Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. I 1 first met Nothemba in Town Two, the neighbourhood in Khayelitsha where she had lived most of her life. In line with the racist and segregationist apartheid system, access to education, decent employment and proper health care was severely limited for this portion of the population. These challenges have persisted post-apartheid, with employment and education levels remaining problematically low.
She was the first in her family to get such tertiary training. Nothemba and her family continued to rely heavily on a combination of social grants and money from her grandmother, who earned a meagre salary working as a domestic worker in a wealthy, white suburb.
The two had met seven years prior while in high school together. She described him as an ambitious, loving man. He had moved to Johannesburg to pursue his career in a new management position in a construction company. They had maintained close contact but distance kept them from meeting frequently. I have another boyfriend who lives in Cape Town. But Nothemba was not interested in marrying her boyfriend in Cape Town because she really only loved her boyfriend in Johannesburg.
Faced, however, with the distance between herself and the man she truly loved, she sought another partner close by. For young people like Nothemba, social and sexual relationships are multilayered and require careful management. Because of the central role of sexual practice in HIV transmission in southern Africa, how and why young people form partnerships has become a matter of sustained public health concern.
The public health literature has often promoted a view of multiple sexual partnerships and concurrency as a behavioural issue of singular importance in driving the southern African HIV epidemic. This view has not always accounted for different kinds of sexual relationships as but one of many complex and multilayered factors that shape the HIV epidemic here.
