Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic

by Jonny Steinberg

  He listens intently and nods from time to time, but I know that I am talking to myself, just as he was talking to himself when he told me about the smoke and the fire.

  WE GET UP and stretch our legs and wander slowly over to the clinic. A young woman is leaning against the front wall sunning herself, her eyes half-closed. She greets us as we approach, and the three of us stand together and chat.

  “You are a counselor?” Sizwe asks.

  “Yes.”

  “So I can test?”

  She perks up and smiles at him. “You want to test? We can go in right now.” She pushes herself off the wall and makes for the clinic door.

  He giggles nervously, peers into the murky corridor beyond the door, and shakes his head.

  “I cannot test,” he says.

  She smiles at him kindly. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m quite sure.”

  “That’s fine,” she says. “You are not ready. It is no good testing before you are ready. You will let it sit with you for a long time, and one morning you will wake up and know that it is time.”

  She goes inside. He watches her disappear.

  “I will never be ready,” he says. “How can I ever be ready to hear that I am HIV-positive? If I test today, and the result is positive, I will have to call off my marriage. I will have to send Nwabisa and the child in her womb back to her home. I will not be able to marry because I will soon die. And even if I am to live a long time, my children might be born positive. No woman could be my wife. I would be like an ox: I would sweat in the fields for a while and then get sick and die.”

  What he has said is so simple, the fears he has expressed so clear. Yet his words come like a welcome shock of ice-cold water, for it is immediately apparent that they issue from a place he has until now chosen to keep silent; and I know right away that in the coming months I will be hearing much more. For the first time, I understand something of what he is doing when he searches Ithanga for a suitable Kate Marrandi. In his scheme of things, MaMarrandi’s work will always be twilight work. Hers is to shepherd ruined human beings, discreetly and with little fuss, to and from the clinics, their ruin written into the fact that everyone knows where they are going but dares not say it to their faces.

  Sitting with him outside the clinic, I feel that a very opaque man, one who has given me only the most oblique glimpses of his inner world, has opened a door.

  PART THREE

  Sizwe and Nwabisa

  I had known Sizwe for some time when I met Nwabisa, the mother of his unborn child and the woman he was to marry. The circumstances of our meeting were awkward.

  I arrived at Sizwe’s spaza shop in the heat of a midsummer afternoon. Already, drinkers were spilling out of the front door, the speakers on his tape deck banging out Zulu Maskanda music. It was a song I knew well. The Maskanda artist Phuzekhemisi was singing about his dog Udlayedwa: “He-eats-alone.”

  I dodged and squeezed my way toward the counter. In the center of the room, three elderly women were dancing in precarious drunkenness, one of them crooning the song’s lyrics in mock anger. She complained, along with Phuzekhemisi, of the dog tax she was forced to pay for Udlayedwa. She asked whether her dog would get a state pension when he grew old.

  The spectacle of an inebriated old Mpondo woman singing in Zulu about her dog was too much for Sizwe’s patrons. Some buried their faces in their hands and chuckled quietly. Others slapped their thighs and howled with laughter.

  Sizwe was standing behind the counter with his hands on his hips, a broad smile on his face. He greeted me impatiently and shouted above the noise that Nwabisa was home, that I was finally to meet her. He told me to go next door, to his bedroom, where I would find her. His enthusiasm was boyish and agitated, almost nervous.

  I slipped out of the service door and made my way to Sizwe’s living quarters. The door was standing wide open. I knocked and shouted hello. There was no reply. I tentatively stepped inside.

  Nwabisa was fast asleep on the bed. She lay in a fetal position, her body cupping a young boy. He too was asleep. I knew from what I had been told that he was her eight-year-old son, here to visit her during his school holidays. One of his hands was tucked under his side. The other lay open-palmed on his mother’s swollen belly; she was due to give birth in less than a month.

  I turned to leave, but the shuffling of my feet disturbed her. She opened her eyes and rolled them around the room in disoriented fashion. As they fixed on me, they widened with surprise. She sat bolt upright, waking her son, and buried her face in her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I will come back a little later.”

  “No,” she replied bravely, her face still in her hands. “We have waited a long time to see each other. You will stay and you will sit down.”

  I fetched a plastic chair from the corner of the room and sat on it. We smiled at each other a little sheepishly.

  “You look just like Sizwe said you looked,” she remarked quietly. “He has been speaking about you for a long time.”

  It struck me as she said this that I had given little thought to what she might look like. Seeing her now for the first time, I found myself, oddly, comparing her face to that of her future husband’s. They were not alike at all. While his eyes were set wide apart, as if opening his face to an engagement with the world, hers were set close together, as if in defense; they were cautious and a little sad.

  She sat uncomfortably on the edge of the bed, her body turned away from me; to make eye contact, she had to twist her head and look at me over her left shoulder. Despite her awkwardness, though, she was curious. She asked whether I was married, if I had children, whether my parents were alive, and if they lived close to me.

  As I answered her questions, the sound of a commotion came to us from the other room. There was laughing, shouting, the thud of a heavy glass bottle hitting the floor, then more laughter.

  “This is Sizwe’s work,” she said, nodding in the direction of the noise.

  “He is doing well.”

  She shrugged. “It is a shebeen. A tavern. It is hard. You must have drinking people around your home.”

  There is a sense in which our meeting consisted of a mutual eyeing out. When I asked Sizwe whether I could write about him, he took more than a month to say yes. I knew that he consulted extensively with Nwabisa during that time. The decision was as much hers as it was his. Now, perhaps, she was judging whether they had made the right call.

  As for me, Nwabisa was my subject’s wife-to-be, and I was growing increasingly aware of what her presence in his life might mean for the book I was writing. Sizwe’s remarks when he declined the offer to test for HIV at his local clinic still lay in the future. He had not yet told me that were he to test positive he would have to call off his marriage, send Nwabisa and the child in her womb back to her home, and live his remaining days like an ox. But I did already know him well enough to see that he had made his impending marriage the very kernel of his identity, and that it was not the sort of identity, nor the sort of marriage, that could withstand the presence of the virus in its midst.

  THE STORY NWABISA and Sizwe tell of their courtship is one of forbidden love. They came together slowly, secretly, and chastely, over a period of two years. There were times when months went by as one crafted a move and the other responded. It was such an admirable tale—one of such dignity and patience—that I was immediately suspicious of it.

  They met at a high school athletics meet. It was the summer of 2000. Both were in their next-to-last year of school.

  Sizwe was with a friend. The friend pointed Nwabisa out in the grandstand and told Sizwe that she was a Mabaso. His interest was immediately piqued. The Magadla and Mabaso families were in the depths of an ugly feud. A cousin of Sizwe’s had married a brother of Nwabisa’s; the marriage had ended on bad terms, there had been a dispute over the return of bridewealth, and the two families had been volleying threats at each other ever since.

  Sizwe made his way to
Nwabisa’s seat in the stands and asked if he could join her. She agreed, if a little hesitantly. They sat side by side all day and spoke guardedly to each other. When the races were over, Sizwe offered to walk with Nwabisa to the taxi rank. It was a long way. Neither remembers what they spoke of, only that Nwabisa was cautious. After some forty-five minutes of walking, she instructed him to turn back; she would walk the remaining distance herself.

  During the course of the following year, Sizwe’s soccer team twice went to Nwabisa’s village to play against the local side. She would come to watch. After the game, the Ithanga team would walk home, and she would accompany Sizwe to the bank of the nearest river, a signal that she was enjoying his courting.

  He was growing increasingly frustrated. He was more than infatuated with her; he found himself preoccupied, daydreaming, scheming. She lived under her parents’ roof in a village Sizwe had no excuse visiting—he had no relatives there, no friends. And if her parents discovered their courtship, they would surely try to end it.

  On their third post-game walk to the river, Nwabisa told him that since she was finishing school at the end of the year, she would soon be looking for work; she’d be grateful were he to find something for her. He took this as an invitation to seek a way to get her away from her parents and into a relationship with him.

  And so he scouted the countryside for a job suitable for a young woman. In early 2002 he found one. There is a state forest not far from Ithanga. Some of the workers live on-site in clusters of two-room cottages. A handful of people are employed to keep the grounds and common areas clean, to maintain the communal kitchen, and to cook meals. The job Sizwe found for Nwabisa was in the kitchen. He sent word to her village for her to come.

  She didn’t.

  “I was not sure what to do,” Sizwe told me. “I put some money in the pocket of a young boy from Ithanga and told him to go to her village to fetch her. He came back without her. A few weeks later I sent a second boy. He also came back without her. The man who ran the kitchen at the forest was getting frustrated.

  “He said, ‘I cannot wait forever for the lady. Why don’t you go and fetch her yourself?’

  “I said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’

  “Nwabisa has relatives in Ithanga. Eventually, I went to a young boy in that family and I said, ‘Go and fetch your aunt. Do not come back without her.’”

  This time she came.

  She took up the job at the state forest and moved in with her relatives in Ithanga. Shortly thereafter, she and Sizwe slept together.

  But there was soon trouble in the Ithanga household into which Nwabisa had moved. She was deeply unhappy there, and decided that she could not stay any longer. She was faced with a choice: she could return home and give up her job, or she could keep her job and move in with Sizwe. She chose the latter. In the same week that she began sharing his bed, Sizwe did the three-hour walk between Ithanga and Nwabisa’s village, sat down with her family, and asked their permission for her to live with him. To the couple’s surprise, Nwabisa’s parents had heard rumors of their relationship months ago, and had already digested the idea and accepted it. Their need for secrecy, it seems, had been fueled as much by their fear and excitement as by a real threat.

  Nwabisa’s parents demanded a payment of three goats in exchange for their permission to have their daughter live under Sizwe’s roof. He assented. He was a poor young man from an impoverished family; it was the most he had ever paid for anything.

  ON A LATE-SUMMER afternoon I asked Nwabisa if I could accompany her to the river to fetch water. Soon after we set out, I told her teasingly that I did not quite believe the story she tells of her and Sizwe, that it seems to come more from a storybook than the world. I wondered about its seamless and graceful construction. Sizwe was twenty-four when he met Nwabisa, and by his own reckoning had slept with more than a dozen girlfriends in recent years. She was two or three years younger than him and the mother of a small child. Their long and deliberative period of chaste pursuit seemed not to issue from their world. I wondered whether the fact that their relationship was culminating in marriage had not caused them to tinker somewhat with the tale of its beginnings.

  She laughed shyly. “You don’t understand. He was forbidden to me because our families were fighting. If my father knew I was seeing a Magadla there would have been big trouble. So when he became interested in me, I thought to myself maybe I don’t need this complication. But even while I was pushing him away, I felt I was falling in love.

  “I confided in my sister. She was shocked. She said I mustn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t. That is why it was so slow and cautious.

  “It was only after I started living in Ithanga that things came out. People saw us together and told my family. They were shocked. But he presented himself to them immediately and soon they were okay.”

  I ASKED SIZWE to explain the eccentricity of their courtship. I expected him to tell the same, bare-boned yarn of forbidden romance Nwabisa had given me. Instead, he offered an opaque, unexpected story, one that I struggled to make sense of at first.

  “You waited patiently for two years before you consummated your relationship with Nwabisa,” I commented to him.

  “Yes,” he replied blankly.

  “But when you tell me other stories from this time in your life, it is a different world. You and Jake are moving from girl to girl. You are sleeping with several people in the space of a few months.”

  “Yes.”

  “But no sex with Nwabisa.”

  “No.”

  “It sounds like you were always chasing her and she was running away.”

  He nodded his head approvingly; he clearly liked the formulation. “Yes, in our culture you have to chase the lady. If you need a lady you need to chase her until you get her.”

  “Even if she loves you, she will make you chase her?”

  “Yes. You have to chase the lady from far away. You go several times to propose but she runs away from you. Until eventually her parents ask, ‘What is this man always doing coming here?’ And then you, as the man who is after the lady, you wait for that moment when the parents are asking questions, and then you tell a member of the family, a parent or a sister, of your intentions. Those people will convince the lady that this is a good man. ‘You must marry him. He has been here many times.’”

  “But your other girlfriends you did not chase for two years.”

  “No.”

  “So what was different about Nwabisa?”

  “In our culture,” he replied obdurately, “you must chase the lady.”

  I gave up. He was giving me a version of the old Madonna-versus-whore story, and that was familiar enough. He had been young and foolish, sowing his wild oats across the villages of Lusikisiki; now he was settling down to a woman, and to a life, of substance.

  And yet if he was telling an old-fashioned sex-versus-love tale, he had chosen an intriguing way to tell it. This is how things are done in our culture, he kept saying stubbornly, as if his relationship with Nwabisa came from the depths of a hallowed tradition, the relationships that preceded it from flotsam. It is an Mpondo lady one must chase, he appeared to be saying; deracinated girls come easily to one’s bed.

  I WAS ABOUT to abandon these thoughts and move on when an experience with Sizwe gave me cause to stop and think some more. It so happened that at the time he told me how one must chase the lady, slowly accruing allies among her family, we were interviewing Ithanga’s octogenarians about their youth. As we moved from one interview to the next, listening to the old people remembering their courting days, it came to me that Sizwe was borrowing bits and pieces of their world, and cobbling them into the story he told about himself and Nwabisa. The young man’s serial journeys to his sweetheart’s father’s homestead, her seemingly ceaseless refusals, his endeavors to make himself noticed among the members of her family, to win sympathizers—these were not memories of his own: they were idealized, recrafted episodes we had heard from the mouths of the o
ld people.

  The story Sizwe told of how he and Nwabisa met, of how one must chase the lady until her parents consent for you to take her, was an act of retrieval, or conservation. From the midst of his quintessentially 1990s sexual debuts, he had, in modified form, resurrected the idea of a traditional Mpondo courtship. Whether he did it just for my benefit, or whether it was a story he himself valued, I did not know at first.

  Of Oxen and Men

  By the time I set foot in Ithanga for the first time, I had begun to learn a great deal about love, sex, and courtship among Sizwe’s grandparents’ generation. It so happens that one of the finest ethnographic monographs ever penned in South Africa was researched in these parts in the early 1930s, and I had lapped it up greedily in preparation for my research. The anthropologist was a young woman named Monica Hunter, and the book she published was titled Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa.

  Hunter did her fieldwork between 1930 and 1932. She never visited Ithanga, but she did spend a three-month period in several of Lusikisiki’s villages. When she began her research she was twenty-three years old and fresh from Cambridge University, where she had studied history as an undergraduate. A daughter of one of Eastern Cape’s more famous missionary families, she was reasonably fluent in Xhosa. She came to Pondoland as the guest of a white trader and his wife. She would settle in to the trading store in the morning, and listen to the gossip of the women who came to buy.