Raça, sexualidade e doença em Moçambique

"Tradition", person, gender, and STD/HIV/AIDS in southern Mozambique

“…In this context, the HIV/AIDS experience can be logically and rationally interpreted in accordance with the premises of "traditional" diseases, as mentioned earlier 13 . This explains the relations that many of the observed subjects have established with HIV/AIDS: on the one hand, they tend not to recognize its specificity; on the other, they actually doubt or even deny its very existence, interpreting it through conceptions of "traditional" diseases.…”

STD/AIDS prevention in Portuguese-speaking Africa: a review of the recent literature in the social sciences and health

“…The elites of these countries include both blacks as well as a white minority, which usually holds strategic posts in politics and the economy 30 . This means that the implications of the color/race dimension on public health in these contexts should be understood in the context of cultural factors, ethnic antagonism, and contrasts between rural, peri-urban, and urban groups.…”

The gender approach in community AIDS projects in Mozambique: agreement and disagreement between government and civil society

“…Sickness in general and AIDS in particular are interpreted from the prism of logic systems and cosmovisions that exclude the notion of an external causal agent and the possibility of human intervention, thereby hampering prevention or treatment activities 7,9 . At the same time, the entire country is absorbed in the work of national reconstruction, with implicit ideas about the division of labor, collective work, and the socialization of its results.…”

“…Yet there is also much resistance to using them, in part for the same reason as in other countries: "it's like eating candy with the wrapper on". But this resistance also reflects distrust of a "white man's" product that keeps babies from being born, that is distributed in order to prevent a disease allegedly invented or imported by this white man, and that may in itself carry HIV 9 . These fallacies concerning the origin and even existence of HIV are basically no different from similar fallacies once, or still, circulating in Brazil and other countries: that the AIDS virus came from abroad, that it was produced in a laboratory for the purpose of genocide, and so on 11 .…”

“…It is worth remembering that this kind of conspiratorial fallacy about HIV acts to obscure the social relations driving the epidemic, including gender relations. In fact, an important part of the work by community organizations in Mozambique focuses on convincing the population that HIV actually does exist, with no room left for addressing native sexual cultures or the barriers these create to the use of condoms, especially through constructs involving masculinity 9 .…”