On a recent Saturday night, inside the fairgrounds on the border of Gaborone’s central business district, 10 beauty contestants dressed in red evening gowns and traditional Tswana dresses took to the catwalk.
It was not your typical beauty pageant. There were the bellowing vuvuzelas and the talent show in which contestants transformed into goalkeepers, referees and match commentators. And then there was the part about all 10 women being HIV positive.
“This is a campaign to champion a stigma-free environment by nurturing the idea that HIV-positive women are also beautiful,” said Kesego Basha, the founding director of the Centre for Youth of Hope, which sponsors the pageant.
The first “Miss Stigma-Free” competition, which was created by Basha to find “positive-living” role models and activists to advocate prevention, destigmatisation and adherence to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, was held in 2002 at the Gaborone International Convention Centre. In honour of the World Cup, this year’s theme was “Red Card to Stigma and Discrimination” and contestants — who took on personae ranging from referee to team coach — had to relate their role in a football team to how they would play that role in the community with HIV prevention.
Charismatic “match commentator” Dineo Minky Mosinyi, a slender, unemployed 33-year-old, went on stage and delivered commentary that left the crowd in stitches with her comparison of stopping and defending soccer balls to Âstopping HIV.
A national HIV survey in 2008 revealed that 93.7% of Botswana’s population expressed an accepting attitude towards people living with HIV and Aids, but those with the disease say that’s not the case on the ground. And that — and preventing new infections — is exactly what Miss Stigma-Free 2010 hopes to address.
Upon hearing that she had taken this year’s crown, an ecstatic Mosinyi promised, in true beauty-queen fashion, to dedicate herself to the cause: “I am going to do a lot of work campaigning to prevent new infections,” she said.