In last week’s post, I discussed how education and awareness of HIV/AIDS are important in preventing the spread of the disease in Botswana. At the time, educating people about the terrible effects of HIV/AIDS and how to stop its spread didn’t really seem that hard. You put up posters, have doctors and other authorities inform people about it, and give people access to condoms, and they’ll get the idea. After this week’s reading, however, my perspective on education has changed completely.
How exactly do you run an information campaign against a disease you can’t see? In what language do you print billboards and pamphlets for distribution among a people- English? Setswana? Both? What kind of images do you place on these materials? Do images of pregnant women on billboards encouraging testing for HIV before pregnancy encourage safe sex practices, or do they, as Bagele Chilisa suggests in her article “Educational Research Within Postcolonial Africa: A Critique of HIV/AIDS Research in Botswana,” create gender divides and caste blame on the pregnant mothers for infecting their children with HIV because they were not aware of their positive status?
Chilisa’s article seems to suggest a sort of “Western conspiracy” in which the campaign against HIV/AIDS is led by the Western/White world to penetrate all aspects of African economic, political, and cultural life. The idea, she says, is to wipe out the indigenous culture and replace it with a Western-style homogeneity that keeps colonial power structures in place. My response to this is that this position is that it seems far-fetched, but then again, as an American citizen who isn’t able to read the minds of the Western leaders in power, maybe I’m wrong. For now, however, I would say give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re doing their best to help. Maybe they’re not going about it quite right, but at least they’re trying.
I do agree, however, that the campaign against HIV/AIDS in Botswana does need to be better adapted to its context. In Suzette Heald’s article, “It’s Never as Easy as ABC: Understandings of AIDS in Botswana,” she argues that too much focus is put on teaching the biomedical aspect of HIV, without taking people’s personal experiences into account. It tries to force people to think of disease in a way that they’re not accustomed to do so.
We as Americans value straight-forward logic. A causes B, and this explains C. Rationality is our expertise. African thinking, on the other hand, according to Chilisa’s article, is more circular and more in tune about people’s relationships to spirits, the environment, and other people. Asking people to believe that a microorganism is causing so much suffering because it’s the logical cause seems obvious to Americans, but it might not seem as believable to a Motswana who is used to explaining illness in terms of having done something wrong and being punished for it by ancestors.
I definitely want to emphasize that this isn’t ignorance or a lack of intellect on the part of Batswana. It’s simply a different way of thinking, one that Westerners are not accustomed to. It forces us to question our definition of knowledge. Is the Western definition of what we know to be fact really universal? Do we really have the right understandings, or are we the ones who need to step back and re-evaluate?
I’d also like to talk about the exclusion of traditional healers, diviners (dingaka), and spirit churches from the HIV/AIDS campaign. Right now, they’re excluded because they’re seen as backwards, not modern, and superstitious. I ask if that is really the case. Even if they’re not scientifically measurable, sometimes the simple act of believing in a treatment can have huge health benefits. A scientific example is the placebo effect: in studies, even when people were given sugar pills but told they were given the real medicine, some of the subjects still saw results similar to those experienced by subjects taking the medicine. Faith healing in the U.S. is another example. Whether you believe that it’s healing by a divine power, or healing through the power of believing yourself to be healed, one cannot deny that belief is a powerful thing.
Is it really right to brush aside thousands of years of traditional beliefs in charms, taboos, and spiritual practices just because science can’t prove they work? Instead of vainly assuming that the scientific, Western way is the only way, maybe HIV/AIDS information campaigns should try to work hand-in-hand with traditional dingaka in order to make their message more relatable and believable to Batswana than the “A- Abstain, B- Be Faithful, C- Condomize” campaign that’s occurring right now.
One form of communication isn’t better or more intelligent than the other. It’s simply a different way of thinking.
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