South Africans beef up at gym to battle AIDS, crime
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With bulging biceps and abs like steel, South Africa’s jobless youngsters are turning to bodybuilding to help them fight AIDS and resist a life of crime.
Makeshift gyms are springing up across the country’s poorest and toughest townships, aimed at helping members develop discipline over delinquency and stay healthy as HIV/AIDS ravages their communities.
“You remember that cartoon He-Man?” asked 20-year-old Thumi Masite from the Johannesburg township of Alexandra - referring to the muscular 1980s TV and comic book super-hero. “Well, my dream is to be like him. To be huge.”
Unable to find a job in a country with unemployment of almost 30 percent, many young men in South Africa’s teeming black townships resort to car-jacking and other violent crimes.
Well aware of the temptations on the street, Masite spends his days pumping iron in his grandmother’s backyard, which he has turned into Alexandra’s first gym.
“I want to be a bodybuilding legend for the townships,” he said, breathless after a session with the handful of weights he and his friends bought with cash raised from washing cars.
“Desire, discipline and determination - that’s my motto.”
Masite and his 71-year-old grandmother Clara Letsoalo set up the gym earlier this year in the yard of their small house to give restless young men an alternative to crime.
About 16 members - almost all unemployed - train regularly and most say they would be roaming the streets without bodybuilding to bring focus to their days.
“I used to see them on the corner of the street there, smoking all sorts of things,” said Letsoalo, a sprightly woman in a polo shirt, sports shoes and flowered headscarf. “I wanted to get them off the streets, stop them from getting into crime.”
“AIDS IS KILLING PEOPLE”
Gyms are hugely popular in South Africa’s smarter suburbs, where year-round fine weather feeds a thriving body cult and fear of crime makes walking or jogging after dark difficult.
But bodybuilding is a fairly new phenomenon in the townships, where poor and unemployed young men are finding any available space - sheds, open fields or bedrooms - to pump iron.
As well as helping curb crime, township gym bosses hope training with weights will encourage young men to stay healthy in the face of an HIV/AIDS pandemic that has swept across South Africa, particularly among young, poor blacks.
South Africa has the world’s highest HIV/AIDS caseload with more than 5 million people estimated to carry the virus - one in nine of its 45 million people.
Eating well, keeping fit and leading a healthy lifestyle may help delay the onset of full-blown AIDS but the HIV virus has hit the poor hardest and millions lack the resources, support and know-how to stay in good shape.
In the township of Kayamandi near the famed Stellenbosch wine region in the Western Cape, Veli Mthelo, 28, set up a gym to help young men beat HIV, and drug and alcohol abuse.
“We wanted to stay away from drugs, alcohol and to live a healthy life because AIDS is there and it’s killing people,” he told Reuters in the rubbish-strewn township, packed with dilapidated shacks.
BODY AND SOUL
Members of Mthelo’s gym are not allowed to drink in shebeens - township drinking dens - and smoking is banned. Missing a session without a good excuse incurs a fine and training starts and ends with a prayer.
“Our rule is that if you are a member you should not go to the shebeen or be a smoker because we are trying to use weights in a sense to build discipline,” Mthelo said. “You need to work hard to achieve all the goals you want.”
Mthelo, who smiles broadly as two young boys swing on his powerful arms, says he looks beyond the body to the soul.
“The other thing is we try not to just build the muscles in people but also to go as far as their spiritual life,” he said.
Members - up to 17 at any one time - squeeze into a tiny bedroom and take turns with the single bench press and three sets of weights as children play soccer in the street outside and neighbors share a rowdy case of beer.
Every Saturday they meet to discuss their experiences during the week and “just talk about life.”
But vanity also plays a part in the bodybuilding craze.
In Alexandra, a tough world where crime is common and street cred a precious commodity, size matters. Young men proudly parade their toned torsos for visitors, competing to give the most impressive display.
Seventeen-year-old Amos Moses, the youngest and skinniest of the gym’s members, is honest about his motives.
“I think it helps with the ladies,” he said, flexing his bony arm. “I’ve been coming for a few months and my body is a bit bigger now.”
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