London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Nadine Beckmann (University of Roehampton) will deliver this talk entitled 'Love won't be enough: marriage, companionship and intimacy in the face of HIV/AIDS in Zanzibar'.

Transformations of courting practices and marriage expectations are at the center of tense debates about the decline of Islamic morality in Zanzibar. This paper analyses how Zanzibaris negotiate traditional values, modernist processes and Islamic reformism in their quest for intimacy and companionship, and demonstrates continuities with the values upon which previous marriages were built. Rather than merely acting upon feelings of passion and romantic love, the women portrayed in this paper exercise a reasoned form of emotion, which requires strategies of weighing up, testing, and surveilling. The paper will draw out some broader implications for notions of trust and the management of intimate relationships in the face of HIV/AIDS in the islands.