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Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies ISSN 2633-0695
Vol 2.1 (Autumn 2020)
13
On Becoming a Change Agent: Journeys of Teaching Gender and
Health in an African Crisis Context*
Musa W. Dube
mudube00@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses my activities in the classroom and beyond to address African contexts of the HIV and AIDS
crisis. Alongside an account of my strategies, encounters and journeys, I discuss the activist Gugu Dlamini and
Mmutle, a trickster of African folklore. Both act as inspirations for the role of change agent.
KEYWORDS
Botswana; Change Agent; HIV and AIDS; Gugu Dlamini; Mmutle
Introduction
A change agent is someone who is prompted by the demands of her (or his) context to take
on the role of public leadership in order to effect change. This, in turn, changes the change
agent herself in the process. In this paper, I share my journeys in the academy and with Faith-
Based Organizations, highlighting how inhabiting the space of being a change agent is shaped
by context, by experiences and by commitment to convictions, which in this case pertain to
the alleviation of suffering and to the quest for liberation and the empowerment of the
marginalized and oppressed. Whereas my commitment to teaching about the protection of
rights on the grounds of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, ethnicity and colonial boundaries
was nurtured in part by my identity, historical background and academic training, this paper
highlights how the social category of health was thrust into my teaching and research agenda
by living in the midst of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Challenges and opportunities for teaching
gender and health in African contexts will be drawn from the University of Botswana
classroom experience, my travels within the continent of Africa, and from the interactions I
have had with theologians and religious leaders on the subject of transforming the curriculum
for mainstreaming gender, HIV and AIDS. I will preface these examples with two narratives, in
order to capture more vividly something of the risk and something of the agility required for
being a change agent. The first narrative is the true and tragic account of South African activist
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Teaching Gender and Health in Africa:
Hearing from Our Change Agents Conference, hosted by the Gender Unit of the Faculty of Theology,
Stellenbosch University, South Africa on 22–23 March 2018. The conference was held in celebration of the
conferment of honorary doctorate to Musa W. Dube in recognition of her contribution to the struggle against
HIV and AIDS.
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Vol 2.1 (Autumn 2020)
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Gugu Dlamini. The second is the figure of Mmutle the hare, the trickster of southern African
folklore stories.
Remembering Gugu Dlamini
The year 2019 brings us to twenty-one years since the brutal killing of Gugu Dlamini.
1
Born in
1962, and beaten, stoned and stabbed to death in late 1998, Gugu Dlamini was a Zulu South
African single mother and HIV+ activist. She had joined the National Association of People
Living With HIV and AIDS and volunteered as one of their community educators. On December
1st 1998 (World AIDS Day), she disclosed her HIV+ status, speaking out both in a public stadium
and on a Zulu language radio broadcast. Following her bold act, Dlamini was harassed,
assaulted, beaten and pushed down a cliff. She was violently killed for openly telling her story
and for assuming the role of teaching about HIV and AIDS in her community. As the Gugu
Dlamini Foundation, inspired by and established in her memory, states on their website
“[Dlamini’s] death highlighted the level of stigma in South Africa and the world in general for
people living with HIV… and [the need] to keep fight[ing] against HIV and AIDS and Gender
Based Violence.”
2
Dlamini’s story brings us to the topics of women’s health, agency and teaching, which
are potentially, as her tragically and brutally cut-short life demonstrates, acutely risky topics,
especially so when women are on the margins. Dlamini was marginalized on account of many
factors: she was poor, Black, a woman, subaltern,
3
a single mother, HIV+. Her story also brings
us to Gayatri Spivak’s tough question: namely, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
4
In this classic
article Spivak tells the story of an Indian woman who is caught between Western imperialism
and the patriarchy of her own people. In an attempt to resist the power of both, this woman
is caught between a rock and hard place. She ends up committing suicide and is thus silenced
in her very act of attempting to break silence. Spivak concludes that the subaltern can not
speak, unless her status changes—when she is no longer subaltern. Spivak’s question and
1
Gugu Dlamini is not to be confused with sex worker activist Dudu Dlamini. Dudu Dlamini is another
health leader of South Africa. Like Gugu Dlamini she has suffered brutal experiences. Dudu Dlamini is winner of
the Prudence Mabele Award (July 2018), which was created in honour of the first Black woman in South Africa
to reveal her HIV status publicly. The award is given in recognition of outstanding work in the area of gender
justice and health equity activism. See Amy Green, “We Speak to Award-Winning Sex Worker Activist Dudu
Dlamini,” Health E-News, 9 August 2018.
2
For the Gugu Dlamini Foundation, see http://gugudlaminifoundation.org/#.
3
The term ‘subaltern’ was coined by Antonio Gramsci and is used in postcolonial critical studies to
designate colonized populations who within the power hierarchy established in colonial settings, are excluded
or displaced and thereby denied any political voice. It refers to systemic and systematic oppression and to
being designated “other” and barred access to the resources of cultural imperialism.
4
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994),
66–111.
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conclusion are very important for underlining the suffocating constraints within the cultural,
economic and political structures, which all marginalized people, and marginalized women in
particular, endure – though, of course, to varying degrees, according to other factors of social
location.
Mmutle the Trickster and Being a Change Agent
I wrote and published an article that is in conversation with Spivak’s and entitled “The
Subaltern Can Speak: Reading the Mmutle (Hare) Way.”
5
In this article I feature and analyze
the folk stories of the southern African trickster figure, Mmutle
6
the hare. The hare, a small
and weak animal, has to exist alongside the big and powerful animals, such as lions, elephants,
rhino, hyenas, and human beings. Nonetheless, for all his disadvantages, Mmutle consistently
and constantly challenges and tricks everyone – even those who had not made any attempt
to oppress him, and even when he is invited to participate. It seems that the subtext of the
southern African trickster stories is that the powerful have already been judged and found
guilty by the subaltern and hence, they have to be challenged and treated at all times with
suspicion, never to be humoured or trusted. Mmutle the hare trickster always mocks,
provokes, challenges, insults and lies to the powers that be and to his whole community, with
or without any apparent cause. Mmutle’s persistent challenge and rejection of the powerful
and the rest of the community, too, can be disturbing and almost borders on anarchy. Yet, in
doing so, the Mmutle discourses underline that subalterns should remain highly conscious of
the structures that they occupy and which militate against them. Consequently, what I take
from this and want to stress is that dedication to resistance should become an imperative
way of life.
7
This can mean that relentless dedication to resistance puts life in danger: in most
stories about him, Mmutle faces danger and comes very close to death. But he escapes and
wins, because Mmutle’s weapon is his brain and his feet—that is, both the capacity to think
5
Musa W. Dube, “The Subaltern Can Speak: Reading the Mmutle (Hare) Way,” Journal of Africana
Religions 4/1 (2016): 54–75.
6
This trickster, depicted as a hare, or rabbit, has other names and manifestations in a variety of
African settings. He is called Uvundla among the Ndebele, for instance, and also Tsuro Magen’a. See
Munyaradzi Mawere, Divining the Future of Africa: Healing the Wounds, Restoring Dignity and Fostering
Development (Langaa PRCIG, 2014), 42.
7
As with any other stories, the trickster narratives have multiple meanings depending upon each
reader and their agenda. In this paper, the trickster is read from the perspective of the marginalized who
employ multiple tools of resistance against their oppressors. Whereas, for example, the colonizers regarded
the colonized as lazy, for the colonized, laziness was a strategy of resistance: the refusal to be exploited yet
more in the colonial wage labour and its structures. In southern Africa, for example, hut tax was introduced to
force African men to move away in order to undertake work in the mines. Needless to say, the colonial
archives and persisting attitudes may still associate former colonized people with laziness, which reflects a
colonial mindset—given that the supposedly lazy people powered plantations and homes of the comparatively
inactive colonizers during the slavery era and afterwards. Arguably, trickery could also confirm stereotypes of
subaltern untrustworthiness but my focus here is on dexterity and invention in the face of oppression.
Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies ISSN 2633-0695
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creatively and trick the powerful, and the capacity to run away. The fate of Dlamini, however,
confirms that brains, bravery and effort do not always win: risk is real.
In the southern African trickster discourse, which I read as a radicalizing subaltern
discourse, there is an emphasis on the marginalized challenging the structures of oppression.
The subaltern, as exemplified by Mmutle the hare, is inculcated never to give the structures
of oppression any ease, but consistently to challenge and subvert them. Be that as it may, this
indigenous discourse of agency does not deny that in doing so the change agent faces real
danger: her or his life is on the line for daring to challenge the powers that be, their structures
and their institutions. There is some agreement between Spivak’s and Dlamini’s stories: both
graphically show that the subaltern’s voice and acts of agency can be so constricted by
structures of power that speaking becomes simultaneously the violent and permanent
silencing of the subaltern. Perhaps, the most instructive rhetoric of Mmutle the trickster is
that no matter how much danger one faces, the subaltern must never give up on disturbing
those who hold power and must persevere in the quest for agency.
Sarah Gammage, Naila Kabeer and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers explain, focusing
particularly on feminist activism, that “structure and agency are closely intertwined with
manifestation of power.” They point out, too, that, “feminists from all disciplines … locate
agency in the context of structural constraints.”
8
Feminists, like other change agents, work
within “structures [that] shape the agency of individuals and groups, but agency exercised by
individuals and groups in turn shapes structures, reproducing, modifying and transforming
them.”
9
In other words, change agents bring about change even within settings that obstruct
them – and they are also themselves transformed by this agency. Change agency is, therefore,
a process of expanding empowerment through tenaciously employing various strategies and
at various levels, both individually and collectively, against structures that constrain women
and other marginalized persons and groups in a variety of contexts. Agency is practised in an
array of forms and manifestations, such as in subtle bargaining, passive resistance, outright
rejection, negotiation, and intentional moves to start a revolution—but always within
constraints of structures and always towards the quest to increase or maintain
representation and empowerment.
HIV and AIDS and Women’s Health
Opening this paper with Gugu Dlamini’s story is meaningful and strategic for several reasons
when exploring the theme of teaching about gender and health in Africa. First, it is important
to remember that Dlamini was a community educator who has gone on, through the
foundation named after her, to educate others long after her violent death. She was an
educator and also part of a collective, because she had joined and she represented a support
8
Sarah Gammage, Naila Kabeer and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, “Voice and Agency: Where Are
We Now?” Feminist Economics 22/1 (2016), 2.
9
Gammage, Kabeer and van der Meulen Rodgers, “Voice and Agency,” 1.
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group. Second, her story throws into stark relief the structural constraints working against
Dlamini as she sought agency and gave her voice and then her life to defend persons struggling
on the peripheries. Dlamini’s story also highlights embodiment, since she was both a person
living with HIV and a victim of gender-based violence.
The atrocity committed against Dlamini in response to speaking out, highlights violence
against women as another major health issue. HIV and AIDS always bring out matters of power
and oppression, through revealing the numerous interconnections between class, sexuality,
gender, reproductive health, the disadvantages of the girl-child, and mental health. The HIV
and AIDS epidemic shows up clearly how both the health of individuals and communal health
are invariably connected by the social categories of gender, class, race, age, sexuality and
disability, among others. And this has the consequence that the HIV and AIDS epidemic
persistently reminds us that health is enmeshed with questions of justice and with the need
to expand the boundaries of justice to encompass all members of our communities. In the
past four decades, HIV and AIDS has functioned much like an apocalyptic
10
text, graphically
and brutally revealing the truth we always knew: in this case, that those who do not have
accommodation, food, jobs, clean water; those who do not have power to make decisions
about their lives and to implement them; those who cannot speak and be heard; those who
do not have resources; those who have no access to education are far more likely to find their
health compromised and their potential and their life cut short. The situation has already
placed them in harm’s way.
It has, consequently, become a slogan to say HIV and AIDS is an epidemic within other
social epidemics. This is because the epidemic demonstrated that individuals’ power to
abstain, be faithful, or to condomize,
11
was in large part dependent on their resources, their
power to make decisions and implement them, as well as their capacity to control and protect
their bodies—which, again, are all affected by the categories of gender,
12
class, race, sexuality
and age. Hence, where people are subjected to gender inequality, poverty, age-based
disempowerment, stigma, racial or ethnic discrimination, among others, they also tend to be
less able to implement healthy choices. By this I mean choices that protect from infection in
the first place and that, in the event of becoming ill, enable access to quality care and to
compassionate embracement that protects from stigma and discrimination. Power
hierarchies, institutions, agency, empowerment and health are all inter-connected and those
lowest in the social hierarchy are most vulnerable to becoming infected with HIV and least
10
The word “apocalypse” literally means “revelation”. While this revelation traditionally pertains in
the Bible to a (frightening) future time, it is also rooted in turbulent and violent social circumstances. The two
biblical apocalypses (chapters 7–12 from the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation) are believed to have
originated in communities experiencing oppression from the Seleucids and Romans respectively.
11
“Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomize” was, and still is, the slogan of one of the most prominent
campaigns aimed at stemming the spread of HIV and AIDS. It was called the “ABC” campaign.
12
For examples of this pertaining to gender, see the contributions in Musa W. Dube Shomanah and
Musimbi Kanyoro, eds., Grant Me Justice! HIV/AIDS and Gender Readings of the Bible (New York: Orbis and
Natal: Cluster, 2004).
Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies ISSN 2633-0695
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likely to receive medication, support and care when they do. The revelations and apocalypses
of HIV and AIDS show that teaching about health goes hand in hand with advocating for justice
and against all forms of oppression.
13
The need for sustained focus on health in the African context cannot be
overemphasized. This is attested, for example, by the United Nations’ progress report on the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
14
While various factors (e.g. carbon dioxide
concentrations and ocean acidity) are highlighted as of worldwide concern, southern Africa,
where the HIV and AIDS epidemic is also most entrenched, is identified as of particular
concern.
15
Several of the SDGs are proving particularly challenging in large parts of the African
continent, including SDG 1, on ending poverty; SDG 2, on ending hunger; SDG 3, on ensuring a
healthy life and promoting well-being, including in the area of reproductive health and
infectious diseases; SDG 4, focused on quality education; SDG 5, pertaining to gender equality;
SDG 6, focused on clean water and sanitation; and SDG 7, working towards affordable and
clean energy.
16
Teaching about gender and health in Africa remains imperative for achieving
the SDG global agenda by 2030.
As I reflect, Dlamini’s violent death raises more questions for me as a teacher and HIV
and AIDS activist. Does one have to, or should one be prepared to die for one’s commitment
to educate for transformation? Is the death of a brave advocate the price for the health and
justice of the many? Yes, teachers and activists undertake their role because they seek the
betterment of life for communities; often they seek to counteract death-dealing structures
in their societies or institutions. Their own death, or the death of their followers, is not in
most cases their choice or aim, but because such advocacy challenges social structures and
institutions, as well as relationships, danger becomes part of resistance and change-seeking.
Like Mmutle the trickster, one must always look for ways to escape from danger in order to
continue pushing at the boundaries but, like Dlamini, one may not always escape. Indeed,
commitment to teaching for justice and health and the continuous engagement with the
powers that push back, can force one to come to the resolution of Nelson Mandela in his
13
I and others have used biblical texts to advocate for social justice and to make visible and resist HIV
and AIDS-related oppressions. For examples, see the contributions in Musa W. Dube, ed., HIV/AIDS and the
Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes (Geneva: World Council of Churches
Publications, 2003). This volume writes HIV and AIDS into the Bible and into reading for liberation and social
transformation.
14
See United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals Report, 2019,
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/progress-report/. For another report from the same year, which
focuses specifically on the impact of religion and religious actors on the aims of the SDGs, see Jorg Haustein
and Emma Tomalin, “Keeping Faith in 2030: Religions and the Sustainable
Development Goals,” Humanitarian Academy for Development, 2019,
https://had-int.org/e-library/keeping-faith-in-2030-religions-and-the-sustainable-development-
goals/.
15
For instance, the report states that “three quarters of stunted children live in Southern Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa” (United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals Report, 2019).
16
There are 17 SDGs in total.
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struggle against apartheid: “It is an ideal for which I hope to live…. But… if it needs to be, it is
an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
17
Mandela endured much but eventually walked out
of prison to play a crucial role in the birth of South Africa’s rainbow nation.
18
Other activists,
such as Gugu Dlamini, Martin Luther King Junior, Chris Hani, Steve Biko, among very many
others, did not enjoy the same opportunity.
19
With all of them, their violent bodily death did
not silence their mission and purpose, which lived on in their followers and admirers. The
Gugu Dlamini Foundation is one example of this posterity and continued activism. It has been
established to keep Dlamini’s memory alive and to carry out projects addressing gender
based violence, achieving women’s empowerment by promoting their socio-economic, sexual
and reproductive rights, offering life skills courses and promoting the well-being of girl-
children, as well as courses on art and sports, which are an integral part of physical and
mental health.
20
There are very many African examples of those who died for daring to be
change agents and whose voices lived on past their physical death.
21
Being a Change Agent: Into Africa
Over the past decades, I have thrown in my lot with those many others who became change
agents in the struggle against HIV and AIDS. In this endeavour, my agency has been enabled by
my social location. First, I had family education. My grandmother was this awesome storyteller
and singer and my mother was a Bible reader and singer. And so I grew up being very active
in church and fancying myself a future creative writer from a young age. My teenage years
and early twenties were marked by lots of singing in choirs, in duets and as a soloist. I also
spent my undergraduate time with the writers’ club, writing poems, short stories and
planning novels. Later, I would occupy the stimulating institutional space of the academy,
which encourages the generation of ideas, researching, writing, publishing and teaching. As a
17
These famous words formed part of Nelson Mandela’s three-hour speech, given on 20 April 1964
from the dock of the defendant at the Rivonia Trial. This trial culminated in the imprisonment of Mandela.
18
The name “rainbow nation” is associated with Archbishop Desmond Tutu who used it to describe
his hopes for a peaceful post-apartheid South Africa, no longer riven by separations along colour lines. Not
everyone accepts the ideal of the rainbow nation (e.g. Sisonke Msimang, “The End of the Rainbow Nation
Myth,” The New York Times, 12 April 2015).
19
In Africa alone the list can be greatly prolonged. One of the earliest recorded is Kimpa Vita (1684–
1706), leader of an African-centred Christian movement and celebrated still as an antislavery figure and an
inspiration for modern democracy movements. She was burned as a heretic, with the consent and counsel of
Capuchin friars.
20
See The Gugu Dlamini Foundation, see http://gugudlaminifoundation.org/#.
21
Just as Mmutle provided me with a fillip for reflection as I contemplated subaltern resistance and
subversion, so I am again reminded of a figure from African folklore. This time it is Utentelezandleni from an
oral tradition. According to the story, she was a young girl, buried by the girls of her village, but she sang out
from her grave, telling her story. For more on this, see Musa W. Dube, “Fifty Years of Bleeding: A Storytelling
Feminist Reading of Mark 5:24-43 (A Gender Personified Perspective on the Effects of the Christian European
Colonization of Africa,” The Ecumenical Review 51/1 (1999): 11–17. Also relevant here is the Zimbabwean concept
of ngozi, according to which the spirit of a person who has died or been killed unjustly returns for vengeance.
Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies ISSN 2633-0695
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member of the academy, I also became a member of the Circle of Concerned African Women
Theologians,
22
which particularly supports research, writing and publications with a cause:
namely, the empowerment of African women in the face of all that militates against them.
HIV and AIDS broke into our communities in the early 1980s and one of my first
responses was to write a short story, which I later published.
23
In the 1990s, as the epidemic
continued to make visible marks on our communities, I wrote songs, poems and prayers. I did
not publish most of them but I continued writing, hoping to mobilize the interdenominational
choir, Hope for Today, with whom I had a long-standing association, to sing songs I had written
and to produce an album, the publicity and proceeds of which would support orphans. I was
by then studying towards my PhD in the USA. When I returned to Botswana in 1997, I was
bringing with me a collection of songs, poems and prayers, but five years on from my
departure, most members of Hope for Today were scattered across Botswana and beyond.
‘My’ choir was no longer there in Gaborone (the capital city of Botswana).
But I did not give up. I tried practising as a soloist. I tried raising funds to sponsor an
album and also the production of a documentary video to use as a teaching tool in churches.
I ended up spending mostly my own money but finally received funding for the video from the
World Council of Churches (WCC). And so, I produced a documentary.
24
The video is in two
languages, Setswana and English, and was intended better to equip churches for tending to
the needs of children orphaned as their older relatives succumbed to HIV and AIDS. The video
documents what churches were doing or not doing, and sought to motivate more churches
into action. Named AfricaThapelong/AfricaPraying, it was launched through the Botswana
Council of Churches, an ecumenical organization. It went on to be used not only in Botswana
but (facilitated by WCC) also internationally.
As with Mmutle, the circumstances around me had made me inventive. As I write, I
realize that in responding to HIV and AIDS, my actions in the academic space came well after
my actions in the wider community and in churches. Creative outputs, compositions for
church settings, and the documentary all came before I took HIV and AIDS into the university
classroom or made it part of my academic outputs, such as publications and conference
presentations. But the pressure of the HIV and AIDS health crisis thrust the issue into my
academic realm, too. This is because the late 1990s were a significantly different time from
the late 1980s or early 1990s. Deaths reached their zenith. The pressures came from multiple
22
The Circle held its 5th Pan-African congress at the University of Botswana in July 2019. For a history
of this dynamic and empowering group, founded by Mercy Amba Oduyoye in 1989, see NyaGondwe Fiedler, A
History of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians 1989–2007 (Oxford: African Books
Collective/Project MUSE, 2017).
23
Musa W. Dube, “Years of Fear and Uncertainty,” Kutlwano Magazine (April 1992): 30–33. This was
followed by my later composition, “They Should Not See Him,” in Nobantu Rasebotsa (ed.), Nobody Ever Said AIDS:
Stories & Poems from Southern Africa (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), 152–57.
24
Musa W. Dube, AfricaThapelong: Dikhutsana Ditlhoka Lorato/AfricaPraying: Orphans Need Love, a
documentary video in two languages (Setswana and English) (Gaborone: Botswana Council of Churches, 2000).
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directions and stemmed from the virus’ incurability, the unaffordability of drugs, from
heightened stigma and discrimination, from the length of suffering and of the accumulating
burdens of caregiving, from the massive death toll and the constant funerals, from the rising
numbers of orphaned children, from the gendered nature of the epidemic, which saw women
struck down in greater numbers. And this was a crisis situation that demanded responses
from all areas—it demanded that everyone commit to educating for understanding and to
arresting and managing HIV and AIDS and its impact.
I am a scholar of the New Testament and I often felt overawed and overwhelmed by my
context, marred as it was by death and hopelessness. I did begin to question the relevance
and purpose of teaching my subject. After all, according to the rate of infection at that time,
half of my students would be dead within a decade.
25
Indeed, students were disappearing
from class: either, because they were taking care of parents or orphaned siblings, or because
they were grieving, or sick themselves. With some who remained, I noticed a sudden drop of
marks, which was probably often due to the devastating impact of the epidemic on their
individual, family and communal lives.
But I was also struck in new ways by my research subject, the New Testament, because
it seemed to be so contrary to our HIV and AIDS context. And this, in turn, forced me to rethink
its relevance and to search for points of reconciliation. The gospels, which I was teaching at
the time, feature Jesus healing every disease, even incurable ones. Jesus dispels stigma by
touching the untouchable: lepers (Matt 8:3; cf. 10:8) and bleeding women (Matt 9:20-22; Mark
5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48).
26
And he also speaks up for the ostracized: for sex workers and tax
collectors (Matt 21:31). Jesus restores the dead to life: this is what happens in the stories of
Lazarus (John 11) and of Jairus’ daughter (Matt 9; Mark 5; Luke 8). But in my context of the
HIV and AIDS crisis, those who were infected and ill were stigmatized, shunned, isolated and
feared. The spread and incurability of HIV and the unaffordability of drugs at that time meant
that those afflicted were sentenced to social isolation, spiritual loneliness and a drawn-out
death. The New Testament stories of healing projected a very different world. The stories
25
I have written of this elsewhere. See, Musa W. Dube, “Remembering the Teacherly Moments of the
HIV and AIDS Texts,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 43/4 (2019): 320–34; Musa W. Dube, The HIV
and AIDS Bible: Some Selected Essays (Scranton: The University of Scranton Press, 2008) and Musa W. Dube, ed.
HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Education (Geneva: WCC
Publications, 2004).
26
The word widely translated “leprosy” in the Bible is likely to refer to Hansen’s disease, an infection
of the skin and nerves caused by slow-growing bacteria. According to Levitical law, contact with persons
affected by such diseases (Lev 13), just like contact with persons who have either menstrual or normal or
abnormal genital discharges (Lev 15), is circumscribed. It appears disease is linked in Leviticus above all to
impurity rather than moral onus. This is less clear elsewhere in the Bible where disease is sometimes
associated with curses and sinfulness. For more detail on this, including with reference to HIV and AIDS, see
Johanna Stiebert, “Does the Hebrew Bible Have Anything to Tell Us About HIV/AIDS?” in HIV/AIDS and the
Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes, ed. Musa W. Dube (Geneva: World
Council of Churches Publications, 2003), 24–34. Jesus does not subscribe to Levitical prohibition but comes
into deliberate physical contact with the afflicted instead.
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held up a card of hope amid hopelessness, by intimating that healing is possible.
27
They called
upon faith-based Christian communities to become havens of hope, healing and
compassion.
28
The challenges posed by the epidemic called for creative response in all of my teaching,
interpretation of the gospels, research and writing. I decided to take the gospel stories of
healing and give them to my students to go out and read them with around four different
people in the community, probing their relevance and meaning in settings where there was
no healing. Students compiled their findings and presented them to the class. Communal
engagement returned interpretations that concluded that healing is God’s will and that
healing will ultimately come.
29
The exercise encouraged students to think about and critically
reflect on the impact of HIV and AIDS on their communities, to talk about HIV and AIDS openly,
to examine their own spiritual response to HIV and AIDS and sometimes, together with faith
community members, to embrace their partnership with God in negotiating healing and hope
where there was no healing and where hope seemed absent. Not only did this task, where
students left the University setting and applied their learning within the wider community,
build bridges and trust between the academy and the wider community, it also gave rise to
new theological frameworks for reading. Communication and learning worked in both
directions and the presentation of findings created a space for breaking the silence in the
classroom, allowing us to talk about HIV and AIDS as a health issue that affected all of us. The
very act of breaking the silence in the classroom gave rise to a space for healing and for
activism, because we together acknowledged that there is a problem and that we could
collectively do something about it. I also encouraged students to focus on HIV and AIDS for
their research projects, stressing my willingness to supervise students who wished to pursue
this line of research. These small moves would later include encouraging my fellow colleagues
to write and present papers on HIV and AIDS from their various disciplines, alongside my own
commitment to including HIV and AIDS in whatever paper I needed to write or whichever
27
To be acknowledged here is that the stories of Jesus’ healing ministry are subject to multiple
interpretations and meanings and have various possible impacts. Whereas in the HIV and AIDS context they
were often read as beacons of hope, they can also be read as stories that marginalize and oppress. For
example, for people with disabilities these stories can be read as subjugating them to assessments of being
deficient and in need of improvement, or to prayers of healing on account of something that is constituent of
and sometimes cherished as formative of their identity. They might also be blamed for having too little faith
when healing does not occur. In such contexts Jesus’ stories of healing are liable to oppressing persons with
disabilities.
28
I discuss this more fully elsewhere: see Musa W. Dube, “Healing Where There is No Healing: Reading
the Miracles of Healing in an AIDS Context,” in Reading Communities Reading Scripture: Essays in Honor of Daniel
Patte, ed. by Nicole Wilkinson and Gary Phillips (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2002), 121–33.
29
See, Musa W. Dube, “Mark’s Healing Stories in an AIDS Context,” in Global Bible Commentary, ed. by
Daniel Patte, J. Severino Croatto, and Nicole Wilkinson Duran et al. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2004), 379–84.
Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies ISSN 2633-0695
Vol 2.1 (Autumn 2020)
23
public lecture I gave. The results of mobilizing my colleagues to address HIV and AIDS were
published in a special edition of the journal Missionalia.
30
These various experiments and my determination to push HIV and AIDS education in
churches and in the academy later led to my continent-wide assignment with WCC to train
theological leaders about HIV, AIDS and about gender. Gender has enormous bearing on HIV
and AIDS and yet neither churches nor theological institutions were mainstreaming gender
education. In many instances such education was inadequate and even nonexistent.
Moreover, this was not showing signs of changing and was contributing to the spread and
misery of HIV and AIDS. Consequently, the WCC made it possible for me to leave my post at
the University Botswana for a fixed term in order to undertake the Africa-wide role of
developing context-specific skills and strategies for mainstreaming gender, HIV and AIDS in a
variety of WCC programmes.
The task was not only to be a change agent but also to train other change agents. It was
intense. The assignment was big and theological-specific materials on HIV and gender were
not yet readily available, so the training of trainers and the production of suitable materials in
a variety of theological areas, occurred simultaneously. Collaboration with the Circle of
Concerned African Women Theologians (henceforth Circle), INERELA+
31
and with other
scholars and leaders was extremely helpful and productive, yielding important resources for
practical application.
32
Given that HIV and AIDS put African women at the centre of the storm,
the Circle, under the leadership of Isabel Phiri, chose to take it up as its research theme for
seven years, thereby stimulating the production of yet more publications. The Circle’s
support for theological-specific work on HIV and AIDS was also very effective in assisting
academic institutions Africa-wide and worldwide so that HIV would become mainstreamed in
more and more teaching programmes.
For churches, meanwhile, I designed “Training of Training” (TOT) workshops on the
theme of compassion and I invited about ten scholars to write sermon outlines on various HIV
and AIDS topics, targeting different groups, as well as specific seasons and moments in the
church calendar and in people’s lives. The compilation became the edited book
30
Musa W. Dube with Tinyiko S. Maluleke, eds., Missionalia 29/2 (2001).
31
INERELA+ stands for the International Network of Religious Leaders Living with HIV and AIDS. It has
a sub-group called ANERELA+, the African Network, founded by Canon Gideon Byamugisha. There exist also
national variants, such as UNERELA, the Ugandan Network. Their slogan is “Positive Faith in Action” and the
network seeks “to empower its members to use their positions within their faith communities in a way that
breaks silence, challenges stigma and provides delivery of evidence-based prevention, care, and treatment
services” (INERELA+, http://inerela.org/, 2018).
32
E.g. Isabel Apawo Phiri, Beverley Haddad and Madipoane Masenya (ngwana’ Mphahlele), eds.,
African Women, HIV/AIDS, and Faith Communities (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2003) and Dube
and Kanyoro, eds., Grant Me Justice! (2004).
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AfricaPraying,
33
which was distributed worldwide and has had five reprints. The narratives of
people living with HIV and AIDS were for me of particular significance in all these attempts to
inspire change agents. This is because the stigma and discrimination around HIV and AIDS
were a major hindrance in all our endeavours to break the silence and enable helpful action
and response. Giving faces and words to the disease, humanized and made vivid the lives and
hardships behind HIV and AIDS. And this was crucial in making change possible. To achieve
this, I worked in several workshops with Canon Gideon Byamugisha, the first African priest to
openly declare his HIV status, and I began also to draw on his organization ANERELA+, which
provided us with names of HIV+ priests and church leaders who were out about their status
and story. I would open each workshop by featuring a church leader who would speak of his
or her HIV status. Their stories created a context of ownership, inclusion and compassion,
highlighting that if one member is HIV+, the church of God is HIV+.
Challenges: Gender, Condoms and Whoredom
For the most part, because challenge was all around and helpful resources few, there was
thirst for a space to talk, learn about, and engage with HIV and AIDS, both from lecturers of
theology and from religious leaders. But this widespread eagerness to find out more does not
mean I did not encounter difficulties and tensions. I recall that from the start, the question
was posed to WCC, “Why are you sending this little girl to speak to church leaders all over
Africa?” Gender- and age-based doubts were raised concerning my capacity to speak to and
be heard by church leaders.
One of the rejections I experienced was from a principal of a Lutheran theological
seminary in my country. He was a Finnish white man. I sent the curriculum for mainstreaming
HIV and AIDS to him and asked to see him, regarding a TOT I was planning to hold and to see
if he could host it in his institution. He granted me an appointment. Upon my arrival, he
informed me that unfortunately neither he, nor his lecturers could participate in the TOT,
because, while HIV and AIDS was indeed a very serious issue, I was “playing feminist games.”
Apparently, the centrality of gender in my proposed curriculum annoyed him. So I went
knocking elsewhere to organize the Botswana TOT.
While running a TOT workshop for church leaders in Brazzaville (Congo) on a theology
of compassion for Central Africa, one pastor came to talk to me during the tea break. As he
spoke French and I did not, I asked someone to translate. The translator told me that the
pastor said, “Compassion is for women!” In response, I said, “Since the Church is the Bride of
Christ, you are already covered.” While these two pastors verbalized their protest about the
centrality of gender in my HIV and AIDS workshops openly, in other cases I found protest in
the evaluation forms. It often took a form like this (I paraphrase): “This workshop was
33
Musa W. Dube, ed., AfricaPraying: A Handbook on HIV/AIDS Sensitive Sermon Guidelines and Liturgy
(Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2004).
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25
excellent, but you almost spoiled it with your gender stuff.” But my mandate remained that
training academic and faith leaders had to focus on both gender and HIV/AIDS.
But nothing was more interesting than the subject of condoms. I quickly learned that
the subject was taboo. It would be at my own risk to bring it up, for once it was out, there was
often an impasse or suspicion and good faith was lost. I could only broach the topic of
condoms at the risk of spoiling a TOT workshop. I did wonder why a piece of plastic over a
penis to protect life would raise such strong, emotional resistance and why faith leaders could
not tolerate such a thing. But perhaps the condom was the most powerful metaphor for
transmitting the message that patriarchal privilege of controlling and possessing the female
body had to be relinquished. The condom metaphor said, “Sperm needs to be released into
a small plastic bag and disposed of in the trash—not deposited in a woman’s womb.”
34
The
resistance to such a suggestion was intense among the church leaders. I quickly reorganized
my approach and would wait for the topic of condoms to be raised by the participants, rather
than introduce it myself.
Perhaps the most amazing resistance I encountered was from an East African church
and ecumenical leader. We were at the All African Conference of Churches assembly in
Cameroon. Prior to the assembly, I had been asked to draft the Ten Commandments of HIV
and AIDS.
35
They were to be short and crisp and to assist the members of the African churches
gathered at the assembly to take away key messages about HIV and AIDS to pass on to their
congregations. And so I set to work on my task. The Cameroonian church had organized a
huge candle for the presentation service. I brought in Gideon Byamugisha and several other
priests living openly with HIV, and I asked them to lead the church in reading the
commandments. It was an awesome moment. As soon as the service ended and people had
dispersed, the East African church leader came to me and said, “I heard that wherever you
go, in all the African countries where you go to train, HIV infections increased!” He said it
suggestively. And then he left me standing there to absorb his statement. Wow! I was
devastated. I realized that he hated me and perhaps even that he hated that I was a woman,
exercising agency inside the church to address HIV and AIDS. He laid at my feet an accusation:
“You are not helping, you are spreading HIV and AIDS in Africa.” Gugu Dlamini was hated, too,
and, like other women, she was blamed for bringing HIV home and blamed for talking about
HIV and AIDS. For her, this hatred turned deadly. She was killed for teaching for
transformation and justice in her community. The pastor made me feel that hatred and sense
its potential for deadliness.
34
See, Musa W. Dube, “Youth Masculinities and Violence in an HIV&AIDS Context: Sketches From
Botswana Cultures and Pentecostal Churches,” in Ezra Chitando, ed., Redemptive Masculinities: Men, HIV and
Religion (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2012), 323–54.
35
These commandments are published in Musa W. Dube “The HIV & AIDS Decalogue,” in The HIV &
AIDS Bible: Selected Essays (Scranton: The University of Scranton Press, 2008), 207–08.
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Conclusion
In the HIV and AIDS context, teaching to transgress and teaching for activism was and is
imperative. The context compels the need to change the methods and the content of
teaching. My classroom space became porous and extended to involve the wider community,
both to learn with and from and to teach the community. This required the dexterity of
Mmutle, so that learning could occur through interaction with a challenging context. Teaching
often called for experimental, experiential, interdisciplinary and transformative strategies –
it was a case of learning as you go. It was also about developing trust, because teachers and
learners worked closely together. Sometimes this posed risks and for Gugu Dlamini the risk
was deadly. Such teaching laid bare life stories; some, like Gideon Byamugisha, disclosed their
HIV+ status and gave a human face and an embodiment of fortitude and optimism to a
dreaded disease, thereby connecting with a community of learners who, above all, needed to
hear about hope in hopelessness and about transcending stigma and discrimination. An
important part of healing and of multiplying the possibility of healing spaces, requires that we
be agents of justice. In this way we can multiply and nurture places of justice within our
families, communities, nations, and throughout the continent and world. “The struggle to
overcome HIV and AIDS is not over. The graves of 35.4 million people who died in my lifetime
from this disease still call on us all to reflect on what we teach, why we teach and how we
teach. Silent graves call loudly out to us to break the silence, with acts of resurrection.”
36
Amongst these millions of graves is the grave of Gugu Dlamini. The very fact that a foundation
exists in her memory, promoting what she sought to do for her community, attests to her
resurrection and to her speaking from the grave. Her voice invites us to join trickster
intellectual communities
37
and I have tried in my way to follow her invitation.
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Dube, Musa W. “The Subaltern Can Speak: Reading the Mmutle (Hare) Way.” Journal of
Africana Religions 4/1 (2016): 54–75.
36
See Dube, “Remembering the Teacherly Moments,” 329.
37
For more on this, see Musa W. Dube, “A Luta Continua: Toward Trickster Intellectuals and
Communities,” JBL134/4 (2015): 890–902 and Musa W. Dube, “Let There be Light: Birthing Ecumenical
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