Ellen Machemba has a mop of curly hair and vivacious eyes, though at the moment they are troubled. She is 29, she has a son of 13 and she is modestly dressed in a long skirt and a second-hand T-shirt. Her legs are curled under her as we sit on a rush mat outside a friend’s house in Mchessi, an area of rutted earth roads and straggling houses with flaking plaster and tin roofs that is part of the capital, Lilongwe. She is talking about life for impoverished women in Malawi. She is talking about sex work.
”I was 23 when I began. I was married and then divorced. My husband had been the only man I knew. I met him as I was going to the market and we had a relationship for nine months before we married. But then he got another girlfriend, so he married that other girlfriend. So I had no support,” she says.
It’s a story that you hear time and again among the unskilled, uneducated women of Malawi. They marry, they have children, the husband leaves and there is nothing else they can do to get money. It’s called sex work, but it looks more like poverty. And it is not a way out — women like Ellen who frequent the bars at night run big risks for little money.”I really wish I could have married again,” she says. ”But most of the men I meet just lie to me or stay for a month and off they go.”
Her dream is to set up a small business. ”If I had a chance maybe I could buy and sell rice,” she says. But that needs capital. Her rent is 4 000 kwacha ($28,50) a month, she has school fees of 650 kwacha ($4,60) a month to pay for her son and then they have to eat. Selling your body in Malawi is not a lucrative business. You can’t save.
”Sometimes depending on the person they might give me 500 kwacha ($3,50),” she says. And sometimes they refuse to pay. ”Most of the time I don’t get enough money to cover my expenses at home.”
Respectable women in Malawi wear dresses and skirts. Under Hastings Banda, the post-colonial president who ran the country for nearly three decades, it was illegal for women to wear trousers. The ban was lifted in 1994, but now denim jeans, which became a badge of liberation for a generation of women in Europe and the United States, are the mark of sex work in Malawi. When Ellen goes out at night, she wears a bodysuit and jeans, she says. Then everybody knows the score.
Edina Ambulosi has three children — a boy of 21, a married daughter of 16 and Matola, an 18 year-old boy whose mental age is far less and who will need his mother’s help all his life to survive. Edina’s husband left them for another woman in 2002, when she was 39. Edina tells a story that would be hard to believe if she were not so matter-of-fact about it and if her friends did not nod in agreement.
”I was taken by satanic people,” she says. ”They wanted to kill me. They said they wanted my blood and my body parts.” I’m doubtful but when I ask other people they say yes, there used to be stories about such things in the papers all the time, though not so much any more.
”I didn’t know the men. There were four of them. They picked me up at a bar and said let’s have a night at a Lilongwe hotel. I accepted. But when they reached the hotel they didn’t stop and went straight past on the road to Dedza.”
Eventually the car stopped on a lonely stretch for two of the men to relieve themselves, Edina said. It was about 2am.
”The two guys went to the bush. I said to the others ‘what are you trying to do?’ They said wait and you will see. I was outside the car but they tied my arms so I didn’t run away.”Then she saw a truck on the road coming towards them. ”I started to run. I fell into a deep well. The water was up to my neck. I stayed there until morning. The guys were looking but did not find me. I was there until 5am. Then I climbed out and started walking. I walked for two days until I reached Lilongwe. I thought I was going to die.”
Sex work is illegal, so there can be no recourse to the police. The women are frequently beaten up. Edina shows me her lower arm, which has set badly from a break above the wrist.
These days Edina goes to the local bottle stores of Mchessi, closer to home. They have a feel of the American frontier town about them — a porch and a yard, a wicket gate and a fence. A few plastic chairs are scattered in the yard and beyond the low fence out of reach of the light from inside the bar lies impenetrably dark bush.
Abiti Peturo bottle store is full of men with unfocused eyes, drunk and getting drunker. Their geniality feels paper-thin, overlying potential violence. All the women inevitably have HIV — some infected by the husbands who left them and some by the men they meet in the bottle stores. They say they carry condoms, but men in Malawi don’t want to wear them. The drunken commercial transactions that go on in the bars, night after night — sex for survival — feed the pandemic.
Patrick Young, who runs an organisation called Theatre for a Change in Malawi, is helping women organise themselves into support groups and pressing local chiefs and the national government to help them.
”Sex workers are regarded as the lowest of the low,” he says. ”They spread HIV. They are loose immoral women. But the truth is they are wonderful people who are on the edge of survival. They have absolutely reduced choices.”
Edina and Ellen now belong to a group of 16 women, all from Mchessi, all in the same dire plight — bringing up children alone, without jobs or skills.
Theatre for a Change gives the women donated food. ”We know a lot of the women are going into sex work because they haven’t enough to eat,” says Young. That has cut the women’s need to visit the bars.
Instead, they spend time acting out their difficulties with enormous enthusiasm, performing every Sunday for local community leaders, the police and anyone who wants to watch. The stories are their own — of women forced to go to the bottle stores, of family who shun them, of men who beat them up and of HIV.
Young’s hope is of achieving policy change right at the top. Local chiefs have been supportive and a women’s caucus of MPs in Parliament is interested, he says. In the meantime, the women themselves have started a savings scheme, putting aside tiny amounts of money each week to help one of them, and then another and another, start a small business and hopefully get out of sex work forever. – guardian.co.uk