A Prostitute Community's Response to Aids in Urban Senegal

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Africa Today 46.2 (1999) 138-140

Book Review

Renaud, Michelle Lewis. 1997. Women at the Crossroads: A Prostitute
Community's Response to Aids in Urban Senegal. Amsterdam: Gordon and
Breach Publishers. 172 pp. $21.00 (paper).

Women at the Crossroads is an interesting story of a community of
Senegalese women prostitutes who must negotiate between their
identities as Muslims, mothers, wives, and daughters while practicing
prostitution in a nation which is ninety percent Muslim. These
women--often disadvantaged in terms of attaining formal education,
being forced into marriage at an early age, divorced, or widowed--are
portrayed as wanting the best for their children and for themselves
and as having turned to prostitution as one of the only economically
viable means of survival. Renaud uses the crossroads metaphor to
illustrate the multiplicity of individuals--from different cultures,
occupations, or class orientations--engaged in preventing HIV/AIDS
and understanding its impact on women.

Instead of entering the field with a rigid, preconceived research
question, Renaud expresses the goals of wanting her involvement to
respond directly to the needs of policy makers, local researchers,
and women at risk for contracting HIV. She disbands with her original
proposal of contributing to AIDS research among non-prostitute
Senegalese women in favor of focusing on those most at
risk--prostitutes in Kaolack, which is the city with the highest rate
of infection. Renaud states that her revised project was to assess
the ability of the local clinic's AIDS program to educate the
prostitutes and to understand how cultural factors affected the
transmission of HIV. In practice, she provides little information as
to the clinic's ability to educate but reveals much about the stories
of individual women and her interactions with them as a Western
researcher.

According to Senegalese law, prostitution is legal for those who
register with the police and agree to bimonthly medical examinations
(p. xi). The purpose of these examinations is to screen prostitutes
for STDs, including HIV, as well as to provide them with information
and free condoms, though this last objective was not always met, due
to supply constraints and disagreements about condom distribution
policy. The prostitutes often felt powerless in relation to the
staff, who Renaud says dictated their physical and mental health in
many ways. In one case, the entire staff locked up the clinic and
attended an AIDS conference in Dakar; meanwhile, the prostitutes in
Kaolack were unable to get condoms and had to "do without" for a week
(p. 80). Admitting her difficulty in remaining impartial, Renaud
raises ethical questions of conducting research in the divisive arena
between the prostitute community and the clinic. Instead of inciting
further criticism toward the clinic, she resolves to use her time
constructively, assessing local needs and problems while making
relevant recommendations to the staff.

Even when the women understood the dangers of having unprotected
sexual encounters, they would sometimes avoid using condoms with
boyfriends because they felt that insisting on condom use might
jeopardize their relationships, signaling either distrust of their
boyfriends or uncertainty about their own HIV status. But, there are
costs involved in having unprotected sex. If a woman tests positive
for a STD, she faces having her registration card revoked until she
receives a negative test result, essentially losing her income until
she recovers. She may, alternatively, practice prostitution illegally
and risk imprisonment as clandos (a clandestine prostitute).

The tenets of Islam often appear to be in contradiction with the
lived experience of the women. Because of the rise of divorce, urban
migration, and higher cost of living, the practice of limiting the
level of education of Muslim daughters no longer seems tenable in the
eyes of these women. Instead, women need to acquire practical skills
so that they may earn a living if their situation does not conform to
the Muslim ideal in which the woman stays home and focuses on the
maintenance of the household.

The women in Renaud's case study were forced to make serious
negotiations between their jobs and their identities as Muslim and
Senegalese women. Some prayed daily for a life free of prostitution
and acknowledged that they were forced to sin, while others felt that
they were prostitutes because it was God's will. Prostitutes and
non-prostitutes alike felt that real followers of Islam were less
likely to contract HIV, while prostitutes were more likely to acquire
it (p. 93). Many women had to hide their work from their families,
while others had been found out and shunned by their families. Out of
such circumstances, these women forged families of their own in the
development of close relationships and cooperative solutions of
disputes.

Renaud, drawing from Paul Rabinow's ideas on ethnographic fieldwork
and reciprocity, reminds the reader of the "give-and-take" nature of
fieldwork. She shares how, in exchange for the information gained,
she provided rides for her informants and used her toubab ("French
colonial" or "white") status to lobby in support of the women when
meeting with the Chief of Police or the Regional Medical Officer (p.
64). She also remarks upon the process of confiding in the women with
whom she worked; she eventually realized that they had a host of
questions to ask her but had refrained from doing so out of courtesy,
despite her asking invasive questions (p. 75).

Though Women at the Crossroads focuses on a community of prostitutes
in urban Senegal, Renaud spends much of the book reflecting on her
daily life and dilemmas being a white American woman living in
Senegal. She provides an accessible, clearly written narrative about
her experience as well as a brief glimpse into the lives of the women
with whom she worked and lived. Renaud should be commended for her
objective of contributing to the solution of contemporary
socioeconomic problems associated with AIDS in Senegal by talking
directly with one of the most at-risk and marginalized communities.
However, the book fails to provide either a clear assessment of the
Kaolack clinic's ability to meet the needs of the community or
recommendations concerning the direction of AIDS policy in Senegal.
Women at the Crossroads would be enriched by creating more of a
dialogue with those who direct policy as well as by relating the
research to contemporary issues in anthropological theory.

Ann Reed
Indiana University

<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v046/46.2reed.html>