Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope (14 page)

When I spoke with Femi Kuti, the air was heavy with the smell of marijuana and music pulsed from large speakers near the stage. I sat with Femi on a balcony overlooking the scene below. He held a shining brass saxophone in his lap and fingered the keys as he spoke. It was somewhat disconcerting to sit across from him because he bears an uncanny resemblance to his father: the same high cheekbones, skeptical eyes, and semipermanent frown.

“We didn’t understand what they were talking about,” he said. He was surprisingly soft-spoken for a man with such a large stage presence. “His case was the first case that was publicly told. Nobody understood what they were talking about. Our generation could not understand that because of sex you will die today. If the brother [Olikoye] who was minister of health could not convince his own brother [Fela] that HIV was real, then …” Femi laughed somewhat bitterly instead of finishing his sentence. “There were hardly any cases. The only case that was in the paper was my father. A lot of people were dying, but they were lying it was malaria or typhoid. Nobody told the truth. Nobody still tells the truth. It’s still even a big taboo. Even worldwide, it’s still a big taboo. It’s not a subject that anybody really wants to talk about.”

But the announcement that Fela’s death resulted from HIV/AIDS cracked the silence in Nigeria and reverberated across the continent. Even if it did not immediately convince everybody that the disease was real or provide a deeper understanding of the epidemic, it allowed conversation to happen. People sat up. People started talking. A number of prominent activist organizations, such as Journalists Against AIDS, were founded at this moment to encourage more conversation about HIV/AIDS.

Death can advance quietly only so far before it inspires speech. The conversation develops slowly, beginning as an intense private reckoning that a person affected (not necessarily infected) by HIV has with himself or herself, before emerging in the public sphere.

For Samaila, the northern Nigerian HIV/AIDS activist and former policeman, the conversation started when his wife was hospitalized with end-stage AIDS. It was the same time he discovered that he too was HIV positive. “Saddiq, my oldest child, got to know when she was still in the hospital. Two weeks’ stay is a very long time,” he told me. “Saddiq’s school was near the hospital, so he could come after school, still in his uniform. My daughter was too young. She couldn’t comprehend. During that time, it was very hard for me and hard for them too, but it was then that I told him what was wrong with his mother. We were at home, in the house, sitting on the bed, when he asked me, ‘Is my mother going to die?’ I said, ‘She may die.’ Saddiq was around eleven or twelve when I found out I was HIV positive. He asked, ‘Will you die too? Are you also going to die then, Daddy?’ I had to tell him the truth. I said, ‘I may die.’” He fell silent and crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course, at that time, I did not have the information I have now,” he said, emerging from his recollections. “I thought God will take care of everything. If bad, it is the will of God. If good, it is also the will of God. I kept asking myself, ‘What will happen to my children? What will become of them?’ I grew to love them even more because I knew I would leave them. We would watch the television, walk around the countryside, sit on a stone and talk, explore their interests. But I kept asking myself, ‘What will I do? How will I look for a cure?’”

He opened his palms to me and let them rest on his lap.

“I also decided to educate myself about HIV. I was reading a lot about HIV/AIDS. Anything I laid hands on about HIV/AIDS, I read. It was from the papers that I realized the federal government had planned to treat ten thousand people in the country. Also in the papers, I got to know about three people who were campaigning actively. Two of these people were also HIV positive like me, and their names always came out in the papers. After my retirement had been approved, I went to Lagos to claim my benefits. I took that opportunity to see those people. I went to see those people through an organization called Journalists Against AIDS. I followed an address that I got from the newspaper, and I went to their office. They asked me to go back to where I was staying and start a support group for people living with AIDS, so that when the drugs come, it will be easy for them to get the required number.

“So I decided that certainly if I’ve got this information, I have to impart this information to other people. I started giving people information about HIV/AIDS, the stigma, drugs, positive living, and things like that within the communities in which I work—the Hausa Muslim communities of northern Nigeria. It was an uphill task getting to know other people who were HIV positive. People refused to come out. But by the end of the day, I was able to get ten, and then we started a support group. I went on television in my locality. I tried to organize workshops. Some of us took the bull by the horns and, as I said before, decided to come out public with our status and maybe in that way galvanize some sort of response from the government, philanthropists, and donors who could come to our aid. If we hid and the virus was not seen, if we didn’t give a face to the virus, certainly there wouldn’t be anything done on our behalf. And so some of us, including me, my humble self, decided to come out with our status.”

After speaking with a number of people who have gone public with their HIV status, I realized that Samaila’s movement from internal contemplation to public disclosure is one that many people experience in their own ways. That moment of first disclosure brings an internal wrangling with the idea that HIV causes death and will cause one’s own death, which after time can grow into a desire to understand whether this new force in life, HIV/AIDS, actually means life’s end. This process usually occurs simultaneously with the heavy task of speaking of one’s condition to family, friends, and loved ones, knowing that disclosure can have a profound emotional effect on the people who have been informed. Finally comes the realization that your story is a powerful tool if used publicly and communicated properly. But public communication is difficult for all who choose to engage in that conversation. It requires navigating the tension between the powerful negative messages about HIV/AIDS that already exist and the desire to spread new messages that humanize the epidemic.

Journalists Against AIDS has been a major force in shaping public discussion about HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. The group was founded shortly after Fela Kuti’s death by the late Omololu Falobi, the former features editor at the popular Nigerian newspaper
Punch
. Its initial mission was to use journalism as a means for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS, but it has since grown into a major advocacy and capacity-building organization with programs that provide economic opportunities for people living with HIV/AIDS. At the group’s headquarters in a house on a quiet side street in the Ogba area of Lagos, I met with a program officer named Jessam Nwaigbo, whose work focuses on evaluating media reporting on HIV/AIDS.

“For me, I pick up a newspaper and I see ‘deadly scourge’—some say ‘dreaded disease,’ ‘an AIDS victim languishing’ or ‘lamenting’—it gives me a very negative sense, and I might not want to read that further. Some say when writing about HIV, they use the scary red. We all know that the color red is danger. When it comes to HIV, you now use red and bold; so you’re rather scaring me than passing off any useful information.”

She took a moment to secure behind her ears her black and blond braids, which had come loose as she gestured passionately while she spoke. Every so often while emphasizing a point, she placed a palm on her heart, covering the silver design of her T-shirt.

“The people we are communicating with, they are a very large audience. You may not know who is picking up that magazine today. We are the third highest in terms of burden,” she said, referring to the fact that Nigeria has the third largest population of HIV-positive people in the world. “A lot of people will be reading that newspaper. Your terms are not friendly. You would rather be reporting scary messages that will be scaring your audience rather than bring them forward to know their status. If they are reading issues that are so stigmatizing, they will say ‘Of what use I should know my status when I know that I am going to die,’ or ‘I don’t have hope. There is nothing hopeful for me in this life.’ We’re not saying you should not say the truth, but people who have HIV—they are not victims. I hardly fall ill. I can stay throughout the year without falling ill. So how am I a victim? Do I run to you begging you for money or help? Did you rush me to the hospital or something? It’s not a very friendly language. So we train the media on how to communicate this issue without using terminology that may be offensive.”

Jessam’s choice of work was the direct result of the negative conversation and messaging that she encountered when she first discovered her positive status in 2004. She heard people speaking about HIV/AIDS in her church, in the media. There was no question that the illness existed, but the level of judgment and stigmatization bothered her, as did the use of discussion about it as a tool to enforce existent moral norms. Her involvement with Journalists Against AIDS was a way of both renewing her commitment to life and reshaping the conversation that she heard happening around her.

“I wanted to do the work because I didn’t want other people to pass through what I went through, both the psychological, the physical trauma, the emotional pain,” she said as we sat in the darkened office conference room. The blinds were pulled shut over the window to block out the intense sun and keep the room cool. “I have been in that position where I thought probably dying should be the best option for me. And I overcame it, and I’ve met people in the course of my work who are saying, ‘Ah, Jessie, do you think I can live? Do you think anything good can come of me? Don’t you think I’m going to die tomorrow?’ And I’m telling them, ‘Is it a dead person who is talking to you? I am positive.’ And they say, Are you sure, are you sure they did not give you money to stand in front of us? How can you be positive and you’re looking good?’ It’s something that you ought to give back to society. Because I was given, I have to give back. I never can tell who is listening to me and will make a U-turn like I did. Real-life experiences goes a long way to combat the spread of HIV and mitigate the impact of AIDS.”

“Real life” in the conversation about HIV/AIDS need not be limited to the experiences and stories of people living with the disease. It can also mean pulling the disease from the realm of idea, where it exists for most people, and molding it into language and a form to which people can relate. In Nigeria, broad-based social marketing done by NGOs like the Abuja-based Society for Family Health plays a large role in bringing the conversation about HIV/AIDS to the people through radio announcements in native tongues or pidgin English and posters that can be found in nearly every health center around the country. But even they would admit that such efforts are not nearly as effective in generating discussion and awareness as locally produced events and peer-to-peer interactions.

In May 2007, I flew from Abuja to Owerri in southeastern Nigeria to visit Felix, an HIV/AIDS program coordinator and activist I had met earlier that year at the national stakeholders conference in Abuja. He had already introduced me to Hope, one of the clients of his program, but this time my visit was to attend an AIDS Awareness Day program he had organized in his village just outside the city. He picked me up from the airport in a burgundy Toyota Corolla, its speakers blasting a man’s falsetto voice crooning “You Give Me Fever.”

When you meet Felix, you realize that everything about him is dramatic. His whole person seems carefully produced for maximum impact on whomever or whatever he meets. He has intense brown eyes that lock onto people and hold them captive. His deep voice, depending on his point, either rumbles into a heavy laugh or pinches into a brief squeak of concern. But it is his body language that is most convincing, his constantly moving hands in fists or palms as he speaks, his head cocked ever so quickly to the side, his brow furrowed when he makes a point that he wants you to find important. Felix had wanted to study acting in college, but his parents had pressured him to drop it. Acting is not generally considered a respectable profession in Nigeria, especially not for a first son and future family head. He ended up taking a degree in management technology. After graduating he worked a number of jobs, first producing documentaries for a rural branch of the national television authority, then working on a freight ship that hauled goods between West African port cities, and finally supervising the transportation of construction materials between cities in Nigeria. A run-in with armed robbers while on a job transporting rebar to Lagos led him to give up the trucker’s life and focus on building a career in his hometown. That’s how he came to work on youth programs and HIV/AIDS education.

He slowed after we passed through a four-way intersection with tall green grass growing at each of its corners. We slipped around a corner and pulled into an impromptu driveway created by tire tracks that had compacted the soft grass into the red mud and hardscrabble weeds. A large bungalow sat at the end of the path. Felix’s father had started construction on the house but died before it was finished. Felix had scrimped and saved to complete it. His family didn’t live there; they stayed in his apartment in town, but he kept the place because it gave him a presence in the village. I helped Felix drag an old diesel generator from a storeroom out onto the front porch. From there we carried it across the grass and loaded it into the car, which creaked and groaned under the weight.

Felix’s village was like many others in the area. There was a paved street with low houses on either side, some behind concrete walls spiked with broken glass, the corrugated tin roofs just peeking over the wall’s sparkling edge. Others were exposed, their front doors open and coughing out the young and old alike to sit in the hot sun, or swallowing them as they took respite from the heat. Off the paved street were dirt roads and paths people had trampled through the grass or bush. Villagers wearing colorful traditional fabrics walked home from church or from home to visit friends and relatives. All seemed unaware of the program Felix had created for them. In fact, the whole village appeared rather unconcerned with issues of HIV and AIDS until we rounded a bend in the road and found a chaotic mass of teenagers milling about by the roadside seemingly without agenda, some with laughter on their lips, others with more serious faces, fully aware of this particular day’s importance. A group of older girls, dressed identically in black skirts and tight white tops, tried desperately to arrange young men and women into orderly lines across the soft eroded red earth and in front of a low bungalow that served as a village meeting place. The building was much used but well cared for; it had a fresh yellow coat of paint. Little children dangled their feet from the low concrete walls of the veranda as they watched the teenagers—their older siblings, cousins, maybe even aunts and uncles—prepare for the production.