When I enrolled at the university in February 1988 I dived headlong into the antiapartheid student movement. At the time I went for my HIV test, I was spending a good six or eight hours a day at the offices of the National Union of South African Students. I was reading Marx and Lenin with the hunger of a young convert. Among the debates I had with my peers was whether a shopping mall full of the rich and bejeweled beneficiaries of apartheid was a legitimate target for a bomb blast. I believed I was part of a movement that was going to rout the state and overturn the economic order.
And yet not once did I consider raising my ire against the campus health center. The possibility of approaching the Students Representative Council to tell them that there was something wrong with the way the university dealt with HIV was not something I entertained. The meanness that had been cast at me was utterly indistinguishable from, was indeed entirely parasitic upon, the meanness I felt toward myself. Even if I had found a way to express my anger, I would not have known whom to fight.
“I’VE COME BACK to Lusikisiki because I can’t finish my book,” I said to Sizwe.
Some three or four hours had passed since we met up outside the Metro Cash & Carry. In the interim, I had traipsed after him as he moved about town accumulating a mountain of supplies for his shop. They were now crammed into a minibus that was driving ahead of us, and into the tiny car I had hired back at Mthatha’s airport; it was complaining volubly of the unexpected burden.
He turned to me and nodded and then looked ahead again, waiting to discover in precisely what form I wished to shake him down.
“I still don’t know why you won’t test for HIV,” I said. “I’ve just spent the last few weeks trying to figure out for myself why you won’t test, and it got me thinking about my experiences. I started remembering how difficult I have found it to test in the past, and I thought to myself, If I can relive my own experience, maybe I can understand yours better.”
I began to tell him of what had happened in the campus health center some eighteen years ago; of the moment the letters H-I-V crossed the lips of the young woman receptionist; of how a roomful of people, their thoughts in all likelihood consumed by their own business, became, in my mind, an audience of naked hostility.
Sizwe listened very carefully. He did not interrupt. But the moment the story reached its first natural pause, he spoke.
“It is not the same for me,” he said quietly. “I have thought about it a lot and it is not the same. A little bit of me is worried about what other people will think, but that is not the main reason why I won’t test.”
He cleared his throat, wrapped his fingers tightly together in his lap, and stared ahead.
“If I know I am HIV-positive,” he said, “I will no longer be motivated to do the thing I am doing now, I mean the thing I am doing right now, what I have spent the morning doing here with you—putting all my energy, every moment I am awake, into my shop. It will all be meaningless for me. I will stay in bed in the mornings.”
He said nothing more. It was senseless asking a question now, so we drove on in silence for some time.
“I am doing all of this for my children,” he finally said. “If I have AIDS, then all this work is no longer for my children.”
“Because you will die before you have accumulated enough wealth for them?”
“Because if I die while my children are too little to take what’s theirs, my money will end up going to people like my father and my brother. These are people who do not help me to earn my money now. They are not interested in helping me with my business. My dad did not educate me. That’s fine. I do not blame him for that. Now, I support him, and when my brother needs money for the doctor it is to me that he comes. But they do not help with the business.
“So that is my first reason. If I die of AIDS, Mfanawetu will not get my money. Some others will get it. That is why I will not test. If I test positive, I will no longer get up in the morning to work.”
Of the emotions his brief soliloquy transmitted the one I felt most was love: a fierce and restless love for Mfanawetu, and for his brothers and sisters who are not yet born. His love is of course selfish: it is his progeny, and no one else, for whom he wakes up in the mornings. But what fiery and desperate love; he must be omnipotent, it is all up to him, like the last man on the Titanic. If the virus has found his blood and he dies a young man, the entire ship that is him and his descendants will be ripped apart by hostile storms.
In a sense, what he was telling me now was not so different from the things he had expressed during the first months of our acquaintanceship. I had met a young shop owner who was anxious that envious people would destroy his nascent success. He worried of Simlindile the gangster arranging for young men to hold him up at gunpoint; of demons who would come to him in his sleep and infect him with untreatable illness; of other demons who would slip into the interiors of his customers and make them wild and crazy and tear his place to pieces. And Sizwe and I had both watched in muted horror the aftermath of Brian’s death: Brian the wealthy spaza shop owner whose assets his own uncle Charlie and cousin Simlindile had quite literally dismembered, selling them off one by one, and using the proceeds to start a shop of their own.
But Nwabisa was not yet his wife then, and Mfanawetu was invisible in her womb. Now the entity he needed to defend had taken life and was there in front of him every day: it was not his flesh-and-blood corporeal self, but a line of Magadlas he loved with all his might. And the menace that threatened them was not a gangster with a gun; it was the most primordial of rivals—fathers, brothers who would take one’s children’s inheritance and spend it on themselves.
“You assume,” I said to Sizwe a little later in our car journey, “that if you test positive you will die soon. If I tested positive, I would go to the opposite extreme. I would instinctively tell myself I have another three decades to live at least.”
“No,” he replied. “That is in fact the biggest reason for me not to test. If I know that I am positive, I will die quicker. Once I know the virus is inside me, it will take me over very quickly. Knowing that my blood is dirty, feeling it every time I wake up in the morning, it would not be long before I’m dead.”
“And the pills?” I asked. We had, just an hour earlier, bumped into a woman we both knew was among the first people in Lusikisiki to start ARV treatment. Once we had chatted and she was walking away, I had remarked, and Sizwe had agreed, how stunningly beautiful she was, and how healthy she looked. “We have both just seen what the pills have done,” I said.
“I do not like those pills,” he replied. “To take them every day is a reminder that your blood is dirty. Especially that big yellow pill, that huge rugby ball pill. If I had to take that pill every day it would be close to the end for me. It would just remind me that I am dying.”
“You would choose not to take the pills?”
“I would take them because they would be the only thing left to me. But I would not be happy.”
I SPENT THE early evening in Ithanga with Sizwe, Nwabisa, and their son. Mfanawetu was fourteen months old now. With his toddler’s unsteady gait, he marched between Sizwe and his mother and me, his face very serious, his voice very loud, demanding to be cuddled and cooed at and made a fuss of. We each obliged him in turn.
After dinner, at about eight o’clock, Sizwe walked me back to the outskirts of the village. It was the night after a full moon. As we crossed the river, our socks and shoes in our hands, the pebbles on the river’s pedestrian crossing appeared and disappeared in the pale moonlight.
“I think a difference between me and you,” I said, “is that the times I thought I felt the virus in my blood have been momentary. Over the last twenty years, on an average day, I have not felt that there is this thing in my blood. I think it is the opposite for you. I think you believe deep down that it is in your blood.”
“There are so many different symptoms I feel,” he replied, “that it is hard to know whether it is AIDS. I do not have a desire
for sex as much as I used to. My hips ache. My body feels weak and it aches. The same thing is happening to Nwabisa. It is possible that we both have AIDS. And Mfanawetu.”
“Because of a demon?”
“More likely because I got it, or Nwabisa got it maybe, before we were together. Maybe it was there all this time, but it was quiet for a while. Maybe it was hidden in Nwabisa that time she tested for HIV.
“Or maybe a demon. I don’t know. Both of us have recently experienced demons having sex with us in our sleep. It is probably the same demon. It is a woman when it is with me, a man when it is with Nwabisa.”
“A part of me is so frustrated,” I replied. “If you are HIV-positive, I know at the bottom of my heart that you would embrace those pills as a life force. You would swallow them and they would invigorate you because they would represent life. You would feel the virus getting weaker in your blood and your thoughts would make you stronger.
“I think that the certainty with which you feel you will not survive the knowledge of your illness is a lie. The trauma you are imagining, it is something you have already experienced; you have already survived it.”
“Maybe you are right,” he replied. “But it’s not worth the chance.”
“You have seen Jake’s brother every day since he started taking the pills,” I said. “Do you not see life returning to him?”
“He looks better if you just glance at him,” he said evenly. “But if you look at him very closely, he is not right. He is much thinner than he should be. And if you look at him around the eyes, he is not right. There is something around the eyes.”
“You look at him and you see death?”
He did not reply. One does not say it out loud; one does not willingly coax the evil eye.
I MET SIZWE at half past six the following morning on the outskirts of Ithanga. He had asked me the night before whether I would drive him to Mount Ayliff, 125 miles away, to book an appointment for a driver’s license test. He was desperate for a four-by-four of his own and for a license. Hiring transportation to carry his stock from town was his largest expense and his most burdensome dependence on others. In recent months, the prospect of a vehicle of his own had begun to consume him. He craved it, but feared too that it might be a poisoned chalice: in the eyes of Ithangans it would be the first categorical symbol of his wealth. He would have to erect a tall fence around his property, buy several dogs, and park his car outside his front door.
Driving from Ithanga, I picked up our discussion from where we had suspended it the previous evening.
“Just think of the relief,” I said. “You go to the clinic, you test negative, and you are free. This whole burden lifts from your shoulders.”
He laughed out loud. “This is not a disease you go and look for,” he said. “You wait until it comes to you. And then you deal with it. If I start getting sick with AIDS symptoms, then I will go and test.
“In any case, if you go and look for it, maybe you will find it. Maybe the nurse who does the test is someone who is very angry with you. And she gives you the disease in the needle.”
So many things were condensed into the thoughts he had shared over the last fifteen hours. The first was quite simple: as much as he knows he will die one day, at bottom he does not believe in his own death. That is something we all share. One sees it every day. It is there in all of our lives. Some weeks ago I attended the funeral of a middle-aged man. Two years ago, he felt a throbbing in his head and wished it away and wished it away until he collapsed, a tumor the size of a golf ball strangling his brain. It was there in the colleague with whom I had coffee yesterday morning; he smokes three packs of filterless Camels a day, and knows, but does not at bottom believe, that he will die young and badly.
Sizwe also expresses a fear that, paradoxically, belongs to a person who believes that he is in grave danger of dying. He said that he has aches and pains and he thinks that they are symptoms of AIDS. He has had intimations of what it feels like to have dirt in his blood and he believes it is a feeling that will kill him. What is this dirt, this contamination?
When Sizwe says his brother and father will snatch his worldly possessions from his son Mfanawetu, he believes he has sinned against them. When he says his community will tear him down for doing well, he fears that he has taken too much from them. When he says his premature death will rob his progeny of their inheritance, he feels he has stolen the progeny of his peers. I think it is these feelings that have taken the form of dirt in his blood.
This book has been awash with examples of a contamination that elides the boundary between the physical and the moral. It was there in the rigid prohibition on drinking and smoking that Lusikisiki health-care workers imposed on ARV users. It made little medical sense, but users understood it intuitively and latched on to it with fervor. It was as if, along with the pills, they had been given the chance to cleanse their bodies and their beings of dirt.
It was there when I interviewed Edwin Cameron in his study in Johannesburg. He had not known, he said, that in the eleven-year period between testing positive for HIV and starting antiretroviral treatment he had all the while felt that his blood was contaminated; that the contamination was at once moral and physical, a self-reproach that ran through his bodily fluids. “I only began to understand these things,” Cameron told me, “when I realized that the drugs were working. Once the viral activity had been stopped in my body, I stopped feeling contaminated.”
It was there too in me as I left the campus health center through what I imagined to be a gauntlet of contempt. My blood test had made it public that I had taken too much. And in Sizwe’s blood too, I believe, is the feeling that he has taken far too much, that he has been contaminated by his choices.
How do I know these things when he has not told me himself? I don’t. I have only felt it, intimated it, and I can only share these intimations as best I can.
Periodically, I asked Sizwe how business was going. Well, he would invariably reply. Long may it last, I would say.
“But it will not last long,” he would always reply. “It is only a matter of time before my customers leave me.”
“Why are you sure they will do that?”
“One day I will bring home a car, and they will see this. Then I will build myself a big rondavel, and they will see that. At some point one of them will say out loud, ‘Whose money is making him so rich? It is ours. Every pension day we come here to him to pay our debts, and there our money is in his car and his rondavel.’ And then they will all leave to go and make some other spaza shop owner rich, leaving me with nothing.”
Sometimes he would say it in the spirit of a wry joke, sometimes as a superstitious precaution, as if by prefiguring it he would chase the actual event away. Nonetheless, it is a fantasy he has rehearsed incessantly. Over and over again he tells himself that his success will not last because it wasn’t his to begin with: he has triumphed over the people around him and they will get their revenge.
Is an entrepreneur who has taken more than his due from his community also a man who has taken more than his due from sex? Shadowing us in the background during every step of our journey was the question what he was doing with his body. He was sleeping with one woman. He was saving his worldly possessions for her bridewealth. His intention was to produce children who would bear his name.
What does it mean to do this in a village where practically every other man of one’s generation is unable to do the same? What does it mean to tell one’s peers that one is now isishumane, a man who has given up sexual conquests, and yet who, paradoxically, grows more powerful than them every day? In having sons and daughters he can claim as his own, is he accosted by the sense that he is stealing their progeny?
From the very beginning, getting ahead meant pushing another aside. Going to school, learning to read and write, that in and of itself was a victory, the outcome of a silent struggle with his father.
These are my questions at any rate. I asked Sizwe why he could not test for
HIV. He told me of a boy he loved called Mfanawetu, and of a fear that the boy would be robbed of his patrimony because of the dirt in his father’s blood. This is what I have made of his reply.
WHEN SIZWE AGREED that I could write about him, it was understood that I would use his real name. I advised him to take care. He had spoken to me candidly about his relationships with other people—with his parents, with ex-lovers, with those whose presence in Ithanga he found threatening. We agreed that he would read everything I wrote, and that he should look out for trouble. “For instance,” I told him, “I want to write about you and your father. But the thoughts you share with me about him are obviously not necessarily thoughts you would want him to hear. When you look at the draft, you must take it as given that somebody will tell your father what is in the book. There must be nothing in it you would rather he didn’t know.”
Sometimes he seemed to take this advice to heart, but mostly he could not take it seriously at all. In all his years, he had seldom seen anyone in Ithanga reading a book, nor, with the exception of novels and plays teenagers studied at high school, had he ever heard a single conversation about one. I tried to impress upon him that this book was different: it was about Lusikisiki and would thus be read in Lusikisiki, and news of its content would come to Ithanga.
“Maybe,” he would reply. “But I don’t think so.”
His nonchalance about privacy ended abruptly when he told me about Thandeka, a loved one with AIDS whose condition was a secret, and whom I would reveal were I to write of Sizwe’s own relation to the epidemic. There and then we decided on two things. We would give both Sizwe and his village pseudonyms. And, since those who really want to discover his identity could do so simply by approaching people whose real names do appear in this book, we disguised Thandeka’s identity, such that no one would find out precisely who she was unless Sizwe himself were to tell them.
Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 33
