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In Africa, the loss of a husband can lead to poverty
AIDS, for many people in America, seems like some horrible fairy tale that is only seen on the TV screen, but for many in Africa, it is the realest thing they have to face.
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
The New York Times
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Feb. 18-- There are two reasons why 11-year-old Chikumbutso never sees his three sisters, why he seldom has a full belly, why he sleeps packed sardine-like with six cousins on the dirt floor of his aunt's thatched mud hut.
One is AIDS, which claimed his father in 2000 and his mother in 2001. The other is his father's nephew, a tall, light-complexioned man whom Chikumbutso knows only as Mr. Sululu.
It was Sululu who came to his village five years ago, after his father died, and commandeered all of the family's belongings - mattresses, chairs and, most important, the family's Toyota pickup, an almost unimaginable luxury in this, one of the world's poorest nations. And it was Sululu who rejected the pleas of the boy's mother, herself dying of AIDS, to leave the truck so that her children would have an inheritance to sustain them after her death.
Instead, Chikumbutso said, he left behind a transistor radio.
"I feel very bitter about it," he said, plopped on a wooden bench in 12-by-12-foot hut rented by his maternal aunt and uncle on the outskirts of this town in the lush hills of southern Malawi. We don't really know why they did all this. We couldn't understand."
The answer is simple: custom. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the death of a father entitles his side of the family to claim most, if not all, of the property he leaves behind.
In an era when AIDS is claiming about 2.3 million lives a year in sub-Saharan Africa - roughly 80,000 people last year in Malawi alone - disease and tradition have combined in a terrible synergy, robbing countless mothers and children not only of their loved ones but of everything they own.
"It is the saddest, saddest story," said Seodi White, who heads the Malawi chapter of Women and Law in Southern Africa, a nonprofit research organization. "People are cashing in on AIDS. Women are left with nothing but the disease. Every time you hear it you get shocked, but in fact it is normal. That's the horror of it."
Story Produced by: Jonathan Krotov
