We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love (review)

On June 1, 2001, twenty years after the first case of AIDS was officially identified, a young Zulu boy, Xolani Nkosi (a.k.a. Nkosi Johnson), died of the virus that his mother had transmitted to him during pregnancy. He had lain in a vegetative state for months in the home of his white South African "foster mother." He was twelve years old and at death weighed about twenty pounds.

But if his death was horrible and premature, Nkosi's life was exceptional. Defying the odds, he lived four times as long as the typical AIDS-infected infant; he was world-famous and became the AIDS poster-child for South Africa at the turn of the millennium. Because of Nkosi, South African public schools were ordered to allow AIDS-infected children to enroll.

Wooten is a senior correspondent for ABC's Nightline, and his book proves how powerful personal journalism can be. Concise, well researched and by turns sentimental (as in the subtitle) and informative, it is a narrative with no protagonist. Or maybe more accurately, a book whose protagonist is an untenable situation: the stampede of an incurable, universally fatal virus across a developing continent whose population is without most of the medical and economic resources of the Western world.

Setting the stage for the personal story that is at the center, Wooten explains early in the book how the Zulu tribal culture of South Africa was destroyed by apartheid policies that broke up the tribe's strong family traditions. The result? Fatherless families and socially sanctioned promiscuity among young women, facilitating the spread of AIDS. Nkosi's mother, Daphne, was a typical example.

This is a book about people with vision, however, and Nkosi's sick, virtually uneducated mother is one of them. After moving to Johannesburg to find work, Daphne learns that both she and Nkosi are infected with the fatal virus. In desperation, knowing that soon she will not be able to care for him, she makes a courageous trip to an affluent white neighborhood of Johannesburg where she has heard there is a haven/hospice for AIDS victims. The Guest House had been started to care for dying gay white men, but when Daphne knocks on the door and asks if her two-year-old son can live there, the residents, and founder Gail Johnson, agree without hesitation to take him.

Gail Johnson is another visionary and a central player in the narrative, an ambitious, headstrong forty-something businesswoman whose unsatisfactory marriage catapults her into humanitarian work with AIDS victims—first gay men and later young black mothers and their children. When the Guest House is forced to close because of lack of funding, Johnson takes Nkosi to live with her permanently. As she and her family take on the job of caring for him, Johnson finds herself plunging into AIDS activism. She is fearless and indefatigable. At one point she says to Wooten, "Whatever I can do, I try to do. Sometimes I try to do things I can't do, and sometimes I know I probably can't do them even before I try—but you never really know until you try."

Much of this book is Nkosi's and Gail's, but the later chapters also describe Wooten's growing involvement with AIDS reporting. (Wooten admits that the AIDS crisis initially held little interest for him as an international journalist—he viewed it as one more tragedy afflicting Africa, about which not much could be done.)

Obviously there's no resolution to a story that continues to roll forward. Wooten cites predictions that by 2010 there will be twenty-five million or more AIDS orphans in Africa, many of them infected themselves. The book ends with the stuff of human existence—life and death, greed and generosity: Nkosi is buried, his grandmother makes a grab for wealth, demanding...