Cultural Background
Traditional Swazi culture discourages safe sexual practices, like condom use and monogamous relationships. There is a cultural belief in procreation to increase the population size, and Swazis believe a woman should have a minimum of five children and that a man's role is to impregnate as many partners as he can. Men may never get married but still have many children from multiple partners. The few men who do get married often practice polygamy. Sexual aggression is common, with 18% of sexually active high school students saying they were coerced into their first sexual encounter.
Many thousands of children have been orphaned by AIDS, and only 22% grow up in two-parent families.
Read more about this topic: HIV/AIDS In Swaziland
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“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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