Meyerton, Gauteng | Tuesday
A ZIMBABWEAN healer wants to promote the use of a traditional spell that ensures fidelity, alongside the more conventional methods of condoms and abstinence to curb the spread of Aids in the country.
Healer Mutsa Chikede came up with the idea of using a technique that involves magically “locking” women and immobilising men, to bar them from having extra-marital sex, alongside condoms and abstinence because the latter only have a limited impact on stemming the spread of Aids in Zimbabwe.
Around one in four of Zimbabwe’s adult population is infected with the HIV virus, and Aids kills an average of 3 000 people in the country each week.
Chikede’s proposed technique uses traditional herbs to cast a spell that can be administered by a healer even in the absence of the subject. It has become popularly known in Zimbabwe as the “central locking system,” or “immobiliser”.
When applied, the spell is supposed to ensure that one cannot have sex outside marriage.
The minority Tonga ethnic group uses the practice to “lock” their infant daughters to prevent them from engaging in pre-marital sex, only unlocking them when they get married.
Chikede is encouraging couples to go for the voluntary preventive measure, which he stresses is reversible in the event of a partner’s death or divorce.
The spell is said to magically block access to the vagina when applied to a woman and prevents an erection in men whenever they try to have sex outside marriage.
“We are looking at the African way of living, and we are saying why not make use of the ‘central locking system’ as a way of preventing the spread of HIV,” Chikede, of Zimbabwe’s Natural Medicine Clinic, said.
The idea has been slowly catching on since Chikede introduced it earlier this year, and at least 45 couples have been locked to each other so far, he said. He hopes to formally launch his magical technique later this month at a medical expo in Harare.
But Zimbabwe’s official medical authorities are opposed to Chikede’s far-fetched idea, with Health Minister Timothy Stamps calling it “primitive and contrary to every concept of human dignity and rights”.
“It is fundamentally flawed and is contemptuous of marriage… and it’s a violation of human rights,” Stamps said.
People don’t need to be locked into marriages “like animals in a donga (dry gully),” he said, because “marriage is not a prison, marriage is not a form of slavery.”
Taking the opposite tack, Peter Sibanda of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (ZINATHA) views the concept as a “great preventive measure” and other advocates of the central locking system say it could be used as a means to thwart potential rapists.
But Caroline Maposhere, of the Women and Aids Support Network, said “We don’t know the side-effects of such practices. You don’t try to curb the HIV/Aids by casting a spell on people — there has to be a voluntary change of behaviour.”
The health minister said the whole idea was bound to fail “because people have always found ways of going around locks in the past”. – AFP