Children Of Africa Confront AIDS: From Vulnerability To Possibility

Foreword

Foreword The statistics overwhelm the language and confound the imagination . Humankind has never known a tragedy of these proportions . Sub-Saharan Africa, where 83 percent of all AIDS deaths and 71 percent of HIV infections occur, has been described as Ground Zero. But terms like New Holocaust and Ground Zero belong to another world, whatever the images of suffering connected to them. They belong to the world of the powerful, and in our desperation to have our tragedy of unspeakable proportions recognized we invoke words that we hope will resonate with the powerful. It’s as if our own pain can only be legitimized in the shadow of theirs. Stephen Lewis of UNAIDS recently demanded that “those who watch [this pandemic] unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account” and suggested that “there may yet come a day when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity.” On the morning of September 11, one of the local Starbucks in the vicinity of Ground Zero actually sold water to distraught people fleeing the disaster. The sales lasted for only a short while and then the sickness of it all sank in and the company apologized. Will a time come when companies will be held accountable for having profiteered on the blood of people because they insisted on putting profits and patents before people and patients? When will the sickness of it all sink in? xi You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Like no other pandemic, HIV/AIDS reflects the games of the powerful on the one hand and the survival mechanisms and cries of the powerless on the other. Some African governments refuse to do the doable, invoking unconvincing arguments about budgetary constraints—unconvincing because their defense budgets are there for all to see. Rather than engaging in frontal assault on reckless sexual behavior that not infrequently involves violence and rape, we find it more convenient to seek refuge in conspiracy theories. White society ascribes the crisis to “black promiscuity”; blacks, to white pharmaceutical companies; straight people, to “homosexual promiscuity”; religious people, to those with “loose morals”; the North, to the “decadence” of the South. HIV/AIDS is the ultimate in othering. Alas there is no North or South, and I have yet to come across a “real” black person or white person. Sometimes when I wash the body of someone who has died of AIDS I weep and ask myself why— particularly when I did not know the deceased. I cry for myself , my own selfhood, which comprises so many others; I am the other, for otherness is a condition of selfhood; I am who I am because of you. This is not the time for homily or one-upmanship (and for once, gender-biased language works just fine with me). When I arrive at the scene of an accident and I witness the injured struggling for their lives, what does it say about me when I rush to smell their breath for alcohol, walk off into the desert of indifference , and use the opportunity to crow about my being a teetotaler? Surely my humanity dies along with those victims. If Not for Yourself, then at Least for the Children While no adult who is HIV-positive has asked for it, they are not as innocent as the children—the utterly voiceless, the xii / Foreword You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. unspeakably vulnerable. The children have only me and you to depend on. In each of these children we have a reflection of where we were once upon a time and, but for the grace of God, it could have been me yesterday or my children tomorrow. This volume deals with the children of Africa—how their lives and deaths are affecting development and democracy in that continent as well as their vulnerability in the face of war and poverty and the often related sexual violence. These chapters are not tales of lamentation but of hope and courage; From Zimbabwe to Ghana, from Kenya to South Africa, come stories and strategies for reducing vulnerability and sustaining...