AIDS: a disease of sex, drugs and rock and roll
By Willemien Brummer
13 April 2010 |
This weekend my boyfriend was paging through the Afrikaans newspapers in a slightly bored fashion.
“See anything about HIV?” I asked hopefully, knowing that I had an impending date with my computer to write a blog for the HIV/AIDS and the Media project.
“Nah,” he answered, fingering the latest gossip about the murdered AWB leader, Eugène Terre’Blanche.
“Are you sure?”
He shrugged: “Even if there were something, I wouldn’t read it. South Africans are AIDS-fatigued. It’s been around for such a long time that it just isn't a sexy subject any more.”
At first I found myself seizing the moral high ground: “You mean in a country where 5,3 million people are HIV positive you just don’t care? What do you want to read about? Soccer? Julius Malema? The holes in Joost van der Westhuizen’s underpants?”
But then I calmed down and thought about the way HIV is affecting my life and his, and probably the lives of most of the readers of the publication I write for. And I wondered, am I really interested in the stories about AIDS that I find hidden on page 4 or 8, or am I just being a goody-two-shoes?
Because let’s be frank – what grips me and most of the people I know is not statistics or the fact that president Jacob Zuma has gone for an AIDS test. It’s that HIV is a disease of sex and drugs and sometimes of rock and roll. It’s a disease that has forced us to rewrite our sexual fantasies and to rethink love. It has made lies into a murder weapon, torn families and relationships apart. It is a pandemic more than any other that has changed the face of intimacy.
Some time ago I went for an HIV test after finding out my love-life wasn’t exactly what I thought it was. In the seconds before the needle pricked my skin I tasted loneliness in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Like scenes from a disjointed movie I watched my whole life flash past me: my mother and the hope in her eyes when I started my first job, falling in love for the first time in standard six, finding out about a partner’s infidelity as if my heart were wrenched from my chest.
For a moment I tried to picture my current boyfriend’s face if my test results should be positive. Would I ever be able to live with myself knowing I’d unwittingly infected him? I remembered a 13 year old HIV-positive girl I once knew. When no one was looking she would slip out to the toilet to pray aloud in Zulu: “Dear Father up there... Please don’t let my mother die right now. She’s the only one who can take care of me and pay my school fees.” I remembered the morbid interest in death that both she and her sister showed - how they would turn up the volume on TV every time there was something about death on the screen. How they wanted to know, in the minutest biological detail, how a person died. I wondered whether the ABC of dying would become as ingrained in my daily routine as eating, or bathing, or reading my book before I retire for the night.
The test results, however, were negative. Soon my life went back to normal and it was as if I’d never tasted loneliness. Love, once again, became a concept associated with fidelity and HIV went back to being a virus that affects other people – most of them poor and with darker skins than mine, a disease which leads to mostly uninspired journalism, snippets squeezed in-between juicier bits about a drunken Terre’Blanche, killed with his genitals exposed.
Only of late have I started asking myself whether it’s not my responsibility as a journalist to bridge the gap between public and private – to reclaim the intimate space that HIV inhabits in almost all of our lives by giving the statistics a familiar face. By writing about HIV with the same vigour and passion that I would invest in a love story. Government’s supposed “revolution” in South Africa’s response to the epidemic with it's whopping R1,4 billion price tag will remain mute and removed from reader’s daily lives if the coverage around it remains bloodless and without guts.
This brings me to my final thought: what would happen if Zuma not only went for an HIV test, but also made his status public? In my eyes that would redeem him of any previous sexual misdemeanours. It has the potential to elevate him from a lame-duck president with a shower fixed firmly over his head, to a true AIDS warrior who understands that the way to a nation’s heart is through honesty and common humanity - a modern-day Madiba who has the key in his hands to reversing a pandemic. In our AIDS fatigued society, so called “publicity stunts”, as Thabo Mbeki has called them, still have the potential to work. It would certainly get my boyfriend to read about HIV.
Willemien Brümmer is a fellow at the HIV/AIDS and the Media Project.
