THE EARLY YEARS (1985-1994)
3.3. The Anglican Church’s Response to HIV and AIDS
3.3.5. Responses to HIV at the Grassroots Level
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relations and HIV and AIDS in its own behaviour.‖710 It appears that HIV prevention in the Anglican Church in Manicaland was undermined by a perceived lack of moral leadership that generally turned into moral rhetoric.
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between 1985 and 1994.714 Chimwaza and Mbutsa in separate interviews concurred that from the time of the first appearance of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, and the surge in HIV infection between 1990 and 2000, the epidemic received minimum attention at Holy Name.715 Whereas there were no corporate parish-based HIV and AIDS interventions, some Anglican Christians at the grassroots level were not deterred from supporting and caring for PLHIV and OVC. For example, the church‘s members who were affiliated to the Mothers‘ Union guild ―cared for people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS and operated without diocesan or donor support for PLHIV and orphans.‖716 Apparently, FACT trained some Anglican churchwomen as voluntary caregivers in the early 1990s.717 Chinouya also paid tribute to AIDS-related care initiatives carried out by churchwomen at the grassroots level in the period between the early 1980s and 2007. As Chinouya has observed, ―there were many
‗hands‘ at the grassroots emerging and pouring the cooling waters on a community devastated by the HIV epidemic. These ‗hands‘ are women like the grandmothers, the Mothers‘ Union [guild] members, people infected by HIV and the nuns.‖718 The fact that churchwomen also acted as pastoral agents to the sick led to their early involvement in AIDS-related care programmes.719
Generally, a large proportion of married women in Manicaland including Anglican followers lived separately from their husbands due to migrant labour practices. As already noted above, this exposed women to the risks of contracting HIV from their spouses. Some married women from the Anglican Church appeared helpless in reducing chances of contracting HIV because the church‘s leadership appeared to underestimate the importance of encouraging married couples to live under the same roof. Whereas women were increasingly exposed to HIV, the leadership of the
714 HNM, Minutes of parish council meeting, 6 August 1982, Minutes of parish council meeting, January 1990. Minutes of parish council meeting, January 1993, Minutes of parish council meeting, 30 June 1993.
715 E. Mbutsa, same interview. See also J. Chimwaza, same interview.
716 M. Nyamwena, same interview.
717 B. Makoni, same interview.
718 Chinouya, ―Ubuntu and the helping hands for AIDS,‖ 104. The presence of Anglican nuns in Zimbabwe is traceable from the arrival of Mother Anne at St. Augustine‘s Penhalonga from Grahamstown in South Africa in 1904 and the profession of the first two members of the Chita cheZita Rinoyera (Community of the Holy Name) occurred at Penhalonga in 1941. Later another group of indigenous nuns established centres at St. Faith‘s mission, Rusape, St. Agnes, Gokwe and St. David‘s Bonda mission. For this see Weller, Anglican centenary in Zimbabwe 1891-1991, 10.
719 B. Makoni, same interview, M. Nyamwena, same interview. See also J. Chimwaza, same interview.
See also R. Munakamwe, interview conducted by M. Mbona, Mutare provincial hospital, 1 September 2010. See also J. Mavhima, same interview.
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Anglican Church became hesitant to confront cultural traditions that domesticated married women. The phrase ‗Musha mukadzi,’ meaning that a married woman was expected to stay in that home permanently. Thus, married churchwomen existed in a
‗prison.‘ Similarly, Deborah Gaitskell argued that the early mission-educated African Christian women only advanced women‘s interests in the spheres of social welfare, community projects domestic work. As Gaitskell has further observed: ―Just as anthropologists ‗saw‘ women largely within the family, so a particular view of women‘s primarily domestic role was widely current among women activists early in this century.‖720 Nyamwena mentioned that within the Anglican Church in Manicaland, AIDS-related deaths culminated in a numerical increase in the number of young widows. Many of the widows could not access help from the church and lack of diocesan programmes to support young widows and their families ―exposed them to untold hardships.‖721
Within the Anglican Church in southern Africa, the church had a hand in supporting the low status of women in the home and wide society. This situation was part of the early missionary legacy. In 1993 Marc Epprecht studied the influence of missionaries on churchwomen‘s movements in Lesotho and concluded that the missionaries in southern Africa prescribed an ideology of domesticity for Christian women, with housewifery, wifehood and motherhood as full time spiritual vocations.722 Similarly, Chinouya argued that the missionary ideology of domesticity compromised the position of women in society: ―This discourse of good, housewifery, needlework, Christian motherhood often silenced the private voices of churchwomen…in particular on matters related to domestic violence, sex and sexual health.‖723 The fact that the leadership of the Anglican Church in Manicaland took some time before establishing AIDS sensitisation and prevention programmes at the diocesan level resulted in the exposure of women to the HI-Virus. The women who championed care activities were at great risk of infection from their own spouses.724
720 D. Gaitskell, ―Introduction,‖ Journal of Southern Studies 10, 1 (October 1983), 6.
721 M. Nyamwena, same interview. See also M. Nyakani, interview conducted by M. Mbona, St.
David‘s Bonda mission, 22 September 2010.
722 For a detailed discussion of this see M. Epprecht, ―Domesticity and Piety in colonial Lesotho: the Private Politics of Basotho Women‘s Pious Associations,‖ Journal of Southern African Studies 19/2, (June 1993).
723 Chinouya, ―Ubuntu and the helping hands for AIDS,‖ 106.
724 B. Makoni, same interview. See also J. Chimwaza, same interview. See also M. Nyamwena, same interview.
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