IRIN reports on African long haul truck drivers who entertain monogamous relationship with a girlfriend whilst they are on the road and their wife is a home.

“I decided to have one girlfriend, because if you go out with so many women then you risk getting HIV or other diseases,” said one Congolese truck driver referring to his girlfriend who lives on the Kenya-Uganda border.

Because this driver and many other like him believes that he is the “one and only”, he does not think condom are needed. But the problem is that many of these “girlfriends” have several “boyfriend” who visit in turns, and thanks to what seems a very well network of girlfriends, they can tell each other when the truck drivers are coming to town.

“Many women here have at least three boyfriends, each of whom thinks he is the only man in their lives,” said Hope Tumuhimbise, a sex worker in Katuna, Uganda. “The women even have friends in several towns, who can tell them when one trucker is in a nearby town so they can get rid of another one and pretend they are alone.”

In a study by Morris and colleagues, the number of sex workers reporting 100% condom use was 26.8% in Kenya and 18.9% in Uganda. Condom use amongst female sex workers in Uganda has been observed to drop from 74% to 50% with regular clients.

Truck drivers know about HIV and about condoms, but the ever optimistic male belief that they are “The One” and that “their woman” is not like “other” women (women don’t seem to be that delusional about their partner) obliterate the rational for condom use.

Women on the other hands depends on these boyfriends to pay the rent, sometimes start a business or to buy food, the whole being “paid back” with sex, in a system similar to the Kenyan Jaboya.

“Prostitution is seen as business. You go into the street and set a price. With transactional sex, the nature of the relationship is different. There are feeling involved. It’s more committed.”¹

Knowledge is there as are condoms. Prevention needs to go one step further and take into account a social dimension often ignored, that sex, its social construction and integration in everyday life can blot out all the good will, and reason, in the world.

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¹ Mzikazi Nduna, a research psychologist quoted in Epstein’s The Invisible Cure, p76.

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