Inter Press Service - December 6, 2004
Moyiga Nduru

"When I was diagnosed HIV-positive, I was given three months to live by a doctor. She told me to go home and pray - that she could do nothing," she adds. "Ten years on, I'm still here."

Njoko, a singer, has devoted herself to helping people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, which currently has the largest number of people infected with the virus: 5.3 million. This is out of a total population of about 45 million. Life expectancy in the country has been cut from 53.7 to 47.7 years.

Along with about 200 other AIDS activists, Njoko attended the launch of the 'Mutapola Campaign' in South Africa's capital, Pretoria, recently (Dec. 3). The initiative, co-sponsored by Action Aid International and the Open Society Initiatives for Southern Africa, aims to give a voice to girls and women infected and affected by HIV and AIDS.

"We have given the campaign the name of a Southern African woman (Mutapola) to focus specific attention on the impacts for girls and women - to give our collective responses a human face and to ignite a sense of urgency in the struggle to defeat AIDS," said Action Aid in a statement made available to IPS.

According to Noerine Kaleeba, chair of Action Aid's board of trustees, "The pandemic is growing despite the efforts put in place in the past 16 years."

"It's mainly affecting girls and women," she adds. "Unless we focus on girls and women, forget about making a dent in HIV/AIDS."

Action Aid's initiative has been given momentum by the fact that young people are already questioning the traditional customs which have underpinned the spread of HIV - especially amongst girls and women.

One of these young persons, Biyi Manana, became sceptical of received wisdom after marrying a man who professed to be a born-again Christian - yet behaved promiscuously.

"I talked to elders in the village and they told me to hang in and make our marriage work. I was faithful but my husband wasn't; he was sleeping out with other women," she says.

"I tried to negotiate (safe) sex by urging him to wear a condom during sex but he refused," Manana adds. Her husband finally moved out.

"Our husbands should not take us as furniture in the house because they have paid lobola (dowry). My wish is that the dignity of the woman, which has been stripped, should be restored. We are not machines for producing children," says Manana, who is now a campaigner for the People Living With HIV/AIDS organisation.

She urged government to build more clinics in rural areas to help people infected with HIV. In her village in south-eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, the region most affected by the pandemic, patients travel long distances to seek help in hospital.

"We have no (local) hospital. We take four taxis to the nearest hospital. A mobile clinic comes only once a month to our village," Manana says.

Kaleeba, who also works for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, says the popular "ABC" anti-AIDS slogan (Abstain, Be faithful and, if you can't, use a Condom) misses the point when it comes to girls and women.

"How can you abstain when you are coerced to have sex? How can you remain faithful when you are married at the age of 16?" she says.

The missing link in the ABC campaign, Kaleeba adds, concerns the lack of involvement of boys and men in projects aimed at combating the pandemic: "Men and boys can be positive forces of change. We have missed the point in the past by ignoring men and boys as agents of change."

The feminization of the AIDS pandemic is very apparent in sub-Saharan Africa, where close to 60 percent of those infected are women - and 75 percent of young people infected are girls aged 15 to 24. Women are more physically susceptible to HIV infection than male because of their biological make up.

Violence against women - rape, for instance - also fuels the spread of AIDS amongst girls and women.

"We have a long way to go in the campaign against violence against women. Before I came to South Africa, I was in an African country and a woman came crying. She showed her back, a result of violence against her by her husband," said Kaleeba.

The timing of this encounter was horribly ironic. "I was angry because this happened in the middle of the 16 days campaign against violence against women," said Kaleeba.

'Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence' runs from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Nov. 25) to International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10).

It is a global campaign that provides the public with an opportunity to take a stand against gender-based violence and to mobilise around women's human rights, says the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International. The theme of this year's campaign is 'For the Health of Women, For the Health of the World: No More Violence'.

But, many women complain that whenever they report violence against them to police, officials tell them to go home and sort the matter out with their partners.

Tradition also counts against women.

Madrilene Cholo of the Women and Law in Southern Africa initiative urged governments in Southern Africa to ban sex cleansing (a practice where infected men sleep with virgins in the mistaken belief that this will cure them of AIDS). She says this custom is widespread in Malawi and Zambia.

"We also want government to ban child marriage," she adds.

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