Our Kind of People

Uzodinma Iweala

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062097675
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Viajes

In 2005, Uzodinma Iweala stunned readers and critics alike with Beasts of No Nation, his debut novel about child soldiers in West Africa. Now his return to his native continent has produced Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis that is every bit as startling and original.

Iweala embarks on a remarkable journey in his native Nigeria, meeting individuals and communities that are struggling daily to understand both the impact and meaning of the disease. He speaks with people from all walks of life—the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, sex workers, shopkeepers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and surprising, and always unflinchingly candid.

Beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines of an unprecedented epidemic to show the real lives it affects, illuminating the scope of the crisis and a continent's valiant struggle.

SEX

I’m actually going to a brothel, I remember thinking as my friend Doc and I drove to a truck stop about an hour west of his village clinic. He had set up services there for a number of sex workers patronized by the intercity truck drivers who stopped for a few hours’ rest. At the truck stop, fields of tall brown grass and low shrubs stretched outward from the junction and its impromptu settlement of zinc-roofed, mud-brick buildings. Around us large trucks rested as their engines clicked while cooling and their drivers propped themselves against their large tires or in the shade beneath their chassis. The men were almost catatonic from a full day’s work of driving. Their only motions were to raise plastic cups of water to their lips. Not too far away, a line of women sat silently against a low cement wall, some of them eating roasted corn, others fanning themselves against the heat.

“Those women are sex workers,” Doc said, thrusting his chin in their general direction.

The year before, during the Nigerian gubernatorial elections, I had interviewed a local Lagos politician about Nigeria’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. During our meeting in his dimly lit office, he had suggested that the disease was a problem of interstate truck drivers and female sex workers.

“For instance,” he had said, “a tanker driver is supposed to leave from Lagos all the way to Kano to deliver fuel. Because of the kind of person he is—he’s very promiscuous—he stops at Ore. He has a ‘friend’ in Ore, and let’s say he picks the HIV virus up in Ore along the way. He’s infected. From Ore, he now gets to Lokoja, where he’s also promiscuous. There he has unprotected sex with somebody, casual sex. He leaves. He has infected a community there. He gets all the way to Kano, where he has another show and a shot of it, casual sex again. He has infected someone in Kano. Then from Kano he heads back again to Lokoja and Abuja, and the person he had sex with is not available at that point in time, so he has sex with another person. A single carrier can do such damage. Along the routes of transportation, different cells and communities of infected people begin to spread.”

I found his words interesting because they seemed to externalize both the epidemic and its primary means of transmission—sex. By focusing on these groups of people that Nigerians traditionally consider promiscuous or of lax morality, he seemed to suggest that normal people with normal monogamous sexual relationships exist outside the reach of the virus. Or as one woman I interviewed, who had recently graduated from college, put it: “Everybody wants to believe that they’re very good and they’re too clean for all of that; that people that die of AIDS or have HIV are dirty people, people that sleep around or do rubbish and stuff, not our kind of people.”

“Some of them are positive,” Doc said about the sex workers. He had just started offering testing and counseling services to the women along with education on safe sex practices and free condoms. The previous week, he said, some of the women had tested positive.

As we stood watching, every so often a man would walk toward the women and the pair would disappear through a nondescript door in the side of a low cement wall. It was almost too perfect. It seemed that right before my eyes, this politician’s theory was being borne out.

I followed Doc across the street to that same narrow door in the side of the wall. He opened it and we stepped inside. Behind the door was a labyrinth of corridors open to the sky with smooth concrete walls broken at regular intervals by metal doors, some shut tight, others covered by limp and grungy curtains. At the end of one corridor, a youngish woman swept rhythmically, stopping every so often to slam the head of her broom against the ground and even out its bristles of stiff, dried grass before starting her motion again. Otherwise it was silent. I’m not sure what noises I expected, maybe even wished to hear in some realm of my imagination—heavy breathing, moaning, the universal indicators of illicit activity. But there was nothing. There was no intrigue here, no color, no vibrancy—-just a bunch of dark rooms, each with a mattress and neatly arranged personal effects at its base.

At the end of one corridor, Doc introduced me to two women he had come to know very well through his advocacy work. His words were quick and almost apologetic: “This is my friend. He has come to do research on HIV. Can he ask you some questions?” Then he disappeared into the maze of corridors.

My new companions sat down on low stools in the corridor, their backs supported by the cement wall. I took a stool facing them and stretched out my legs as they had.

One of the women puffed her cheeks wide before smiling at me. She was naturally radiant, the woman at the party who makes everyone feel comfortable and looked after. She wore a red and orange rappa (a sari-like garment) wound around her legs and torso. The knot holding up the fabric sat in the dead center of a bright red T-shirt stretched tightly over her chest. A black scarf covered her hair. Her companion was a darker-complexioned woman with wrinkled skin on her fingers, her exposed arms, and in the corners of her lips and eyes that made her look like the peel of a desiccated yam. She didn’t say much except to chime in for emphasis.

Our conversation began rather benignly with the usual pleasantries, after which the women shared with me their comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS.

“We were taught,” the first woman said at one point. “We went to lectures with the doctors, and they told us there is a tablet for it, but it cannot cure. This tablet can only subdue the various diseases. This is the worst disease we have in Nigeria. If you pregnant, then it will affect the baby.”

“The worst!” her companion agreed.

But things changed dramatically when, in an attempt to shift the conversation, I asked softly, “How many men do you see in a day?”

Immediately the woman wearing the red shirt changed. Her natural ruddiness paled. Her smile became synthetic. The second woman sucked in her teeth with disapproval. “That question has no answer,” she responded. “This is a road. Million of men can pass here in a day.”

“Why do you ask?” the first lady said. “There is no need of that.”

Why did I ask? It almost certainly doesn’t matter what the numbers are, except for what asking about them suggests. It has taken me some reflection to truly understand the significance of my question—indeed, my whole interaction with these two women—especially within the larger context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its relation to sex. The primary issue that has concerned me for some time is why I felt the need to start my exploration of the relationship between HIV/AIDS and sex with sex workers. With 35.6 percent of sex workers in Nigeria testing positive for HIV, there is surely some epidemiological justification for doing so, but if I am honest, there is something else at play, subtly expressed in my supposedly innocent question about how many men each woman was to see that day. It is the same sentiment that caused the politician to associate the HIV/AIDS epidemic solely with the sexual practices of prostitutes and truck drivers. It is the same sentiment that initially led some to look at the scope of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and suggest that if, as Susan Sontag has put it, “AIDS is understood as a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity,” then Africans must be more promiscuous and perverse than the general population. This desire to define a type of sex or sexuality that is more closely associated with HIV/AIDS, followed by an overt or implied judgment about the newly defined group, probably speaks more to society’s general anxiety about sex and sexual morality than it does to the practices of the group in question. This anxiety about sex has affected how we consider sexual relationships during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

From the time of its appearance, HIV/AIDS has been linked with the idea of an unnatural or morally transgressive sexuality. It divided the public into those who have HIV or are at higher risk of contracting the virus and what Sontag called “this disease’s version of ‘the general population’: white heterosexuals who do not inject themselves with drugs or have sexual relations with those who do.” The appearance of HIV helped to enforce the idea of a normative sexuality exemplified and practiced by white men and women, all sex outside of this realm receiving the label abnormal or, still worse, dangerous.

When HIV first appeared in homosexual populations in the United States in the early 1980s, it was thought that something intrinsic to gay sex was the cause of both the virus and its spread. The medical literature contained references to GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), which then morphed into the popularly used “gay plague.” In the late 1980s, massive efforts to educate the public about HIV/AIDS and strong campaigns by gay-rights advocates drastically reduced the presence of such dehumanizing rhetoric in the West. But rather than disappearing, the connection between HIV/AIDS and “weird” sex simply changed geographical locus as the extent of the sub-Saharan epidemic revealed itself.

The idea of African sexuality as Other in international dialogue begins first with accounts of Arab and Portuguese explorers in precolonial times. Themes of sexual aggressiveness, promiscuity, and strange sexual rituals addressed first in these early accounts have attached themselves to the sexualities of African and black peoples, coloring commentary on the subject for the greater part of the past millennium. Some have suggested that such accounts reflect the projections of European men from societies where the sexual experience was considered to be more strictly governed by explicitly understood social or religious convention, that the fascination and disgust with a perceived limitless African sexuality encountered on the frontier was the result of frustrated sexual expression at home.

More recently such themes have surfaced in the context of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic. For some both on and off the continent, the widespread presence of HIV/AIDS in Africa confirms that there is indeed something untoward about the way Africans approach sex. I am reminded of an encounter I had a few years ago while passing through London on my way back to Abuja when I decided to delay my onward journey by a couple of days to catch up with an old college friend. On a warmish spring evening, after dinner, we found ourselves in front of a nightclub discussing the only thing I seemed able to talk about—HIV. I was just explaining to my friend how prevalence rates in Nigeria—indeed, throughout much of Africa—had recently been downwardly revised, when the attractive young woman in a black blazer, skinny jeans, and heels standing in front of us turned around, a tad tipsy, and asked, “Isn’t HIV the disease that started because someone in Africa had sex with a monkey?” While that statement can initially be dismissed as the silly musing of an ignorant drunk woman, it does reflect a line of thinking that was found in scholarly literature about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Consider this observation by the medical anthropologist Daniel Hrdy—which might be considered one of the more benign explanations for the origin and spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa:

Although generalizations are difficult, most traditional African societies are promiscuous by Western standards....

There is a striking analogy between promiscuity as a risk factor in humans and the “promiscuous” behavior of vervets. Typically, female vervets, unlike baboons, are sexually receptive for long periods … and during that time mate with multiple male partners, sometimes engaging in dozens of copulations on a single day....

We are left to conclude that even if HIV/AIDS isn’t the result of some African having sex with a monkey, it has certainly spread because Africans were having sex like monkeys.

This initial argument that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was the result of a base African sexuality was rounded off in papers like “The Social Context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa,” published by the anthropologists John and Pat Caldwell, which suggested the spread of HIV/AIDS was linked to societies where “virtue is related more to success in reproduction than to limiting profligacy,” and the fact that “polygyny exists on a scale not found in the Eurasian system.” It is useful to start with polygamy when discussing the HIV/AIDS epidemic because the reactions to this cultural practice and its implication in the spread of the epidemic provide a starting point for exploring understandings of the relationship between sex and HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.

Polygamy has long been a point of concern when the world considers African sexuality—if indeed such a thing even exists. During the height of the British colonial project, it was thought that the “greatest struggle is not so much with heathenism and fetishness as with worldliness, unchristian marriages and polygamy.” The assumption made in anthropological assessments such as the Caldwells’ of the relationship of an aberrant African sexuality to HIV/AIDS is that polygamy institutionalizes an innate promiscuity that is central to the spread of disease. It is not difficult to see why earlier researchers came to this conclusion—especially considering the historical and anthropological bias favoring the idea of the promiscuous African. It also reveals why many Africans initially pushed so hard against the idea that HIV was actually a problem. No one wanted to really answer the question: what does it mean if these historians and anthropologists are right? Unfortunately, both the unfounded assumptions about African sexuality and the pushback against these assumptions colored the debate and perhaps delayed the formation of an effective strategy to deal with HIV/AIDS.

I didn’t originally intend to explore the role of polygamy in the spread of the epidemic, but it came up in a conversation I had with the prominent activist Samaila Garba, who runs Amana, an association of people living with HIV/AIDS in the northern Nigerian town of Kontangora.

I first met Samaila when Doc and I passed through Kontangora on our way to the village where Doc had his clinic. Samaila lived on a busy street near the center of town, just behind the emir’s sprawling palace compound, where kids kicking a soccer ball scurried to the roadside every time a car or motorcycle buzzed by and people made slow progress in their amblings, stopping every five minutes to greet another person they knew. Residences were indistinguishable from storefronts—goods for sale hung from or sat on almost every available hook and flat surface. People blinked repeatedly when stepping from the shade of their dwellings into the harsh, hot sun. Samaila emerged from his low doorway slightly stooped, but soon unfolded himself to his true height. He towered over most people, and with his bald head, dark skin, and chiseled facial features, he appeared the emblem of seriousness, a distinguished look that vanished as soon as his face exploded into an enthusiastic, toothy smile.

He was an unlikely activist. The son of a poor farmer, he had grown up in northern Nigeria with dreams of attending college and becoming, as he called it, a “big man.” But due to the relative poverty of his family, he was not able to continue his education beyond secondary school. Instead he became a schoolteacher and later, after some persuasion by close friends, a police officer. He worked instructing new recruits on the intricacies of the law, and sometimes went undercover to break syndicates of livestock thieves operating in the vast farm and grazing lands of the north. He certainly fit the part of a police officer—his imposing presence and assured movements, his gestures controlled and authoritative, his voice at once calm and commanding. And though police officers in Nigeria are much maligned for petty corruption, he was unapologetic in his love for his former profession. “Whatever they say about policemen,” he had told me when we first met, “I know it built my character. It made me strong. It taught me courage, and I believe that courage is what I brought along into this HIV/AIDS work that I am doing.”

When next we met, it was at the Kontangora General Hospital, where the Amana Association had its headquarters. We met in a stuffy office that was filled with files detailing potential grants, stacked piles of community activism training manuals, and peer-counseling and testing brochures. Dust collected on an old, clearly unused computer beside which rested a picture of Samaila meeting the Queen of England. We took two plastic chairs outside to the shade of a large mango tree abutting the building, where a group of women, members of the association, sat across from us against the wall of the hospital ward, their legs stretched out on the dusty concrete before them, laughing and chatting as little gusts of wind made their headscarves ripple. Every so often, they glanced toward us and whispered.

“In 2001 I did accept that I was HIV positive. I made statements as such in the public,” Samaila said, once we were seated. “It was quite a revolutionary thing to do in the north because nobody had done that before. It was very tough for myself and for the remaining members of my family. It affected my children. They became very despondent, first of all because their mother was lost. Then they were not happy at school—people were giving them a lot of headache. Their peers were giving them a lot of headache. They would tell them, ‘Your father is Mr. AIDS! Your father is Mr. AIDS!’ And my kids would cry their way back home. I found a lot of rejection from my immediate community. When I went for prayer in the mosques—even to pray in the mosques—people didn’t want to stand by me,” he said, still wounded.

“But I also knew and I saw that people were misinterpreting the issue of HIV/AIDS. And I realized that the onus of removing the stigma lies on me and me only. I suffered the stigma and I realized the stigma was a result of misinformation.

“People talked about HIV/AIDS, for example, as being a disease of the promiscuous only. People with wayward behaviors were being punished by God, infected with HIV/AIDS. That was the norm of the thinking among the population.” He coughed. “I certainly had relationships with many women before I got marr...