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Indigenous
knowledge and responses to AIDS. Title-Give an African face to the ABC
strategy: Reflections on the need to appropriate indigenous African
parenting and reproductive technologies in the HIV/AIDS discourse in
Africa.
Loveness
Mabhunu
Department
of Africana Women Studies
Clark
Atlanta University
Zimbabwe/Estados
Unidos
The continent of Africa has the highest HIV
prevalence rate in the World. The situation seems irreversible despite
cheap and high purchases of condoms in the subject continent. Questions
have been asked as to why the use of condoms is proportional, if not
keeping pace with the infection rate, especially among the literate and
productive age groups.
The omission, by researchers, of indigenous African
parenting systems, reproductive technologies and other afrocentric gap
knowledge systems, the cultures of the affected and infected Africans,
refusal to have an unconditional condom/ARV technological transfer to Africa and the scientists' unwillingness to develop the ageless
reproductive technologies of Africa to complement the condom neo culture
have been put on the spotlight. To this end, a notable reluctance, on the
part of the rich nations to invest in the development of afrocentric
parenting, pedagogies and reproductive technologies has culminated in the
rapid expansion of a monopolistic ARV/condom industry. This has further
decimated the ailing Africans' parenting methods and reproductive
technologies to moral bankruptcy that is creating a manifold of avenues
for HIV infections among Africans.
Nonetheless isolated and unsystematic
lobbying on the need to preserve, perpetuate and amplify, research and
identify, develop and commercialize viable Afrocentric parenting systems
and reproductive technologies in the war against HIV seem to have dawned.
This is the paradigm shift that is strongly resisted by advocates of
Western value systems that view condoms as the panacea to the deadly HIV
virus. It is this uncharted and fast emerging paradigm, it is supposed,
that has been profiled for consideration if any meaningful HIV discourse
in Africa is to succeed. The researcher will use Zimbabwe as a case study
for the presentation.
About Loveness Mabhunu
Loveness Mabhunu is a native of
Zimbabwe.She is a PhD student in the discipline of Women studies at Clark
Atlanta University, Georgia,USA. A recipient of Fulbright Scholarship and
Delta Kappa Gamma World Fellowship.She graduated from the University of
Zimbabwe,Zimbabwe with a BA HONS and MA in Religious Studies with a
concentration in Hebrew language and Old Testament.She is a professor on
study leave in the Department of Religious Studies, Classics and
Philosophy at the University of Zimbabwe.She worked with Women
Organisations and The Girl Child Network in Zimbabwe.She has experience as
a researcher in Women, girl child and HIV/AIDS; the traditional Zimbabwean
sex culture and its relevance to HIV prevention; and African Traditional
Religions.Currently, carrying a research on adolescents and HIV/AIDS.She
had presented papers on conferences and seminars in Zimbabwe and the
United States of America.
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