"I thought a man was somebody who's got a family, somebody who's got authority, power, that kind of thing," says Lungelo Fakudze, one of the roughly 100,000 orphans in Swaziland, which is home to 1.3 million people.
It is a difficult image to break in Africa's last absolute monarchy, ruled by King Mswati III - who has 15 wives and can pick a new one yearly from thousands of virgins presented to him during an annual ceremony - and which is blighted by the world's highest rates of HIV, TB and intimate partner violence. [...]
The men also stay away from health clinics, which tend to be female-centred, where they could get a diagnosis and treatment. As a result, while more women contract HIV, more men die as a result of it.
"They believe that they should be big and strong and solitary and authoritative. Reasons you're less likely to go to the clinic and get a check-up and seek out medical services until it's too late," says Tom Churchyard, the director of the charity Kwakha Indvodza (KI), which means Building a Man. [...]
Researcher Bekhie Sithole believes that men's withdrawal from healthcare is a result of the "moralising" of HIV and the way that men have been painted as the perpetrators and women as their victims.
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