A reporter from BBC
met Eric Aniva in the dusty yard of his three-room shack in Nsanje district in
southern Malawi. Goats and chickens graze in the dirt outside. Wearing a grimy
green shirt, and walking with a pronounced limp (he's been lame in one leg
since birth, he says), he greets me enthusiastically. He seems to like the idea
of media attention.
Aniva is by all
accounts the pre-eminent "hyena" in this village. It's a traditional
title given to a man hired by communities in several remote parts of southern
Malawi to provide what's called sexual "cleansing". If a man dies,
for example, his wife is required by tradition to sleep with Aniva before she
can bury him. If a woman has an abortion, again sexual cleansing is required.
And most shockingly,
here in Nsanje, teenage girls, after their first menstruation, are made to have
sex over a three-day period, to mark their passage from childhood to womanhood.
If the girls refuse, it's believed, disease or some fatal misfortune could
befall their families or the village as a whole.
"Most of those
I have slept with are girls, school-going girls," Aniva tells me.
"Some girls are just 12 or 13 years old, but I prefer them older.
All these girls find pleasure in having me as their hyena. They actually are
proud and tell other people that this man is a real man, he knows how to please
a woman."
Despite
his boasts, several girls I meet in a nearby village express aversion to the
ordeal they've had to go through.
"There was
nothing else I could have done. I had to do it for the sake of my
parents," one girl, Maria, tells me. "If I'd refused, my family
members could be attacked with diseases - even death - so I was scared."
They tell me that
all their female friends were made to have sex with a hyena.
Aniva
appears to be in his 40s (he's vague about his precise age) and currently has
two wives who are well aware of his work. He claims to have slept with 104
women and girls - although as he said the same to a local newspaper in 2012, I
sense that he long ago lost count. Aniva has five children that he knows about
- he's not sure how many of the women and girls he's made pregnant.
He tells me he's one
of 10 hyenas in this community, and that every village in Nsanje district has
them. They are paid from $4 to $7 (£3 to £5) each time.
An hour's drive down the road, I'm introduced to Fagisi, Chrissie and
Phelia, women in their 50s and custodians of the initiation traditions in their
village. It's their job to organise the adolescent girls into camps each year,
teaching them about their duties as wives and how to please a man sexually. The
"sexual cleansing" with the hyena is the final stage of this process,
arranged voluntarily by the girl's parents. It's necessary, Fagisi, Chrissie
and Phelia explain, "to avoid infection with their parents or the rest of
the community".
I
put it to them that there's a much greater risk that these
"cleansings" will themselves spread disease. According to custom, sex
with the hyena must never be protected with the use of condoms. But they say a
hyena is hand-picked for his good morals, and therefore cannot be infected with
HIV/Aids.
It's clear, given
the hyena's duties, that HIV is a huge risk to the community. The UN estimates
that one in 10 of all Malawians carry the virus, so I ask Aniva if he is
HIV-positive. He astounds me by saying that he is - and that he doesn't mention
this to a girl's parents when they hire him.
As our conversation
continues, Aniva senses that I am not impressed. He stops boasting and tells me
that he does fewer cleansings than before. "I still do the rituals here
and there," he confides. Then he tells me: "I am stopping."
Sorry, I can’t continue narrating
this story! I am feeling sad.
Source:
BBCNewsMagazine
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