Introduction
Taking inspiration from an interview with Gilles Deleuze shortly before his death, in an essay entitled ‘Ethics of survival’, Didier Fassin (Reference Fassin2010) reflects on what the confrontation with near death does to people's views on life. He notes that the vulnerability of life and its need for protection have inspired political theory from Arendt to Agamben. These authors examine what state protection does to quality of life as well as what the imperative to protect life does to the nature of political power. While political theory has ‘unveiled’ this, and has shown how ‘individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by power, the market or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era’ (ibid.: 93), Fassin critiques these theories for falling into the trap of reducing human life to its physical aspects: that is, the constraints of survival and the physical vulnerability of the body. Beyond that reasoning, he shows that the ways in which people express their views on life and their desire for survival are in fact ethical statements. He concludes by calling for an ethnographic practice that is sensitive to these ethics as they evolve in confrontation with near-death experiences.
Fassin's essay serves as an inspiration for this article, which deals with the emergence of new ethical fields in HIV prevention in Botswana, in a similar way to that outlined in the introduction to this special issue. Its main argument is born out of my growing frustration with a number of studies on social practices in the context of HIV/AIDS in African societies that stress the enduring reluctance of people to comply with HIV prevention messages, particularly those of safe sex (cf. Hunter Reference Hunter2002; Reference Hunter2010; Kaufman and Stavrou Reference Kaufman and Stavrou2004). These studies suggest a mismatch between institutionally pursued HIV education and social practices of local morals on the ground, which allow people to have sex with multiple partners without using condoms, as deploying barrier methods would arouse suspicions of infidelity (cf. Hirsch et al. Reference Hirsch, Wardlow, Smith, Phinney, Prikh, Neathanson, Hirsch and Wardlow2010). These studies propose that local moralities make it impossible for people to accept or integrate HIV/AIDS prevention into their lives.
On the other hand, there are also studies that highlight how HIV prevention campaigns hold power over people's lives, especially with regard to the distribution of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Some authors stress that those who are being helped are the recipients of capital-led governmentality, which means that their bodies and spirits are shaped by disciplining bio-powers in the process of healing or becoming healthy (Biehl Reference Biehl2007; Ticktin Reference Ticktin2006; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2009). As these studies show, institutional and political agents are important in the lives of many people in the context of HIV/AIDS; they not only regulate people's access to life-saving treatment and technologies (such as condoms) but they also launch specific ethical messages in order to prevent new infections and to encourage people to enrol in treatment programmes. Also more generally, the study of ethics in anthropology and philosophy has noted the importance of (newly emerging) institutions for ethics-in-practice (Faubion Reference Faubion2011; Williams Reference Williams2011; Mattingly Reference Mattingly2012; Robbins Reference Robbins2012; see also Bochow et al., this issue; Dilger, this issue), especially if they promote (new) ethics such as the integrity of the body, freedom of the person, human rights or social and political equality as part of larger educational humanist programmes.
In this article, I highlight the various ways in which confrontation with death in Botswana, where estimated HIV prevalence rates have been very high for almost thirty years, has affected public debates and deliberations on the value of life, the ethics of sexuality, and the ethics of social relationships and family life. I argue that these perspectives on and evaluations of life transpire in everyday situations. Exploring these newly emerging evaluations of life in the context of HIV prevention in Botswana, I take inspiration from Lempert's (Reference Lempert2013) work on ethics as an interactionist field. Discussing Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action (Reference Habermas1984), Lempert states that defining ethics or the ‘best good’ in a specific situation represents the result of social interactions: ‘[H]umans seek consensus on criticizable validity claims, claims not just about the “true” but also the “good” (the domain of ethics)’ (Lempert Reference Lempert2013: 383). Referencing Habermas, Lempert draws attention to public expressions of ethics (cf. Parkin, this issue), something that we refer to as the explication of ethics in emerging publics (cf. Bochow et al., this issue).
Following a similar line of argument, in this chapter I examine an interaction, if not a dialogue, between educational programmes and, firstly, their plans for how people should live in the context of HIV/AIDS and, secondly, what people do and think about life in everyday situations. Domestic and international policymakers and HIV activists share common ground with people in their everyday lives: namely concerns about death and new evaluations of human and social life in view of death. It is my aim to analyse these interactive forms of referencing between various people and institutions as they relate to value judgements (Lambek Reference Lambek2008) regarding what the ‘best good’ is in the context of death: What are the virtue ethics ‘involv[ing] characteristic patterns of desires and motivations’ (Williams Reference Williams2011: 10) that individuals and institutions express and produce over time in view of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and ongoing death and dying?
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Gaborone that included several visits to the city in the years between 2009 and 2011. I conducted fieldwork among educated urbanites from a wide range of professions, such as teachers, academics, pastors and civil servants, but also among university students and unemployed people. While the sample reflects the diversity of socio-economic backgrounds prevalent in these respective groups of people, all of them can be considered as being exposed to and engaging in public discourses on HIV/AIDS. During the time of my research, I recorded the reproductive histories of eighty female and fifteen male educated professionals from three different generations, conducted genealogical interviews and collected printed material on HIV/AIDS, including government reports and strategy papers concerning HIV prevention and education, and also interacted with people on an everyday basis in various settings.
The emergence of (new) ethics of life: HIV education and individual responsibilities
Botswana has an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 20 per cent in the adult population and is therefore severely affected by the pandemic. Deaths reached their peak in 2001, with an estimated 25,000 people dying from HIV-related illnesses in a country with a population below 2 million.Footnote 1 As in other places that have been severely affected by HIV/AIDS (cf. Iliffe Reference Iliffe2006), this wave of death led to a drastic demographic transformation of Botswana society by the mid-1990s: the disease had an impact on mortality rates and life expectancy, and the overall fertility rate dropped (Velkhoff and Kowal Reference Velkoff and Kowal2007: 17).
In 2000, the high number of deaths and the enormous social consequences alarmed Botswana's policymakers. The president at the time, Festus Mogae (1998–2008), declared HIV/AIDS to be a ‘national tragedy’: ‘We really are in a national crisis. We are threatened with extinction … People are dying in chillingly high numbers,’ Mogae told reporters.Footnote 2 Shortly thereafter, Mogae established a nationwide ARV programme, the first of its kind on the whole African continent. This programme was initiated with the hope of saving Batswana from dying as well as stopping the spread of the disease. Joining forces with international donors such as the President's Plan for HIV/AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as national health initiatives, the government of Botswana guaranteed every citizen access to free ARV treatment (Heald Reference Heald2006). ARV treatments prolong the lives of those infected, turning HIV/AIDS into a chronic rather than a deadly illness, and therefore change the nature of the disease. Nevertheless, death still features highly in ordinary people's and educators' ethical engagements with HIV/AIDS.
This is most obvious in many public health campaigns. Throughout the history of HIV politics, education has been an important channel for launching new ethics, thereby trying to persuade people to prevent HIV infection, to care for their sick relatives and to seek treatment. The Botswana government used school education, for instance, to support the fight against the disease with the intention of imbuing students with a sense of responsibility for their own and other people's health.
Students are taught about HIV/AIDS in two subjects: Biology and Moral Education.Footnote 3 In school books, death is presented as the ultimate consequence of HIV/AIDS, despite the fact that the introduction of ARVs has rendered the previously deadly disease chronic and ‘manageable’. For instance, a biology book with the title Science is Fun introduces only briefly the nature of the virus. It was taught in Botswana during the time I conducted research there (2009–11). Information about the exact workings of the virus – for example, the well-known fact about the ‘window period’ with the highest infectivity of carriers of the virus – is omitted. The book was published in 2004: that is, four years after the introduction of ARVs in Botswana. Nevertheless, its focus on death as an outcome of HIV infection remains strong. The text simply alludes to the fact that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) weakens the immune system of infected people by stating that: ‘The person gets sicker and sicker until the person dies’ (Moolman and Vermeulen Reference Moolman and Vermeulen2004: 116). Brief references to ARVs are made; however, their effect of prolonging people's lives is downplayed in relation to the fact that the virus still causes death and that treatment is expensive (ibid.). This is followed by an entire page that covers the statistics of Botswana's estimated prevalence among and death rates of students, therefore concretizing the social consequences for students of ongoing death and rising infection rates (ibid.: 117). Unprotected sexual intercourse is presented as ‘the most common’ means of transmission.
As a consequence, the textbook stresses the need for safe sex through the use of condoms or abstinence. Sexual activities are clearly framed as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sexual behaviour, and thus serve the promotion of a specific ethics of sexuality. Thus, while medical technologies have made it possible to perceive HIV/AIDS as something other than a ‘deadly’ disease, the biology textbook still emphasizes its deadly nature and teaches protection and condom use as the favoured means of stopping the spread of the virus. The book therefore frames its value statements on students’ prospective sexual life by highlighting the potentially fatal nature of the virus and at the same time appealing to the students’ desire to survive rather than getting infected and being threatened with death. This constitutes an attempt to sensitize students to the results of their (conscious) decisions concerning sexual behaviour.
These attempts are even more pronounced in teaching materials for the subject ‘Moral Education’. One common strategy in one of the textbooks, Exploring Moral Issues (Kgathi et al. Reference Kgathi, Saganabeng and Seretse2006: 29), is to present students with possible outcomes of a fatal decision – such as unprotected sexual intercourse – on their life courses, thus demonstrating the vulnerability of their lives and their individual capacity to change them. These materials foster first and foremost a sense that people need to take care of their bodies and that they are responsible for not getting infected by the deadly virus, despite effective HIV treatment being available in Botswana. It is important to note that these messages address individual learners and request their individual engagement with value statements and decisions – for instance, on whether or not to be abstinent or on which form of sexual protection they would prefer. The family remains an important source of these new sexual ethics as each episode is introduced with a story of people who were infected and became a source of grief as well as a financial burden to their families (ibid.: 39). The focus of educational campaigns remains the individual and his or her personal preferences, choices and decisions.
This agenda of responsibilization is in many ways exemplary of ethics promoted by public health campaigns that mostly focus on individuals as the (new) subjects of (new) health ethics. These programmes require individuals to act differently, and clearly address the single person and his or her agency to change things for the better. Ethical programmes that require self-governance over one's body and mind and suggest a reformation of (intimate) relationships and the family have been important for many campaigns combating HIV/AIDS in Botswana.
Emerging ethics fields: developing an agenda of life
The national pandemic and the experience of dying and the loss of lives have triggered a number of private initiatives by individual people and groups, alongside or within the framework of government HIV prevention campaigns. Some of them preceded the state campaigns; others were in line with official programmes propagating the safe sex message. In this section, I discuss two campaigns in order to illustrate the manifold interactions through which an ethical field is emerging in the context of HIV/AIDS. Some of these interactions describe the relationship between leading figures of certain initiatives and the daily experience of loss and dying; others show how various publics intersect within the co-production of a new ethics of life. Christian initiatives are of central importance here. As Christianity has significantly informed educated professionals’ ‘ordinary ethics’ and ways of life throughout the twentieth century, the examples below show how public figures, as representatives of emerging new socio-political groups in postcolonial Botswana, took on and transformed prevention and developed their own ethical agenda.Footnote 4
In 1985, when the first HIV case was detected in Botswana, political decision makers, academics, teachers and public figures, as well as many of the urban educated elite, failed to anticipate the potential scope and importance of the HIV/AIDS crisis for the country. A series of interviews I conducted in 2011 showed that these groups initially did not consider HIV/AIDS to be something that could affect their social environment so profoundly. Because the first case of HIV/AIDS was found in a woman whose husband had studied in the US, these educated elites perceived HIV/AIDS as having come from abroad; they also viewed it as God's punishment for promiscuous sex, having multiple partners, or engaging in same-sex sexuality. It seems that, at the time, no one really anticipated the rampant growth in infection rates that would have an impact on the country's social and political development throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
In the course of the 1990s, educated professionals introduced the issue of HIV/AIDS into the political agenda and education programmes. This was before it became central in mainstream political discourses and initiatives under President Mogae. Later on, some of these actors entered politics themselves or became leading figures of international organizations that supported the HIV prevention campaign under Mogae. By the 1990s, the Botswana government had started its first prevention campaign. However, during that time, such campaigns mostly concentrated on urban areas (Heald Reference Heald2006). By contrast, in the rural regions of the country, HIV/AIDS was still seen by many as a mysterious disease that resembled locally known ailments caused by witchcraft or broken taboos (Ingstad Reference Ingstad1990). Among the pioneering individuals was Musa Dube, now a professor of theology at the University of Botswana, who returned to Botswana in the mid-1990s after completing a PhD programme abroad. Back home, she ‘saw people dying like flies’.Footnote 5 Many of her friends had died, and some of her close relatives and family members had been infected with HIV/AIDS and were suffering from the effects of the disease. This motivated her to join the fight against HIV/AIDS, actively attempting to attribute new value to life in the context of encounters with death and developing educational programmes to reform people's values and choices. Her case is an example of how the personal experience of death and dying inspired academics to join the fight against HIV/AIDS and become public intellectuals.
Dube and others like her took the initiative to launch HIV prevention campaigns. At first, their campaigns prioritized safe clinical care over behavioural changes. For example, Dube reports that they started blood safety programmes and educated the general public about the importance of using gloves while caring for relatives infected with AIDS. Later, she took a leading position in involving religious groups and people in the fight against HIV/AIDS. She campaigned on HIV/AIDS issues within Christian communities and pleaded for the development of an HIV/AIDS-sensitive theological programme. In order to do so she organized workshops for church leaders and theologians in the form of think tanks to develop ideas on ways in which to integrate the issue of HIV/AIDS into the curricula of universities and schools. Some of her publications and workshops were sponsored by the Word Church Council and UNICEF, and she also made herself known as an educator, training church leaders in how to integrate HIV/AIDS into their pastoral practice.
Dube's ethical pronouncements were directed especially at ‘the church’,Footnote 6 which, as she claims, ‘has been part of the problem [of the pandemic] by silencing HIV/AIDS and excluding those who were affected’ (Dube Reference Dube2003: iii). She stood up against this apparent silence on the part of many church leaders on HIV/AIDS issues by claiming that the church needed to take on the challenge of ongoing death and dying as a spiritual task: ‘It [the HIV pandemic] raises spiritual questions: Does God care, does God hear prayers or heal, is God punishing us?’ (Dube Reference Dube2003: iv). She and others called their programme ‘Theology of Life’;Footnote 7 it aimed to bring hope and love into a context of grief and suffering, and included a variety of messages. For instance, she challenged pastors to show a compassion that was free of prejudice for those mourning instead of excluding them because of the ‘shameful’ death of their relatives.
A recurrent theme in Dube's writing is the role of culture in either providing productive ways of handling the disease or being an impediment to them. For instance, culture for her appears to be a source of ethics and virtues, such as respect, which ought to enable people to change their sexual behaviour. At the same time, in her view, culture is a source of gender disparities and taboos surrounding sexuality that lead to issues regarding the disease being silenced and neglected. These statements reflect Dube's position as a feminist liberation theologian. Many of her examples draw on family life as well as on the role of and attitudes towards women. She aimed to counter, for example, the traditional counselling of brides during which women are told that ‘Monna phafana oa fapanelwa’ (‘A man is a calabash that is passed around’) (Dube Reference Dube2003: 123). Thus, Dube integrates cultural sensitivity on issues of sexuality and gender into her theology of hope, and on these grounds she develops a Christian ethics of love, compassion and inclusiveness.
Dube's example shows how social initiatives to fight HIV/AIDS are emerging among the country's academics and how their experience of death and dying encourages them to develop new evaluations of life. These elements are the backbone of Dube's ‘Theology of Life’. Others followed her example and continued a public discussion on possible religious engagement with issues relating to HIV/AIDS (cf. Togarasei Reference Togarasei2010). These movements have been reflected on by anthropologists and political scientists, who have noted both that the churches’ claims to spiritual wisdom and explicit moral education target everyday ethics and behaviour and that their concern for sexuality and relationships positions them as important players in the fight against HIV/AIDS (Prince et al. Reference Prince, Denis and van Dijk2009). Notably, these initiatives have all profited in one way or another from financial support from the government or international institutions: for instance, publications have been sponsored and workshops paid for.
The notion of culture as a source of virtue ethics remains important in other prominent prevention campaigns, such as the new educational programme (‘Skills for Life’) pursued by the government, which involved a shift in the ethical ‘programming’ of students. In around 2010, many international donors slowly started to withdraw financial support for the distribution of ARVs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, one of the largest private charitable institutions and one that had long played a major role in building the national health system in Botswana, had stopped its financial support by 2014 (Bochow Reference Bochow2015). PEPFAR remained committed to its financial support of the government of Botswana in its fight against HIV/AIDS, even after 2010, but shifted to investing in educational campaigns from 2009 onwards. Its new educational programme, ‘Skills for Life’, was first developed in 2005, and the teaching materials were tested in some pioneering schools in 2009. The Botswana government has been discussing integrating this programme into the school curriculum (Botsang Reference Botsang2013). The new programme brought a new impulse to profiling ethics in the context of HIV/AIDS.
The ‘Skills for Life’ programme promotes culture as a carrier of virtues in a way that is similar to Dube's approach. It is designed to enable individuals in their decision-making processes, highlighting these virtues as equipping individuals with skills to deal with situations in which they might be exposed to risk, including the risk of HIV/AIDS. Following the introduction of this programme into the curriculum guide for teachers, virtues promoted included ‘values’, ‘self-awareness’, ‘stress management’ and the capacity ‘to make wise choices’ (Ministry of Education et al. 2005: 21). Many of these objectives are reminiscent of personal qualities that have been described as being intrinsic to constructions of personhood in the form of ‘the neoliberal self’: people should be able to fashion themselves over and over again, adjusting to the requirements of demanding labour markets that require individual flexibility and mobility (cf. Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank, Barry and Osborne2013).
Additional to these personal abilities and qualities, the ‘Skills for Life’ programme alludes to general ‘African’ values such as botho (Ministry of Education et al. 2005: 9–16) in order to support people in making informed decisions. Botho is a Tswana word commonly translated as ‘humanness’, ‘humbleness’ or ‘respect’. In some units of the teaching material, the family and its elders as well as the village are introduced as representing authorities of botho, as the source of inspiration for those who wish to seek a life according to botho, and as sites where botho is played out. Further, a policy document that was released by the government of Botswana in 2010 explains that the new educational programme ‘Skills for Life’ not only seeks to equip students with the ability to make ‘wise choices’ but also aims to ‘strengthen the nation's unity’ (Ministry of Education 2010: i). Thus, the virtues of botho promote a culturalist notion of the nation that is transmitted through teaching materials.
The turn towards ‘traditional values’ such as botho corresponds to a tendency among Botswana's educated professionals and public figures to highlight ‘culture’ as an inspiration for behavioural change. These traditionalist voices speak against a climate of sexual liberty and promote faithfulness in the name not solely of Christianity but also of culture and tradition. One example is the theologian Joseph Gaie, who teaches theology at the University of Botswana and is a representative of the St Engenas Zionist Christian Church, one of the largest so-called African independent churches in the country. Gaie was actively involved in designing the curriculum for Moral EducationFootnote 8 and is also involved in various other public activities. He also pleads for the integration of botho in HIV/AIDS education in his academic writing (Gaie Reference Gaie, Klagba and Peter2005) and publishes newspaper articles, for instance condemning abortion, in which he reminds readers of traditional values such as botho. His example shows that educational programmes and the development of new ethics of life emerge in the intersection of various publics, as represented here by academic publications and national print media.
The examples of Dube's theological campaign and Gaie's involvement in curriculum development demonstrate how ethical fields not only emerge with reference to the everyday experience of loss and death but are also formed by the interaction of various publics – some of them within the circle of active Christians, some of them within broader national publics. These transformations are an expression of vital evaluations of life in the context of death in Botswana's public sphere(s). The paradigm of prevention and safe sex is taken up by Musa Dube as well as by the ‘Skills for Life’ teaching materials. In doing so, they subscribe to biomedical prevention paradigms and an ethics of responsibility. In addition, the educational programmes discussed here – especially Dube's – promote virtues of empathy, love and hope. Further, they shift public health's emphasis from the individual subject as the locus of ethics to collectivities such as the nation, humanity, Christianity or culture. The latter are presented as sources of what are deemed to be the ‘right’ ethics and virtues, and individuals are expected to serve these collectivities. Remarkably, these alternative educational programmes also foreground family and kin groups, who are at the heart of the ethical imaginations of Botswana's public intellectuals.
Death and the ethics of life: kinship and reproduction in times of HIV/AIDS
What are educated professionals’ perspectives on life in the context of HIV/AIDS? And how do they engage with (new) sexual ethics, ideals of gender, cultural virtues and the imagination of kinship? Continuity of relations and the aspiration that life should continue are important to their outlook on life, as I argue in this section. Most importantly, having children fulfils their desire for a symbolic continuation of life and social relationships, as children guarantee a spiritually and socially valuable life. Given that children are seen as being a link to life, anxieties about having children are heightened in the context of death and dying. This is best illustrated with reference to perceptions of kinship.
Kinship ties are weakened by the continual death of family members (for a similar finding, cf. Dilger Reference Dilger2008). Against this backdrop, my interviews with educated professionals on their kin relations revealed the fragility and flexibility of these relationships and showed how HIV/AIDS impacts on family life and kinship ties. Take, for example, my conversation with Pearl,Footnote 9 a thirty-two-year-old journalist living in Gaborone. Of her father's nine siblings, six had died: one in a car accident, the other five ‘after a long illness’, which is the common euphemism for an HIV-related death. In addition, some of the partners of her father's siblings had died.
My interview with Pearl revealed that her kin network consisted of relationships with varying degrees of responsibilities, especially with regards to parenthood. Some of the subsequent partners had brought children who were fathered by other men into the family. Yet, when Pearl talked about these fathers, their names had entirely disappeared from her memory; this meant that, when mapping out the web of relations in a genealogical diagram, there were a lot of loose ends. In fact, the only evidence of these broken relationships were the children, who remained important in Pearl's memory. She knew their names and generally remembered their year of birth. In sets of kin relations like hers, children represent the living products of the relationships of their parents. These children are known even if the parents are unknown, have left or have died and their names have therefore been forgotten. Children are thus important links between individuals who are related by kinship ties, as they not only preserve the memory of these ties but also symbolize the temporal continuity of kin relations.
Recent theories of kinship stress the importance of substances for the consolidation of relationality as well as personhood. Substances such as blood, milk, semen or flesh are symbols of kinship through which mental links are created; these substances also bind people together when shared (Carsten Reference Carsten1997; Reference Carsten2000). Therefore, the examples mentioned in the literature are as diverse as the sharing of food on an everyday basis (Geissler and Prince Reference Geissler and Prince2007; Reference Geissler and Prince2010; Clark Reference Clark2000) and the sharing of ‘blood’, which is a naturalized symbol with substantial physical gestalt (Carsten Reference Carsten2011). What is shown in this work is that kinship is done; it relates to certain material practices and not merely to a given set of rights and entitlements based on birth, as in the structural-functionalist paradigm (Radcliffe-Brown Reference Radcliffe-Brown, Radcliffe-Brown and Forde1950). In contrast to the latter, in the case of Batswana urbanites’ imaginaries and practices of kinship and procreation, it is children who symbolize these bonds. Children thus represent the continuity of kinship in situations of disruption, as in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, during which conjugal ties are often nothing more than loose links and entitlements to care while solidarity and support are disrupted by ongoing death and dying.
People I talked to said that children provide a connection to kin, spouses, and even to the self. As became clear to me in a series of interviews in which I asked people to describe the process of reproduction, people gain their social and spiritual identity, to a notable extent, through having children. For example, a teacher named Phomelo said the following:
Each family member will be remembered through children and their names. Children are a gift from God; love [between man and woman] is strengthened by the children. It is a source of communication and it is a connection … The child is the mirror of the parents. The connection to the child is through resemblance. You see your child and you see yourself in the child so that you connect. A child is a connection.Footnote 10
When Phomelo, aged thirty-eight and married with two children, conceptualized the making and beginning of a new life, he spoke about genes, the soul and love, and his ideas were more articulate than those of most of my other respondents. As a well-educated, active Catholic, it may be that he had given more thought to the beginnings of life and the act of procreation than the other men and women I talked to. Phomelo situated his ideas about procreation and identification within the framework of the conjugal union that is reinforced through the presence of children, who are seen to be the symbolic link of identification as well as a mediator between the spouses. He saw ‘love’, ‘sex’ and a ‘satisfied soul’ as important contexts in which the child is created and into which it is born. It is here that Phomelo's ideas on procreation clearly reveal his Christian background. At the same time, a child is often given the name of deceased family members and consequently continues their memory. Phomelo thus made reference to a common belief in Botswana that children carry the memory of their parents and ancestors (Schapera Reference Schapera1966: 27, 220). A child connects people not only to the future – a future the child will grow into – but also to the past, to those people who have gone before and whose memory is carried through them. In many societies in Africa, it has been found that people feel a strong connection to life through their ancestors, who remain connected to the living through the chain of memory and can impart prosperity and blessings or illness and misfortune (cf. Ashforth Reference Ashforth2000).
For many people in Botswana I talked to, the biological imaginary of genes played an important role in this process of personal identification. When I asked educated urbanites how they would describe the process of procreation, all of them drew on the imaginary of genes: genes are the substance that travels from men through women into their children; they help create each child's physical features and character. This was also reflected in Phomelo's account:
A child is created by the genes of a man and a woman. The genes travel from the man through sperm, enter the woman and mix with the genes of the woman. A child grows in the womb of the woman.
This statement becomes particularly meaningful in view of the changing meaning of parenthood in the context of HIV/AIDS. Many ethnic groups in Botswana engage in the social practice of fostering, where children often live and grow up in the households of relatives. Yet this situation changed after Botswana was hit hard by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and after the wave of deaths in the 1990s and 2000s. In subsequent years, the sheer number of children left behind after the deaths of their parents created a great dearth of, and need for, childcare. However, the question of childcare and the measures introduced to address it – such as food baskets and orphanages – have been highly contested in Botswana's public sphere (Dahl Reference Dahl2009; Reference Dahl2010). Also, a new category of children was created: orphans. Despite intensive public campaigns encouraging adoption, the people I spoke to were adamant in their refusal to adopt Footnote 11 a child. They were afraid to admit ‘foreign DNA’ into their household. It is worth noting here that the theory of resemblance extends beyond mere appearances: physical appearance is here understood to be more than simply the external appearance of the body; facial and other features are also associated with their carrier's personality. As a consequence, resemblances are seen to lie in personality traits as well. In their refusal to adopt children and accept them as full members of the family, my interviewees pointed out the unknowability of the families of origin of the children. You might get the children of thieves or criminals. Further, raising the children of other people is not well received, as the self-assessment of an orphanage carer recorded by Bianca Dahl (Reference Dahl2010: 97) suggests.
In this way, the theories of procreation expressed by Batswana educated professionals reflect a trend towards the biologization of parenthood. As my case study shows, there is also a fixation on belonging between children and parents (mothers) through the imaginary of genes. This stands in contrast to what the anthropology of kinship has shown in relation to many ethnographic examples (Carsten Reference Carsten2000; Strathern Reference Strathern and Strathern2005): namely that constructions of kinship can be highly flexible in that people can claim parenthood for the children of others in terms of shared histories, shared substances, or practices of care and mutual liking. Something similar has also been observed among Christian groups in Gaborone in the context of caring for the dying (Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 37–81). However, urban Batswana do not allow such a flexibility of kinship in their theories of procreation. According to them, relatedness cannot be acquired through care, since, for them, genes are the only possible link that creates a parent–child relationship or through which parental identification is possible.
This is meaningful for educated professionals’ conception of personhood through procreation. As discussed above, the identity of and bonds between children and parents are created through the sharing of genes and are then reaffirmed through the child's physical appearance. A child's outward appearance is an image of the parents, and the child is thus seen as a continuation of them. In other words, the moment Phomelo sees his child, he recognizes himself, and this creates an attachment between him and his child. Yet, when it comes to moments of near death, some of my respondents told me that they had asked themselves what would remain of them on earth after death. As children are the product of one's genes and thus are a version of their parents, at least according to these medico-cosmologies of educated professionals, they come to embody a person's continuation after death. In a way, through having children one is therefore able to ‘transcend death’, which means that a child guarantees one's spiritual survival beyond death.
All these contribute to educated professionals’ evaluations of life. In a setting of ongoing death and social disruption, giving birth to one's own biological children is a central value of life. Children connect people in multiple ways to one another and to their past and future. Therefore, strong everyday ethics are centred on and directed towards childbirth. The fact that young people, at times, postpone childbirth evokes the scorn and anger of their older relatives but also of their peers and friends. Married couples who have not given birth to children are often accused of being selfish. These reproductive ethics have a long history. As was also reported in early ethnographies on Tswana-speaking people, childbearing evokes strong ethical concerns (Schapera Reference Schapera1966). In the present, it is well known that family members pressure married couples to have children and that childless marriages are judged in ethical terms. Sometimes families will even force a childless couple to divorce (Schapera Reference Schapera1933; Mogobe Reference Mogobe2005). Thus, throughout the twentieth century, not having children appears to be equated with social death. Since the 1990s, these ethics of parenthood and desires for children have been enforced in a context in which kinship is experienced as a continual loss of people and lack of care. In fact, as argued throughout this section, begetting one's own biological child appears to be a strategy to overcome death in both social and spiritual terms.Footnote 12
This case also demonstrates that ethical engagements are often pursued with much personal involvement. Many social routines of educated professionals centre on childcare; this holds especially true for life in the city, where children's birthdays, baptisms and first days at school are treated as festive occasions to which friends and family are invited. People who are childless tend to feel excluded from these important social moments – being without children, they are often unable to share the joy of such festive events. In addition, as they are unable to reciprocate, many stop accepting such invitations. These constellations exemplify the ways in which parenthood represents a social obligation: one that enables people to fulfil their social responsibilities within their families. Those with no children are unable to fulfil some of these obligations that regulate the everyday routines of people and enable them to participate in social life and strengthen their social relationships. Their ethical self-inspection as someone unable to fulfil the requirements of care and reciprocity lead them to withdraw from certain social activities.
In view of ongoing death and dying, urbanites’ relational ethics highlight social and spiritual continuity and care. Although the kin group is seen as the spiritual and social unit of solidarity, care and shared genes, its very continuity appears disrupted. And this is where and how sentiments and emotions transform into ethics: educated urbanites’ relational ethics are directed towards the reinstallation of this continuity. In other words, in their view, a fulfilled social life and the spiritual continuation of life beyond death are largely conceptualized as necessitating that one gives birth to one's own biological children.
Conclusion
In contemporary Botswana, educated professionals often express strong desires to have children, despite – or perhaps intensified by – the context of death, because, in this context, the social responsibility of urban middle classes to produce children is strongly connected to their ability to maintain the flow of reciprocal invitations and other social interactions related to child-rearing. However, this desire runs counter to official HIV/AIDS education messages, which appeal to individuals’ responsibility for their own health, especially to avoid infection. Nevertheless, as I have argued throughout this article, policymakers, educators and public figures in Botswana share common ground with the citizenry in their everyday lives: namely their concern for life in light of the staggering death rates of the 1990s. The latter are inspiring a re-evaluation of life in Botswana's public sphere and introducing a new ethics of the body, health, self-care and social relationships in the context of HIV education. Thus, the history of HIV prevention programmes in Botswana has seen constant developments, as various individuals and institutions have formulated and reformulated ethical positions with regard to life itself. Constantly interacting with each other, these individuals, local institutions, (religious) communities, public figures and educators move in an ethical field that encompasses a variety of different life ethics, some of them stressing the need for safe sex, others the need for social inclusion.
In discussing prevention as consensual, I have shown that the emergence of ethical fields in Botswana's HIV prevention campaigns has been co-produced over time by various publics and is strongly related to everyday experiences of death and dying. As diverse as these popularized evaluations of life may be, they share an imaginary that takes kinship and culture as a source of virtue. HIV/AIDS prevention and the ethics of the continuity of life therefore feed into the political imaginary of postcolonial Botswana.
The anthropology of ethics took inspiration from Durkheim's writing on morality, in which morality is the ‘glue’ of human relations. Durkheim observed that ‘the very fact of living together was a sacred moral thing … the very thing that kept humans together’ (Heintz Reference Heintz2009: 2). Contemporary anthropological writing on ethics has rejected the notion that communities are the ‘natural’ locus of ethics. Nevertheless, the question of in whose name people want to be or need to be ethical remains important for understanding how ethics are translated into the practice of everyday routines in people's lives in Africa and elsewhere. As a projection of ethical discourses, ‘kinship’ can serve as a symbol for such imagined communities (Anderson Reference Anderson2004) in discourses by public intellectuals, religious figures and educational programmes. In everyday life, kinship evokes high ethical sentiments, as is also argued by Rijk van Dijk (this issue) in his contribution on weddings among the emerging middle classes. HIV/AIDS is experienced as socially disruptive and a source of disappointment, for instance when it comes to health problems or partnerships. However, in HIV/AIDS education and in people's imaginaries of life, the kin group is also perceived to be an anchor for the continuation of life. The obligations and responsibilities, virtues and behavioural imperatives of these imagined anchors of life, such as respect and the imperative to reproduce biologically, are vividly drawn on in these imaginaries and have inspired political discourse on the ‘best good’ throughout the HIV era.
Acknowledgements
This article was first presented at the workshop ‘Ethics as Ideals of Practice’ at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Konstanz University in November 2013. I thank the Centre for Advanced Studies for its generous support during my stay as a junior fellow at the Centre. My research was made possible by support from the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, and was conducted with the permission of the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs, the Ministry of Health, the Gaborone Private Hospital (Dr Music and Dr Eaton), and the Bokamoso Private Hospital (Dr Abebe). I thank all the institutions and people involved who have supported my research, both financially and intellectually. Pearl Sechele and John Hamathi also assisted me greatly during my research. I especially thank John Hamathi for his inspiring words and his help in establishing connections with the right people. I also thank Sethunya Mosime, Godisan Mokoodi and Treasa Galvin from the Department of Social Science and Musa Dube and Francis Nkomasana from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Botswana. I would also like to thank Rijk van Dijk from the ASC, Leiden, who introduced me to these colleagues.
