Building a home: Unemployment, intimacy, and AIDS in South Africa

In 2004, ten years after South Africa's first democratic elections, five million South Africans were infected with HIV, a prevalence rate of roughly 30%. This study challenges many of the common ways in which the South African pandemic has been researched and understood. A long literature going back to the beginning of the 20th century has noted how male migrant labour, an institution at the heart of apartheid, destabilized the African homestead. The syphilis epidemic that peaked in the 1940s remains emblematic of the disruption to African relationships caused by state policy and rapid industrialization. This dissertation is critical of the tendency within Aids research to project forward these past social dynamics to understand the contemporary pandemic. The central argument is that over the last three decades rising unemployment and sharpening inequalities have reconstituted sexual relations and networks in decisive ways. Rooting the pandemic in South Africa's racialized institutions, the dissertation therefore contends that more attention must be given to recent political-economic shifts. While democratic transformation ended explicit racial forms of domination, the market-based policies favored by the post-apartheid state have created new social divisions that help to fuel the Aids pandemic. Based on archival and ethnographic research, at the heart of which is a year and half's ethnographic field work in an informal settlement and township in KwaZulu-Natal, the study records dramatic changes in relationships over the last generation: the plummeting of marital rates such that less than 30% of adult Africans are currently in wedlock; the rapid reduction in the size of households, seen most vividly in the rise of one person households in informal settlements; the sharp increase in women's movement that challenges the overwhelming prominence given to male-migrancy as a conduit for HIV infection; and the emergence of the "materiality of everyday sex" that can fuel multiple-partnered relationships but where "gift exchanges" are not simply instrumental but characterized by an exchange of obligations that might include love and affection as well as money and sex.