Last September, King Mswati III of Swaziland ordered all young women to abstain from sex for five years to reduce the spread of HIV. Swaziland being an African culture, men were not ordered to be celibate, but having sex with a woman under age 18 would result in a fine of one cow, the country’s real currency.
Now, who’s forking over a cow but King Mswati himself! He recently announced he would marry a 17-year-old girl, and a large group of young women protested outside the palace — so he paid them the fine he himself had imposed.
Little Swaziland, with perhaps 25-30% of its 900,000 people infected, is one of the world’s 10 most HIV-impacted nations. AIDS has reduced life expectancy from 58 to 33 years, and more than 50,000 children are orphaned. Some of Swaziland’s proposed solutions (HIV positive branding, concentration camps for the sick) are off the wall and some already enacted (banning miniskirts) are lightweight; but at least Swaziland acknowledges the seriousness of its problem — and they are developing a Swazi-unique national strategy, which is more than we have. Laugh, if you want, at Mswati’s one-cow fine, but it’s an approach that’s culturally relevant to the people at risk, and unlike our leaders, he’s not a hypocrite. Who knows? For those reasons, it just might work!
This article appears in December 14 • 2001.