence or punishment. The anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith describes one of the main ways this is done in Nigeria as moral partnering, the construction of sexual relationships in the language of monogamy and religion, in which relationship morality is associated with decreased risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS.
On one of my trips to Lagos, in 2007, I had a long chat with Dele, a university student who explained the idea very clearly: “So basically me, I believe that if you love somebody—as in when, I mean, you love somebody, you have to be faithful to the person for you to even love the person. I’m using myself now as an example. My ex-girlfriend—I was faithful to her to the core. I trusted her. I still trust her, you get? If you and your partner trust each other, I don’t think there’s going to be any room for fear of AIDS or any kind of sexual disease.”
He spoke loudly, but it was hard to hear him over the din outside. We sat by a lectern in a chapel in the compound of a mutual acquaintance. A carved wooden Jesus looked down at us from a simple wooden altar. It was election season then, and the politicking was in full swing. Along the streets, political posters covered nearly every available surface, and vans laden with speakers blasting the advertising jingles of the various candidates could be heard even inside. Dele was a physics major at the well-regarded University of Lagos. Freshly barbered with his hair brushed forward and smoothed to a black shine with sweet-smelling oil, wearing a pressed short-sleeve shirt, stylish jeans, and sneakers that were impossibly white, given the dusty streets outside, he looked more like a GQ model than a physics nerd. He made me incredibly self-conscious of my rumpled green tiedyed shirt and hair that I hadn’t had cut in months.
“Tell me about your girlfriend,” I said.
“She’s my ex-girlfriend now,” he said, shifting his weight in an uncomfortable orange plastic chair. “She’s the girl I’m still going to get married to, because I pray to God about it. I used to be seriously crazy about the girl. I’m still crazy about her. She was a very beautiful, reserved girl. She’s pretty.” His hands clutched each other, massaged each other as he sat otherwise still, causing a flutter in his sleeves. “Yeah. She has very good shape, very lovely shape. Yeah. Fit,” he said. “She was a virgin.” He made sure to point this out. “I just wanted to date her. I don’t know sha. Probably I just wanted to sleep with her or something when I first met her. She was really proving stubborn and everything. OK, I now started liking her sha. Then we started dating. She’s the best thing. She changed my life. Seriously, she changed my life. I started breaking up with a lot of girls. I broke up with like half of my girlfriends in the first two weeks.”
“Sorry,” I interrupted. “You said you broke up with half of your girlfriends?”
“Then, officially, I had eight girlfriends,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t have time again for girls like that. As in she had this one kind of impact on me. Then later, after about one month or so, I broke up with everybody apart from one other girl. I really liked that girl too. Then along the line, after one and a half years, I just had to choose one.”
How can you be faithful to more than one person? I didn’t understand it at first, but Dele’s story shows the mental and emotional constructs people create to cope with prohibitions against sex. In the realm of moral partnering, the terms boyfriend and girlfriend have positive moral connotations and are thus preferably used to describe relationships. A person can potentially have more than one moral partner at a time, as the start of one relationship might overlap with the end of another. Condom usage is not high in these relationships because it suggests the possibility of “one’s own or one’s partners’ infidelity.” Furthermore, I imagine that asking whether or not a partner has been tested for HIV would also imply that the person is or has been immoral. These factors lead to a mental picture of low risk of exposure to HIV that does not translate into reality.
The reality of the situation is that we all, when we make the decision to be sexually active, place ourselves at some risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. While some groups may be more at risk than others, the virus has the potential to infect all sexually active people. This should not be a cause for alarm and further restrictive grouping or meaningless prohibition of sexual activity. Rather, it should lead us to more open and accepting discussion about what Samaila, the former police officer, called “the greatest pleasures of life: love, sex.” By understanding how sex in Nigeria—indeed, throughout Africa and the world—influences and is influenced by the presence of HIV/AIDS, we can better enable ourselves to halt the epidemic’s progress.