Drugs, Sex, and Hiv/aids in Contemporary South Africa

DRUGS, SEX, AND HIV/AIDS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA Glen S. Elder. Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. xiii + 188 pp. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Jeff Gow and Chris Desmond, eds. Impacts and Interventions: The HIV/AIDS Epidemic and the Children of South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press / New York: UNICEF, 2002. xiii + 211 pp. $23.95. Paper. Ted Leggett. Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex Industries in the New South Africa. London: Zed Books / Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. x + 206 pp. Index. $19.95. Paper. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, South Africa's transformation from a segregated apartheid state into a multiracial democracy transfixed much of the Western media. Interest has since waned, and when South Africa makes the news today, the focus is often on the government's reluctance to address the country's HIV/AIDS crisis. Over the last decade, the democratic state has struggled to meet the expectations of its citizens and to redress the inequities of apartheid. The apartheid legacy is at the center of Glen Elder's innovative study, in which he seeks to rethink what he terms the "procreational geography" of apartheid and its lingering effects on the contemporary state. Jeff Gow and Chris Desmond draw together recent research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa and consider its impact on development. Ted Leggett focuses on the evolution of the drug and sex industries after the first multiracial democratic election in 1994. What all the authors share is a call to action, demanding that the government actively address the problems facing South Africa's citizens. In Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies, Elder applies queer and feminist theory to "ask how bodies, sex, and erotics played out in South Africa during apartheid and after" (xii). Apartheid policies, he argues, were both racist and sexist. He chose hostels as his subject because the officially male accommodations were consciously used by the apartheid state "to regulate and reproduce a certain kind of heterosexuality between men and women" (5-6). The apartheid state, he argues, sought simultaneously to destroy the black family-by drawing men to wage work in urban centers-and to maintain it, by restricting women to idealized rural areas, where their "bodies became bait in [a] . . . white-constructed, black heterosexual fantasy. . . to 'lure' men back to rural areas once their contracts had expired" (52). Elder focuses on migrants from KwaZulu-Natal, the region historically and currently among the most impoverished in South Africa. Women are at the center of his study because, despite the guarantees of equality in the constitution, they remain among the new state's most marginalized citizens. Elder asserts that hostels were never exclusively male; women had long migrated for short- and long-term visits, often living in adjacent informal settlements and supplementing the family income with beer-brewing. In the late 1980s, as apartheid collapsed and levels of violence increased nationwide, women began formally moving into hostels. Elder cannot answer with certainty how many women lived in South Africa's supposedly all-male hostels, but the thirty women he interviewed at the KwaThema hostel near Johannesburg in 1993 and 1994 suggest that the number was not insubstantial. South Africa's media and its governments have explained the violence that wracked hostels in the late 1980s and into the 1990s in ethnocultural terms, pitting supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) against the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Elder offers a different explanation, positing that the violence was in part gender-based, shaped by male resistance to the influx of women into hostels, and by men's desire to retain their dominance in a hostel system whose legitimacy was, ironically, protected by the collapsing apartheid state. …