The archives of the regional southern Africa office of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM, has some precious photographs that offer a record of women's life experiences in the year 2003. In its own way, each image shows the very different ways women across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region endure a world in which poverty has increasingly determined the extent to which women are able to make choices. In one of the pictures four women in their late 20s and early 30s sit side by side, enjoying a moment of sisterhood in the African sunshine.

A shared experience connects them. They are all determined and gallant activists in the movement of women living with HIV and AIDS, agitating for their rights. Hope glows from their faces. Hope of an imminent victory in a struggle that seeks to set women free from all forms of oppression and injustice. But no amount of creative artistry could have enabled the photographer's lens to capture the story behind Angeline Chiwetani's glasses.

In 1999, the working mother of two young boys learned to be tough. She had hit the hardest of times. Her husband, HIV positive and without treatment, needed constant looking-after. Chiwetani drafted a letter of resignation and handed it over to her employers.

Moving away from a job that provided the family its sole income put Chiwetani's life at its darkest ever. For 12 long and lonely months she was miserable and knew little else but pain, anger and disappointment.

Women and the stigma of AIDS

"My marriage had problems. My husband used to go beyond our bedroom and have sexual relations with other women. I told my family lets talk and adjust the situation and they said I was trying to rule the roost, "says Chiwetani.

"No one came to see my husband except for my relatives and friends. My in laws, his brother and sisters labelled me a city woman. They meant I could go and sleep with any guy, " says Chiwetani, pointing to a kind of isolation that women caring for HIV positive husbands have repeatedly voiced.

Thousands of HIV positive women across the sub-Saharan African region daily suffer the nasty effects of gossip, ugly name-calling and being labelled everything from whore to witches. Their collective experiences show the extent to which addressing AIDS related stigma remains a critical priority for any actions aimed at cutting back the impacts of the epidemic on African women. Eliminating the segregation, isolation, emotional and psychological violence HIV positive women like Chiwetani and their families bear.

Women's resistance to AIDS gains momentum

Chiwetani has become a leader, organizing support and care for HIV positive women and their families and communities. The last four years have seen Chiwetani develop strength and resilience. Her boys, now aged 12 and seven, are at school and their grades have been encouraging. She was recently appointed the Executive Director of the Network for Zimbabwe Positive Women (NZPW+), a not for profit group that supports more than 3000 HIV positive women across the country in various ways.

NZPW+ is supported by UNIFEM, through a special fund aimed at empowering HIV positive women to put pressure on public institutions to safeguard the rights of especially women living with HIV and AIDS.

"We need to get what we need to save ourselves", she says, running off her fingers some of the resources that HIV positive and other women need to secure empowerment and autonomy, "Education is key, so are jobs, access to treatments for the illnesses HIV positive women face and above all social and legal support".

She says a critical factor in providing support is to create a public and private environment that enables HIV positive women to live with their status. " I cannot emphasis how important it is to have stigma reduction programmes. This allows us to come out in the open and talk to some one who can comfort you and help you get over the stress, someone to share with. I opened up because when I got into this situation someone opened to me. I think I would be dead. There is no one to talk to you can get stressed up and have problems."

AIDS and Women's failing rights

Women and girls account for 58 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan African countries like Zimbabwe that are deeply affected by the pandemic. In some instances girls aged 15 to 19 years are four to seven times more likely to be infected with HIV than boys within the same age group.

This reflects the low and oppressed status of women in Zimbabwe. While Zimbabwe's women have paper rights enshrined in the National Gender Policy, a fracture exists between policy and lived reality. The AIDS pandemic has not only uncovered the very deeply ingrained sexual abuse, gender violence and impoverishment that especially poor black women experience, but it has also served to reinforce and provide new avenues of discriminating women and showing that a critical gap between proclamations and real change remains.

Sexist attitudes and sinister patriarchal practices that privilege men have kept women and poor, rural women in particular, in positions of deep disadvantage. Not only has this made women more vulnerable to HIV infection, but also forced women and girls into working as unpaid, unrecognized home nurses carrying the burden of community based care programmes.

The phenomenal sacrifice women of the sub-region make in nursing the AIDS affected, without appropriate training, equipment, food, water, firewood, money, medications or recognition, is a stunning sign of service. Yet it is also a form of exploitation that reveals the marginalisation of women and girls in societies that accept that women are unequal citizens who should be made to accept labour: washing soiled bedding and clothing, whipping wounds and sores, burying the dead without coffins, caring without knowledge or information or protection has led to a trauma so deep it is difficult to see recovery of families and communities from the burden.

AIDS, Women and the Family

As her husband's health deteriorated Chiwetani sent messages to his family requesting support. The harsh advice that came back was: "Go and stay in the village, near a grave," she says. The family did not want, in the event of her husband's death, the responsibility of moving his body from the city to the village where the funeral was bound to be.

On July 23 2000, while the rest of Zimbabwe was consumed by the headiness surrounding the constitutional reform debate and parliamentary elections, Chiwetani's husband died. "It happened in our house. When I sent a message to his brother the words that came back were "Tell her I am waiting for my wife to finish the laundry", she says.

In a short space of time Chiwetani had gone from wife to widow. No sooner had her husband's coffin been lowered into the grave that new difficulties emerged. A tug-of-war surrounding property believed to belong to the deceased put further strain on already mangled family relations.

HIV and AIDS? The Experience of Widows

"When I went home for the funeral, there was a lot of talk about how I had killed my husband and made him sick", explains Chiwetani. "My husband had amended his Will and reversed certain sections. The Will had been stamped by his lawyers. The family was not very happy that the children and I had been left with everything.”

Bitter inheritance disputes, that often leave widows and their children dispossessed and may even result in fatalities, have been the subject of extensive research by regional feminist networks such as the Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Education Trust, WLSA. The network, along with women's rights groups across the continent, has lobbied for legislative reforms that protect the property and inheritance rights of widows and children. AIDS Activists such as Chiwetani have recently added their weight behind the demands for just inheritance laws and legal practice before both civil and traditional courts.

"Zimbabwe's inheritance laws are very clear: widows and children are the rightful heirs to the deceased's estate, where there is a Will, its contents are meant to be respected,” says Arnold Tsunga, Co-ordinator of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR). "Yet more than half of all inheritance disputes have women and girls as complainants. This is partly due to the prejudice women and children encounter through sexist legal practice and customary law that favours men as heirs."

Chiwetani couldn't agree more. "Wills are very important. They prevent people from grabbing property from widows at the time of need,” she says about the strategy that worked for her and her children. "Now that I have my life and our network is growing, my main worry is treatment for the women on whose behalf I have dedicated my life to.”

Women and AIDS Treatment Campaigns

With more than half of the people living with HIV and AIDS being women, treatment campaigns can no longer afford to sideline women's demands for appropriate care through service centres that meet the very specific needs of women.

As the UN's World Health Organisation rolls out its "3 by 5" campaign, which aims to have 3 million people on treatment by 2005, the momentum steadily gathering in the region to demand treatments will need to ensure that a significant number of the beneficiaries of treatment are women and girls living with the HIV.

"Treatment is something to do at all costs," says Jephias Mudondo, director of the Family AIDS Counselling Trust (FACT). "People are dying unnecessarily. The solution is political commitment. Commitment with action.”

"Women are more affected in a lot of ways. Even in infection by older men. Married men go out and get infected. A married woman is the most vulnerable person. When positive they carry all the burden. Poverty does not have access to treatment in the country. We have a programme of volunteers taking place. Of 600 volunteers only 10 are men. The rest are women. Community care impacts on them. When they get ill who do they get support from?"

AIDS and the Ballot Box

It has been both difficult and painful to comprehend the world's impassivity when millions of women and girls continue to die of AIDS that has come about as a consequence of gender discrimination. Any other form of oppression would have caused massive outrage. The race, sex and class factors that have for the past two and a half decades allowed African women to die slowly, one at a time, from the casualty and shame of AIDS cannot go ignored.

On the eve of the National Conference on HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe that ran June 15 to 18 women's rights activists showed their collective indignation at the deeply rooted gender and human rights violations that have allowed the full horror of this mammoth plague to emerge. Not providing early, affordable and accessible treatment, along with the resources so necessary for the disease's elimination has proved to be extremely costly and damaging.

As Zimbabwe moves closer to Parliamentary Elections planned for March 2005, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Beijing Fourth World Conference of Women, AIDS is steadily graining momentum as an issue of governance and democracy. Political will to tackle gender segregation in the context of AIDS will determine which way the millions of women whose lives have been rocked by the disease will cross their voting cards. After all, women command 52% of the vote.

* Isabella Matambanadzo is Zimbabwean Feminist Activist. She is currently the Executive Director of the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) a women's pressure group that since its establishment in 1990 is committed to empowering women to make informed choices and decisions.

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