A few years ago, I co-authored an article on the possible relationship between crime and Aids orphans in South Africa. We also spoke about armies and police forces that might turn to “wilding” or even coup attempts as a result of the impact of Aids among their cadres.
We were wrong.
Recent studies in South Africa and elsewhere demonstrate that Aids does not lead to a rise in crime; that uniformed personnel have proved remarkably resilient in the face of the epidemic; and that bands of orphans are not turning to violence.
I have come to rethink not only my original fears about Aids orphans, but to reconsider what we mean by the socio-cultural impact of Aids. There is so much being written about the “collapse”; shouldn’t we have a more complex understanding of what may unfold, and what we can do about it?Â
This is not an argument to provide a platform for pro-Malthusian racists. Rather, we need to understand Aids as a long-wave phenomenon changing societies in profound ways — a Darwinian event if ever there was one. This is not a restatement of tedious, romanticised notions about the “fetish of coping” or the “extended African family”. Rather, Aids may well represent an opportunity to teach ourselves about what it means to be more humane, caring societies.
It has become a cliché to compare Aids to the Black Death in Europe. But in addition to the terrible toll of death and human suffering, we should also note the broader socio-political consequences of earlier plagues. For example:
- Depletion of the agricultural labour force, resulting in decades of crop and livestock deficiencies. This led to a revolution in the structure of European agricultural production in the decades and centuries following the Black Death. Will the agricultural production structure in Africa be similarly transformed?
- Loss of faith in the Catholic Church because of priests’ failure to perform last rites. This led to authority shifts and, eventually, the Reformation and secularisation. Funeral rituals and grieving periods in many African contexts have already changed; will Aids galvanise similar questioning of the power and authority of traditional healers, or will we see an increase in supernaturalism and social conservatism as a response to the pandemic?
- Erosion of feudal control. Will rural Africans also insist on empowerment and property rights rather than vesting power in traditional leaders?
- Property disputes as a result of disrupted lineages of power. In Zambia and elsewhere, widows of Aids casualties are often victims of “property grabbing” — under a law allowing or tolerating in-laws who claim the land of the deceased husband.
The point is that societies have to find ways to respond to HIV and Aids that will strengthen social and state resilience, rather than lead to inevitable state collapse. The trajectory is not necessarily as linear as the current discourse would have it.
Another possibility to be considered is that the pandemic may lead to questioning of what Richard Dawkins calls “skyhooks” — those traditional centres of authority such as customary leaders, supernatural moralisms and religiosity that at times act to fan the pandemic. Admittedly, at the moment the prognosis for this is not good, as there seems to be an increase in social conservatism and moralism surrounding Aids in Africa.
Could the response to Aids galvanise positive changes in sexual and gender politics, as well as changes in political culture? The Treatment Action Campaign is seen by some as an example of civil society evolving from a single-issue organisation to one addressing broader matters regarding social inequalities, and this may strengthen overall democratic participation. Societies are learning to build new political palimpsests: new kinds of patrimonial relationships have to coexist side by side with legal-rational bureaucracies. These can be examples of sociopolitical evolution related to Aids rather than any predestined collapse.
The difference between state fragility or collapse on the one hand, and societal resilience and evolution on the other, is not necessarily a given or an absolute, as has been presented. Even in the context of mature Aids epidemics, behaviour change can decrease HIV incidence, treatment measures can bend Aids mortality downwards and little appears to be truly inevitable regarding the impact.
What will we choose to learn from Aids?
Pieter Fourie is the author of The Political Management of HIV and Aids: One Burden Too Many? He teaches politics at the University of Johannesburg