AFRICA - 'Sorry, Aunty, Driver No 2 was got by the evil snake'greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread |
ET'Sorry, Aunty, Driver No 2 was got by the evil snake' Christina Lamb
THE first time it happened to me, I couldn't quite believe it. I had arrived in Harare, a place I had reported from for years, though hadn't been to for some months, breezily checked into Meikles hotel, where all the journalists stay, and caught a cab over to the Sheraton to find my usual driver.
"Can you call Solomon for me?" I asked the bell captain. "Sorry Aunty, we have no Solomon," he replied. "Yes, you do. You know Solomon, Driver No 2," I insisted in that arrogant way we representatives of the British press unfortunately seem to adopt the moment we arrive in a Third World country, leaving the words "You Silly Man" hanging unspoken in mid-air.
"Driver No 2 is ended," he said. What could he mean? Had mild-mannered Solomon with his funny black pork-pie hat been struck off the register? With a sinking feeling I remembered forcing him to drive straight through a roadblock of war veterans, in addition to secretly taking me to one of his cousins who had served as a soldier in the Congo. All for a few lines in a long-forgotten article.
Had Mugabe's henchmen somehow found out and persecuted him? In today's Zimbabwe anything is possible. Eventually the bell captain explained. "Driver No 2 has gone to the sky. He was got by the evil snake."
I looked at him in horror. The evil snake is how some Africans refer to Aids. I shouldn't have been shocked. I knew the statistics. Four out of 10 young men in Zimbabwe are HIV positive so there was a good chance that many people who I have come to know here would die of the disease.
There is a vast difference, however, between reading the statistics and losing your friends. Solomon and I had been through a lot together. He often got us lost, but always cheerfully, and was endlessly resourceful, persuading a group of baffled villagers on an oxcart to go back and forth along the gleaming Robert Mugabe Highway for a photograph until the ox lost patience and landed them all in a ditch.
He loved asking me questions about London - how many buffaloes we had in the streets, how many cows my husband had paid for me, and was ecstatic to know that we too had a Woolworths just like that in Harare.
Solomon was younger than me and for years he had worried that I - in my thirties - was getting old and was still single, so he was overjoyed the time I turned up and told him I was now a respectable married woman. He had a baby son born only two weeks after mine. Gift was the name of his child because he was a much longed for son who would in years to come bring in income for the family.
While my son has a wooden crib and a plastic chest full of cars and Thomas the Tank Engines and musical cubes which make sounds when pieces are dropped inside, Gift slept in a drawer and his toys consisted of a cardboard box stuck with magazine pictures and a tin can with a stone in for a rattle. What would Gift's future be without a father who was the only wage-earner supporting eight people living in their two-room shack? Harare is full of ragged Aids orphans living by begging coins or catching pigeons which they roast on pavement fires. I tried to track down the family but when I finally found Solomon's shack, it was empty and no one knew where they had gone.
Harare for me is not the same without Solomon. He and his ilk are the real unsung heroes of journalism - they are the people who, for 50 dollars a day, will risk their lives and their vehicles driving us to front lines or opposition activists in hiding.
We western journalists kid ourselves that it is a fair deal as we are paying them what might be the equivalent of a month's wage, conveniently forgetting that while we can get the next plane out, they must live with the consequences.
Unfortunately Solomon's fate is becoming all too common in southern Africa, where according to the United Nations Programme on Aids, half of all 15-year-olds can expect to die of the disease. All too often now when I arrive in places and telephone contacts, from local journalists to academics, there is a silence and then I am told the person has died.
In the past year I have lost the wonderfully-named Good News in the Niger delta - a would-be Michael Schumacher who insisted that if we didn't drive at 200mph we would be kidnapped. I will also miss Haile in Addis Ababa with his flashing fairy lights taped along his windscreen and his pirated Bruce Springsteen tapes, not to mention Parks Mankahlana, the talented if somewhat prickly spokesman for Nelson Mandela.
A whole generation is being wiped out. My friend David who runs a large farm in northern Zambia says he despairs of training supervisors and mechanics as they all keep dying. In 1998, Zambia lost 1,300 teachers to Aids in 10 months. In Ivory Coast, seven out of 10 teachers' deaths are due to HIV. By 2010, life expectancy will have fallen to 29 in Botswana, 30 in Swaziland, and 33 in Namibia and Zimbabwe.
At the moment there seems little cause for hope. The problem is not just the prohibitive cost of Western drugs but also attitudes in countries where sex at truck-stops costs less than breakfast and government ministers see fund-raising for Aids as an easy way to line their own pockets.
In many African countries men do not expect to be faithful and often take several wives. If a husband dies, his wife is often then taken on by his brother, thus passing on the infection.
The situation is getting worse. Back in Harare last week all the road signs had disappeared. I asked where they had gone. The reply was sinister. While the traffic light bulbs have been taken by nightclubs unable to obtain them because of the country's foreign exchange crisis, the street signs are being melted down to provide metal for coffin handles.
-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001
Sadly, many foreign aid agencies are beginning to write off Africa as a lost cause because of the endless wars, deep-rooted corruption, and AIDS. I've read that India sees the entire continent as a possible safety valve for its excess population in a few decades -- after Africa has gone through its own version of the die-off. But then, AIDS is spreading rapidly in india, too ...
-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001