LoveLife’s advertising campaigns are up the pole. They are useless, ineffective, costly and obscure. That’s the message from some of the world’s leading Aids scientists and activists.
As World Aids Day arrives with a swelter of red ribbons on pious breasts, foreign popstars telling people, in this the country with the highest rate of HIV infection, how to avoid HIV (yeah, right), and dozens of extravaganzas hosted by companies that say they can’t afford to extend HIV medication to their employees, the question needs to be asked — does culture have a role in HIV prevention?
Last week United States songster Alicia Keys, who was in the country to perform at a music festival for Aids Day, told an interviewer that, yes, she knew someone who had died of Aids. A friend of her mother.
Well, golly gee. It is likely that at any event she performs at in South Africa a third or more of her audience will be HIV infected: the highest infection rates are in teenagers — girls aged 13 to 19 and boys 16 to 25 — according to the Department of Health.
In a country where soccer players and politicians die from “mysterious illnesses” and where growing numbers of musicians and film stars are infected, or have friends and family members who have succumbed to this virus, why do we have to import popstars who speak with flat thumbs?
But still, we think, if it comes from the US it has to be better. LoveLife’s campaigns are an example, but more about them later.
We miss the amazing approaches that are taking place across the country. Townships are seeing the fastest growth in theatre since the mid-1980s. Pieter-Dirk Uys has trekked across the nation speaking to young people about HIV. Communities are putting together their own theatre groups to provide information about the virus. Oliver Meth, a 14-year-old Durban boy, is a member of the Austerville Aids Clinic sub-committee, which performed plays with an anti-Aids message in parks in Wentworth, south Durban, this week. Meth, a grade nine pupil at Umbilo Secondary School, said the youth taking part in the travelling theatre were concerned about high rates of infection in young people and their parents.
Kate Mzambo, a 23-year-old Kwa-Thema mother who became HIV-positive after being gang-raped in 1999, has a group of children aged nine to 13 who travel across Gauteng performing a play they workshopped about rape and HIV. Most of the group have been raped and have HIV as a result.
Culture is again becoming critical in displaying the wound within our society — and in finding ways to heal it.
But culture is not always effective. Good intentions are not enough. Mzambo was photographed by a world-famous photographer. His photograph is artistically brilliant. “I hate that photograph,” she says, “I look so sad. He makes me look like a victim.”
Time magazine and Newsweek have led the charge depicting those living with HIV/Aids as “stick” people. No one ever appears to be living a happy, fulfilling life — and so the role of culture in entrenching myth, fear and stigma becomes critical in silencing those who need to speak out.
And then we have loveLife. Sigh. The president’s wife sits on the board. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a major sponsor; so is the Kaiser Foundation and our government. The Centre for Aids Development, Research and Evaluation (Cadre), in Johannesburg, notes that “loveLife is the only HIV/Aids organisation with its own line item in the South African Budget — $7,5-million over three years”.
Never has more money been spent on more incomprehensible advertising.
In a country where illiteracy is high and poverty acute, are lavish brochures and inserts in expensive Sunday newspapers communicating with everyone?
Cadre notes: “The explicit imagery found in loveLife’s ThethaNathi youth magazine, which is distributed in newspapers, includes, for example: an image of a young male standing with his belt unbuckled being embraced by a young female with her skirt riding up and her legs wrapped around his body; an image of a couple embracing while a young woman with her legs apart and panties showing looks on; a skimpily clad young woman with a chain wrapped around her crotch; or a collage of young males with their flies down, their crotches being examined by a young female. How does this contribute to HIV prevention?”
Daniel Halperin, a US-based medi-cal anthropologist who is a visiting professor at the Medical Research Council, and Brian Williams, a South African now working for the World Health Organisation, wrote in The Washington Post of loveLife: “South Africa’s most visible response to the crisis is misguided.”
Halperin, who also works with USAid, said in an interview with the Mail & Guardian that research he conducted in South Africa last year and this year revealed that few people understood the loveLife messages.
And then there are the billboards. We first had strange squiggly figures apparently put together by a New York-based advertising executive who had overdosed on caffeine. Now we have messages that are purportedly teen dialogue from advertisers who clearly believe that no teen knows about love and respectful sex — that it’s all about fucking.
Lawyer Christine Qunta hammers loveLife, saying its ads are culturally offensive. “Why is no effort made to offer an alternative — namely abstention? Why is it presented as perfectly okay to engage in sex at 14 or 15 as long as condoms are worn? The billboard ads are situated in a pseudo-American cultural context. There surely must be means of communicating messages in an African cultural context?”
Halperin and Williams note that “the Ugandan emphasis [which saw drops in HIV figures] was on a radical shift in community norms of sexual behaviour, in contrast to loveLife’s focus on changing individuals’ decision-making capabilities”. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni asserts, “I have emphasised a return to our cultural practices that emphasised fidelity and condemned premarital and extramarital sex.”
Cadre notes too that “billboards do not allow for audience segmentation by age. Imagine, an eager six-year-old learning to read by scanning road-side billboards happening upon ‘Sex is sex: show me the money’ or ‘I only do it skin-on-skin’.”
There is another school of thought that says it would inhibit free expression if the media took a more responsible and respectful stance on sexuality.
The UNAids report of 2000 notes that Aids-prevention messages in South Africa appear to be working because “approximately 55% of sexually active teenage girls report using a condom. But these developments are accompanied by a troubling rise in prevalence among South Africans aged 20 to 34.”
UNAids says: “Knowledge is not enough. Behavioural change requires locally appropriate, targeted information, training in negotiation and decision-making skills, social and legal support for safer behaviours, access to the means of prevention [condoms or clean needles] and motivation to change behaviour.”
Research psychologist Neil Orr, in a posting to the US-based Communications Initiative, which included a recent debate on loveLife with not a single Aids expert finding anything positive to say about it, observed: “I have not seen or heard of a single country in Africa that can attribute any change in sexual behaviour due to a single communications programme. If changes in prevalence rates in target groups occur, can this be attributed to the messaging, or are other social and epidemiological forces at play?”
Is the sight of endless funerals of contemporaries a brake on behaviour? Or is it the sound of a pop group on a TV Aids-linked musical extravaganza?
UNAids suggests that loveLife “research indicates that, of the 62% of young South Africans who report having heard of the programme, 76% say they are aware of the risks of unprotected sex, and 78% report they now use condoms during sex”.
Warren Feek, director of the Communication Initiative, observed: “The [loveLife] claim requires rigorous review. Does awareness of a brand connect to such substantial behaviour change? How about the other national and local HIV/Aids initiatives — of which there are hundreds? Why is it that loveLife is the causal factor?
“Can you say that one programme/ intervention was the key to over-throwing the apartheid government? Of course not. And yet in development communication there seems to be this tendency towards claiming or identifying ‘the one programme that made all the difference’.”