South Africa’s real sex scandal

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When it comes to sex scandals, South Africa makes Italy look like the United States. President Jacob Zuma has three wives and is engaged to be married with a fourth.  In 2006, while beating charges of rape, he admitted he had sex with his alleged victim, the daughter of a family friend. Last week, the 67-year-old politician apologized for fathering a child with a woman he isn’t married with.

But South Africa is different from the Italy and the United States, in that it’s engaged in a desperate fight against a deadly sexually transmitted disease. Elisabeth Pisani, an expert in AIDS prevention and the author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Whores, points out that in this context, Zuma’s dalliances are far from a personal matter.

Want a hyper-epidemic? All you need is a tradition of polygamy AND high levels of female autonomy. Big Men have their little network of wives and/or lovers. Women buy in to duty sex for the status and security, but get to run their own little networks on the side, for the fun of it. That has been the pattern in South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries where more than one adult in seven has HIV.

But woe betide anyone who points this out. At best, you are insensitive to cultural traditions. At worst, you are perpetuating racist myths of the hypersexualised African male, blah, blah, blah.

Now South Africa’s president is unrepentantly living the myth. He has been married five times, and is currently shared by three wives (one of the others killed herself). He’s got another fiancée in the wings for good measure. In 2006 he was acquitted of rape charges, and now we find he’s bonking the daughter of an old mate who’s running the World Cup organising committee. This puts him in good company. In neighbouring Swaziland, where one adult in three has HIV, the king sets an example by taking a new teenaged wife every couple of years — a baker’s dozen so far.

Following his rape trial, Zuma was ridiculed for testifying that he knew the woman he had unprotected intercourse with was HIV positive, but thought he could avoid contracting the virus by showering after sex. His latest escapade (you don’t father a child while wearing a condom) shows that he’s learned nothing. That’s the real scandal.