Mention sex, and the average Kenyan blushes. Topics like homosexuality are verboten here and they’re greeted with riots of laughter. Odd, because men walk down the street arm in arm, holding hands, hugging and walking. Victorian attitudes and freewheeling tribal customs make bizarre bedfellows. Men routinely have girls on the side and multiple wives. I was talking the other day with a devout Catholic who has seven wives and no problem with it. Tribalism and science are not getting along well, either. Local lore has it that you can be cured of HIV and AIDS if you have sex with a virgin. A national politician has suggested that the root cause of HIV and AIDS is the local music, Lingala. The president says that the solution to the purported 25-percent HIV infection rate is for every Kenyan to abstain from sex for two years. Good luck. For a culture that is so shy and conservative, Kenyans definitely keep their sex workers employed.
Walk into bars like Florida 2000 and you’ll see a swarming mass of prostitutes ready to pick up the slack that sexual oppression laid out. A typical greeting from a woman in this bar involves a generous hand on the nutsack or on the wallet. One friend who went in recently (OK, so it was me) didn’t really want to be disturbed and was more interested in observing the goings-on. After telling the lady sitting on my lap that I was gay she became baffled. I tried to explain, going into progressively more detail until she burst out laughing. She then spent the next 30 minutes walking around the bar telling groups of girls the story. Each time they’d turn around, laughing their heads off. I was disturbed.
When the president spoke of abstaining for two years, a newspaper ran a story quoting a local man in rebuttal. “There are three things that make a Kenyan man a man: drinking beer, eating the meat of the goat, and sex.”
Walking through slums like Mathare that cram 500,000 people into two square kilometers, the sex industry is invisible to an outsider. Prostitutes simply sit in their doorways and “look clean,” as one villager put it.
In the center of all this iniquity lies a story that defies physics. A superhuman tale of inexplicable luck.
AIDS-proof prostitutes.
Pumwani is a slum on the east side of Nairobi with a red light district of international importance. Back in 1993 in Berlin, a study on Pumwani was released at an international AIDS conference. Out of the 1,200 prostitutes involved in the research, some 10% of them seemed immune to HIV. Even those that had daily exposure to the virus, often ten times a day. A theory was born that these women were immune to all STDs. Tribalism jumped in and started conjecturing about goats and great- grandmother’s infidelity. Science had to fight to continue its research free of old wives’ tales. Upon closer look the researchers noted that the 10% immune to HIV were laden with STDs. These women were not being abnormally careful about condoms. They were just special. Science could find no reason why this group of girls was so invincible. They all had different tribes of origin, all different ages…
Then it got stranger. It became apparent that there was one particular way they could get the disease. Go on vacation. While they were away everything was fine but as soon as they got back to work they were as vulnerable as the other prostitutes. Not only would they catch it, but the infection would be worse than most. The rate of progression from HIV infection to full-on AIDS was considerably quicker than usual.
Despite naysayers in the scientific community who thought that they were missing something, that the women were actually carrying and it wasn’t detected, the research continues. Today the most popular theory holds that the women, through constant low-level exposure to the virus, boosted their immune systems’ response. The researchers talk about T-cells and immuno responses while the elders talk about rain clouds and curses and neither of them knows what the fuck is going on. Cool, eh?
PETER TANIA
