Strange and worrying things are happening in the village of Mamvuka, in Limpopo’s rocky Nyhelele Valley. Up there it’s hard, arid country. Mamvuka’s folk scratch out their survival, making do with what they’ve got: a strip of mealies here, a plot of cabbages there, with the principal source of income and food that ubiquitous of African domestic animals,
the goat.
Goats are essential to Mamvuka-style subsistence, as they are all over the world. Wherever there are poverty-stricken rural people, there are goats. These uncomplaining and usually gentle creatures live on just about anything they can find, they’re resistant to disease, tough survivors through bitter cold and blistering heat. They give milk and when they’ve finished doing that they can be slaughtered and eaten. Even their tough old hides have uses.
In Mamvuka, though, goats have been awarded an extra vocation, half medical and half sociological in nature. Mamvuka’s resident goat community is being used both for sexual relief and viral firewalling by village teenagers. I emphasise, so far only male teenagers. No girls are known to have indulged in these hircine pleasures.
The explanation for this trans-species intimacy is that it’s prophylactic. Not one of the goat-doodling youngsters has admitted to enjoying the activity. Instead they speak of it as if it were a community duty.
In an SABC-TV news item last Sunday, one of them said that shafting goats does not carry the risk of contracting HIV. “We know about Aids,” he said, “and we are very afraid of it. That is why we have sex with these goats. Goats don’t have Aids. We boys discussed Aids and how people in our village are dying. We agreed to stop sleeping with women and settle for goats.”
One of his buddies chimed in with a quick explanation of the bilateral medical benefits of sexual congress with goats. “It’s obvious that if I’m not sick there is nothing I can transmit to the goats, or the goats to me. We won’t get HIV-positive because goats don’t get Aids.”
The village folk are not too charmed with this. Chief Elias Thivihidizo was particularly concerned. “It’s very painful for me and my people,” said the chief — never mind the goats. What is more the youngsters are claiming up to four goats a week, though none seemed willing to specify which goat gender was the more favoured. I asked a retired Boland stuffgoat, Amos Knoesen, who lives down the valley from me. He told me that billy- goats are usually preferred by connoisseurs because you can get far better penetration if you’ve got horns to hang onto.
Intrepid SABC reporter Mia Malan commented: “Mamvuka community leaders have thought about going to the police but are both ashamed and scared it may backfire.” Which doesn’t seem to have worried the boys.
Other penalties visit Mamvuka. No one from surrounding villages wants to buy any Mamvuka produce, specifically goat meat or milk — or any glassy-eyed chickens for that matter. Then there’s the fact that the sexually ravished animals cannot decently be offered in traditional sacrifice to tribal ancestors. An elder in the village said the ancestors would be seriously pissed off if some recently buggered goat got dumped on their altar. They might easily take revenge.
All of this trouble and travail has also come about because, speaking as one, the youngsters have said that not one of them will marry a girl in the village unless she can provide an HIV-negative certificate. The girls on the other hand are a tad dubious about marrying any of the lads. “I won’t agree to marry one,” said one teenaged lass, “because they will say ‘there goes that woman whose husband used to have sex with goats’.”
I asked some of the usually reliable contacts I have in the health department whether the Mamvuka teenagers are merely field-testing some imaginative strategy by the department to combat the spread of HIV/Aids. All of them said that, apart from rumours, they had seen or heard nothing official. “But then nothing Minister Manto does or says surprises us any more,” said one, proudly. “She’s got some brilliant people working for her and if one of these experts has found that screwing goats is a new way to combat the spread of HIV/Aids, then all I can say is good luck to them. Think of the savings on anti-retrovirals.”
The international community is currently reeling, gobsmacked by Mr Thabo Mbeki’s renewed avowal that 99% of the world’s leading medical specialists are nothing but a bunch of white supremacist dickheads who won’t listen properly when he tells them that HIV has nothing whatsoever to do with Aids. How he’s going to sell Poke-a-Goat as a preventative measure is another matter.
But please let Mr Mbeki not rush around trying to claim that the goat-bonking up in Limpopo is an African solution to an African problem. We Europeans have been after animal-tail far longer.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby