Zvingangokuwanawo – Zimbabwe

Most scenes on the drama are in familiar settings like beer halls and nightclubs known well by Zimbabweans. The programme uses a popular tune on HIV/AIDS by a well-known local musician, Thomas Mapfumo, as theme music. Most of the dialogue in the drama uses humorous language and most of the actors on the series are school-going youth who had to be trained.

In the drama, a young married man is using his financial status to woo young girls in his community into love affairs. He is also going out with commercial sex workers at the same time. In most cases he does not use condoms. Despite warnings and advice from his friends and workmates, he continues this behaviour, saying HIV/AIDS is imaginary.

He believes that what people call HIV/AIDS is actually "runyoka", which is a constructed disease. (According to Zimbabwean culture, runyoka is actually some herbs, which a man puts on his wife if he suspects that she is cheating on him. So when another man has sex with her, that man ostensibly suffers a variety of illnesses, including weight loss and a protruding stomach.)

In the end, this young man gets HIV/AIDS and infects many girls in the vicinity as well as his wife. Even some other young guys still at school (who were having some affairs with their counterparts at school) got infected. In fact it becomes a triangle of HIV infection. When this young man starts getting ill, he thought it was this runyoka as he was losing a lot of weight, along with other symptoms. But when he finally got tested for HIV/AIDS, he was found to be HIV-positive.

He decided to go public and this news spread around the community, making those people he had had affairs with afraid. In his addresses to the public, he advises people to avoid promiscuity, lest they catch HIV/AIDS like he had. He emphasises the value of faithfulness and advises school-going youth to delay sexual activity until they have completed their careers.

HIV/AIDS, Youth