A friend of mine who is an AIDS treatment activist working in Lesotho (and more generally, a human rights activist focused in Africa) wrote me an e-mail about what work is like currently in the village she is at. Her e-mail included great news about their setting up some farming systems and self-sustaining bio-responsible systems for the village that involve among other things I don’t understand, dual purpose chickens. It was fascinating. Chickens would lay eggs (duh!) and those would be sold in the local market and the closest nearby grocery and then the funds from that would go towards the cost of living and caring for the village AIDS orphans, which are numerous and in the care of a “care group”. And at some point in that cycle the chickens would eventually also become food, thus the dual purpose.
In speaking to my friend I often feel the worse part of my African guilt, which I won’t get into now but obviously as the name suggest has to do with my being an African who isn’t in fact, a human rights activist focused on Africa.
She was talking to me about all kinds of terrible realities and then focused on a very real problem she perceives rightly to be a huge impediment to good work in terms of AIDS—a seemingly “cultural” resistance to treatment and acceptance of this massive death rate. Her prior work had been in South Africa, in the context of a very active and hardcore grassroots patients’ rights campaign by the organization TAC. Her current work is in a village in Lesotho where folks are not that engaged. She said to me in part:
"But, work here is so very frustrating…. working here is entirely different to working in South Africa (or at least being at TAC.) There is absolutely no sense of urgency here… do you know what I mean? I mean that, coming here I knew all about the statistics—one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the entire world and a very high death rate to accompany that, a huge AIDS orphan population, and high rates of unemployment. What I did not expect to find was a (dare I say…) apathetic population who are largely too scared to talk about HIV, let alone test for it, and who would rather go to funerals every single fucking Saturday, rather than stare into the face of the pandemic that has swept their country. The population is just under 2 million and 66% is youth and children… there are 200,000 orphans (10% of the population…yes, 10% of the pop is an orphaned child….isn’t that insane?) The group with the highest rates of HIV infection is women 25-29 years old, 40% of whom are HIV positive. 40 PERCENT!"
And she wrote also about struggling to understand where that apathy came from:
"The thing is that I remarked on this lack of urgency right away, but sort of tried to understand it in its own cultural context… I don’t know if it’s part of the culture—this inherent understanding of the impermanence of life and the unquestioning acceptance of that fact, or what. But, I am struck daily by the lack of urgency with which people deal with this public health crisis. Not in a judgmental sense more in a sociological sense. The Basotho are now attending a funeral every single Saturday, the current life expectancy (debatable) is 35 years of age, there are close to 200,000 orphan children living in a country with a population of just 1,800,000, the central market of Mafeteng town is full of coffin-makers, makers of coffins for every size corpse.”
And about the challenges for women’s ability to negotiate their own (sexual) health:
"I know it sounds naïve, but I think that a society, any society, can not claim to be enlightened, until a woman (the average woman) can negotiate sexuality with her partner. Is the U.S. enlightened, in this sense? Again, we all know that there are “two Americas.” For women of my cohort, yes, I think I can say that yes, they can indeed and most often, do. However, the HIV/AIDS epidemic would not be spreading as fast as it is amongst many populations in the U.S., if this were the case for all American women."
And finally, about the hurdle created by the “traditional” healers:
" A traditional healer who makes one feel comfortable, provides care, attention and emotional support, or prescribes indigenous herbs as remedies for illnesses is not only acceptable and permissible, but actually it is essential for successfully combating HIV/AIDS and the multiple ways it attacks society. The human resources crisis is so intense in the health sector in Lesotho and in most Southern African countries that there are not even enough healthcare workers to test, treat, and care for AIDS patients. Traditional healers have an advantage in that they are usually trusted and respected by the community and they can take time with each patient. If treatment activists could effectively collaborate or ally with one another, both recognizing their shared interests and the collective benefits of partnership, to deal with the public health crisis, there would be a creative synergy as opposed to a dangerous and distracting dichotomy... [Unfortunately] There still exist “witch doctors” who advise that HIV can be cured by having sex with a virgin (or worse yet, a small child) or who prescribe cutting the patient to “clean” the blood.”
Not easy stuff to deal with. And as an African, not easy stuff to hear in way. Because I know my friend is a toughtful and committed person and if the reality on the ground is what it is, then the conclusions that she draws are legitimate. But of course they are not legitimate to me because I refuse to believe certain things. I tried to tell her and think for myself about another angle on this issue.
It seems to me (and I have the advantage of actually *not* looking at coffin makers in the markets every day) that people can only be who they are. And that adversity alone does not change that--various various circumstances have to converge for people to rise up in their own "defense" so to speak--nevermind to do it successfully, in a way that is not self-destructive and pointless in the end. Whether we're talking Lesotho or America. I think hindsight is 20/20 and we often get this linear thinking that connects going through hardship with rising up in a social movement and we forget how many other ways the story goes. I'm sure there's a so-called complacency in the people, but there is one here as well--there is that everywhere.
All the time, my feeling about Africa is always that the DISASTERS (all of them, civil strife, genocides, droughts and famines and AIDS) are so extreme that the rest of the world comes to expect exceptional human behavior from Africans in response. The world looks at that continent and expects that Africans—against human type and norm--be strong and stand up for themselves in dire circumstances, that they resist corruption and violence and other normal human inclinations under strife, that they shake off their own cultural context and trust Westerners, that the women negotiate rights they do not have and never have had, that they opt out of their medicine in favor of another from people who have never done much for them-- another medicine they simply don't understand.
It seems not fair an expectation but I hear it in people’s frustration with “Africa”. Even I fall prey to that. In the end, whether "we" Africans (and I put the quotes on the we fully aware that there's all kind of Africans) are dying in massive numbers or not, we are only ordinary people. Like everybody else. We are no more willing or inclined to face a pandemic than the next person say, in the States, who is unwilling to face that their government is a nefarious influence in the world; that their country systematically condemns millions to "Africa-like" poverty and despair though it calls itself a democracy; that not getting tested for HIV or not wearing a condom is really dumb.
I think people are always afraid and excepting very few individuals (like my friend and others like her, all over the world whose work is about human rights) prefer to cling to the notion that they should get a break and be allowed to "just live a happy life" without having to get into a fight for the death about it. Or without having to change the way they've lived. Or something. I think that it would be actually odd if folks in Africa were anything but aclimated to the idea of premature death and other loss. You know? It seems contradictory but I think it’s about a reaffirmation of a whole continent’s humanity that we can’t get it together—how could we get it together? WHO could get it together under the circumstances Africa is under? Personally, I'm scared to even visit certain places in the world and see life in certain states of disarray. I’m still devastated that I let myself watch the Frontline special on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. That's how much I am naturally inclined to run from that shit and I'm not even at stake; I don’t live there.
I think on a positive note, that people like my friend make a huge difference. Cumulatively. If you read about movements, all kinds of movements and currents of change, they start very very quietly and small and so slow. Way before there's something on the radar of "world history", or something that can be spun into "a book" or an entry in wikipedia or a movie with Denzel Washington and what not—way before that, there's people like my friend and the villagers she is collaborating with, and the health professionals, doing day to day work. And working in the face of odds that would make most people just sit and weep and walk away. There's people who use their place slightly outside of that despair to come and shake things up a little bit and say there should be another way to deal. But you can’t expect someone living and eating and breathing that despair to just up and say, oh today I’m going to be hopeful and combative and proactive about this. Today I’m going to affect change in my life that has an expectancy of 35 years. I think it’s not fair to expect anything from a human being who is not allowed to expect to live past 35.
It's going to take everything (from grassroots local stuff, to international human rights activism stuff, to science, to medicine, to money to government to sheer luck and the graces of the gods) to correct the path of the African continent, and when I personally think of that, that terrifies me because I don't think what happens in Africa upsets enough people. Is it because the place is so damn fucked up every which way or is the place that fucked up because most people don't care about the place? Pointless chicken and egg question, but it does come back to the notion of complacency, doesn't it? Just because my friend can't see sometimes how the work that she is doing is affecting the larger scheme, it doesn't mean it's not.
But in the same way, just because we can't see a visible and familiar manifestation of a people's anger or resilience or will to live, it doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean they don't care. Every day life can speak its own (fucked up) truths to us and what happens really becomes "all that can happen" but I refuse to believe there is inclination, anywhere in Africa, irrespective of what we think we understand about the people, towards letting themselves just die off. Because fundamentally that makes no sense. Human beings just are not built that way.
It occurred to me something when I was thinking about what she wrote me about complacency that a comparison of sorts could be made to the mid east and suicide bombers. I suppose they could be considered to be the ultimate "non-complacent" people, in a sense. But we all know that what they do with their despair has another profound human tragedy quotient as well. I think the root of it is the same, right? An acceptance of death at the hand of unjust circumstances, a resting of hopes in false witch doctoring prophets, a disenfranchised human being's own inadequate "adjustment" to a fucked up fate. If someone internalizes all of that and decides to blow themselves up in a bus vs if they just decide to die quietly in a village in Lesotho--which is better for whom? Which rattles the conscience of the world? Some would say neither if the conscience of the world can’t be bothered. Having posed the hypothetical question, I am full aware that the question itself is immoral. Just like the realities in the question are just immoral: human beings just should have the right to better options than a pointless death.
I get “Africa frustration” all the time. Especially when I am thinking about corrupt governance, “war lords”, child soldiers, rapes and ethnic genocides and all of that shit. I often have those un-PC thoughts of “how fucked up are you people, goddamn?!”—but I have those same thoughts about my people in Africa as I have about my people in the ghettoes of American cities. And in both counts they’re not real convictions, just the rude frustration. Same as when I lose it with my son and accidentally curse at him. Symptomatic of my exasperation but not my conviction. Fact is that if it is true that poverty breeds dysfunction and that the two are proportionate, imagine if ALL of America was the lower 9th ward of New Orleans or West Baltimore or DC or the South Bronx? Imagine if all the people here lived in the same conditions that some live in the reservations? If all of that dysfunction was not imbedded in this hugely wealthy, hugely expansive country whose government more or less controls the world? What would this country really look like? And further, what would its people look like for "putting up with it"? Pretty culturally inclined to apathy and complacency, I think…
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