Mme Ma Africa (Sotho)
Dikhutsana
Difeng Marobalo
Ditlatsuha Ditsamaya
Mother of the Nation/mother Africa
be kind to the orphans
give them a place to sleep;
they will be gone tomorrow
" Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man -made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.' Nelson Mandala, Former President South Africa
I have recently completed my first day working at a needle exchange program in Oakland. It was a deeply touching experience. Men women and youth, most who were homeless, came to talk, drink coffee, eat breakfast cereal and exchange their needles for clean ones, and refresh their condom supply. We were deep in the heart of East Oakland, where a young man who was a resident of the homeless shelter where I work was recently caught in gun fire while riding his bike in the streets of his neighborhood. Where last year a young black man shared with me that he was too scared to leave his house for his Dialyis treatment for fear of being shot, he has since passed his diabetes and kidneys finally took his life, he was 24 years old.
Mostly, each one that shuffled up was black. I asked a man how he was doing as he stood resting by a the fence trying to catch his breath his eyes weeping with a white liquid that oozed from the sides of his eyes, his fingernails so long they curled over the tips of his fingers, where the dirt ingrained behind the nails constantly reminded him of the squalor of nights sleeping on the sidewalk. "Blessed" he replied as he squeezed a toothless smile. I turned away so he would not see the tears that caught me by surprise, the ones that catch you in your throat when the suffering you witness daily is pushed into a recess, but without warning they overflow. His girlfriend came to stand by him they spoke gently to each other and leaned into the bond they shared maybe they were in love and maybe the bond was their addiction, whatever it was it bound them together for the moments when they were coming down. She asked about her HIV results while he drifted into a stare that is borne of years of shooting up looking for that high- the first one, when you knew that you were golden. They say if you have not experienced that golden moment you die inside, maybe thats what she did, make him feel like gold. Some may say we are encouraging the drug addicts to continue. With HIV and AIDS so rampant any choices made to prevent the spread of disease and the education that accomapanies it is a wise and responsible choice.
They approached the table with a trust of knowing there was no judgement in the eyes that served them. My heart cracked open each time I looked into the face of suffering, poverty, homelessness and addiction. Each set of eyes held mine sometimes only briefly and what I saw was the longing in the mirror to the lost soul, the eyes behind the eyes. Children do not hide this, they dont know how to. Their eyes are raw, in your face, they tell of loss, of poverty and longing and ask what is happening in this world.
In contrast that night I drove to Napa Valley with my choir Vukani Mawethu to perform at a fund raising Benefit for The Ubuntu Education Fund. ubuntufund.org. We walked into a three million dollar property where young wealthy people were gathered for the common purpose of raising money for an HIV and AIDS Project in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Fine food and excellent wine was served, it was another world. They spoke about Ubuntu and how the 21 one year old white South African young man who in 1998, founded with a black man Ubuntufund where together they now provide life saving education and health resources to over 40,000 children. They go into the townships that remind us on a daily basis we are here, in poverty and have a right to live in dignity.
Recently the REV, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, blamed the government for "inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color." Wright is not the first to say that AIDS originated in the White House, others have attributed the epidemic to a laboratory accident, and malnutrition. Among the most popular and pernicious theories is that AIDS is not a caused by a virus at all. Peter Duesberg, a biology professor at University of California-Berkeley, has argued that drugs and promiscuity are the principle causes of the disease and that in Africa it is malnutrition.
The inability to fight HIV and AIDS is connected to a deficient immune system so the ability to fight the disease becomes almost impossible for those who live in poverty, and with malnutrition fewer people are likely to survive. In addition as in South Africa water and clean water are also major factors in the poverty war and the fight against aids. Money in terms of fund raising is not necesarily being used for these issues. We are told it is being used to buy drugs to fight the disease. The drugs are so expensive that the Africans cannot afford to buy them so the pharmaceutical companies continue to get richer while the water stays dirty, and we continue to have blood on our hands each time another child dies. I know many people here who have been living with HIV for years. They are not in poverty or have malnutrition.
The question remains where did it come from?
Two years ago when I visited Credo Mutwa in Kuruman, in the middle of the bush. He said to me "Madam, Africa is dying from this disease, AIDS is a man made disease. I ask that who ever is killing our children , to please stop!" In an interview with Rick Martin, Mutwa quoted the name of the man, a Dr. Robert Gallo. Martin referenced the following: See Len Horowitz's monumental book Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola; Nature, Accident or Intentional for a wealth of documentation placing Dr.Gallo longtime head of the National Institute of Health (NHI) and National Cancers Institute (NCI) Section on Cellular Control Mechanisms, at center stage in the AIDS arena. Evidence suggests that he created the AIDS virus about a decade ago before he received a lot of political accolades for having discovered it. The text hauntingly dissects the potential motives and administrative mechanisms underlying the prevalent belief that HIV and Ebola may have been deliberately deployed and that the AIDS epidemic may be accomplishing what was desired.
Mutwa speaks with passion and desperation about the children of Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa there are close to 44 million people with AIDS , but the South African newspapers dare not print the true stories about AIDS. Bertrand Russell he states said that the Western nations would have to decimate Black people, using war, famine, and disease. And this has happened.
I encourage you to read a fascinating article posted on Mutwa's website, credomutwa.com/about/biography-09/
In South Africa now more than one out of eight black South Africans is HIV positive. Jonny Steinberg a Johannesburg newspaper columnist and author of the book "Sizwes Test" A young man's journey through Africa's AIDS Epidemic recently reported that 800 people die of AIDS DAILY. His book is presented through the eyes of one man who he calls Sizwe Magadla, who is 30 years old and lives in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape Province. It is a rural black overcrowded slum. The area has a well stocked first rate AIDS treatment program and yet one in three pregnant women are HIV positive. In the book he unravels the layers of the complex social network that reveals the stigmas and realities of why people may not be willing to be treated. "There's an even deeper layer to people's resistance to testing and treatment" he goes onto say that as with many indigenous people the sickness is seen as something sent to you by those who wish you ill. If whites already took away so much farmland, mineral and wealth, the thinking goes, could not the very needle the white doctor or his nurses use to draw blood be what's spreading AIDS in the first place ? And if an enemy does attack you, what more deadly way than with an illness that seems connected to a mans potency and ability to procreate. Men are anxious about this the world over, but nowhere more so than when, in desperate poverty they posses little else. This theory is not a new one, and when it comes to so many people especially the indigenous ones, then I trust the wisdom of the old ones.
Mutwa, and Sizwe are simple humble men, Mutwa will be the first to tell you so, and they are also men who are profoundly insightful and sharp. I leave you with this question from Micheal Meade "What story are we in when those carrying the dream of life increasingly find themselves near the door of death?" mosaicvoices.org
Ubuntu says my humanity is inextricably bound up in yours and I cant help but see in the eyes of the young ones in the above image, the question to me and you "What have we humans done?"
