Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

Lots of people have jokes to tell about the Aids crisis on the African continent. Some even try to use various anecdotes in order to prove that the basic problem is the inability of Africans to take in information. Many ignore the fact that the real problem is illiteracy. Instead, these unpleasant joke-smiths conjure up an image of stupidity, a peculiar lack of intelligence when faced with facts and arguments. The stories and the conclusions are downright racist. The implication is that it is the natives' own fault that so many Africans are HIV-positive. They ought to know better than to indulge in extra-marital affairs or to lead polygamous lives. If they are infected, there is not much that can be done about it. Let them die.

This is not said in so many words, of course. But I have heard the joke, told by a Scandinavian aid worker, about the European nurse who travelled to a remote African village to address them on the subject of Aids. She talked about condoms. To demonstrate how they should be used she stuck up two fingers and slid the condom over them. Whereupon all the men present, according to the Scandinavian teller of the tale, went home and applied a condom to their fingers before mating with their wives.

It is easy to make fun, racist fun, of African people. But misunderstandings about safe sex are not a result of stupidity. They are a relic of the tradition and heritage that Europeans have forced upon Africa. They have to do with the only golden rule that mattered during the four centuries of colonialism. Europe said: don't think, do!

Unsurprisingly, this attitude lingers on. It is neither stupidity nor cowardice. It is a continuation of European pressure. Moreover, teaching people how to protect themselves is a very sensitive matter. In many African cultures you simply do not talk to strangers about your intimate sex life. It is completely inappropriate for a clumsy European to march up and gather villagers together, then make threatening gestures with his or her fingers and slide a condom over them. Being illiterate is not the same thing as being devoid of dignity.

I have met vast numbers of poor, ignorant Africans whose dignity far exceeds anything I have come across in the West. This is not a tendentious or far-fetched claim. Human dignity does not go arm in arm with material well-being or a high degree of knowledge. Human dignity is an automatic reaction in poor people who have understood why they are weighed down by poverty.

Informing people about how the infection is passed on is crucial, obviously, but the teaching has to be adapted to those who are to be taught. Those whose mission it is to impart this information must first learn to listen, and not seek to impose the solutions and rules of conduct that various Western experts and bureaucrats have decided are correct.

Thousands of people are dying of Aids today because of wrong, often downright arrogant methods of trying to make them realise how HIV is passed on. There is no doubt that one essential tool in the effort to reduce the rate of infection whether in young or rather older people would be the taking of steps to ensure that everybody has access to an ABC-book. For instance.

The statistics paint a complex picture, but they tell the same story. It is a lack of basic education that makes people more vulnerable to HIV infection.

There was one question which I put to everybody I talked to in Uganda. A question I had also asked people earlier in Mozambique, people suffering from full-blown Aids, or people who had just been infected and told that they were carrying HIV.

I asked them where they thought the virus had come from.

Replies varied. Astonishingly, many thought that it could very well be a disease the West had introduced secretly into Africa, and was making sure that it spread everywhere in order to reduce the number of poor people there. In other words, the disease was a subtle way of committing mass murder. The invisible gas chambers of a new age, a microscopic virus that could send people to their graves in a "natural" way. The people who believed this to be the origin of the HIV epidemic often replied very emphatically. They were absolutely convinced that the death they were facing had been deliberately planned. The whole of the West was made up of witches or medicine men bent on genocide.

There were some who introduced a religious dimension into their fate. Abandoned gods were spreading death and destruction all over an Africa that already seemed to be ripe for extinction. Famine, civil war, expanding deserts, malaria parasites and diarrhoea. And now Aids. There was a self-disgust about these people that doubled their suffering. They were often the ones who lived for the shortest time. Their immune system was unable to cope with the double pressure of the ravages caused by the virus, and their mental collapse.

These people gave the impression of using the virus as a means of committing suicide.

Most others knew nothing more than what the doctors had told them. A virus – whatever that is. Something that resulted from making love, from blood transfusions or from using dirty syringe needles.

Everybody seemed to agree that the suffering was hitting the African continent especially hard.

Christine said: "It's as if there's no end to it. I read about our continent. It is as if we Africans are concerned only with dying, not with living. But it's not like that, of course. Even if all these diseases hit us especially hard."

Of course there were many people who also maintained that the West was conspiring in some remarkable way with various gods. The overworld and the underworld had combined to destroy the African people with the help of this virus.

Christine again: "I've heard that some people think the disease originated in animals, especially the apes, and that we got the disease inside us when we ate meat from apes. But couldn't it just as well be that we have always carried the disease inside us? Maybe it has always been inside, us but it is only now that it has been given a name."

What did Moses think? He shrugged.

"Is it important? I can't tell you the answer, nobody can. Why should I spend my time worrying about that? My time is already limited. Death is wherever there is life. Death sometimes wears visible clothing, sometimes he makes himself invisible."

I spoke to everybody, including Gladys and Beatrice. The answers varied, but were always evasive.

In the end I spoke to Aida as well. We were in among the banana trees, but not to look at her mango plant: we were trying to find one of the black piglets that had decided to run away. Aida found it and pounced on it before it had a chance to escape her grasp. We carried it back to the pen. Then Aida went to wash her hands.

It was she who asked the question: "Where does it come from, this disease that Mum has?"

"I don't know. Different people think different things. But it's a virus, a so-called micro-organism."

"Why is it only people here who get it?"

"It isn't only here. People get infected just the same in the country I come from."

Aida thought about that.

"Where did it start? In your country or here in ours?"

"Probably here, but nobody knows for certain."

Aida seemed depressed. We walked back to the houses and the courtyard where a cockerel with an injured leg was limping about.

"I think the disease comes from somebody who wants to harm us," Aida suddenly said.

"Who would that be?"

"I don't know."

"Diseases don't come from 'somebody'. Diseases are there all the time. They develop and change. Eventually people start to die of them. It has always been like that."

Aida said nothing more. As we walked towards the raffia mat where Christine sat cleaning a wound on Aida's youngest sister's foot, she aimed a kick at the cockerel who fluttered away, cackling angrily.