The Most Vulnerable: Women with AIDS and Islam in Mali (book review) (2017)
Submitted to: Association for Africanist Anthropology
Reviewed by Robin Poulton PhD
Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mali
Vice-President, Virginia Friends of MALI http://VaFriendsofMali.org
Research Professor affiliate in French West African Studies (2012-15), School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University http://www.has.vcu.edu/wld/faculty/poulton.html
Co-Chair, 2013 VCU Conference on Women War and Peace in Mali www.vcupeace.net
Session Moderator, VCU Conference on Doing Business in Africa, 4-7 October 2017
The Most Vulnerable: Women with AIDS and Islam in Mali by Christopher A. Brooks and Salim Coumaré, New York: LINUS Learning, 2017
AIDS remains a terrible threat worldwide …. and it is still a terrible affliction for millions of African patients, although new medications allow many of them to live with the HIV virus and many never actually develop AIDS. Anthropologist Professor Christopher A. Brooks (of Virginia Commonwealth University) knows a lot about AIDS in Africa. In this book he allows us to hear the voices of people who live with the HIV virus in Mali. Many of the women whose voices are transcribed in this new book, live with a secret. Their medical visits are always in secret. Their treatment is secret. The stigma of AIDS has not disappeared from Malian society, and people try to hide their affliction.
This is Dr Brooks’ third excellent book on the anthropology of AIDS. He has studied the subject with men and women in Southern Africa, and is himself a trained AIDS counsellor. Professor C.A. Brooks is a considerable expert. His work in medical anthropology can be described as “seminal” in a specialist area which is still relatively young, and extremely delicate. The “anthropology of AIDS” is a field that Brooks himself has created. He does, as one would imagine, show great sensitivity to the victims: “It is well-known,” he writes, “that the most vulnerable person to this virus worldwide is still a married woman.”
Most of his Malian interviewees fall into this category, and he allows each to tell her story in her own words, with Salim Coumaré’s translations. Salim is a teacher of philosophy in Ségou (Mali’s second city) and a doctoral candidate at the Gaston Berger University in St Louis du Sénégal. The translations are true to each patient. Each woman is described and named: but the names are pseudonyms, designed to disguise the identity of each informant.
Karitio Dembele’s husband was a soldier, forcibly retired from the military for reasons of ill health. She says: “The military doctors performed an HIV test on him and he was positive, but he never said anything to me about it at the time. I only found this out years later. [….] After his death, I found a letter he had written to an old girlfriend, but it had not been mailed. In this letter he told the woman he was dying of AIDS and that she should get tested. But he never admitted a thing to me. [….] My husband’s family actually believes that I had something to do with his death, so they rejected me and my children.”
It is – alas! – standard practice in West Africa to blame death on some magical or malefic cause. Wives are often blamed for the deaths of a husband – one example of cultural sexism against wives in Mali, and one that is very difficult to change. Or challenge. Such things are often said in whispers, spreading an unhealthy cult of secrecy and suspicion. The tragedy of secrecy encourages the spread of AIDS. The tragedy of AIDS is spread by the cult of secrecy. The taboos associated with secrecy encourage not only sickness, but also social rejection.
Dr Brooks and his co-author Salim Coumaré emphasize the fact that social rejection is not due to Islam. While most of the women interviewed are Muslims (90% of Malians are Muslims), the taboos surrounding AIDS are related to age-old, pre-Islamic, African taboos concerning sex, sexuality and the secrets of women’s society (including rites of initiation, which encompass the study of medicinal plants and herbs for cooking, and which often also involve female genital mutilation which brings its own range of psychological and physical troubles, including the spread of AIDS and other infections through the use of an unsterilized, ritual knife).
Brooks and Coumaré discuss the status and submission of women in Malian life. The authors interview African women, not religion-dominated women. Does the word “submissive” contain an element of Western values? Or Arab values? or Asian values? Are Western perceptions of womanhood in Africa influenced by the Indian cult of sati, the ideal of the “perfect submissive wife”? One of the risks in anthropology, is the unconscious transmission of prejudices from one society to another: not only our own, subconscious etho-centricity, but also the transfer (for example) of Indian or Arab models to Africa, or vice versa.
The feminine qualities to which Malian women aspire are represented by an ideal mythical woman named Nyéléni. Nyéléni was a Bambara woman, who born in the Bambara region of Ségou at an unknown period of history. This is convenient because the interviews carried out by Brooks and Coumaré mostly took place in Ségou.
Oral tradition attributes to Nyéléni all the virtues of a perfect daughter, and wife. She is obedient; but I would not call her “submissive” in any way. The only daughter of her parents, for whom she was a source of great pride, Nyéléni produced the best food and vegetable crops and won all the horticultural prizes. She is said to have domesticated the popular food grain fonio, which is a wild grass seed much prized in luxury Malian cooking. Nyéléni was a willing and active partner in all social activities, a leading participant in women’s associations. Nyéléni was hard-working, innovative, charming, modest, a great dancer and obedient to her parents …. All Malian women desire to show the qualities of the mythical Nyéléni.
The place of West African women in society is not always easy for Westerners to apprehend. The Malian sage Amadou Hampâté Bâ, speaking at UNESCO in 1992 (on two CDs presented by Hélène Hackman and published by Radio France Internationale with UNESCO, refs: ARCL 32.), explained that the “African Woman occupies a quasi-spiritual place in the family. Her status is almost divine.” The Malian Mother is worshipped for having given life to her children, twice: once through birthing, and a second time through her maternal milk, which plays a strong spiritual role in Malian society. Children fed from the same breast have the status of siblings, with the taboos and expected loyalty that goes with that status. To call someone a “milk brother” or a “milk sister” is to pay them the very highest compliment, implying complete trust.
Mothers are responsible for the education of their children, whose successes (or failures) reflect on the mother rather than the father. For Africans, Eve was not created from Adam’s spare rib. On the contrary, the Creator began with a drop of milk (in the Fulani creation myth): first he created the Cow, then he created Woman, and finally, behind the Woman, he placed a man.
If Nyéléni became a mother, as we should assume she did, then she rose to the semi-divine status (in Malian society) of One who has given birth to the children. Twice, indeed, through birth and breast-feeding: mother’s milk has a cultural value superior to paternal sperm. At the end of my Mali and Sunjata-Keita-the-original-Lion-King presentations to 3rd Grade elementary school students, who are studying the medieval empire of Mali for their Virginia State standards of learning, I ask the young children to go home and tell their mothers: “Mom, today I discovered that you are a Goddess.” This message goes down very well in Richmond households. I am popular with Richmond mothers.
At the end of one such Mali presentation, as ninety students were filing out of the hall, one ES teacher reported hearing a 7-year-old say to her best friend: “When I grow up, I am going to be a Goddess.”
This Malian and Bambara society does not sound like a culture where the women are sub-servient. Perhaps we should accept the word “submissive” - after all Nyéléni, and every other perfect wife and perfect daughter, is content for their man to make the major decisions. But Malian women also demand that they be consulted. “Behind every beard, there is a plait” says the Bambara proverb, referring to the elaborate plaited hairstyles of Malian women. I am reminded of the immortal line in that wonderful American anthropological film My Great Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the mother tells her daughter: “Of course your father is the Head of the Family. He will make the decision. But I am the neck. It is the Neck that tells the Head which way to turn.”
Malian women therefore, do not find themselves in a position of inferiority such as we might identify with the “submissive wife” in the Indian sub-continental tradition of sati. Malian women are “submissive” in the sense that they recognize that a potentially polygamous family can only have one Head (remembering the levirate tradition) and this is the husband. If the wives gang together, however, the power of the husband is quickly neutered.
There is definitely some wife-beating in Malian (and especially Bambara) society; but it takes a brave anthropologist to equate domestic violence in America with wife-correction in Mali. This is not raised in the book by Dr. Brooks. I am not a supporter of wife-beating, but I have met plenty of Bambara women who defend the practice: societies have different values. However important a “culture” may be in defining the terms of marriage, the status of a wife in every society depends largely on the personal relations between spouses, and the good or ill humor of each. On the other hand, when a Malian husband comes home from the market or from working in the fields, he is fed and watered by the person who is charge of running the home. The family and children are most definitely organized by the mother; even more so if she is First Wife, because this means she is also First Mother. (Women who cannot give birth suffer from both sadness, and from a lack of status.)
Brooks and Coumaré are quite correct in stating that women are expected to stay at home, cook the food and raise the children, cultivate vegetables and provide sex on demand (easier to manage when there are two or three wives). Women in Malian society therefore are both bosses of their household, and constrained by their “submissive” role before their husband as Head of Family.
Men and women alike, in the Brooks and Coumaré interviews, conform to this model of mutual respect … but that mutual respect does not encompass sexual fidelity. This is not a WASP society with Victorian sexual mores. Sex in West Africa is a separate issue from procreation and from marriage; and this naturally makes the society more vulnerable to the spread of AIDS.
In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was a new and poorly-known threat. A Malian man had died, and his two wives had agreed to marry his brother. The levirate tradition dates back thousands of years, and – as every anthropologist knows - it represents Africa’s “social safety net” for widows and orphans. A man has an obligation to take her in and care for his brother’s widow and her children. To ensure that she has a respectable social status, naturally the brother marries her. In the case of my story, one Malian health worker was confronted with an ethical dilemma: she alone knew that the deceased husband had died of AIDS. What should she do? If she told his widows, or the man’s brother, they would deny any connection to AIDS and accuse the health worker of desecrating the reputation of their family. They would say he had died according to God’s Will, Who alone can determine the time and manner of death. Yet the health worker knew that the dutiful brother-in-law already had two wives and several children. If the widows of the deceased man were unknowing carriers of the AIDS virus, they could very easily contaminate their new husband and then his existing wives. The whole family might be at risk.
The next morning when she awoke, our health worker knew what she must do: she must pay a visit to the family of the brother-in-law, present her condolences on his brother’s death, and inform his wives about the cause of death. They would believe her; they would not be overwhelmed by the need to protect the reputation of their dead brother-in-law; they would understand the risk to their health and to the future of their own children. These two women would insist on the widows having AIDS tests. If necessary, working together, the two wives would be strong enough to force their husband to renounce his idea of marrying the AIDS-infected widows.
The complexity of Malian society, its focus on pride, reputation and secrecy are well illustrated by this story. Brooks and Coumaré supply plenty more such examples of families struggling with taboos, with secrecy, with the need to protect family reputations and also the health of spouses and children. We now have 30 years more knowledge and experience than in the 1980s story. These days, people carrying the HIV virus can live for many years without developing AIDS. That is the situation for most of the people interviewed by Brooks and Coumaré. Medical progress has been impressive. Social progress has moved along too, but more slowly: we learn that the taboos and secrecy remain strong, yet we can also feel how Malian society has become more knowledgeable, more understanding, less condemnatory.
This is an excellent study, thoughtful and sensitive. The subject is delicate; the authors treat it with delicacy, and with respect. The authors and their interviewees teach us quite a lot about AIDS in Ségou, and even more about the way in which Malian society deals with the virus and with the disease.