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

  “But either way,” I said, “something was in your house last night and came into your sleep.”

  “Yes. Whether a demon with poison or my people to tell me something, I don’t know.”

  “Who might be trying to poison you?” I asked.

  Sizwe looked at me blankly.

  “I think it’s time to go back and join the others,” Mfundo said.

  THREE DAYS LATER, I arrived in Ithanga to the news that the second twin had died.

  “What happened?” I asked Sizwe. “Was there no one with a car to take the child to the hospital?”

  “No, that was not the problem,” he replied. “It happened too quickly. The child was healthy and happy when she went to sleep. She woke up in the night very sick. By the morning she was dead.”

  “Did you dream?” I ask.

  “Yes, I dreamt.”

  He did not say whether it was about raw meat or one of the signs of death. I did not ask.

  When I next saw Hermann Reuter, I described the death of the twins to him in all the detail available to me. This was, I imagined, a favorite subject of his: infant death in a village far from medical care.

  “From what I have said,” I asked, “do you have any sense of why they died?”

  He shrugged elaborately. “Who knows? It was God’s will.”

  SOME WEEKS LATER, on a Saturday morning, I walked into a crowded restaurant on Lusikisiki’s main street. It is a place where villagers like Sizwe eat their lunch when they are to spend a whole day in town. The patrons assemble at the counter in long lines, choose a piece of raw meat in the glass window under the counter, and then watch it being grilled in front of them. Looking into the sea of faces around the tables I caught Sizwe’s eye. We greeted one another silently across the noise. I was surprised to see him; we had arranged to meet in Ithanga in the early afternoon. He made some space on the bench next to him and signaled for me to come.

  Seated on his other side was a young woman. She held a tightly bundled infant in her arms. She was a cousin, Sizwe told me. She was passing through, and had spent the night at his place before moving on. After she put him down, her child had fallen ill; he cried without pause until after dawn, dozed briefly, and then awoke crying again. The moment the first taxis of the day began leaving Ithanga, Sizwe brought his two visitors to town to see a doctor. The child had received an injection and some tablets, he told me. They had decided to take a meal before leaving town.

  I offered to give them a lift home. Sizwe went to do some shopping. I took the mother and child to my car to wait for him.

  Sizwe had been consulting a general practitioner in town for several years. I presumed that is where he had taken his visitors. I asked the young mother what the doctor had said.

  “He is not one of your doctors,” she replied. “He is an inyanga.”

  “Do you visit Western doctors?” I asked.

  “Yes, often.”

  “Why not this time? What makes you consult a Western doctor one day and an inyanga the next?”

  She laughed evasively and said nothing.

  We watched the child together. He started drifting off to sleep and then jolted awake.

  “Look,” the child’s mother said to me. “He is so sensitive.”

  “To what?”

  “To evil spirits. He is responding to something we can’t see.”

  We watched the child. I wanted to ask more questions but felt inhibited by her guardedness.

  “He has been sleeping well for two months,” she finally said, unsolicited. “Why was he sick last night? The problem is the demons lingering around Sizwe’s place.”

  “Why does his place attract demons?”

  “Because there are so many people there all day drinking. They come in and out, lots of people. They go home and sometimes their demons stay behind to make mischief.”

  By now, Sizwe had joined us. He was listening silently and attentively.

  I turned to him. “Why would people who are angry with you set their demons on your visitors?” I asked.

  “As my cousin says,” he replied cautiously, “demons are mischievous. They have minds of their own. The humans they are attached to go home after drinking, but they themselves linger, just so that they can make some trouble. They often attack my visitors. Last month, my nephew was staying with me and he woke one morning with a razor blade cut above his knee.”

  “You have not made the long trip to East London for a while,” I said, “to get more muthi to protect your place.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I have been lazy. The other night, two men fought in my place. That is unusual. Usually it is the women customers who fight. It means it is time for more muthi.”

  “What caused the two men to fight?” I asked.

  “Maybe my enemies. Maybe someone sent their demons into these two men, and the demons made them want to come to my place to fight. Maybe my enemy was hoping I would be hurt or killed trying to stop the fight.”

  “How does your muthi stop them fighting?” I asked.

  “It makes them forget. The men come into my shop and they forget that they came to fight. And even after they have left, they never remember that they came to fight. It is foreign muthi from another place. The demons do not see it coming.”

  He stared at the child.

  “Babies are so sensitive. If he looks you in the eye now, tonight he will dream of the things you experienced this morning. If you murdered someone this morning, he will experience it in his dreams later. He will wake up screaming, and we will not be able to make him quiet.”

  AS I DRIFTED off to sleep that night, my thoughts wandered to Sizwe wandering into his own sleep. The idea that falling away from consciousness opens one’s body to a medley of visitations unsettled me. I saw a host of souls drift in and out of him through the course of the night.

  And then I recalled that some of his visitations were benign, some joyous.

  One morning some time after we met, I came to his house early to find him in an ebullient mood. His steps were uncharacteristically light as he moved about his kitchen, his demeanor quietly boisterous. He began to tease me at the slightest provocation.

  Over coffee, he told me that Jake had come to him the previous night.

  “In my dream, I was sitting in Jake’s house,” he recounted, “and he walked in. He had come from fishing. He was holding mussels and crayfish and three musselcrackers. His brother was sitting with us. Jake handed him some bait and his brother went fishing.

  “He sat down. He spoke. He was very happy. He was smiling and laughing. I was so pleased. He used to visit me before in my sleep, shortly after he died, and he was very sick then, and miserable. Now he was healthy and happy.

  “A woman walked into the room, someone from his family. She said to Jake: ‘There are always fish when you come from Johannesburg. When you are in Jozi, there are no fish.’

  “At the end of the dream, I noticed that there was a fifteen-kilogram bag of King Korn lying on the table. King Korn is used to make umqombothi. Jake loved umqombothi. I saw this to mean that Jake wants a ritual of beer made for him.”

  That afternoon, Sizwe paid a visit to Jake’s home and told the family about his dream. Yes, they said. He has come to three different people’s dreams in the last month. He is asking for stones and a cross over his grave. His grave is unmarked.

  “We don’t have money for a gravestone,” they told Sizwe. “But beer, yes; we will make beer for him.”

  WE HAD KNOWN each other some three months when Sizwe finally told the overarching story of the place of illness in his life. Until now we had been nibbling around the edges.

  We were alone in his bedroom. He closed the door, shutting out both the sun and the ears of eavesdroppers, and told me his tale in the dim light.

  Some four or five years back, when Sizwe and his brother were forced to abandon their studies for want of money, Sizwe went out in search of work. The first job he found was temporary, poorly paid, and unpleasant.
On a farm some six miles from Ithanga a long-abandoned compound of old metal and wooden structures was to be revived and converted into a chicken coop. Sizwe and about a dozen others were employed to do the work.

  After six weeks of daily labor, the men lined up in front of a wooden table and were given a paltry six hundred rand each.

  The following day, the proceeds of his first job in his pocket, Sizwe took his parents to town and into the consulting room of the most famous and respected igqira in Lusikisiki. He told the illustrious man that he had been suffering from a burning sensation in his stomach for more than a year, that each night before the burning recurred, something came into his sleep and fed him raw meat.

  The igqira asked several sparse questions and then began talking of two figures. One was a man and was short, the other a woman who was tall. They stood at the opposite bank of a river, watching the Magadla family. Immediately, all three Magadlas knew precisely of whom he spoke, a couple with whom the family had a long-standing feud, one that began long before Sizwe’s birth.

  “He could not have known,” Sizwe told me. “He had never been to Ithanga. We had told him nothing about ourselves. And yet we recognized straightaway who he was speaking about.”

  Sizwe has instructed me to write no more about the identities of these two figures, or the source of the conflict between them and his parents. Suffice it to say that this episode with the igqira is the point to which all of his talk of spirits and illness was leading, the episode he could not possibly omit if he were to tell me the story of his life. The revelations that issued from the igqira are omnipresent; they insinuate themselves into the very trajectory of his and his family’s life, explaining why they have become the people they are.

  On the day he took his parents to see the sage, Sizwe was a young man from a poor family living through its poorest hour. That he spent his first wages on this expedition suggests that the igqira’s words were prefigured, that the sequence of explanations Sizwe was to thread together afterward had been taking shape inside him for a long time.

  In the wake of the visit to the sage, a sweeping narrative came together, no less potent for the fact that nobody would ever be sure whether it was true. The Magadla family has its fair share of chronic illness. Aside from Sizwe’s recurring stomach problem, he has a sibling who suffers from epilepsy, a source of embarrassment to the family and an illness that it has kept a secret. It is common cause that attacks of epilepsy are triggered by a demon who launches a frenzied attack on its victim from within her own body.

  “The demon lives inside you quietly for a long time,” Sizwe told me. “Then one day you watch a bird fly past you, and when your neck is turned it gets stuck there, and that is when you fall and begin to shake and foam at the mouth. But what happens with my sibling is not quite the same. In this illness, the sufferers know they are going to be sick and they ask you to hold them. You hold them until their hand starts to shake and you keep holding them until they stop.”

  Sizwe’s younger brother, Mfundo, also has an indefinable nervous disorder. There are times when he wakes in the morning and his right side is numb. He does not know the cause of it.

  “It could be from when Sizwe and I were at school,” he told me. “Our lives were so tough then. Maybe it is damage that is coming to the surface now.”

  But then again, Sizwe told me later, the problem began when circumstances brought Mfundo into daily contact with one of the two figures whom the igqira described standing across the river.

  It is not just somatic illness. One of Sizwe’s sisters is a wanderer. She comes back to Ithanga for a few weeks at a time, then vanishes without saying good-bye, and is not seen or heard of for months. Someone recalled an incident from her childhood. She was preparing to cross a bloated river and took off her clothes; she was being escorted by one of the two figures the sage spoke of. The figure picked up her panties and refused to give them back. The girl came home half-naked and crying.

  What was done with her panties? Where are they now? What is the connection between that incident from long ago and her habit of wandering now?

  Most important of all is Buyisile. Who kept coming to him in his sleep and calling him to the life of an igqira? Was it indeed his dead grandfather, or was it a spirit disguised as an ancestor? Had the old man been coaxed down a false path that would lead his family to penury? And what of his drifting? His flights from familial responsibility?

  As I listened to Sizwe’s story, I was struck for the first time by the full weight of what it means to live in a magical world: magical in the strict and narrow sense of a world in which the gap between ill wishes and the means to fulfill them closes. Those who wish to ruin you can do so by little more than wanting it. The trajectory of a family’s path through the world, and all the psychological complexity contained within it, can be traced to the envy of others. Buyisile squandering his family’s assets, Sizwe and Umfundo’s abandonment of school, the chronic illnesses that visit family members: the psychological and the somatic are pulled into one line with a common etiology, an etiology that begins with rottenness within families and among neighbors.

  “COULD THANDEKA’S HIV have come from the same source?” I asked Sizwe. “From the people across the river?”

  “No,” he replied. “She got that from sex, probably with her current boyfriend. His previous girlfriend got sick. I think he got it from her and gave it to my niece. Maybe she even got it from earlier. When she left school she went to Durban for a year. We do not know what she was doing there.”

  He said these things flatly and conclusively, as if there were no more to discuss. But for me it was the very beginning of the story. If witchcraft can explain Buyisile’s life choices, the pain in Sizwe’s stomach, his sister’s propensity to wander, and the numbness in Mfundo’s side, why not AIDS?

  “When we first met,” I said, “you told me of your fear that your enemies had sent their demons to have sex with you while you are sleeping. You—”

  “I remember. Sometimes one is not sure. Sometimes, you find yourself wondering about certain things. But I think there is only one way to get HIV.”

  It is not just Sizwe. I have been confronted by the same response in conversations with at least half a dozen young people in Lusikisiki. We are in the thick of a conversation about illnesses caused by witchcraft. The subject turns to AIDS. My interlocutor declares, by the force of simple fiat, that “there is only one way to get HIV.” The discussion can go no further; it is a declaration, and a brittle one at that. A rickety fence is erected around HIV protecting it from witchcraft.

  Why? I am not sure. By the time I arrived here, even a place as remote as Ithanga had been saturated by AIDS messaging—on the radio, on billboards, in the town center, on the tongues of people coming from the cities. No other illness has ever been the subject of such sustained publicity. The message that it is sexually transmitted is ubiquitous, universally known, reducible to stock phrases. Perhaps this universal knowledge is used as a shroud to smother, but never to quell, doubt. It stops conversations, but not thoughts.

  There is another possibility. The idea that an epidemic of envy is killing the young and the healthy in large numbers is perhaps intolerable. Maybe people separate AIDS from witchcraft in order to protect themselves from the idea that neighbors and family are murdering one another in droves. In the course of this research, I read of a village in Mpumalanga province, more than six hundred miles north of here, where people are no longer prepared to leave their children with neighbors or accept food that was cooked behind closed doors. Perhaps here in Lusikisiki, people are protecting themselves from such a fate. For if AIDS is indeed an epidemic of neighborly hostility, the villages have descended into little more than a state of nature, one in which each soul lives in a cocoon of mutual suspicion. Perhaps it is a need to preserve a modicum of solidarity that pushes AIDS away from witchcraft.

  If the fence around AIDS has indeed been erected to keep it from the corrosiveness of witchcraft, i
t is not a stable fence. I was to watch soon with my own eyes how a shock suffered unexpectedly by a whole village can tear down the fence between witchcraft and AIDS during the course of a single morning.

  IF THE INSISTENCE that AIDS is caused by sex rather than witchcraft is born from an attempt to drain the epidemic of social toxicity, it is not at all clear that the attempt succeeds. What are the demons that people speak of: the ones that come to Sizwe in his sleep, feeding him chicken and sex; the ones that made his little nephew sick during the night?

  The most commonly spoken of demon in these parts is the tikoloshe. He is no more than a foot tall, has an old man’s face and a beard to his chest, and a penis so long he carries it over his shoulder. (He can, some say, turn himself into a woman in order to seduce a man.) He is visible to children and to the adults he sleeps with. His favorite habit is to befriend children. Some Ithanga adults have told me that tikoloshe lived in their homes when they were young, invisible to their parents. They were pests, like monkeys, impish and naughty, forever knocking things over and stealing food.

  A tikoloshe becomes dangerous when his child friends grow up and he proposes love to one of them. In combination with a human sexual partner he is a killer. He murders those his lover envies, and if she envies nobody, he demands that she present him a person to kill. He needs human blood; he is insatiable. The human being who makes a lover of him has entered a deadly pact; she must become a murderer.

  The second most common demon is the impundulu, or lightning bird. He appears to his human lover as a beautiful young man. In Buyisile’s time, he always arrived in Western dress, as if he had just disembarked from the Johannesburg train. He seduces women when they are out alone, collecting firewood or water.