I Die, but the Memory Lives on

Moses fell silent. Then he shouted something to his daughter. She came in with a bottle of water and two glasses. Moses poured, and assured me that the water had been boiled.

"It is a terrible plague," he said after a while. "In the night, in the darkness, when men and women come together, the disease wanders from person to person. There have been other diseases in the past that have infected people in the same way. But nothing as dangerous as this, nothing as painful. I have seen how people suffer before they die. I have listened to people in houses a long way away from here, screaming in agony before everything goes quiet, and they fade away into the other darkness, the one that never quite dissipates when the sun rises again. The land of death is a land without sun, that is the nature of it and we are all frightened of being forced to go there before we have lived for so long that we don't really care any more. Now I have the disease myself, and every day I look for signs to show that I am on the way to being overcome by this thing inside me, and every time I think about that day my father came home and was worried as he told us about his friend Lukas."

Moses stared at his hands.

"I didn't want to write these memory books. Not for a very long time. It was as if the moment I picked up my pen or started telling my story for my grandchildren to write it down, I was giving up all hope of not having to die as a result of this disease. Obviously, I don't have any hope. Everybody who catches this disease dies of it. But deep down there is another kind of hope, something you have no control over. It's as if there is an unknown being inside my body that is hoping on my behalf. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. But once I'd started to write those books, it was as if I'd accepted the fact that I was going to die. I dreamt about my father the night before I started preparing to write the memory books. He was coming back from the city on foot, just as I remembered it as a child. He always walked quickly, carrying a bale of clothes on his head. Now he was old and didn't have anything on his head. The worst thing was that he didn't stop. He didn't turn off the road and come back here. He just kept on walking until I could no longer see him. When I woke up the next morning and remembered the dream, it seemed as if he had instructed me to accept my fate. That was the day I started preparing the books."

Moses had finished his tale, abruptly, as if he'd told me too big a secret. Then he said with a smile that he was tired, and needed to rest.

We said our goodbyes, and I left. I didn't know if I would ever meet him again.

31

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.

32

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 pla

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.