The vital link between AIDS and marriage in Africa is the bride price. It condemns women to a life of marital enslavement with little or no control over their own sexuality. It denies them the power to negotiate sex and they become prone to HIV/AIDS infection from unfaithful husbands.

Once bride price has been paid, the man sees his wife as a mere object and expects her to be compliant in matters of sexual intercourse even if he is running around with other women and is evidently infected with HIV/AIDS.

A study has shown that men often scoff at the idea of safe sex once they’ve paid the bride price. They have been known to say that they had fully paid the bride price and that no beast had been deducted to make up for the use of condoms. When women dare to suggest the use of condoms, they often suffer rape and severe beatings. A UN country report on Zimbabwe, entitled “Facing the Future Together” and released in 2004, noted that one in five of the women they surveyed between the ages of 15 and 29 had experienced sexual violence by an intimate partner.

A support group for abused women in Harare, Zimbabwe, spoke of forced and unprotected sex with unfaithful husbands and of subsequently contracting sexually transmitted infections but being unable to afford treatment. They said they were often too frightened to discuss safe sex lest they attracted more violence from their partners. All invariably spoke of the lack of parental support in a society where it is generally understood that once a man has paid his bride price, he has unlimited rights over his wife. Thus women generally remain in these abusive, life-threatening relationships for lack of other support mechanisms.

But it seems that women have also been been socialized into believing that any relationship is better than none, that if you are married then you have a higher status than one who is not.

Women also believe infidelity and sexual violence to be quite normal. The UN report found that many relationships were premised on the idea that “men can have multiple sex partners while women cannot” and that domestic violence was so “normalized” in Zimbabwe that women themselves believed that wife-beating and coerced sex followed naturally from bad behavior.

It is unlikely that the bride price will ever be discontinued through an act of parliament as some have suggested. It is normally the first step in every marriage process and is deeply entrenched in the cultural beliefs of African societies. It is also a means by which poor families can rise out of their poverty. In Zimbabwe where inflation has topped 100 percent and unemployment 80 percent, the bride price is big business. It is not unusual for payments to exceed Z$500 million and to include luxuries such as mobile phones, air tickets and cars. The woman’s educational level, the nature of her employment and her virgin status are important considerations.

But it could be that once they have been empowered and their societies educated, women could be better able to take advantage of existing laws against HIV/AIDS-related violence in marriage. The Sexual Offenses Act in Zimbabwe, for example, allows women to sue for marital rape or the willful transmission of HIV/AIDS through sexual intercourse.