The political economy of concurrent partners: toward a history of sex–love–gift connections in the time of AIDS

Over the last decade, one of the most influential explanations for high HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa is the existence of sexual networks characterised by concurrent partners. Recently, however, a growing number of scholars have challenged the evidential basis for the concurrency argument. While this dispute has led to a call for more sophisticated quantitative methods to measure concurrency, this article widens the discussion to emphasise the political economic roots and qualitative dimension of concurrent partnered relations. Specifically, the paper argues for the importance of situating concurrency within key historical processes and, to that end, gives special consideration to the growth of ‘transactional sex’ – non-prostitute but material relations between men and women. Critics of the concurrency–HIV thesis have sometimes dismissed as anecdotal accounts of sex–gift exchanges in Africa. Yet by exploring through an ethnographic/historical lens the changing configuration of sex, love and gifts in South Africa, this article illuminates different manifestations of concurrency, including connections between concurrency and condom use.