Where Loose Behaviour is Main Source of HIV Spread

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

Daniel Muhau

2 May 2011

There are many reasons Bernard Mapalala cites as the major causes of the spread of HIV/Aids – his main theme in Passed Like a Shadow. From mere immorality (people sleeping around) and peer pressure to widespread ignorance and blind devotion and belief to disastrous traditional norms, the reasons are many and varied.

The author shows that one of the reasons people are dying of Aids in Uganda and Tanzania where the story is set is due to their promiscuity. There are several men and women in Passed Like a Shadow, who sleep around – they have more than one sexual partner, and for this they pay with death.

Good with ladies

Mapalala warns that the penalty for prostitution, adultery or infidelity is a slow and painful death. Adyeri is a well-educated man, a former headmaster, who loses his head after losing his job, and begins having affairs despite the fact that he is a married man, with grown up children. He has a prostitute called Birungi. As if that is not enough, he sleeps around with women in the streets. The result is he gets HIV and infects his innocent wife as well.

At his funeral his friends make interesting and very important comments about him. One says, “The man could really drink…” Another friend observes, “He was good dealing with ladies.” However, one of Adyeri’s friends does not use figurative language or sugar coat the kind of person their deceased colleague really was. He says: “But he was a fool. It was his love for ladies which killed him.”

One would have expected much better from him, being an educated and “intelligent man” as his friends say. Apparently, he is not the only one. There are many more loose characters: David and father enjoy causal sex. The father gets attracted to his beautiful house girl, who is suspected to be responsible for infecting him with the disease. There is also poor Vicky, whose failure to marry the man she loves leaves her frustrated. To ease her sorrows, she has sex with any man, who comes around. She dies a painful death at the end. When her cousin sister Abooki visits her later, she says: “I am a dead person already.”

Promiscuity, Mapalala wants to show, has become a major problem in Uganda and Tanzania. Men at Adyeri’s funeral paint a gloomy picture of the situation. One of them makes a touching comment and frightening observation: “Mawe, this disease will kill us all. Are we going to survive? And the ladies are becoming more and more attractive.”

And the problem is that prostitution has taken the better not only of the elderly people, but also the younger generation. This makes the situation even more tragic. It comes as a little-surprise when we read that Adyeri’s son, Atwoki, who has become a successful footballer, earning himself the nickname ‘Bullet’, is also a womaniser. The young boy grows up with no role model.

He gets money and fame after years of working hard to come out of poverty, but like his useless father, gets carried away by women in the streets. Like his father, he dies of Aids. The fact that he is an international footballer with money cannot save him. His death is even more painful because he is just a young man.

John, the foxy young man, who befriends Abooki, Atwoki’s sister, indulges in a game of sexual conquest with this innocent girl. He thinks it is smart to seduce a girl, and force her into sex after drugging her drink. The stupid boy he is, he laughs at his ‘victory’ after breaking Abooki’s virginity. It does not even cross his mind that by having unprotected sex with her, he exposes himself to Aids as well.

In a nutshell, Mapalala points out in a shrewd way, that Aids could not have been the infamous killer it is today if people changed their behaviour.

AllAfrica – All the Time