The fourth estate

Willemien Brümmer

21 June 2010

It’s strange how our hypotheses never seem to work out the way we planned. And how inherent judgments about the world always find a way to sneak into the stories we construct. So called fourth estate journalism is certainly not exempt from this.

The story I constructed in my head about men and HIV starts about five years ago when I conducted in depth interviews with ten women at the paediatric HIV service based at the Groote Schuur hospital.

Most of these women talked and easily shared intimate details about their families and how the virus had changed almost every aspect of their lives. They spoke to me about love, abuse, loss and death. But what I remember most vividly is that most of them were single mothers who would do almost anything to keep themselves and their families alive.

At one point, one of these women stopped collecting antiretrovirals for her and her two young children from the hospital. She was force to made a choice between dying of hunger and dying of the opportunistic infections that would soon start ravishing her body. She chose to eat.

The reason she had no money, she said, was because her husband had left her. "Nguwe oze nehiv – it’s you, you brought HIV", he told her. He left her the day after she had been diagnosed, even though she had never been unfaithful to him.

One after the other the women told me the same tale of how they had disclosed to their partners and how these men had subsequently left. It was obvious that it was a collective narrative – one with it’s own words, images and morals. A tale which had become ingrained in these women’s heads for at least as long as the virus has been around.

This story stayed with me until this year, when I proposed to do research about the reasons why the men leave as part of my fellowship with the HIV/AIDS and the Media Project. From the start I knew it would be hard to find men who would be willing to speak to me. But I was certain that with a little persistence I would soon find those who would tell me how they ran away from loved ones because they couldn’t face the truth about their own behaviour. They would be men without conscience who continue to spread the virus until they get sick and die.

Another one of they myths that I’d constructed was that most people have children because they have found a partner whom they want to spend the rest of their lives with. They get married, have a stork tea and have babies. When the man eventually decides to abandon the woman in these circumstances it’s a tragedy which leaves the woman broken-hearted.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken. At the TC Newman hospital in Paarl I was told that at least 70% of the HIV positive mothers who make use of the facilities here did not necessarily fall pregnant by choice. At the time they fell pregnant, they were mostly uncertain whether they wanted to continue the relationship with the father of the child.

I also found that all love stories are different. Thus far not one of the men I interviewed were angels. But not one of them had left in the way that I had imagined. One of them, a soft spoken young man from Malawi, had left his girlfriend because he had heard from other people that she is HIV positive. She didn’t tell him herself that her previous boyfriend had died of AIDS related illnesses. For him honesty would have changed everything. He went back to her two years later when he was diagnosed as HIV positive himself.

Another man with a heavy stutter had left his girlfriend because he believed she had infected him with HIV. She was diagnosed a few days before him and he subsequently heard from his friends that “she’d been selling her body”. I don’t know if this is true. She is not here to tell her side of the story. She died a few years back. He attended the funeral and realised on that day that he still loved her.

Through each of these interviews I realised yet again not all men are bastards, chauvinists, rapists, psychopaths, bigamists or AIDS denialists. They bleed when they are hurt, they sometimes cry in the dark and they experience loss as intensely as their female counterparts.

This has made me realise that no story is black and white – about male villains versus damsels in distress. The good stories are the grey ones, the open ended ones where each character is infinitely complex and guilt isn’t spelled with a capital G. It’s those stories that really make a difference.