That is how things stood during much of the period in which this book was researched and written. Officially, we were using pseudonyms to protect Thandeka.
But there was obviously more to be said than that. Whatever the official reason, Sizwe was now collaborating with me undercover. And the question that ought to have arisen, but that did not until the last days of our collaboration, was what, precisely, this cover was permitting us to do.
During one of my last trips to Lusikisiki, in February 2007, I put a suggestion to Sizwe. If we could agree among ourselves, I said, that Thandeka’s identity was sufficiently hidden, would he consider dispensing with his pseudonym? Would he allow me to name him and his village?
“If somebody who reads this book really wants to find you,” I said, “it won’t be too hard. The reason was to protect Thandeka, and I think she is protected.”
He thought about it for a moment or two. He had nothing to hide, he said. There is nothing in his views about AIDS of which he is ashamed; they are reflective of the views of many black people. Even in the things he has revealed of himself, there is not much that would surprise those who knew him. Despite all that, he said, he wanted to keep his pseudonym.
Why? He gave me a hundred reasons during my two-week stay in Lusikisiki that February, but none rang true. He trusted blacks to understand the things he expressed in the book, he said, but not whites; they would make trouble. Or he trusted whites, but not Indians. He was babbling, filling up space: he did not want to say.
The closest he came to expressing his real fears was on the last afternoon of my trip.
“I would be accused of giving away black people’s secrets,” he said. “It is like what you are accused of when you act as a guide. When Graeme and the bird-watchers were there at their cottage, and I was showing them around the forest, my cousin and I organized a cultural tour for them. We took them to see a sangoma, an inyanga, to see traditional dance, to see the floors of the hut being cleaned with cow dung. They watched the ritual when a goat is being slaughtered.
“After they left, some people in Ithanga were very angry with us. They said, ‘You go around showing the white people our culture, but they show us none of theirs. You are giving away our secrets to put a few cents in your own pockets. But it is our secrets you are making money off, our culture.’
“I am afraid that I would be accused of the same thing.”
“Doesn’t that argument have some power,” I asked.
“No. I don’t think the whites are going to use our secrets. It is we who keep borrowing the culture from the whites. And anyway, these people who get angry, if they had money to travel to other places, they would also want to know about the people they met there. It is just that they are too poor to travel.”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Maybe they are saying two things. First, that the tourists are given their secrets for nothing. But the second is different. Maybe they are saying that when the whites come here on holiday it is like they are going to a game reserve to look at the animals. They are interested in your culture in the same way they are interested in the fact that the leopard sleeps alone in a tree and the lion with his family on the ground.”
“Yes,” he nodded, “they are making that point, too.”
“And that is humiliating. It is an unequal relationship.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So why are you cooperating with me if you think that these people who will be angry with you might have a point?”
He grinned widely, insouciantly, a little irritably, as if to say, You asked for it, now you’ll get it.
“You know Botha Sigcau,” he began, “the Mpondo chief during iKongo?”
“During the 1960 Pondoland uprising,” I replied, “in which many men from Ithanga were thrown in jail.”
“Yes, iKongo. The whites put in front of Sigcau a bag of money and a bag of soil. They asked him to choose. He chose the money and gave away his land, the land on which his people farmed. And when the people rebelled against the theft of their land, the whites took Sigcau up in a helicopter, and they asked him to fire the first shot. He did: he shot at his people.”
“So you are Sigcau,” I said. “You are selling your people’s culture and their secrets to me?”
He shook his head and laughed. “I’m not selling you anything so valuable. As I said, it is us who are stealing your culture from you.”
“But what is the exchange? You agreed to do this for nothing.”
“I did it to make friends with the umlungus,” he beamed. “We know that if you make friends with the umlungus now, you gain something later.”
“Like the stooge Botha Sigcau?”
“Yes.” He laughed loudly. “Botha Sigcau and Sizwe Magadla are the traitors of Lusikisiki.”
ON THE MORNING I drove Sizwe to Mount Ayliff to book an appointment for his driving test, I took up the issue again.
“Is your fear that people will accuse you of giving away your culture’s secrets the real reason you are keeping your name disguised?” I asked.
“No,” he said softly. “Well, it is a reason, but it is not the main reason. The main reason is that I would look stupid for talking about private things. Like that I went to school behind my father’s back. This is not something about your life that you share with people. They read it in the book, they see it is me, and I will get embarrassed.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“I bumped into Phumza a few days ago,” he said by way of reply. Phumza is a woman I hired as an interpreter early in my research. I once asked her, in Sizwe’s presence, whether she would consider allowing me to write a chapter about the time I spent with her. She said she would think about it. Some six weeks later I heard from her. We spoke about this and that, but she did not raise my request, and so neither did I; from her silence it was clear that she had decided against it.
“I asked her,” Sizwe continued, “why she didn’t want you to write about her. She said, ‘I’ll never let him. He’ll get rich doing it, and I’ll get nothing. I will have given him private things about my life and I will look stupid.’
“So what people will maybe say about me,” he continued in a calm, even voice, “they will say I have sold something that is not for sale.”
The heaviness of what he had said sat with us in the car.
“I do not think that I have,” he continued. “But there are others who might think so. It is not such a big thing. It does not matter so much what they think. If we had been using my real name it would have been okay. But since I was given the opportunity to use a different name, I would like to take that opportunity.”
Outside the window, I noticed, the landscape had changed considerably since the beginning of our journey. The sharp hills and deep valleys of the Lusikisiki district were beginning to make way for a magisterial landscape; we were driving toward large mountains.
A feeling of unhappiness settled over me. Sizwe was trying to be reassuring, to wish away something painful. But his attempt only caused it to linger. In his recurring nightmare about the ruin of his business, which he talks of as a joke or a warding off of the evil eye, the wool is suddenly lifted from over his customers’ eyes. It dawns on them that all the things he has sold them were never for sale, that he has been getting rich with their money under their very noses. There is something similar in the unease he had just expressed to me now. Here too, he stands accused of selling that which is not for sale. In order to get close to the world of the umlungus, he is bartering his privacy. To have this sale revealed to the world would be embarrassing, he said.
Yet perhaps it is a good deal more than embarrassing. He is a black man selling his interior to a white man. There is a special transgression in this sale, one as powerful as it is hard to articulate. It is something you know because you feel it deep in your bones: it has grown out of generation upon generation of racial hurt.
You do not sell your interior to whites, for what is inside you is an instance of
a shared, black interior. What you are offering to the white man is not yours, it is everybody’s: a collective sphere of privacy bounded by race and politics. You do not hawk a piece of that interior to people who have spent generations trying to extinguish your spirit. That is what he was saying when he likened himself to the stooge Botha Sigcau, a man who sold his people’s birthright because he believed it was his to hawk to whites.
Sitting in the car with him on the drive to Mount Ayliff, I thought I glimpsed the high-water mark of his moral doubt. I saw something of the burden he carries in his quest to give his children the future he has dreamed for them. I understood as well as I ever will his feeling that his blood might be polluted, and his suspicion that Mfanawetu’s blood might be, too.
THE BUBBLE OF a tiny car is an intimate space. I do not know whether Sizwe felt the full extent of my unease, but he certainly sensed my change of mood. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on a colder, more distant quality.
“I have said this to you before,” he began, “but I will say it now. My generation, and the generation before mine, are dying younger than the last. In the old days, only the very old would die, and even then, only occasionally. Now there are funerals every weekend and it is young people who are being buried.
“Partly, it is diet. We are eating things our ancestors never ate: amafuta [saturated oil], rice, coffee. Even the children are drinking coffee now. In the old days, the elders would throw the dregs of the pot out, fill it up with water, and the children would drink that water. The coffee was hardly there anymore.
“And as for AIDS, the umlungus definitely have a cure. I know absolutely for sure that they do. And they are holding it back. The umlungus are so clever. It is not possible that they don’t have a cure. They want the blacks to die so that life can be more comfortable again. Tell me, why did people start dying of this thing after democracy came in 1994? And why does it only affect the blacks?”
“It started in other countries long before 1994,” I replied. “And as you know it hit countries very hard in which the white rulers had left long ago—for Britain and Belgium and other European countries.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Why only in black countries?”
“America was just about the first country in which it was detected,” I said. “And it killed thousands of young, white, middle-class people.”
“Yes, but they stopped dying, didn’t they? They got better. Why did they get better when we didn’t?”
That is Africa’s great question about AIDS: why has the epidemic been uniquely terrible here? Sizwe answered this question from his vantage point in a village in the old Transkei. He also answered it from his place in a conversation in my car. We had spent some of the last fifteen hours talking of our fear of testing. He did not want to test for dirt in his blood, he said, because the knowledge would kill him. And from there we had discussed the selling of things that are not his to sell. He was expressing guilt, guilt that his life’s quest was poisoned because it would entail triumphing over people around him.
And then the mood in the car changed, and when he spoke again, it was still about AIDS, but he was no longer guilty, no longer a wrongdoer. The source of the hostility was outside him now, far outside. He was now a black man among other black people, and together they were the victims of a gruesome conspiracy. He had freed himself of the guilt he was feeling just moments before, but at a heavy price. For he was now a man facing a pernicious and invisible onslaught, a man who must not trust whatever comes from the outside. An anti-entrepreneur, really: one who retreats in the face of the new.
The switch from one to the other had happened at lightning speed.
Sizwe and Hermann
Some eight or nine years after my first HIV test, I entered a state of anxiety about my health similar to the one I had experienced at the back of the lecture hall in Johannesburg. This time I was a doctoral student at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. I was twenty-seven. I still hadn’t had a lasting sexual relationship, and if the criteria established by my last bout of anxiety held, I thus remained suspended, despite my age, somewhere between childhood and the grown-up world.
My anxiety came in a very different form this time. It did not crash down upon me in a single moment, but accumulated quietly over time. One by one, I went over in my mind the sexual encounters I had had since I last tested. They had all, I thought, been reasonably safe. And yet the more I reflected on it, the more the boundary between safe and unsafe seemed to blur. I could not be absolutely certain unless I tested. Whenever I brooded upon it, I felt dizzy and nauseous in the way I had nearly a decade earlier, as if the virus itself was in my body and had decided to make its own contribution to my internal dialogue. I was tormenting myself; I needed to test.
I made an appointment with my doctor, Andrew Rutland, the same word-shy man whose benign, authoritative presence had helped me give up smoking, my memory of whom had been stirred as I watched Kate Marrandi and her patients. His consultation room was about the safest space in Oxford I could imagine in which to be tested for HIV. I would be in his hands.
When I told him what I wanted he shook his head. He would take blood from me if I really insisted, he said, but he felt he should tell me that it was not in my interests to be tested here. He could not guarantee that the results would be confidential. They would enter my record where they might be accessed by a host of institutions that could one day use them against me: life insurance companies, medical insurers, prospective employers. It would be better if I went to the nearest public facility, the Radcliffe Infirmary, not far from the center of town. The service there is good, he said, and I could be sure that no record would remain of my having tested there.
I left Dr. Rutland’s consultation room puzzled. Something was not right. A hundred questions flared up in me that I should have asked him moments earlier. Do insurance companies have a right to demand to see a private practitioner’s patient records? Prospective employers? And if not, how on earth would they get their hands on them without the doctor’s permission? Had this island become a totalitarian state? Had I missed it in the newspapers?
I held no ill feeling toward Dr. Rutland himself. On the contrary, he remained the paternal figure in whom I took comfort, looking out for my interests, steering me from a danger that in my ignorance I had drifted toward. But I was nonetheless enraged. I was twenty-seven now, not the fumbling nineteen-year-old who had walked into the Wits health center in a cold sweat. Back then, the prospect of disapproving strangers barging into the rooms in which I had sex to take notes and keep records and write to my mother bore some sort of symmetry to the child I was. I was an adult now. I had earned my privacy. When I closed my door it ought to remain closed.
Now, to hold on to my privacy, I would have to take my place at the end of the line at the Radcliffe Infirmary: small, reduced, cap in hand. What came to mind was another crowded room, like the one at Wits, another hurried, indifferent person managing the line. This was a violation of my adulthood, I thought to myself, an insult to the integrity of my genitals themselves, as if they were still those of a prepubescent.
Looking back now, it is hard not to view the advice Dr. Rutland gave me as terribly destructive. As with the young woman at the reception window years earlier, he was either woefully ignorant of the workings of shame or, unconsciously, only too aware. For if shame is an internalized voice of opprobrium, one in search of an echo from the outside, Dr. Rutland gave my shame all the echo it could ever have hoped for. Of course an HIV-positive person in 1997 had a great deal of cause to fear the prejudice of insurers and future employers. But the point is that they could not get into Dr. Rutland’s consultation room. They could not pore through his patient records. He had in effect told me that the virus that may be in my blood carried an accusation so vicious and penetrating as to threaten a right to confidentiality established by generation upon generation of common law; that the very prospect of recording it, even here, in a consultation protected by doct
or-patient privilege, was too dangerous.
If I had been clear-sighted I would have seen at once that what Dr. Rutland said could not possibly be right. But since I was a person living with a great deal of shame, a feeling I had never reflected upon with any measure of insight, his words instinctively rang true. Of course there were powerful forces out there and in here seeking to damage me; I knew the feeling of their presence all too well, since I had been living with them inside me my entire adult life. And so I turned my rage against these forces. And since I could not distinguish whether they were inside me or outside, I confused the object of my rage. Unwittingly, I pointed my venom at myself.
A few days after my visit to Dr. Rutland, I cycled to the Radcliffe Infirmary, which most residents of Oxford knew was on Woodstock Road. Quite bizarrely, I could not find the front entrance. I had it in my mind that the infirmary was on Walton Street, a block behind Woodstock Road. Indeed, I was absolutely convinced that the entrance was there; I would have bet my life on it. And I did find a sign to the Radcliffe Infirmary on Walton Street, but it was to a back entrance, an asphalt alleyway that turned sharply to the left and disappeared behind a building.
I sat on my bicycle, one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal, and stared down the alleyway. Several thoughts accosted me at once and I knew within a second that I would go no farther. The first was that I lived more than a mile away from here. The second was that I had no way of getting home except on my bicycle or by foot. (The prospect of hailing a taxi did not cross my mind.) The third was that having blood taken from my arm would make me dizzy and weak, and I would have no way of returning home. In that moment, I forgot entirely that I had never felt remotely faint at the sight of blood. I imagined myself in the wake of the test, stumbling around and disoriented, my legs weak and unsure. I mount my bike and fall down on the pavement on Walton Street, and my residence room, its work desk and laptop waiting for me, remains empty and silent.
Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 34
