Solomon Xaba is Nomalanga Malekane’s partner. They’re both blind, live in Soweto, and Xaba speaks to Africa Alliance about why both condoms are important for all couples to use.
This article is part of an African Alliance series celebrating 25 years of the inner condom in South Africa and the people who helped to establish the world’s biggest state-funded inner condom project.
Solomon Xaba is a blind man living in Orlando East in the township of Soweto, in Gauteng. He is currently unemployed.
In 2021, a Daily Maverick article says Blind SA approximates that their current job-seeker database has more than 500 applicants, ranging in skill from matriculants to university graduates, and only about five people have been placed, in part-time positions, within the last year. This is a tiny fraction of the people who could be employed.
Despite the Employment Equity Act, there’s many barriers for visually impaired or blind people to access employment. Post-Covid, not much has changed.
Xaba met Nomalanga Malekane in 2019, at a National Organisation of the Blind in South Africa (NOBSA) meeting, where they were holding a workshop to brainstorm ways to fundraise for the visually impaired. They’ve been together ever since.
He thinks the female/inner condom is good, because sometimes there’s not enough male/external condoms at the clinics. Inner condoms provide variety and help close the gap with the need for condoms.
Xaba says his partner usually puts the condom on 30 minutes before sex. You can put the condom on up to eight hours before sex, which helps women have control over their sexual and reproductive health needs.
“When we are in motion, there’s that rubber ring by the clitoris, I usually feel it, and it makes it feel so, so good,” he explains.
Now that’s a glowing review of the pleasurable side of the FC2 condom.
Disabled young people are sexual beings, and deserve equal rights and opportunities to have control over, choices about, and access to their sexuality, sexual expression, and fulfilling relationships throughout their lives, says a perspective article published in 2017.
For Xaba, true access for blind people is only a reality when inner condoms come with instructions written in braille, so both men and women can understand how to use them.
Are you a visually impaired or blind person? Have you ever encountered sexual health tools that include braille? Get in touch with us on X and Instagram. We’re at @Afri_Alliance.