[ 2016-07-21 ]

Photo: Aniva with a root which he grinds up and adds to water to drink before sex

The man hired to have sex with children
In some remote southern regions of Malawi, it's
traditional for girls to be made to have sex with
a paid sex worker known as a "hyena" once they
reach puberty. The act is not seen by village
elders as rape, but as a form of ritual
"cleansing". However, as Ed Butler reports, it has
the potential to be the opposite of cleansing - a
way of spreading disease.

I meet 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."

All of those involved in these rituals are aware
that these customs are condemned by outsiders -
not just by the church, but by NGOs and the
government as well, which has launched a campaign
against so-called "harmful cultural practices".

"We are not going to condemn these people," says
Dr May Shaba, permanent secretary of the Ministry
of Gender and Welfare. "But we are going to give
them information that they need to change their
rituals."

Parents who have had more education than others
may already choose not to hire a hyena, I am told.
But the female elders I spoke to remain defiant.

"There's nothing wrong with our culture," Chrissie
tells me. "If you look at today's society, you can
see that girls are not responsible, so we have to
train our girls in a good manner in the village,
so that they don't go astray, are good wives so
that the husband is satisfied, and so that nothing
bad happens to their families."

According to Father Clause Boucher, a French-born
Catholic priest who's lived in Malawi for 50 years
and is now its pre-eminent anthropologist, the
rituals date back centuries. They stem from
age-old beliefs about the need for children to be
passed into the "heat" of adulthood by a sexual
act, he says. In the past, when girls tended not
to reach puberty until they were 15 or 16, this
would often have been carried out by a selected
future husband. Today it's more likely to done by
a paid sex worker, a hyena, and there's no shame
attached to that.

Father Boucher points out that the efforts to
change this sexualisation of children have been
stubbornly resisted in remote southern areas,
despite more than a century of Christianity and 30
years of the Aids epidemic. In most of the country
- and particularly in areas close to the cities of
Blantyre and Lilongwe - "sexual cleansing" is
rarely if ever practised.

In Malawi's central Dedza district, hyenas are
only ever used to initiate widows or infertile
women, but the Paramount Chief Theresa
Kachindamoto - a rare female figurehead in Malawi
- has made the fight against the tradition a
personal priority.

She is trying to galvanise other regional chiefs
to make similar efforts. In some other districts,
like Mangochi in the east of the country,
ceremonies are being adapted to replace sex with a
more benign anointing of the girl.

In Nsanje, though, there is little effort to bring
about change. With Malawi one of the poorest
countries in the world, and suffering from growing
reports of rural hunger, it's not a policy
priority.

In a remote village, I meet one of Aniva's two
wives, Fanny, along with his youngest baby
daughter. Fanny was herself widowed before being
"cleansed" by Aniva with sex. They married soon
after.

Their relationship looks strained. Sitting next to
him, she admits shyly that she hates what he does,
but that it brings necessary income. I ask her if
she expects her two-year-old to be undergoing
initiation too in perhaps 10 years from now.

"I don't want that to happen," she says. "I want
this tradition to end. We are forced to sleep with
the hyenas. It's not out of our choice and that I
think is so sad for us as women."

"You hated it when it happened to you?" I ask.

"I still hate it right up until now."

When I ask Aniva too whether he wants his daughter
to undergo sexual cleansing, he surprises me
again.

"Not my daughter. I cannot allow this. Now I am
fighting for the end of this malpractice."

"So, you're fighting against it, but you are still
doing it yourself?" I ask.

"No, as I said, I'm stopping now."

"Really?"

"For sure. For real, I'm stopping."

Source - BBC

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