Wall Street Journal - December 20, 2006
Michael M. Phillips, michael.phillips@wsj.com

He told a woman troubled by her husband's impotence that a "foul and moody" wife would put any man off his game. He advised a man whose sisters had children out of wedlock that, when the women are out of the house, he should pack the kids into the van and deliver them to their biological fathers.

And Mr. Gama, who has called condoms "un-Swazi" and vowed never to use one himself, warned an HIV-positive man that the groups fighting AIDS in Swaziland "are full of half-truths and lies."

Almost anywhere, such incendiary on-air commentary might set off a debate among listeners. But Swaziland is no ordinary country, and Mr. Gama is no ordinary radio announcer. Here, Mr. Gama's words carry the weight of royalty and, after years of broadcasting, have landed him at the center of an angry national debate between those who believe the country's ancient social, sexual and marital traditions are part of the AIDS problem, and those who believe they are part of its solution.

This mountainous land, nestled between South Africa and Mozambique, is the last remaining absolute monarchy south of the Sahara, ruled by King Mswati III. His word is final, his spending legendary and his wives legion. It is a country where a husband often has many wives, a widow is often obliged to marry her late husband's brother, older men often marry girls in their early teens, and women have so little power that they say they often cannot refuse sex.

It is also the country with the worst AIDS problem in the world. One in three Swazis between 15 and 49 is infected with HIV, the highest national prevalence in the world, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.

Besides being a broadcaster, Mr. Gama is King Mswati's top adviser on all matters of Swazi customs and culture -- a chief-maker and power-broker akin to a traditional prime minister. When Mr. Gama speaks, Swazis hear the voice of their king.

Mr. Gama "is just a loose cannon," says Nonhlanhla Dlamini, director of Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse and one of Mr. Gama's most frequent sparring partners. Ms. Dlamini helped organize a conference earlier this year on violence against women that ended with a formal -- and unheeded -- call for the government to muzzle Mr. Gama.

Health workers, research scientists and even the king's own AIDS council have concluded that polygamy, child marriage, widow inheritance and a culture in which women are virtually powerless have contributed to the disease's spread. A Swazi born in 1991 could expect to live 65 years. One born today will, on average, never see his 36th birthday, according to a new study led by Alan Whiteside, a Swazi-born economist specializing in AIDS at South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Mr. Gama and his traditionalist allies say the current anti-AIDS campaign is failing because it tramples on Swaziland's ancient ways and gender hierarchy. Young people and women shouldn't tell men how to behave in bed, they say. Strict adherence to the old ways -- fidelity within polygamous marriages, for instance -- would help stop HIV, they say.

Mr. Gama, who broadcasts in the local language, siSwati, is "trying to remind the Swazis to remember where they came from," says Senanile Nkosi, a distant relative of the king and a member of his traditional advisory council. "If the Swazis had kept these traditions in mind, the pandemic wouldn't be so bad."

King Mswati, known to his people as the Lion of Swaziland, is the elephant in the room when Swazis contemplate their AIDS crisis. He rules over dual political and legal systems -- a weak parliament, cabinet and judiciary that operate parallel to a traditional network of chiefs and royal courtiers such as Mr. Gama.

AIDS workers credit the king for declaring AIDS a national disaster in 1999 and for mentioning it frequently in speeches.

Yet some Swazis also privately say the 38-year-old monarch's own polygamous lifestyle sets a poor example for a nation dying of AIDS. Court officials say the king's marriages are a private matter. But one man who deals in royal matters says the king now has 13 wives and one fianc e. A woman who sits on the king's traditional council says it's really 12 wives and one fianc e. King Mswati himself told the British Broadcasting Corp. recently that he doesn't keep count.

His father, King Sobhuza II, had 70 wives, sired 210 children and left more than 1,000 grandchildren, according to Richard M. Patricks, research officer at the Swaziland National Museum.

Kings have ruled Swaziland for centuries. On occasion, kings select brides at the annual reed dance, during which tens of thousands of virgin girls between eight and 22 walk great distances to collect reeds for windbreaks for the queen mother's residence. The event is supposed to reinforce the value of chastity.

But the king's few critics argue that the message is a mixed one. The girls walk in traditional garb -- short skirts below the waist, nothing above it. By tradition, the king can pluck any of the girls from the crowd to be his fianc e. Once she becomes pregnant, he marries her.

Over the years, two of King Mswati's wives have bolted the royal embrace and the country, according to a senior court official. One mother sued the king in 2003 trying to prevent him from marrying her 18-year-old daughter, whom he spotted at the reed dance. The suit failed to stop the marriage.

"Common men marry their way; kings marry their way," explains 50-year-old traditionalist Bongani Dlamini, Mr. Gama's longtime radio co-host.

King Mswati, who has ruled since 1986, has a fleet of cars, including a Rolls Royce and an exotic Maybach sedan. He builds palaces for his wives, and his older children tool around the country in silver BMW sport-utility vehicles. A few years back, the king tried to buy a royal jet, but the outcry was too much even for an absolute monarch in a country where 69% of the people live below the poverty line.

The Swazi government raised $806 million in revenues last year and spent $957 million, according to the CIA World Factbook. Much of its revenue comes from its share of common import duties collected by the five-nation Southern African Customs Union, as well as from income taxes and levies on sugar companies and other industries.

"There's a lack of role models," says Agnes Mtetwa, HIV/AIDS program officer for the Council of Swaziland Churches. "The king is a young man, and he has a whole host of the most beautiful girls in the land.... Which young man doesn't want to be like the king?"

Ms. Mtetwa is one of the few Swazis willing to criticize the king publicly. Mr. Gama, however, is seen as fair game, and he gives critics plenty of ammunition during his thrice-weekly program on state-owned radio, which the station estimates reaches more than a quarter of the country's 1.1 million residents.

A diminutive man with a white moustache, somewhere between 65 and 70 (he won't be specific), Mr. Gama was a popular radio personality specializing in Swazi traditions long before the king summoned him to run the royal household early this decade. Yet he is guarded with the press. He broke one appointment to talk for this article and, at a second, announced that he wouldn't sit for a formal interview. "As governor of the royal residence, I cannot talk about Swazi traditions and culture with people I don't know or with foreigners," he said.

In his office near the royal cattle enclosure, he spoke reluctantly for a few minutes about the plague that has struck Swaziland. "Nothing can stop AIDS," he said.

Swazis "are dying like flies" from the illness, he said, wearing bibbed blue-jean overalls and a black leather jacket. Beyond that, he said he knew nothing about the disease.

Mr. Gama's influence was evident last month when he brought 13 new chiefs to the royal compound to receive the king's blessing. At that ceremony, Mr. Gama wore traditional clothing, red fabric with a black-and-white pattern draped over his torso, exposing one shoulder, with another piece of cloth wrapped around his waist like a skirt. A leopard pelt hung from his beltline, and a long feather perched on the crown of his head.

Hundreds of villagers, elders, chiefs and princes waited more than seven hours for King Mswati's arrival, which was announced by heralds singing his praises. When he did appear, Mr. Gama ran the show, telling the king that identifying the rightful chiefs had required the royal committee he chairs to parse competing claims and investigate angry denunciations among rivals.

The king told the chiefs to steep themselves in culture and tradition, so they'll be able to settle disputes wisely, and warned them to consult with elders when making important decisions -- rather than impose their will by force. "Most especially I want to warn you against imbibing intoxicating drinks," King Mswati said. "They confuse the brain."

Such royal ceremonies are of paramount importance to Swaziland's traditionalists. But they can also become a point of conflict. Last year, the government irked health groups by canceling local World AIDS Day events because the king was in seclusion to prepare for a traditional event in which thousands of boys 15 and older collect sickle bush and red bushwillow and meet with the monarch.

In 2001, to combat the spread of AIDS, King Mswati revived an old custom and ordered all girls under 18 to refrain from sexual relations for a period of five years. Any man who slept with a virgin under 18 -- identified by the traditional woolen tassels she wore on her head -- had to pay a cow to her family. Soon afterward, however, the king selected a 17-year-old bride, paid the cow and cut the five-year period short by a year. One royal adviser says that the betrothal had been in the works before the king ordered the celibacy period, but it nonetheless struck many Swazis as hypocritical.

Health advocates see the reed dance and the boys' ceremony as opportunities to hit young Swazis with an HIV-prevention message, presumably before they become sexually active. In 2004, however, the boys' ceremony turned into a disaster for AIDS groups when some of the boys were rumored to have paraded about with condoms unrolled onto the ends of their traditional walking sticks. While condoms are encouraged under the national AIDS program, this alleged display, during a traditional event, was deemed offensive, causing a scandal at court.

Now all private organizations must coordinate participation in traditional ceremonies through a group sponsored by the queen mother, which promotes sexual abstinence. "We like condoms -- we feel it is something that can protect not only men but also women," says Mrs. Nkosi, the group's chairwoman. "But it must be done in a dignified way; you cannot give children condoms and have them walking around like this," she said, holding her butter knife vertically at breakfast recently. "It's not proper."

At the reed dance, the queen mother's group handed out bookmarks that read: "Your girlhood is your pride .... Preserve it."

When a swazi woman marries in the traditional style, the groom's family pays a bride price, often in the form of cattle. The woman's relatives turn her dinner plate upside down, a symbol of her permanent departure. "There is a kind of sense that they paid for you ... and hence some of them feel entitled to you," says Lomcebo Dlamini, a 28-year-old attorney and Swazi coordinator for Women and Law in Southern African Research and Educational Trust. (Dlamini is a common family name in Swaziland.)

By custom, if a woman doesn't produce children, the groom's family may demand its livestock back. Or the groom may demand -- and receive -- his wife's younger sister or a niece to bear his children. Likewise, the husband may seek out additional wives at any time.

"In Swazi culture, a man can have as many wives as he can afford," Mr. Gama told the Times of Swaziland newspaper last year after a married cabinet minister was caught at a night club with his girlfriend. The minister had no choice but to take the woman out on the town, Mr. Gama said. "You do not show your girlfriend to your wives."

Underlying Mr. Gama's statements, according to his radio co-host Mr. Dlamini, is the ideal of a traditional Swazi man who is sexually faithful within a polygamous marriage. The man may shop for additional wives, but he isn't supposed to sleep with a girlfriend until they marry. "In Swazi culture, you can only bear children with your wife or your wives, not your girlfriend," says Mr. Dlamini.

Likewise, when a man "inherits" his brother's widow, he is supposed to provide her food, shelter and money, but not sleep with her.

"You people should learn to control yourselves and only bring children to the Earth when you are ready to take care of them," Mr. Gama advised one listener who wrote in last month for help with a complex family drama.

The problem, according to health workers, is that there is a vast divide between traditions preached and traditions practiced. Many Swazi men spend months at a stretch working in faraway South African mines. And AIDS has apparently done little to subdue a culture in which men win esteem by bedding as many women as possible.

Mr. Gama "is talking about a purist culture which I believe no longer exists in that form," says Derek von Wissell, director of the government's National Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS. The wall in the council's waiting room is papered with memorial stickers: "I Remember Sonnyboy." "I Remember Xolile." "I Remember my sisters -- Gugu & Ntfombi."

Mr. von Wissell and Mr. Gama clashed publicly several years ago after Mr. Gama declared condoms "un-Swazi" on state radio, in contravention of a government policy promoting condoms alongside abstinence and fidelity. Mr. von Wissell and other health advocates argue that HIV is so prevalent that even married Swazis should use condoms if there is the slightest possibility of infidelity by any spouse.

Polygamy can be especially risky because of the nature of the AIDS virus. A person is most virulently contagious for a few weeks after being infected. So if a man contracts the virus from a girlfriend, he is more likely to spread it around if he immediately has sex with his wives. The same danger occurs if a wife in a polygamous marriage picks up HIV from a boyfriend, and brings it home to her husband and co-wives.

"Under the guise of polygamy, they're having multiple concurrent partners," says Mr. von Wissell. "The abuse of culture is the problem -- not the culture."

Mr. Gama is vague about under what conditions condoms would be acceptable, according to AIDS workers in Swaziland. "The AIDS campaigners are pushing condoms into the bedrooms of the Swazi marriage," says Mr. Dlamini, who says his views mirror Mr. Gama's. "You are saying [the husband and wife] don't trust each other, when the paramount principle of a Swazi marriage is trust and honesty."

Men certainly have the upper hand in a typical Swazi marriage. While the civil constitution that came into effect this year declares women equal to men, the laws grant women no more rights than children. A married woman can't sell land or so much as a sofa without her husband's permission -- even if she owned the item before getting married. Women generally can't hold title to certain royal tracts distributed by local chiefs; a man's name must be registered as the owner. That can mean a widow must put land in the name of her oldest son in order to keep control after her husband's death.

"Even my one-year-old son, a baby in diapers, can access land ownership, but I can't," says Treasure Maphanga, a former chief executive of the Federation of Swaziland Employers.

Widows often lose their assets to in-laws and, while in mourning, can find themselves unable to make a living. Khosi Mabuza, 49, is program coordinator for the queen mother's abstinence group. After her husband, an optometrist, died of a heart attack in August, she immediately donned black, which she planned to wear for three months. But she soon discovered that meant she couldn't go to work. The group's offices are in a royal-owned building, and widows in mourning are forbidden from approaching the king's court.

Mrs. Mabuza could still run her catering company, but when local school officials hired her services, they asked that someone else actually deliver the food.

"A woman is a child," Mr. Gama frequently says on his radio show. His co-host, Mr. Dlamini, says, "In the Swazi setting, anything that is serious needs the attention of men." He adds that AIDS activists and women's-rights campaigners have never understood that it is unacceptable in Swaziland for young people, and especially women, to tell men how to conduct their sex lives: "There are too many women in the AIDS campaign. They are fighting their own wars. They're divorced. They're disgruntled in their relationships."

But health workers and researchers say AIDS is inextricably linked to the relative powerlessness of women in Swazi culture. "What you have is women engaging in sexual relations in order to secure food, accommodations and security," says Mr. Whiteside, the economist.

Sometimes that means women make bad decisions for fear of losing what little security they have. Albertina Nyatsi remembers asking a boyfriend to use a condom a decade ago. He refused, she says, asking whether her request was an accusation of infidelity or an admission that she was a prostitute. Ms. Nyatsi says she let her guard down. "I was giving into something I knew I shouldn't give into," she recalls. In 1997, she tested positive for HIV. Now she is 32, living in a housing project with four adopted daughters -- three left orphaned when her sister succumbed to AIDS. So far she isn't showing any symptoms.

Mr. Gama "is one of those people who perpetuates the problem and takes us backwards," said Ms. Nyatsi, while her girls watched "The Bold and the Beautiful" soap opera on television. "He's talking tradition, tradition, tradition -- and some of the traditional practices perpetuate HIV," she says. "He has the king's stamp of approval, but I don't think he understands the issues."

Sometime within the last year or so, the issue became more personal to Mr. Gama, says Mr. Dlamini. One of Mr. Gama's own daughters died of AIDS, according to Mr. Dlamini, who says that Mr. Gama took her death very hard. Mr. Gama wouldn't give any details, except to say that he has lost "many" family members to the disease.

Earlier this year, Mr. Gama agreed to sit down for several hours at the royal residence with Khanya Mabuza, a top official at the national AIDS council. Mr. Mabuza says that when he first met Mr. Gama in the early 1990s, Mr. Gama accused contraception advocates of trying to depopulate Swaziland and blamed AIDS on witchcraft.

This time when they met, the national AIDS council was finalizing the country's HIV battle plan, which concludes that some Swazi cultural practices are perpetuating the disease. The conversation was an icebreaker, at least. The men agreed the nation was in grave danger, Mr. Mabuza says. He says Mr. Gama told him that he was willing to visit outlying areas to explain to his followers how the Swazi ideals of fidelity and premarital abstinence could help prevent the spread of HIV.

But, according to Mr. Mabuza, Mr. Gama vowed to continue to oppose sex education for children. He said he wouldn't abandon his support for widow inheritance or arranged marriages, in which older men marry girls under the age of 16, despite the legal prohibition against it. But he said he would advise that men get an HIV test before taking child brides.

In October, Mr. Gama's co-host Mr. Dlamini submitted a proposal to the AIDS council, asking for $55,000 in funding to take the Gama show on the road, and to "employ culture to encourage responsible sexual behavioral change within the context of our norms and values." Among the topics Messrs. Gama and Dlamini promised to address are widow inheritance, bride prices, premarital sex and polygamy.

"Culture has not been used as one of the tools" to combat AIDS, the proposal says. "Culture has only been featured for blame, that it is responsible for the spread of the pandemic."

AIDS council officials, desperate to slow the spread of the virus, hope this could be a way to meld Western public-health practices and Swazi tradition. "He's got the listenership to get the message out," says Mr. von Wissell.

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