skeletal

There are plenty of things that are not easy to write about, but this one may be the toughest. When I first started coming here about 8 years ago, no one used the term “HIV” or “AIDS.” People would whisper, “She has TB [tuberculosis],” pronouncing TB with a deliberate slow emphasis punctuated with a certain stare-as-signal about what the speaker really meant. Today, discussions are much more open in many ways, but a heavy stigma remains – and even in many personal relationships, environments where sexual education is being done, and circles of people who talk an activist game in the abstract, the barriers sometimes remain too big to cross. It may have become easier to admit this ‘shame’ to a stranger, it seems, but perhaps not to those closest to you.

It is commonly taught in HIV education here that you can’t tell who has it by looking at them. But at the same time, there is a clearly identified set of indicators that people look for as others become sick. For me, each time I come back, I notice who has become skeletal. A few years ago, the appearance of one of the staff members from a conservancy in which I had worked shocked me. His height accented even more his skin-stretched-over-bones appearance and I nearly did not recognize him. But this time it has been especially hard. I met Samuel [not his real name – even though he’ll never read this, I know he wouldn’t want me to call him in this way] the first time I arrived in Katima. He was, perhaps not unlike me, round and smiling, admiring of my shape but not aggressive in his compliments, quick to laugh but also thoughtful. Over the years we have sat thru meetings together, walked around his village together, spoken of elephants and basket-weaving and fences and the militarized history of the area where he grew up (thanks to the South African Defence Force’s incursions into Angola from the Caprivi).

But Samuel is no longer fat. His khaki pants hung back, baggy and generous, when he leaned in to hug me the other day. The shape of his face has changed, sunken cheeks skimming jawbones and drawing in towards teeth rather than being padded with flesh. The crinkles in his face when he smiled were still there, but sharpened. When I raised the subject of finally doing a bit of fieldwork together that we have been talking about for some years now, he said, “Ah, but I am going on leave.” He spoke the words slowly, softly, not like someone looking forward to a holiday but simply someone in need of rest. And they made me sad.

I have not been able to figure out the constitution of this kind of shame. I have long argued that it does not make sense to have such a burdensome cultural stigma surrounding a disease transmitted by something everyone is doing – having sex, and with someone of the opposite sex. When the “gay cancer” first emerged in the US, there was at least some twisted logic in associating the virus with a behavior that was (unfortunately) not yet socially acceptable. The same is true for the emerging epidemic in countries like Russia, where it is associated with IV drug use – a small “outcast” section of the population. But here, it spreads thru heterosexual intercourse, and multiple partners (for men) remain an expression of masculinity. There are some pieces that contribute – like the role of Christianity in shaming talking about (and having) sex, but I don’t think that is enough.

I have thought at times that perhaps the distance between being exposed to the virus and contracting the disease remains too great to seem like an imminent threat. For the girls trying to earn money by sleeping with truck drivers passing thru between Zambia and South Africa, for example, the risk could feel remote compared to hunger or desperation for a stable place to live. In this way, telling people at health workshops and in doctor’s offices that “you can live a long time with HIV!” may have worked at cross purposes, turning into “I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.” And, at the same time, there is a basket of condoms by our office door here that needs constant replenishment. There is, at least, that – which would not have been possible a few years ago. More and more people here are getting access to ARVs, but even as the epidemic progresses, new ways of coping with shame emerge to contest the public space for open discussion that is fighting for ground. I’ve heard stories about those on treatment burying their pills and digging them up to take a handful only when no one else is around – which is, of course, a recipe for resistance. I’ve seen those who conduct workshops and counsel others who are completely unable to talk about their own losses or behavior – to confront the cheating husband, for example. And so I don’t know what it will take.

An epidemiologist friend of mine left South Africa some years ago now, despite loving the place – because, as he put it, “I don’t need to be here when people really start dying.” He, of course, had the choice – but the most affected do not. Is it possible for a situation to be getting better and worse at the same time? Because that’s what this has begun to feel like – at least, in a larger sense. In a more personal one, it’s become a matter of horrible wondering who might become the next skeleton.

it's better to sell than to steal [or not]

I like sports. I don’t follow soccer (or any other sport) fervently, or really at all, but I enjoy watching a good game. But I had not realized the extent of soccer fanaticism until I was in the middle of the World Cup in Joburg.

I became interested in soccer tourism when the transfrontier conservation areas in southern Africa created a brand specifically to market wildlife safaris to World Cup fans. Come for the soccer and stay for the safaris – or something like that. The brand is “Boundless Southern Africa” – an idealistic construction of grand, wild notions of untamed Africa – available at a park near your favorite soccer stadium! As plans for the Cup proceeded, the language around the ways in which South Africans would benefit grew more and more generous and was extended to surrounding countries. So I wanted to see if such promises would be realized – that is, who might profit, and who might struggle.

There are larger economic issues here – like, for example, the fact that the South African government’s bid book to FIFA (whom I am increasingly convinced is clearly some form of soccer mafia) claimed that the cost of upgrading stadiums would be about 1 billion rands. In the end it was more like 16.5 billion. Where *did* that money come from, in a country that includes in radio broadcasts announcements about which traffic lights are ‘out’ because of power shortages?

There are also small, less visible layers – and these tend to be the ones in which I am most interested. So I spent six days wandering around Joburg, walking around stadiums and malls and fan parks, stopping at intersections and chatting to guys selling flags and vuvuzelas to passing cars, and trying to get a feel for what the money trail might look like to the average street trader.

I forced myself to spend the better part of a day in Sandton, the northern suburb regarded as a hub of tourist hotels and “safety” – but also the temporary home of a group of women who were knitting (and teaching others to knit) stocking caps striped with the colors of the South African flag. I wanted to find and talk with them, which turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than I thought. Eventually I found them in rocking chairs on a patch of carpet in the middle of a mall hallway, selling caps for 120 rands, 50 of which went to the knitter. Not bad.

On the taxi ride back to where I had left my car, the issue was neatly summed up for me by my driver when I asked him if he thought people would benefit from having the World Cup here: “I think that those who already have money will make more money,” Musi stated, directly and without bitterness. He pointed out that government had been making efforts to clear the streets of informal traders because they wanted the place to “look nice” for tourists, adding that most of those who sell on the street are foreigners. This gave an ominous undertone to the street sweeping, as if those from abroad (who may or may not have legal papers) could be easily removed with the trash.

The Ellis Park Stadium is located just east of the city center, where I went on the day of the Argentina-Nigeria match. A 4pm start time meant that roads around the venue had been closed since 10am and there were police cars parks at every intersection, manned by at least 2 men (and an occasional woman) in uniform. As I walked closer to the stadium itself and found myself in the middle of a festive group of Argentines, I began seeing men selling vuvuzelas, flags, packets of cookies and nuts, and painting faces with stripes of national colors. I stopped to chat with a group of three young men wearing neon green t-shirts carrying black dufflebags full of earplugs. They were working for a registered company, but we talked about making money on the street. Chris, the most vocal of the three, told me that he didn’t think today’s match would yield much. “Even me, if I’m not working for this company, I would go home and sleep, you know, this area, Hillbrow, no one wants to come here, it’s dangerous, with gangs and even me, I don’t like it, the tourists won’t come.” The growing crown of Argentines seemed to conflict with his assessment, but he also talked about how difficult it was to get permission to sell on the street, with FIFA’s permitting requirements in concert with the City of Johannesburg restricting all commerce – especially, of course, regulation of FIFA-logo merchandise, but other items as well.

Just up the sidewalk from us, a policeman had taken interest in a man selling powder blue and white flags of various sizes. The cop began folding them up, as if to take them – which another policeman had told me was their policy, to confiscate and destroy. As the policeman circled, a man with a bag full of cookies and snacks next to us zipped the flap over them so they were not visible. And over the flags, there seemed to be some kind of slow negotiation going on; I was trying to watch intensely out of the corner of my eye. “You see? You see?” Chris interjected. “He’s just taken money, this one [the policeman], now he’s leaving him to sell.” And it was true – pocketing some rands led the cop to meander on his way, leaving the flags spread out on a bench. “But this, it’s too much, why can’t he let them sell?” Chris added. “Because how can people make money? If you can’t make money you have to steal. And it’s better to sell than to steal.”

The one way around this need for permits seemed to be face painting. Apparently, carrying around some small cups of color and a brush did not meet the standard of illegal commerce. “This, it’s just creative,” one policeman told me, “There’s nothing we can do about that.”
Soccer City – the tiled calabash-influenced stadium in Soweto that seats 90,000 people – was another story entirely. The stadium has the feel of being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by highways and wills made of mine tailings and pools of water turned colors not found in nature by the seepage of minerals and chemicals over years of extraction. It’s also dusty. Very, very, dusty. I took a combi – a minibus taxi crammed with people – because there would not be a place to park. I couldn’t take the train without a ticket to the match. I couldn’t park in the park-and-ride-or-walk lots without a ticket to the match. And because I was going to leave when the game started, I couldn’t take the bus because, well, they don’t run until it’s over. Police were turning cars back from the main road probably at least 4-5km’s away from the stadium, and only let us thru because there was one lucky soul with a ticket in his hand sitting up front. There was also a man with a plastic bag full of blue vuvuzelas ready to sell, but that went unnoticed.

The result of Soccer City’s location is that there is literally nowhere to hide. We walked and walked and walked to get even to a parking area, then walked some more to reach the gated funnel-like paths beginning to fill with Dutch fans decked out in orange. And of course, cops. Everywhere, everywhere there were cops. Walking for two hours, I saw only 2 or 3 brave souls selling flags – and a few face-painters. But the fact that there is no semblance of daily life – flats, shops, restaurants – around Soccer City meant that not only was it hard to access, but it made everything and everyone stand out, in need of a clearly approved, appropriate role to play in the melee. Here, there was no room for selling without permits.

As the match crowd would up, we headed back to the main road to find another combi. But we had to walk even further back than where we’d been left off. By the time one showed up, crawled through the surrounding neighborhoods picking up passengers and parcels, got close to downtown, and suggested we transfer again, I wondered if I might not have walked faster. It took me nearly 3 hours to travel what is, as the crow flies, about 9 kilometers. And all without a match ticket.

I think it’s fair to say that Musi was right – the best indicator of benefit is existing privilege. This, while frustrating and disappointing, is not shocking. At the same time, I did appreciate the excitement for the Cup that was vibrating throughout the city. Flags adorned cars, vuvuzelas started honking at 6am, people were literally dancing and singing in parking lots and on sidewalks. The celebration seemed to transcend racial boundaries – doing the service, as one newspaper article pointed out, of forcing Afrikaner rugby fans to go to Soweto for a soccer match. Certainly there is something to be said for that. But in terms of material benefits, I’m afraid what can be said adds up to ‘not much.’

welcome to jozi

[an indulgent aside - these 'events' were nearly two weeks ago. i'll catch up, slowlyslowly]

Joburg has never been easy for me. While I maintain that it’s not as bad as the “murder capitol of the world” stories make it out to be, it is necessary to know your way around. I don’t. I never really did. I came and went a few times when I was living in the bush and it always made me a bit anxious. Having friends there helps, a place to stay, good conversation and an evening fire in the winter. So leaving the warmth of my second family in Windhoek and going to stay with old friends from my South Africa days did not seem so bad at the beginning of last week. I wanted to do a small project on the informal economy during the World Cup – go to the stadiums, walk around, see who was selling what on the streets, and find out if FIFA’s tight restrictions on licensing and marketing were as limiting in practice as they seemed on paper.

The edges of one AM are still blurry. Nina had been crying. I heard the alarm, an alarm, it woke me, but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. I heard Tim get up and the noise stopped. Nina was crying. I was disoriented, the first night in another bed, tired. I think I heard the dogs’ claws clicking on the wooden floors. But I still don’t really know how to describe the noise Tim made next, a scream of sorts but so much louder, angrier, like a raging roar coming three times from the other side of the wall.

I bolted out of bed, grabbing for something warm, anything solid, opened my door, stumbling as my leg ached from being still. There was a man in the garden outside my window, Tim said, who had cut the electric fence, climbed over the wall, and was sitting in the corner hiding from the motion light over the driveway as it flicked on in his presence. Tim had only seen him when shining a flashlight out the window, just out of curiosity, even after he had shut off the alarm under the assumption that it was nothing. Nina was crying. Gail had scooped her up and taken her to their room, the panic button had been pressed, the security company called, and so we waited. We called again. The space around us seemed liquid, thickened with fear and uncertainty and frustration. I sat on Gail and Tim’s bed with Nina as they tried to figure out what was going on. “I’ll keep you safe, ok?” she kept saying to me, at three and a half years old, blonde and wide-eyed, talking of how we’d shoot the bad guys if they came back.

The man in the garden had fled back over the wall at the sound of Tim’s howl, breaking the water pipes in the process and leaving us without water. When the security guard finally arrived nearly fifteen minutes later, he parked his car in our driveway to watch – since the fence was not working and it would now be easy to get into the yard. “Do you want to crawl in bed with us?” Gail asked me.

Instead, I took one of the dogs back to bed with me. Shesha growled at the security guard’s car backing into the driveway just outside. And I got back into bed to wait for daylight, staring at the pale curtains hung over the window between me and the garden, watching every shadow of every tree branch, each leaf, leaving my glasses on so that I could tell the difference between a threatening shape and what shifted in the wind.

I’ve never been a particularly fearful person, which certainly does not mean I’m never afraid. It’s more that I am too stubborn to allow fear to stop me from doing the things I want to do. But the days after 1AM were animated by a flickering memory of what that kind of ‘afraid’ felt like that flared constantly – on the road when I took a wrong turn, when someone seemed to walk too closely behind me for too long, when I had to leave the car parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and when I shut off the light to labor at sleeping.

There are many things to say about what happened. This, it seems, is one of the hazards of living in Joburg. Everyone around me seemed to have a story that was far worse (comforting, and not) – because in our case, the system had basically worked. No one got in, we weren’t hurt, nothing was taken – except perhaps that false sense of security one gets from living in a fortress where the neighbors classify themselves as being under siege. Last month, some guys broke into the house across the street, shot the dog, and threatened the woman living there until her husband came home and “talked them out of it.” Friends of some friends had been tied up and held hostage in their home while being robbed. At a bar a few days later, even the edges of the flatscreen on which we caught the Ghana-Serbia match were being dusted for fingerprints as we watched after the previous night’s break-in.

This flies in the face of my claims that the only real concern for tourists coming to the World Cup was vuvuzela-induced deafness from the long plastic trumpet-like horns that South Africans blast with abandon at soccer matches. Johannesburgers (if that’s a word) are used to this kind of thing. It can’t be too big of a deal when it happens, because it happens often. Just, not to me. And at the same time, as I keep saying to a friend here, it’s all fine. Really. That *system* worked, such as it is. Maybe it’s more a problem of that “as it is” than anything else. It took a few days, but when my own fear began to settle, I thought about what it would feel like to be crouched outside someone’s window, waiting, perhaps looking to steal a radio from the car, but caught in a motion light, wondering if the [white] people inside had a gun. Horrible isn’t enough of a word.

Still, I admit, the next-to-last thing I wanted to do in the following days was suck it up and keep working by going to Hillbrow – a neighborhood considered intimidating even by many city residents – to walk around a soccer stadium looking for street trading which may or may not be legal. At the same time, the last thing I wanted to do was to feed my fear by deciding that I could not do what I wanted to do, that I would not be able to answer the questions I had or talk to people affected by the wave of soccer fans arriving at their doorstep.

So I went to Ellis Park, and to Soccer City anyway. And they deserve stories of their own…soon.

chameleons

One of the things that happens as soon as I land here is that my manner of speaking changes. By this, I mean that the cadence of my voice shifts, the words chosen are different, my speech pattern sounds altered (even in my own head). This is something about which some friends from the US have commented, when hearing me on the phone with African friends or actually being here. It’s not necessarily conscious but certainly habitual, sprinkled with a few Shona words that have become usual, and recalibrated to sound and feel more like those around me.

The content, however, also changes. As in any space, there are thing you say and things you do not. Sometimes, when the subject is difficult, we use hypothetical situations about other people as a replacement for what is actually happening to us. The other day, for example, a friend of mine was trying to figure out how to talk to a house guest about her tendency to come, stay, ask for rides, and eat without ever contributing to the household. It’s a touchy subject, to talk about generosity and hospitality without offense – especially in a place where my own experience is one in which the women I visit would generally rather give a guest their last sweet potato than save it for their own dinner. In the end, my friend decided to tell the guest a story about another person who was struggling with the same problem, about those who were coming and going “without even bringing so much as a loaf of bread!” It was not as hidden a tactic as it seemed, I thought, but anyway, it didn’t work.

This brings up questions for me about how it is we ‘know’ something about those around us, perhaps especially as researchers. We make claims of expertise based on having ‘been there,’ talked to people, perhaps stayed in the village for some days. But after ten years of coming and going, there are still subtleties of communication to which I am adjusting, tiny-spoken tidbits slipping out in a moment in front of the evening fire that completely change my interpretation of something I thought I’d understood. There are secrets, of course – like the fact that it took a dear friend of mine who works with HIV+ youth nearly two years to tell me that her brother had actually died of AIDS – but it’s more than that.

I can say this not only about others, but myself. It’s not only my voice that changes, but the way in which I inhabit space here. I respond mostly to “mainini” when called by “maiguru” – the little wife obeying the head wife; I cook and dish and serve dinner to the man of the house first; I bow and hold my right elbow in my left hand when I offer a plate. I do these things largely without thinking about them. And at last weekend’s kitchen party, I held my tongue in a roomful of women talking about ways in which a wife should serve her husband and reading the Bible as a reminder that the husband is the head of the household as God is the head of the church. But even as they nodded agreement, many of these women personify strength, independence, humor, and will. The lines that get so clearly drawn by outsiders about who is empowered and not fail to recognise much of the daily complexity constituted and reconstituted by the process of living out these personal relationships.

One of the things I have promised myself is that what I will respect most in doing my research is the people I encounter and with whom I am fortunate enough to spend time and share stories. This means that most of my time here is spent sitting and talking with people – not in interview form, but just passing time and discussing anything and everything from the floods to the garden to the last election. It is becoming clear to me that this approach is, in the view of many other academics, costly in a professional sense. In a male-dominated field, I spend time on things that “don’t matter,” resulting in me being shut out of some discussions and not respected for, say, spending time with women talking about craft markets rather than taking GPS points. A few years ago, I was giving a talk and in the process of introducing me, an older male colleague referred to me as a “relationship builder.” It was code for “someone who likes people” rather than “a serious scholar like me.” It felt rather pejorative, especially when after my presentation, he proceeded to reverse my interpretation of my own research – gleaned from weeks sitting with women in the Kalahari dust talking about how they cope with the risks of HIV in their sex lives and in caring for their sick family members. It was all that much more problematic because he was not being particularly argumentative – but rather, what was clearest was that he simply had not heard (or perhaps, listened to) much of what I had said.

I suppose there are things to be said about covering miles in others’ shoes and so forth; we all may appear different depending on the context – as well as who is in front, behind, or beside us. Perhaps the challenge is, whatever the appearance, to be open and genuine in the midst of that difference.