HIV/AIDS Communication in South Africa

Are You Human?

C. Chasi

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137491282
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137491299
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Even though sub-Saharan Africa is the region most affected by HIV/AIDS in the world, no new theories have been discovered, and questions about life and death are ignored. This book uses certain selected communication practices to offer the foundations of an African theory of communication, applicable to the crisis of HIV/AIDS.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter discusses the need to develop new theory as regards HIV/AIDS in South Africa with references to recent research findings. It discusses the importance of going past merely listing inventories of the latest statistics about prevalence, survey findings concerning about an assortment of communication practices regarding HIV/AIDS, and other such programmatic engagements with the epidemic. It speaks of the value of presenting new theory about life and communication in this era of epidemic.

Keywords: communication; HIV and AIDS; theory

Chasi, Colin. HIV/AIDS Communication in South Africa: Are You Human? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137491299.0002.

South Africa continues to be home to the world’s largest population of people living with HIV ... one of every six people with HIV in the world lives in South Africa. (Fraser-Hurt et al., 2011, p. 18; emphasis added)

The most recent survey data on prevalence, incidence and behaviours regarding HIV in South Africa came out on April 1,2014 (April Fools’ Day). Key findings are that in 2012 the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS were again on the increase and condom use was in decline (Shisana et al., 2014).

Meanwhile Johnson et al.’s (2013) The Third National Communication Survey 2012 finds that HIV communication programmes in that year reached 82 per cent of those aged 16–55. Significantly, it finds that these programmes particularly penetrated into younger black communities, which are most at risk. Notwithstanding that three years earlier 90 per cent of people in the 15–55 age range were exposed to these programmes, the conclusion reached is that HIV communication programmes ‘have shown success in a number of areas related to HIV in terms of building knowledge, developing appropriate attitudes and beliefs, and – as a consequence – changing behaviour patterns’ (p. 51). The compilers of The Third National Communication Survey report clearly still believed, however, that communication programs are changing people’s beliefs, norms, perceptions and other ideational factors with positive consequences regarding behaviour change (p. vi).

From the above it is plausible to say that there are important insights about the challenge of communicating on HIV/AIDS that are yet to be revealed. If this is true it is important to go beyond enumerating known histories in their many varieties and forms.¹ It is also important to go past listing inventories of the latest statistics about prevalence, survey findings concerning an assortment of communication practices regarding HIV/AIDS, and other such programmatic engagements with the epidemic. Anyone can Google these.

I have no intentions to play at sorting apart the oldest from the latest innovations of experts and other programmers of this communication. After all, who has not been a part of many amazingly grand and small communication interventions and exercises aimed at variously changing people’s information states, attitudes and even behaviours?

It is vital to accept that on any topic it is clearly impossible to discuss all the angles, frames and controversies. Even the most trivial of things can be understood from infinite vantage points. My intention is not to try to cover the vast body of intentions, strategies and practices on communication regarding HIV/AIDS. It is simply to put a finger on parts of them in order to draw fundamental new observations about life and communication in this era of epidemic.

This book will

1discuss communication on HIV/AIDS as a failure that was waiting to happen;

2poke holes into the idea that state leaders are expected to speak in ways that ameliorate the HIV/AIDS epidemic;

3contest the view of some that retribution should befall those who are somehow found blameworthy as regards HIV/AIDS; and

4try to show that the moral philosophy of ubuntu can act as a normative framework that guides how HIV/AIDS is communicated upon. Drawing on ubuntu is appropriate. It is a moral philosophy with a strong African pedigree (Metz, 2007) that has implications what people do as regards HIV/AIDS and communication on it.

Drawing on the South African experience in this way enables me to boldly offer a unique compendium of insights into HIV/AIDS communication and related experiences. This is crucial in the work of enunciating an African approach to the challenge of communicating on HIV/AIDS that this book embraces.

Note

  1   Keyan Tomaselli’s (2011) discussion of the history of communication on HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and particularly his notes on the departure from thinking that communication can change behaviours, is very instructive.

2

Are You Human?

Abstract: There is abundant evidence that Africans know the basics of HIV and AIDS – that the challenge of achieving desired behaviour change is not merely about getting them ‘into the know’. This chapter presents the seemingly tame view that meaningful communication for behaviour change as regards HIV/AIDS involves contending with questions concerning the humanity and dignity of self and other. It encourages existential questions in relation to the African. These questions are often seen as strange and unwise even though HIV/AIDS fundamentally drives individuals to ask, ‘Are you human?’ The chapter argues that if we continue to fail to ask existential questions as regards Africans, the conditions and practices by which Africans of courage may face the epidemic in a new renaissance will continue to be under-theorized and neglected.

Keywords: communication; existential questions; HIV and AIDS; human

Chasi, Colin. HIV/AIDS Communication in South Africa: Are You Human? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137491299.0003.

As suggested by Mary Fisher (1992), the key question HIV/AIDS poses is ‘Are you human?’

Startling encounters with illness and death beg questions about how each unique life, including one’s own, may be meaningfully recognized in ways that advance the freedoms of both self and other to create new histories. The possibility of illness and death poses questions as to how life may be dignified in how one and one’s others face the duty to not choose to renounce freedom. In the face of HIV/AIDS, we are challenged to ask how we may promote recognition worthy of the self and of others.

In South Africa it is widely held that Africans are collectivists for whom questions of existence do not apply. In terms of this dominant view existential thought is bracketed as concerned with individualistic, Western and bourgeois concerns, and Africans are marginalized from basic questions concerning human existence (Ikuenobe, 2006; Ramose, 1999). This may be one reason why some find it unimaginable to think that, here too, HIV/AIDS begs the question, ‘Are you human?’

Yet a person is a person first, and only then is a person socially given to be an African or a Westerner, and so on. All persons choose how to be human in relation to others with whom they interact. In other words, all real living persons exist in really choosing to meet the world of their encounters. This gives new existential meaning to the ubuntu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu which has often been under-read to suggest that Africans ascribe to a collectivist orientation in terms of which a person is only a person as determined by the collective (Chasi, 2014).

Adopting an existential approach in the African context involves becoming a contributor to a literature of liberation which holds, at least for Frantz Fanon and Lewis Gordon, that the alienated and denied cannot overcome their marginalization by getting incorporated into the practices and emergent structures that characterize their oppression. In other words, the overdetermined cannot articulate a path to freedom by mimicking how they have been historically dehumanized. (Re)establishment of the conditions for humanization involves violence against the logics and practices of dominance. Real education on HIV/AIDS involves questing for liberation. Without undermining the benefits of play in processes of learning, it is fair to say that the search for truth benefits from moving away from word games that detract from real engagement with lived-concerns. Real engagement with the world of encounter demands beginning with the individual by whose perspective the encounter may be known.

Learning is not a mere act of reproducing aspects of the world of encounter. Learning is for the seeker who crafts ways to see. Learning is for one who would write with an imagination that goes beyond good and evil conceptions of method. In this way real learning seeks to unpretentiously or authentically confront problems faced.

The path of enquiry has consistently opened ways where dead-ends had been declared. In one instance, following media and medical reports that there was an outbreak of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, fevers, flu-like symptoms, and a rare pneumonia among young gay males in New York, the path of enquiry opened the way to knowledge that the cause of the new acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was the HI-virus. This victory of questioning that was garnered by Luc Montange and Robert Gallo ought to not now lead to the surrender of the infinitude of possibility that embodied human beings breathe into human-living.

Following the dawn of our discovery of HIV/AIDS, we do not have to succumb to resignation in the evening of our realization that, by and large, African lives are hard.

In the question of how our human lives should be lived in relation to HIV/AIDS the individual is the centre. He or she does not have to gently accept the walk into dark silence. We do not have to be fearful unto death, trembling at the very acronyms HIV and AIDS. We do not have to kneel at the altar of three letter words and acronyms.

Questions regarding how life and death should be faced are proverbially written in blood and these questions ought to be listened to with heart (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 28). When it comes to choices that people must make concerning HIV/AIDS, our coldest calculations on how to speak with others are shallower than the deep, heart-felt encounters that are called for. Too many have already written accounts of their despair in blood, in terrible choices made in terribly constrained context. We cannot merely label them ‘ignorant’ or ‘unfortunate’. We must listen to them with our hearts.

Who writes in blood more starkly than the one who lays down his life? Who would deny that the millions whose lives have been lost to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS have left a legacy of blood and proverbs that calls most strongly to be learnt by heart? Who would deny that those who live amongst the dying and suffering themselves write passages in proverbs of starkest red?

Africans are losing ubuntu, our ability to humanize the world in the ways in which we interact, people say. Many lament that we are losing our ability to meet each other as people. Thus there is a danger that with growing distrust and polarization that seem to increasingly characterize African societies, the centre of what little social cohesion there is will fall apart. And is the falling apart of this centre not the falling apart of the individuals from whose perspectives the world is composed? What seems sure is that the dismantling of old structures of misanthropy is not the same as the establishment of a new modus vivendi by which the contending forces of society are even momentarily balanced. The striving for recognition of the individual is made hollow and unsound if it is not accompanied by a striving for broader social processes by which the security, certainty and safety to act, choose and so change the world can be communicated. For this reason the search for individual freedom is in fact a political exercise.

We can soar high above the limitations of the present in the ways in which we creatively seek new paths. This demands that we be creative in the face of the abundant limitations that surround us. To this end we must learn to celebrate and venerate the freedom and worth of each person for this is the fount of creativity. Such embracing of individual capabilities is a critical part of establishing democratic norms within which health and development can be achieved.

If the concern is for health, development and democracy, it matters what our messages on HIV/AIDS say about our respect for the individual. Thus, for example, our communication on HIV/AIDS cannot be worthy if it merely aims at the most basic questions that relate to whether or not individuals are ‘aware’. Indeed, as has often been said, there is a need to go beyond awareness of HIV/AIDS.

For the one who would be a messenger as regards HIV/AIDS, the challenge of going beyond awareness involves going beyond transmitting a modicum of common facts to targeted populations. Generally, it is understood that going beyond awareness involves ensuring that the messages communicated impact on attitudes and high-risk HIV/AIDS behaviours in such ways that the epidemic is ameliorated.

And what is it to aim at changing the attitudes and behaviours of another? Is it not to become the creator of new beings? Is it not to seek the rebirth of otherwise doomed men and women? Does not the search for ways of taking others beyond awareness existentially involve questions of how one may meaningfully communicate with the other concerning how life should be lived and died? And is this not to return to Mary Fisher’s observation: The question HIV/AIDS poses is ‘Are you human?’

To rise to a Kierkegaardian (1947, p. 7) platitude: Indeed, we do not have to resign to the communicative expression of our agentic choice and freedom to such measure that it can be said our publicity and marketing concerning HIV/AIDS take ‘perilous delight in swimming in shallow waters’.

Whatever the harm or good of the matter, each message only achieves meaning in the sacred choice and freedom of ‘targets’ in whose lived-situations real responses are called for. It does not seem too much to ask that those who would do the right thing and engage in communication on HIV/AIDS realize they raise existential ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Are You Human?
• 3  Failure That Was Waiting to Happen
• 4  On Belief in the Communication of State Leaders
• 5  Just HIV/AIDS Communication
• 6  Towards Ubuntu as a Framework
• Works Cited
• Index