Interrogating traditionalism: gender and Swazi Culture in HIV/AIDS policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the late twentieth century, HIV/AIDS-related global public health discourses in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) have been driving cultural change there. Cultural change refers to local critical consciousness about the value of the royalist state’s traditionalist policies and projects that get branded as a ‘Swazi Culture’. Using feminist discourse analysis of health policy documents, supplemented by ethnographic insights, this article shows how global health discourses addressing the epidemic are critical of traditionalism predominately on grounds that it creates harms and transmission risk in gender- and sexual-based violence and inequalities for women. This criticism echoes a longer history of external interrogations of local sociocultural practices, today including kingship, as a gendered problem for health, a move that simultaneously interrogates state traditionalism but, in turn, solidifies the state’s own cultural reifications. More broadly, this case shows how gender and sexuality reshape relationships between nation-states, health systems, and culture in postcolonial Africa.