Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

This disease is shameful, burdened with guilt. Whole villages, whole generations are riddled with guilt and shame in the shadow of Aids. Not everybody is affected in this way, not people like Gladys, Christine or Moses. But far too many are.

All those who refuse to accept that they are ill believe that they alone will survive. At least, as long as they refuse to start recording their memories in little exercise books made up of a few pages of grey paper.

One day my stay in Uganda comes to an end. In the evening I drive from Kampala to the airport in Entebbe. There is traffic chaos as usual, with frequent gridlocks: cars, overcrowded buses, lorries with lefhally packed loads. The only ones who get to where they want to go are those on cycles or mopeds, or on foot. It is Saturday evening, the jams are especially chronic. But eventually traffic starts moving again, and we get to the airport in time. The flight departs late at night and I head for Europe, and before long I shall be dreaming about the people in the coniferous forest.

Those faces projecting from the tree trunks, their frozen faces, their wordless horror. The coniferous forest crammed with the dying, and the already dead.

I must be honest. It was a relief to get away. So much death and suffering in a few intensive weeks is more than enough. I shall never forget the people I met. Nor shall I ever cease to be angry over the fact that so much of this suffering is unnecessary.

Christine again: the medication she needed cost twice her monthly wage as a teacher. She earned the equivalent of US$55 a month (£30). The drugs, in their simplest form, cost US$110. Approximately US$1300 (£720) per year. That's US$1300 for Christine, US$1300 for Moses, and another US$1300 for Gladys.

But they shouldn't really need to pay anything at all. When the history of this epidemic is eventually written, a chapter will be devoted to the gigantic pharmaceutical monopolies and the actions of their shareholders and executive boards during the years when Aids ravaged the world. No courts will be able to bring the owners of those companies to justice.

But the greed and inhumanity tells the story of our age. What we allowed to happen. We will never know how many people died before the drugs companies permitted or were forced to permit medicines to be manufactured in places and at prices that made the drugs accessible to the poorest people of the world.

The scale of this crisis is unique. The greed today concerning drug licensing, the ruthless exploitation of the weak economies, the increasing but nevertheless inadequate resources made available to combat Aids are another scandal. No wonder many Africans believe that the West has no objection to large numbers of poverty-stricken Africans being killed off so as to "ease the burden".

I think about this as I fly to London. It strikes me that these giant aircraft travelling through the night skies are the modern equivalent of sailing ships. In olden days they would ply the seas to Africa at a stately pace.

Nowadays, everything goes much faster. But the distances are no shorter. They are still vast. They are kept vast. They are not distances to be bridged. They are chasms to be left in place. Or patrolled.

The truth about Aids is of course a general truth about what the world is like today. In other words: what we allow the world to look like.

It is like one of those awful, cruel fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen or the brothers Grimm. It deals with one of the most frequently recurring themes in literature. The possible variations are limitless. Two people, brother and sister, brother and brother, twins, or two people not known to each other at all, are born at the same time. If they are twins, they might become separated only to meet again later without knowing who the other is. As I say, there are endless variations.

Here is one: in November 1989 a good friend of mine, a stage designer, was told that he was HIV-positive. When his male partner underwent tests and was found also to be infected, they were soon able to work out what had happened. They were frank with each other and with their friends. The stage designer's partner had visited New York in the spring of 1988. He had been careless one night and invited a man he'd met in a bar to his hotel room. There was no other possible source of infection. A one-night stand, death the outcome. Despite the fact that one of them was clearly guilty of making them both carriers of the disease, they never – as far as I know – uttered a single angry word to each other. They both knew the risks. One of them had taken a chance. At that time, in the late 1980s, there were no ARVs. There was no hope at all, in fact. Death would ensue. Soon.

They began to make preparations. Or rather: they decided to live life to the full, to do everything they had planned to do, to cut out everything that was unnecessary. They moved from the town where they lived, settled in the country, and lived a quiet but intense life. I don't know much about their nights and their dawns: they must have been suffused with fear. Then they died, one of them in 1996, the other a year later.

A few years earlier, a woman friend of mine in Mozambique told me that she had Aids. Well, she didn't actually tell me at first, but I had started to suspect as much when she suddenly started losing weight, acquired a nasty cough, and lost a lot of her good humour. We knew each other well enough for me to ask her outright: had she tested positive? She confirmed my suspicions. When we went on to talk about it, she admitted that she had started living on borrowed time. She learned for certain that she had the disease in the spring of 1988.

She didn't last long after she told me that she was ill. Although I was able to help her financially, the resources available in Mozambique were inadequate to ease her suffering. Her death was dreadful. Unlike the friends I had in Sweden who were able to die without needless pain, one of them in an ordinary hospital, the other in a hospice.

All three died on the wrong side of the border, as it were. Before this happened, there were virtually no ARVs: afterwards, the new medication could give hope to the sufferers. The researchers and doctors had almost reached the first of the finishing lines. Only a year or so later it began to be possible, in the West, to slow down the progress of the disease. Nowadays, people with Aids live comparatively normal lives. A lot manage to die of other illnesses, or simply of old age.

But this development would have made a difference only to my two Swedish friends who died. The ARVs would not have been available to my friend in Mozambique. At least, not unless I had paid for them.

That makes me angry. A desire to overturn the injustice must survive the death of its victims.

In the early 1990s, at the theatre where I work in Maputo, we staged a production of We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!, a play by Dario Fo that has been performed successfully all over the world. In it, a coffin is used to smuggle sacks of flour past a number of watchful police officers. The old carpenter, Mestre Afonse, made the coffin we used from thin plywood. Heaven alone knows where he managed to find this relatively rare but very useful material in Maputo. Anyway, we performed the play many times and then put the production in mothballs as we intended to include it in the repertoire at some future date.

And that is precisely what we did. Two years after the premiere our theatre manager, Manuela Soeiro, decided that it was time to give the Fo play another run of about a month. He spoke to me and we arranged times for rehearsals and reallocated one of the parts, since one of the actresses was much too pregnant to manage her part.