South Africa's gold mining workforce has the highest prevalence
rates of tuberculosis and HIV infection of any industrial sector in
the country. The contract migrant labour system, which has long
outlived apartheid, is responsible for this unacceptable situation.
The spread of HIV to rural communities in Southern Africa is not
well understood. The accepted wisdom is that migrants leave for the
mines, engage in high-risk behaviour, contract the virus and return
to infect their rural partners. This model fails to deal with the
phenomenon of rural-rural transmission and cases of HIV discordance
(when the female migrant is infected and the male migrant not). Nor
does it reveal whether all rural partners are equally at risk of
infection. This study examines the vulnerability of rural partners
in southern Mozambique and southern Swaziland, which are two major
source areas for migrant miners. It presents the results of surveys
with miners and partners in these two sending-areas and affords the
opportunity to compare two different mine-sending areas. The two
areas are not only geographically and culturally different, they
have had contrasting experiences with the mine labour system over
the last two decades. The spread of HIV in Southern Africa in the
1990s coincided with major downsizing and retrenchment in the gold
mining industry which impacted differently on Mozambique and
Swaziland. Swaziland has been in decline as a source of mine
migrants while Mozambique remained a relatively stable source of
mine migrants. The study therefore aims not only to shed light on
vulnerability in mine sending areas, but also to draw out any
contrasts that might exist between two mine-sending areas that were
inserted into the mine migrant labour system in different ways
during the expansion of the HIV epidemic.
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