Abstract
In AIDS and Masculinity in the African City: Privilege, Inequality, and Modern Manhood, Robert Wyrod paints a portrait of men’s lives in Bwaise, Uganda. Traveling with Wyrod through the carpentry workshops, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), clinics, and dance halls of Bwaise, any novice to social relationships in sub-Saharan Africa is in excellent hands. Using an ethnographic approach, Wyrod endeavors to illuminate the extent to which the AIDS epidemic has transformed gender relations in Uganda and argues that understanding gender relations is central to understanding the arc of the epidemic since its onset in the early 1980s. Uganda remains nearly 80 percent rural; but in keeping with a longstanding tradition within sociology, Wyrod focuses on the urbanizing class. Bwaise, a rapidly growing slum community on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, is crowded and prone to flooding. Work is scarce. Life is hard.
Wyrod begins with a compelling and layered motivation for setting his study in Bwaise. During the Museveni era, Uganda was widely touted as a success story with respect to its AIDS epidemic—national estimates of HIV prevalence dropped from 14 percent in 1990 to about 7 percent in 2000. One hallmark of Uganda’s early efforts to curb the spread of HIV was the “Zero Grazing” campaign, which encouraged men to reduce their sexual partnerships but may have simultaneously promoted male sexual privilege by reinforcing the expectation that men have multiple partners.
Uganda is also home to what some have called the most successful women’s movement on the subcontinent; this is a unique context in which local women’s organizations proliferated and flourished, women’s access to paid work expanded in unprecedented ways, and innovative legislation like the Domestic Violence Act, which enhanced penalties for a variety of forms of gender-based violence, was both implemented and enforced. In the wake of these changes, new tensions around gender and sexuality have emerged, providing clear motivation for Wyrod’s interest in the dynamic nature of social interactions and social processes around gender —in particular, the position of men and masculinity in such a context.
Wyrod’s perspective on Bwaise is multi-faceted. The backbone of the project is supported by twelve months of fieldwork conducted in 2004 through three distinct points of entrée: an apprenticeship in a carpentry workshop, volunteer work in a local clinic, and a support group for HIV-positive men. Data collected during follow-up visits in 2009 (three months) and 2015 (one month) allow Wyrod to address the “and then what?” question about a small subset of his interlocutors from 2004. Throughout the book, Wyrod handles his ethnographic duties with great care—reflecting and elaborating on his positionality and its implications for his findings and insights.
After setting the stage in Chapter One in terms of context, method, and puzzle, the book proceeds with five major parts. Chapter Two, “The Making of Masculinity in Urban Uganda,” provides a historical perspective on gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships from the pre-colonial Buganda kingdom to the present. This chapter builds on secondary sources, including foundational ethnographies from the heyday of structural anthropology and contemporary, high-quality historical work. Readers glean a sense of continuity and change in authority structures, marriage rituals, polygyny, household relations, economic transformations, and the challenges of urbanization and entrepreneurism in the setting. This 36-page whirlwind through most of social life over two centuries goes some way to situate the case of Bwaise today, but serious readers will crave more of the source material.
In Chapter Three, “Providing in Poverty,” Wyrod’s unique contribution becomes clear. Here we get vivid descriptions of Julius, Issa, Dennis, and Rafik—each of whom is emblematic of a particular manifestation of the complex relationships between work and sexuality in a setting where the ideal of male economic provider is suffocating, yet work itself is scarce. For providing men, economic success underpins sexual privilege—manifest in concurrent sexual partnerships that are sustained through informal or formal polygyny. Unemployed men also juggle multiple relationships but for a different reason; Wyrod diagnoses this approach to sexual relationships as “sexual escapism”—an attempt to compensate for failing to meet the provider ideal.
Keeping his promises to situate masculinity as a component of gender relations more broadly, Chapter Four, “Women’s Rights in the Remaking of Masculinity,” takes a dyadic view, describing different styles of negotiation within intimate relationships as couples face poverty, property skirmishes, HIV-positive diagnoses, infidelities, and infertility. The often-conflicting perspectives of partners are described, balanced, and interpreted with care. We see how a vocabulary of women’s rights has been folded into everyday interactions, though deployed in a variety of ways—sometimes undermining and sometimes reinforcing men’s authority and male sexual privilege.
Chapter Five, “The Intersection of Masculinity, Sexuality, and AIDS,” applies these insights to the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic and argues that the persistence of masculine sexual privilege—even throughout the worst of the epidemic—is unsurprising. In embracing the pragmatic (small p) message of “Zero Grazing,” both women and men have contributed to the reification of male sexual privilege, even as other aspects of masculine ideals changed considerably during this same period. Wyrod speculates that the shift from “Zero Grazing” to the global strategy articulated by “ABC” (
In “Beyond Bwaise” (Chapter 6), Wyrod relates the findings from his ethnographic case to insights on sex, relationships, and HIV from other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter reads like a literature review and functions to underscore the similarities between the themes he gleans from Bwaise and insights from scholars working in both nearby (e.g., Kenya, Zambia) and more distant (e.g., Nigeria, South Africa) African contexts.
Despite its strengths, the book suffers from being a bit epidemiologically and demographically adrift. Important topics like male labor migration, voluntary medical male circumcision, and pronatalist values as an impediment to condom use receive little to no attention. That access to anti-retroviral therapy has expanded rapidly, dramatically reducing transmission probabilities over the exact period of inquiry, is essential for understanding the arc of AIDS but absent here. Throughout, Wyrod seeks to contest explanations of AIDS that hinge on African hypersexuality—as if this were ever a dominant view. He takes particular aim at a 1989 paper by Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggen that should be reexamined and valued for what it is: a serious effort to describe and understand real differences in entire systems of social relationships—sexual relationships included. In reality, nearly thirty years ago, these authors described something very similar to what Wyrod finds in Bwaise—”that there is a distinct and internally coherent African system embracing sexuality, marriage, and much else, and that it is no more right or wrong, progressive or unprogressive than the Western system” (Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin, p.187).