ABSTRACT
In southeastern Nigeria, mobility and migration are key strategies for economic livelihood. As the basis for subsistence shifts from agriculture to wage labour and participation in commerce, and as people’s aspirations grow to include consumption of modern commodities, urban-influenced lifestyles and relatively expensive education for their children, few households can manage their financial needs without work-related migration. For the Igbo ethnic group that dominates the region, as for many African people, migration strategies commonly involve maintaining a household in a rural place of origin while some members of the family embark on economically motivated migration of varying durations – from a few days to many years (Geschiere and Gugler 1998; Chukwuezi 2001; Gugler 2002). When migration divides families into rural and urban households, most typically, but certainly not uniformly, it is a husband/father who migrates and a wife/mother who stays in the village to raise the children and supervise rural economic activities such as farming and small-scale trade. The necessity and pace of economic migration grew in Nigeria during the
same period as the emergence of the country’s HIV epidemic. While Nigeria has avoided the catastrophically high infection rates characteristic of southern Africa and parts of east Africa, with an adult seroprevalence of about four per cent and Nigeria’s population of over 140 million people, more than two and a half million citizens are estimated to be infected, the third highest absolute number of any country in the world (UNAIDS 2008). In many world regions where the most common form of transmission is heterosexual, increasing attention has been focused on the risk of marital transmission (UNFPA, UNAIDS and UNIFEM 2004; Hirsch et al. 2007). In particular, the reality of gender inequality and of widespread double standards with regard to men’s and women’s sexuality have led many researchers to explore the social contexts and pathways by which married men might infect their wives through their involvement in unprotected extramarital sex (Hirsch et al. 2007; Parikh 2007; Wardlow 2007; Phinney 2008).1 The urgency of this research and the implications of these findings are amplified by the emphasis in global HIV prevention on the ‘ABC approach’ (Abstain, Be Faithful, Use Condoms), which touts the protective benefits of fidelity for people involved in sexual relationships, a promise upon which
married women with cheating husbands cannot rely. In Nigeria, moralistic messages that extol abstinence and fidelity as avenues to HIV prevention are common, but so is male infidelity (Smith 2003, 2007, 2008; Mitsunaga et al. 2005). Married women’s vulnerability to HIV infection from unfaithful spouses
appears to be exacerbated by the changing nature of marriage itself. In southeastern Nigeria, as in many parts of the world, younger couples increasingly value choosing their own life partner, often based on a notion of romantic love (Smith 2001; Hirsch 2003; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006). While one might expect that modern marriages are beneficial to women because they choose their partners themselves and because the personal relationship between husband and wife is central to the quality of a marriage, my research challenges this view. In fact, as the conjugal relationship becomes more privileged as a locus of emotional investment vis-à-vis other social ties, Igbo women lose some forms of leverage with their husbands. In the context of men’s continued pursuit of extramarital sexual relationships, women’s power vis-à-vis their husbands is a crucial factor in navigating the risk of HIV infection. High rates of mobility and migration both increase men’s opportunities for extramarital sex and complicate women’s abilities to protect themselves. In this chapter, I focus on the specific contexts of Igbo men’s mobility and
migration that enable and even encourage extramarital sexual behaviour. The description and analysis of the influence of mobility and migration on men’s behaviour is situated in relationship to other social factors that shape men’s desires to cheat on their wives. My findings emphasize the ways in which men’s infidelity must be understood not simply as a natural biological desire or as individual ethical failing, but also as the product of structural opportunities and social circumstances. After explaining men’s behaviour, I will briefly examine how migration that splits spouses for extended periods of time intersects with changes in marriage itself to affect married women’s responses to their husbands’ infidelity.
