The Widow in Blue: Blood and the Morality of Remembering in Botswana's Time of Aids

Abstract

Popular talk and silence about AIDS in Botswana have been shaped by survivors' efforts to manage the ways in which they remember relationships arising from procreation. The emotional force of death induces the immediately bereaved and wider communities of survivors to recollect who has shared blood with whom through sexual intercourse. Such acts of remembering may have decisive repercussions on relations of kinship, marriage and mutual support. For Batswana, ‘remembering’ is a form of acting as well as feeling, possessing a capacity to shape moral conduct for the long term. In the context of death, local debates about what and how to remember reflect contested endeavours to make relations based on blood persist beyond a person's passing. Focusing on a particular set of local perspectives on the morality of remembering, the article shows that members of an Apostolic church in Gaborone encourage one another to remember in a manner reflecting distinctive methods of maintaining relations of kinship and care.

Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against AIDS

“…Contemporary entreaties to practice self-restraint can be understood as an adaptation of older moralities to contain the threat of the AIDS epidemic (Klaits 2005). Once Malawians knew that HIV was transmitted through sex, men and women mobilized their existing moral understandings, including categories of bad people (e.g., prostitutes and bar girls, mobile men, and sugar daddies) and typologies of bad behaviors (e.g., “moving” with many partners, old men seducing young women with money, young women seducing rich men by wearing miniskirts, and spending money on alcohol rather than on one's family).…”

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“…The 'proper' ritual shedding of blood also occurs during male circumcision, another central rite of passage in Xhosa systems of knowledge. Klaits (2005) observes how Batswana use the theme of blood, and in particular the potential harmful mixing with the blood of widows, to re-imagine social relations of care and kinship in a time of AIDS. 18.…”

African Theology as Liberating Wisdom

“…About the death rituals in Botswana, see Amanze 2002, 200-223. Regarding widows' social position and the idea of 'hot' or 'dirty' blood of the mourners, see Klaits 2005. About African women and ritual, see .…”