Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope (3 page)

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Nigeria—indeed, most of Africa—began to wake up to the crisis brewing in our midst. I remember the summer of 1997, when the great Afro-beat musician Fela Kuti died and over a million people marched his coffin down the streets of Lagos. I was fifteen then and remember watching the procession on television with my family in my uncle’s living room. There was total silence. “Fela,” said Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, his brother and the former minister of health, “had died of AIDS.” People couldn’t believe it. For weeks afterward, there were whispers: “How can a great man like Fela die of AIDS? It’s not possible!”

But the revelation that Fela had lived with and ultimately died from HIV/AIDS did spark some change. Also important was Nigeria’s return to democracy and the election of Olusegun Obasanjo, who was very concerned about HIV/AIDS as president. I remember when billboards with public service announcements about it (now ubiquitous throughout the country) first appeared on buildings and by highways. They displayed slogans like
AIDS NO DEY SHOW FOR FACE
next to the smiling face of musician Femi Kuti, Fela’s famous son, or
KNOW YOUR STATUS
next to images of happy couples in traditional dress. Newly elected President Obasanjo spoke openly of the “HIV/AIDS pandemic that continues to bring havoc, misery and hopelessness on humanity, especially in Africa where the pandemic is threatening to wipe out entire generations.” He made public appeals to the citizens and members of the military and police to get tested. Something, however small, in the country’s attitude toward HIV/AIDS was changing.

I could hear it in the discussions about HIV on the radio or in the comments my cousins in college made about safe sex. Once, during a visit home the summer after I graduated from college, I overheard two gentlemen pondering the process of HIV transmission in a Lagos nightclub: “If a man get am and a woman get am, then any child they get must surely catch am.” His companion offered a laughing rebuke. “No. No. No. It neva pass like that.”

By the early part of this century, HIV/AIDS had become part of the national consciousness. Certainly I could see now, as this kind driver and I rolled slowly along the main thoroughfares of a hustling, bustling, choked, and congested city, it had become part of the landscape as well. Billboards and posters lined the highway. I saw the universal awareness symbol, a red ribbon, painted boldly on the backs of transport trucks. AIDS was now real to Nigerians but, as it is to most of the world, in an abstract, “I’ve heard about it and know it’s there” kind of way.

The demographics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria and worldwide are such that people need not knowingly encounter someone who is HIV positive every day. The most recent data collected by the Nigerian Ministry of Health reveal that about 4 percent of Nigeria’s population is HIV positive. This is a small percentage when compared to the 20 percent of the population that is positive in countries like Botswana or South Africa. However, 4 percent of Nigeria’s 150 million people means approximately 3 million Nigerians are living with HIV, the third-largest population of positive people in the world. With such enormous numbers, it seems inconceivable that someone could not know an HIV-positive person, but Nigeria is a geographically and demographically large country. Likewise, though there are approximately 34 million positive people in the world, this is actually less than half of 1 percent of the total global population. This means that most people in the world today have not and will not knowingly encounter someone living with HIV. Under such circumstances, it is hard to convey the diversity of experiences that constitute the reality of HIV. In my own case, when I started writing this book, despite having a background in health and time spent working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, I was not close to anyone of known positive status. I had yet to see what the day-to-day reality of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was like.

One of the first conversations I had about HIV/ AIDS in Nigeria when I first started writing was with my good friend Femi Adegoke. At the time, he had just finished a master’s degree in public health at Harvard and returned to Abuja to work for Columbia University’s International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs. He has since moved on to work for a number of HIV/AIDS-focused organizations in Nigeria. Indirectly, he was the reason I ended up getting an appointment with Rolake Odetoyinbo. One night in early 2007 as we sat on the rooftop bar of the British Council, a common hangout for diplomats, expats, and aid workers in Abuja, watching the power flicker across different neighborhoods in the common practice of load sharing, he said to me that in Nigeria, “We don’t see AIDS patients. We need to be faced with this reality to move forward. We need to see these things every day.”

That same week, there happened to be a very visible HIV/AIDS presence in the capital. Every two years, the major groups involved in HIV/AIDS-related work convene at a conference sponsored by the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), the government body charged with rationalizing and coordinating Nigeria’s response to the epidemic. With community-based organizations, advocacy groups, NGOs, and state government agencies traveling to Abuja from each of Nigeria’s thirty-six states, as well as a strong representation from international organizations, the conference is anything but a regular affair. It is not designed to represent the daily reality of HIV/AIDS, but to allow those who work on the Nigerian epidemic the chance to come together to share experiences, debate related issues, and ultimately speak with one voice about the direction the country needs to take to improve the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and prevent more infections from occurring. Femi urged me to attend, saying this would be the best place to gain a broad understanding of HIV in Nigeria and perhaps meet people who might be of good help.

Later that week, I drove to the Abuja International Conference Centre, where the meetings were already under way. I had been to the massive structure, with its sweeping arc of a roof and immaculate glass facade, a couple of years earlier for the wedding reception of a cousin. Then, the speckled red granite floor of the grand entrance hall had boasted a red carpet and numerous tables covered in white cloths and pink napkins. Bridesmaids in pink danced among the tables, inviting all who were seated to join in the festivities and move to loud music echoing from the wall speakers.

The day of the conference was an altogether more serious affair. The entrance hall still sparkled but remained unfurnished. Instead it bustled with people in dark suits or traditional Nigerian prints, attaché cases or files of documents in hand or under arm. The attendees were mostly domestic. They stood in clusters, locked in serious conversations. They folded their arms across their chests or cupped their chins in the space between thumb and index finger. Occasionally greetings would break up the exchanges as smiles and laughter erupted when people working on similar issues in different parts of the country made their annual reconnections and collided into hugs and handshakes.

Femi had told me about the conference after the completion of registration, so I attended without accreditation. I slunk around the conference hall from table to table, picking up literature, pocketing brochures, and engaging in casual conversation with the representatives of various NGOs and SACAs (state AIDS control agencies) who had arranged their tables and booths to emphasize the strengths or needs of their various organizations. All of Nigeria’s thirty-six states were represented. At the Kogi State table, tended by a wiry man with tinted lenses in his metal frames, the emphasis was on counseling and testing programs for sex workers. Kogi borders Abuja, and its capital, Lokoja, sits near the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. Any truck heading toward the southwest must pass through this city. Where there are long-haul truck drivers, the conventional wisdom goes, there are sex workers, and in these places, there tends to be a higher rate of HIV transmission. The Plateau State booth boasted a whole set of educational materials for primary schools, with a group of young women hardly enthusiastic to explain the process of creating them. They told me they were members of the National Youth Service Corps, recent university graduates completing a mandatory year of national service. Mass communication, not HIV/AIDS, was their specialty. They looked more disoriented than I was.

After an hour of wandering from table to table, I stumbled from the main hall back into the lobby with an armful of brochures and a pocketful of business cards. I had met a few interesting people, some of whom I intended to contact immediately, but for the most part, I was tired and confused. I recognized that there was a certain absurdity about not wanting to sensationalize the HIV/AIDS epidemic while desperately searching for some charismatic HIV-positive figure to introduce me to its reality. I had no idea where to begin. This overload of voices, colored brochures, screaming posters, and videos was not helping.

I made my way toward a set of stairs that led to an over-air-conditioned cafeteria. As I ascended, I briefly locked eyes with a young man with uncombed curls of hair, dressed in a dashiki and descending the staircase.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I stammered, concerned that he was a conference organizer who would realize that I had no right to be around and promptly usher me out.

“Dapo,” he introduced himself, extending a hand. “I work with PATA.” He noticed my blank look and added, “Positive Action for Treatment Access. We’re based in Lagos. Who are you with?”

“Oh, I’m not really with anyone. Just trying to get an idea of what AIDS is really like in this country.”

He nodded knowingly. “So you’re a journalist.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t necessarily want this to be a journalistic endeavor, but journalist seemed more acceptable than “personal crusader” or “interested party.”

“Well, I work for my sister Rolake, who founded the NGO. If your work brings you to Lagos, be in touch.”

I had heard about Rolake Odetoyinbo but not her organization. She is a well-known and well-regarded Nigerian AIDS activist who has had no qualms discussing her HIV-positive status on television, radio, and in the regular columns she writes for newspapers and magazines. I was in luck.

T
he PATA offices were in a dingy four-story building set back from the noise of Awolowo Way, a busy street in the Ikeja section of Lagos. The noise of the building’s standby generator was relative calm compared to the horns of the traffic-clogged road yards away. It looked sturdy, but the structure had clearly seen better days, a condition that became all the more apparent when I entered a dimly lit staircase with plaster flaking off the walls. But inside the office, the sunlit rooms were a whirl of bright fabrics as women participating in a PATA-run support-group meeting flitted about with plates of food, conversing and laughing loudly over the unrelenting rumble of the generator two stories below. The walls were sparsely decorated with informational posters advertising new HIV medications and encouraging safe sex. Powerful standing fans made the posters flutter against the walls.

Rolake appeared moderately peeved, if also understanding of my tardiness.

“Go-slow,” I muttered, invoking the traffic jam as an apology.

She offered me a plate from a table full of rice, fish and beef stews, and fried plantains. Then she led me to a corner of the room away from the commotion.

She was, as she had been described to me by a university student who had seen her speak in a seminar, “Big. Healthy-looking. An average person.” Her round face was indeed full and healthy with smooth, plump cheeks that folded into creases under her eyes. She traveled constantly, and though she wore it well, the fatigue was still written on her face. Before she became an HIV/AIDS activist, Rolake was a relatively successful baker who sold her pastries in fast-food joints and other venues. It wasn’t her ideal job—she had studied dramatic arts at one of Nigeria’s premier universities—but her husband’s career moved him from place to place, and she needed something flexible to earn money. She lived what she calls a relatively normal life until testing positive for HIV in 1998.

In an interview for the Nigerian newspaper
Punch
, she called the first four years after she tested positive the “worst years of my life” because “for four years I was waiting for death.” She said, “I was so sure AIDS was going to kill me,” and told the interviewer, “It was four years of living in fear, silence and stigma, not knowing what to do and not having access to the right information.” Then in 2002, she attended an AIDS conference in Barcelona, and it changed her life. “I didn’t know much about HIV. In fact, I wasn’t open about my status. I went to Barcelona with the knowledge that HIV was a death sentence. I felt that while I was alive, let me just get the best out of life,” she said in a 2004 interview with the Nigerian newspaper
Vanguard
. “The conference for me wasn’t so exciting. It was the people I met that made the world of difference. I met people who had lived with HIV for 20 years and couldn’t tell they had HIV. So Barcelona challenged my mentality. It also helped me see HIV/AIDS in a different light.” In the
Punch
interview, she had said, “I realised that if I wanted to die, I could do a better job jumping in front of a moving train because HIV wasn’t in a hurry to kill me.”

Two months after she returned from Barcelona, tired of the silence, shame, and fear and wanting more from life, she gave an interview to a major newspaper disclosing her HIV status. Her life changed dramatically. From speaking to conferences and support groups, she went on to found PATA (Positive Action for Treatment Access), a group that seeks to empower women living with HIV and AIDS, prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and build awareness and understanding of the epidemic in the general population.