Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - June 15, 2001
Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala

With reference to the title of this singer's hit song, the girls who giggle at this joke do so because they know (or should be starting to learn), that love should indeed cost a thing -- many things in fact.

Older sisters share the schoolyard joke with younger girls at home, who laugh as well, but don't even know why. They are left to reflect on the meaning and inherent lesson. Ah ha, so love has a cost and the cost is measured in things. When the time comes, they surely won't be so stupid, they won't be poor, their love will have its own proper price tag.

They get the joke and the lesson is then registered somewhere in their mind, shaping their attitudes and expectations about love in today's South Africa. Consumerist culture has cut a deep and wide swath across all sectors of post-apartheid South African society. Along with places like China and Russia, South Africa's opening up to the world has entailed a mad rush towards, and eager pursuit of, all that glitters, tingles and titillates.

Old struggle values no longer seem relevant in a society where materialism and consumerism define the new way forward. Activists and ordinary people alike have been sucked into the soft and spongy embrace of modernity's soulless money machine in the pursuit of pleasures that have little to do with nurturing a future. Given the magnitude of poverty, want and frustration that existed before 1994, perhaps this state of affairs was to be expected.

But in our present context of phenomenally high HIV/Aids rates, a growing reverence for "King Cash" might prove to be our undoing.

HIV/Aids infection rates have skyrocketed and continue to do so despite all efforts of the past decade to halt the rapid spread of this disease. Researchers have tried to understand the nature of micro- and macro-dynamics that propel the virus, and to identify factors that could be manipulated to assist with behavioral change. We now know a fair deal about the social and behavioural "enablers" of HIV/Aids, and what we know is perhaps more depressing than not knowing anything at all. There are just so many dysfunctional component parts that play a role in shaping South African society as the world's foremost high-risk context for HIV/Aids.

What emerges most clearly is the fact that the type of social and economic changes needed to slow this epidemic will take a long time. During that time millions of people will be infected, millions will die, and in the process, new forces will emerge to drive the epidemic even faster and further afield.

One of these forces, as we are currently seeing, is associated with rising standards of living and increases in disposable income. It is not poverty itself that is a major factor in the growth of this disease in South Africa. Rather, it is poverty in the midst of wealth, or more appropriately, wealth in the midst of poverty. Perhaps even more appropriately, one way of understanding Aids in Africa more generally is as primarily a problem of men with money and women without.

There is currently a growing predation of young girls and women by older men. It's a trend that many say has started in the past few years and is one that will surely continue to grow. This will ensure that our high HIV/Aids rates remain with us for some time. This trend is tied directly to simultaneous increases in poverty among one (huge) sector of society and increases in wealth among another (small) sector of society.

For many, the 1990s have brought incredible opportunities for acquiring wealth, status and power where such things were formerly unobtainable. These new "fruits of freedom" have combined with old ways of thinking that have long equated power and status with increased access to women.

A man's ability to attract and maintain a coterie of women has for eons been an index of manhood and a mainstay of patriarchal privilege in our sexist world. In many societies today those notions still have wide currency. In modern-day South Africa, such measures of manhood are very much alive and well. In the context of astronomical HIV/Aids infection rates, the power-women-prestige complex is a great cause for concern. A man who cruises the country's urban ghettos in a shiny luxury car, accessorised with a cellphone on the dashboard and a chunky gold-ringed hand on the steering wheel, knows exactly what and who will look his way.

Research tells us that it is not only the material benefits that girls are after in their pursuit of sexual liaisons with these sugar daddies. Just the prestige derived from being seen in his expensive car is often enough, or the status that comes from being associated with Mr So-and-so.

Research shows mothers often turn a blind eye to these liaisons. Keeping quiet while a daughter has her school fees paid, wears dresses that she herself cannot afford, and brings home groceries for the family is rapidly becoming a new form of silence for women in South Africa and another silence that nourishes Aids.

At the recent Aids Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand, a group of young women presented their research findings on youth sexual dynamics in Alexandra township. Under a column marked "women's expectations" was listed "the three Cs". The women explained, in a light-hearted way, that this stood for the things women "needed" most (not "wanted" most). These things were cash, cars and cellphones.

A participant asked why clothes were not included as one of the "Cs". One of the women responded that men cannot be trusted to make proper selections of clothing for women because they "don't know quality". For that reason the women preferred cash to buy their own.

In KwaZulu-Natal, young women speak jokingly of their "need" for several ministers in their lives; a minister of transport (he with the luxury car), a minister of finance (Mr Money Bags) and a minister without portfolio (a general good-time guy), or, as one woman remarked: "He could be the one that you actually liked or loved."

Such are the times in our fast-changing society that love and sex have come to have as much commodity value as most everything else. The lethal mixture of cheek-and-jowl poverty and wealth in South Africa with the growing incidence of both and a consumerist "get it while you can" social ethos will ensure that we will remain world leaders in HIV/Aids rates for some time.

The social performance of male sexual power and privilege will continue to be enacted in ways that drive the epidemic, and the obvious need for jobs, water and roofs over heads will continue to justify scoffing at calls for greater gender equity.

Perhaps it is time to give up cracking our heads over why behavioural change has not occurred amid relatively high levels of HIV/Aids awareness. Maybe we underestimated the power and misinterpreted the nature of the combined forces that swept into life in the new South Africa.

Maybe we just did not know what kinds of strengths would be needed to manage the transition process. Maybe we still don't know, and maybe we won't really care. Maybe it should be just as it seems -- time to let the good times roll and leave the future to look after itself.

Dr Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala is active in Aids research and intervention at the faculty of community and development disciplines at the University of Natal
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