The Failed South Africa Essay

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?!?!?!


After Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama tested himself for HIV in his father’s village of Nyangoma-Kogelo in Kenya, he pledged that the United States would send nearly $50 billion in HIV/AIDS aid between 2009 and 2013 if he were elected as president. He also had a local beer named after him, visited his grandmother for lunch and toured the Kibera slum.“It does not matter if you are Kikuyu or Luo, but people should work together to build the nation," the senator said. "I love you guys and Uriti uru [goodbye].” said Obama, as he bid goodbye to the people of his father’s village, a place where 700 people die of HIV/AIDS related illnesses daily.

Although he spread the love, it is doubtful that during his two-week Africa tour, Obama learned the meaning of the saying “Kanayaka Kudala Bayenda” (the red light is on, he is soon dying) or ashawo, a prostitute or “Kalaye Noko” (say good-bye to your mother). Each of the three terms stigmatizes people who suffer from HIV/AIDS in Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia, respectively. In plain English, these people are compared to “moving coffins”.

Obama’s test was obviously negative and he endured no name calling. He tested himself yet again at an AIDS summit at Saddleback Church in Southern California hosted by Pastor Rick Warren and the test came out negative. Again. Somehow, a candidate getting stuck with needles is a crowd pleaser. But so is laying out an HIV/AIDS care plan for a region which has become a scar on the global community without detailing any specifics for the plan.

Sub-Saharan Africa already carries two-thirds of the world’s HIV positive people. According to the United Nation’s 2007 AIDS report, women make up 61 percent of that number. In South Africa alone, of the 5,500,000 reported HIV cases, 3,100,000 of them were women in 2005 . There is a scar on the planet and a infection boils beneath it known as ‘triple oppression’.

Some women are so frequently raped they resort to strapping plastic trash bags around their legs so that their urine and feces won’t drip out. This sort of violence against women is the norm, and those who suffer from it are three times more likely to be infected with HIV.

According to Avert.org, women “face great violence in South Africa and the rest of Africa based on their race, class and gender.”The disease sentences women, as they are stripped of their rights to property, are physically abused and sometimes killed after they are diagnosed because they are seen as a threat to their partners and a threat to the children they might birth. The issue becomes greater than a matter of name calling in what we consider a foreign tongue.

Africa is becoming a continent of widowers and orphans who are running out of room to bury their dead .

Did Obama visit the women who had been tossed on the street because they were HIV-positive? It isn’t enough to say you will foot a bill that will go towards the education of both sexes on the HIV-free joys of condom usage and monogamy and a C-130 Hercules chock-full of anti-retroviral drugs if and only if you’re elected as president. What happens in the now? How to address the peril women face if, when they ask for their partner to use a condom, they are beaten? What happened to the cries in the late 90’s about a global pandemic which have slowly dimmed to a murmur?

Maybe the scars of Africa are so deep that elected officials can’t see how they can possibly be treated and can only dab at them with cheap ointment. Maybe journalists lost the heart to keep writing the stories that generated awareness and moved people to action. Maybe Africa makes people reflect too much on the HIV/AIDS situation at home which goes by ignored and mismanaged. But just maybe it’s time we start to bring everything back full circle, pack up some heart, get out there, write the stories, film the desolation, and make people care instead of waiting for them to ask “why should we care?” We cannot be bystanders while people die in the thousands each day. If we are, we scar our collective and personal conscience, and that scar only deepens and reddens with our apathy, a word that can also be defined as a death sentence unto others.