We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy’s Courage and a Mother’s Love
By Jim Wooten
Penguin, 243 pages, $19.95
For southern Africans who came of age as apartheid crumbled, the ’80s held the same flowering sense of possibility as the ’60s held for Baby Boomers in North America. You had Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, we had Thomas Mapfumo and Miriam Makeba. You had Martin Luther King, we had Nelson Mandela. You had Vietnam, we had . . . well, you name it. We had Rhodesia, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, apartheid. And like you, we crawled out of decades of oppression and fighting ready to make love, not war.
But the promise of our peace was short-lived. When we should have been concentrating on rebuilding our fragile economies and shattered psyches, we instead turned back to struggle and in so doing helped ignite an already furiously burning epidemic. To give just one example: Fourteen armies and rebel factions from several African countries were involved in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000, and from 50 to 80 percent of the soldiers were infected with HIV. Armies, washing in and out of this and other conflicts, carried the virus en masse up and down the spine of the continent. Truckers, moving freely from the Cape of Good Hope to Congo, transported the virus too. So did migrant workers and
You had the pill, we should have had condoms.
So, instead of the renaissance we hoped and fought for, we were visited by a level of plague not seen since the 14th Century, and now we’re dying in medieval numbers. “Numbers”–apparently from the Northern Hemisphere phrase “to be numb.”
“How many times could this same story be broadcast?” writes ABC News senior correspondent Jim Wooten in “We Are All the Same,” his book about an African boy with AIDS. “My pessimism about Africa was inherent in my detachment and my disinterest in the AIDS catastrophe, in my determination to treat it as just another story, broadcast today, forgotten tomorrow.” As quickly as the AIDS crisis mutates and as wide as its mouth yawns, the West is stunned to boredom by the sight of yet more dying Africans.
But, “EXECUSE ME,” insists Kenyan writer Muthoni Garland in her terrific poem “POSTHIV POSITIVE”: “Would it bother you too much if I stood on/your patch/and let out oodles of feeling slithering like/shiny baby snakes/just hatched?” Hers is a direct shout to the north: We’re dying over here! Don’t look away!
But it’s hard not to look away. AIDS is not a polite or glamorous way to die (the crippled immune system allows diarrhea, herpes, TB, malaria, boils and mucus to take over the body). Moreover, because spiraling HIV/AIDS rates are associated with a lot of people engaging in a lot of risky sex, it is a disease that brings the pulpit and moralizing with it.
But frankly, we’re in it over our heads now, and anyone’s moral opinion about how we got here is irrelevant. What matters now is that there are about 30 million people infected with AIDS in Africa. By 2010, 21 million African children younger than 15 will have lost one or both parents to the disease. Many of these orphans are born with the virus already howling in their blood.
Xolani Nkosi Johnson was such a boy. From the moment he was conceived he was poisoned with HIV. He was so tiny in his mother’s womb that her friends teased:
“You sleep with a midget?
“Or some kind of alien?
“You got a pea in your pod?
“Girl, how do you do that?”
Twelve years later, Wooten writes, on June 1, 2001, “twenty years to the day since the first case of AIDS was officially recognized for what it was,” Nkosi’s adoptive mother leaned over his tiny dead body. ” ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘Go quietly, my darling boy.’ “
By the time he died, Nkosi weighed just 20 pounds (“Even through the long sleeves of his pajamas, the outline of his bones was visible,” Wooten writes), but he had done more in his short life to alert the world to HIV/AIDS than any other African (perhaps any other person) has yet done. ” ‘We must not forget that he was but a child,’ ” said Rev. Brian Oosthuizen at his funeral. ” ‘Yet, because of his disease, he was a man.’ “
Two-thousand people attended Nkosi’s funeral, The New York Times ran his obituary on its front page, and swarms of reporters descended on his home in an effort to capture the quality of his last days. Nkosi Johnson, with his irrepressible smile and inspiring courage, had given the anonymous horde of HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa not only a human face, but the face of an appealing child.
When Xolani Nkosi was 2, his biological mother dropped him at a home for HIV/AIDS victims in Johannesburg. When the home was closed because of lack of funds, the child was taken in by the woman who had started the home, Gail Johnson. The child, known only as Nkosi, became Nkosi Johnson. “It was not a legal adoption, simply an informal arrangement between two women who cared deeply for the boy.”
Johnson, a woman of already extraordinary courage, had met with a dying child who nonetheless ” ‘fought like a tiger,’ ” and between the two of them they fought tirelessly for the rights of HIV/AIDS victims in South Africa, and in so doing brought the disease to the attention of the world. From gaining the right to attend school, to a private audience with Mandela, to a speech at the 13th International Conference on AIDS held in South Africa in July 2000, Nkosi seemed almost tireless in his crusade to broadcast his message, “We are all the same.”
Wooten has pulled off something close to miraculous with Nkosi Johnson’s story. He has taken off the rubber gloves, torn away the plastic mask and touched the face of HIV/AIDS with compassion and humanity. Instead of mind-numbing statistics and arm’s-length reporting, Wooten gives us the very flesh-and-blood, ” ‘not an angel’ ” Nkosi; his young, dying, biological mother, Daphne Khumalo; his remarkable adoptive mother, Gail Johnson; and his best friend, Eric Nichols. The characters tumble off the pages of this remarkable, short book in full cry. Wooten has a gift of the quick draw, and we are quickly drawn into the story. Simply put, it’s difficult to look away.
This book, writes Wooten, “is about the relationship between a black child who never grew up and a white woman who never gave up. It has neither a happy ending nor even a promising beginning, for the child had no choice and no chance, and the woman knew all along what she was up against. Had they lived their lives separate from one another, they might have become more or less ordinary people. . . . Together, however, their impact was considerable.”
HIV/AIDS confounds our thinking about how to write about it. AIDS is an imperfect tragedy. There is no real villain and too few heroes. Instead, there is a cocktail of circumstances (an invisible killer, an impoverished people, silent politicians, seemingly endless wars) against whose power a continent climbing out from under years of disempowering governance has little defense. As Wooten makes beautifully clear, it was not Nkosi’s actions that led him to his personal tragedy, nor was it necessarily the actions of his young, biological mother that led her to hers. It was the machine set in place decades before either of them were born that brought them their fate.
HIV is thought to have originated in western central Africa in the 1920s or 1930s. It is likely that the disease, harbored without ill-effect in chimpanzees, crossed from apes to humans when someone with a cut on her hand contracted the disease while preparing chimpanzee meat for consumption. Fifty years later, the disease was identified, but, even as it caught fire across the continent, African leaders squeamish about sex and chronically disorganized were carelessly ill-prepared for the epidemic. Mandela, who came to power in South Africa in 1994 and who was heroic in almost every other respect, was strangely silent on the epidemic, admitting later that “because AIDS was primarily a sexually transmitted disease, he was embarrassed to speak of it in public.” Thabo Mbeki, who took over from Mandela, has been nothing short of criminal with regard to the disease. As Wooten tells it:
“[A]lmost from the moment of his inauguration in 1999, whatever else he may have done for the people of South Africa has been overshadowed by his peculiar public approach to AIDS. Simply put, what Mbeki said about the disease was that it was not caused by HIV. In fact, he insisted, over and over, that there was no such virus.”
Into this complicity of silence and embarrassment came Nkosi Johnson, who not only insisted on the all-too-urgent reality of the disease, but who brought us a way to look at the people who suffer from it and hear what they have to say in a new and poignant way. “Care for us and accept us,” Nkosi said at the 13th International Conference on AIDS. “We are all human beings. We are normal. We have hands. We have feet. We can walk, we can talk–and we have needs just like everyone else. Don’t be afraid of us. We are all the same.” Lifting drab details of African life to sometimes-poetic heights, Wooten gives us an Africa that anyone who knows the continent from the trenches up will recognize:
“[T]he boy was born . . . in a land that no longer existed, in a village with no name. It is still there, somewhere out in the bush of what was once Zululand. . . . More a squatters’ camp than a village, it nevertheless offers a shabby air of permanence, with at least a hundred or so Zulus residing in corrugated tin shacks and cardboard shanties, all either on their way to someplace else or with no other place to go.”
Pack your Kleenex and follow Nkosi out of this village. It’s not an easy journey, but it is a terribly important one.
