Shona Womanhood: Rethinking Social Identities in the Face of HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe (Report‪)‬

Introduction One of the major problems in sub-Saharan Africa at the moment outside ethnic conflict is the issue of HIV and AIDS. The scourge has created multifarious problems that even call for fundamental changes to obtaining social relationships and patterns of existence that had almost assumed an absolute character in many African cultural groups over the years. This work focuses on the impact of the HIV and AIDS disease on Shona society with specific focus on Shona women. The Shona constitutes one of the largest cultural groups in Zimbabwe. This work has been prompted by an upsetting revelation that rather than being a solution to the problem of HIV and AIDS marriage has become a heath on which the disease breeds and is then passed on to partners. According to the Zimbabwe Human Development Report more and more women are being infected inside marriages than outside (iii). All this has been blamed on the patriarchal social philosophy that condones wayward behavior as part of what defines the Shona man. While it may sound unfortunately like blaming the victim, the work argues that armed with their numerical advantage Zimbabwean women have what it takes to bring about positive change and reduce the spread of the disease if only they could transform themselves into agents of cultural change or incubators of a new social arrangement. The work considers how the Shona women over the years have been made vulnerable by the very identities which they have taken for granted or as given and therefore natural. Of particular interest to this work is the construction of womanhood among the Shona based on two elements of being a wife and a mother which are stipulatively taken by the writer as 'belonging' and 'producing' respectively. This work draws on the theory of social constructionism and the idea of agency to argue that in confronting the pandemic women can do well to 'think outside the box' provided by their own Shona tradition and culture in order to build new identities for themselves that can empower them to confront the pandemic. To bring about that positive change, women also need to confront cultural and gender essentialism as well as selective labeling (iv), weapons used by dominant members of a cultural group to maintain the status quo. The work goes on to make recommendations on how women can construct enabling identities that may reduce their vulnerability.