Interrogating traditionalism: gender and Swazi Culture in HIV/AIDS policy

ABSTRACT

Since the late twentieth century, HIV/AIDS-related global public health discourses in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) have been driving cultural change there. Cultural change refers to local critical consciousness about the value of the royalist state’s traditionalist policies and projects that get branded as a ‘Swazi Culture’. Using feminist discourse analysis of health policy documents, supplemented by ethnographic insights, this article shows how global health discourses addressing the epidemic are critical of traditionalism predominately on grounds that it creates harms and transmission risk in gender- and sexual-based violence and inequalities for women. This criticism echoes a longer history of external interrogations of local sociocultural practices, today including kingship, as a gendered problem for health, a move that simultaneously interrogates state traditionalism but, in turn, solidifies the state’s own cultural reifications. More broadly, this case shows how gender and sexuality reshape relationships between nation-states, health systems, and culture in postcolonial Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Traditionalism
• health policy
• discourse
• gender
• HIV/AIDS
• Eswatini

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Vito Laterza for his stewardship and to my friends, informants, and consultants whose lives and stories led me to this recounting. I also thank Rebecca Fielding-Miller, Gabby S. Dlamini, Mlungisi Dlamini, and participants of a workshop for UNICEF Eswatini hosted by the Rift Valley Institute at Lobamba, 6–8 November 2017 for their insights and corroboration: Christopher Makwindi, Sonene Nyawo, Martha Shongwe, Fortunate Shabalala, Lethumusa Simelane, Alfred Murye, Mary Joyce Doo Aphane, Sibonelo Mdluli-Groening, Mary Pais da Silva, and Alice Akunga.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This reporting and periodized cut-off refers to the first Swaziland HIV Incidence Measurement Survey (SHIMS), conducted between 2010 and 2011 with findings first presented and published 2015–2017.

2 The examination was formerly available at the UNSIWA Library online repository and originally accessed 28 November 2015. URL: https://www.library.uniswa.sz/pastpapers/quest/agri/aem/2014/hsc113m2014.pdf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casey Golomski

Casey Golomski is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Core Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire and a visiting researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand. His other publications on Eswatini, gender, and well-being/health appear in Journal of Southern African Studies, Material Religion, Social Dynamics, and the book Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work and Culture Change in an African Kingdom (Indiana University Press).