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Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 3
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He keeps a hard-backed ledger behind the counter, with the name of a client on the top of each page. The old people buy steadily on credit during the course of the month. On pension payday, each must settle his debt. Some customers drink far too much. They are old and tired and have lived difficult lives, and they come to Sizwe’s place to relax. They are not always counting their pennies, and so Sizwe counts for them. He knows each customer, the size of her income and her credit, the number of people her pension supports, whether there is food on her table. For each customer, Sizwe has a credit threshold in his head, a point beyond which he knows she will not be able to pay the debts that she owes him. He tries to pace his customers. He warns them a few days before they reach their limit. He talks them through a plan to stagger their buying. And then he refuses to sell to them.
It is an awkward task. Controlling an elder’s purse strings, as if he were a mere child, is a delicate matter. It is particularly delicate if you are young, have stylish dreadlocks, and are wealthier than most of the people who walk through your door. Among the most important tools in Sizwe’s repertoire are his mildness, his deference, and his timing: his intuition for extending an act of generosity at the most unexpected times.
His younger customers are more troubling and more difficult to manage, but that is another story.
THERE IS NO electricity here. The fridge in which Sizwe keeps his beer runs on gas. His hi-fi is in fact an old-fashioned car tape player attached to a large battery. He wants to buy another battery, a much larger one, large enough to run a television set. If he did so, his would be the only television in Ithanga. He would have to build a much larger spaza shop to accommodate his customers, he tells me, because everybody would come to watch television. Thus far it is just a thought, and he is reluctant to give it life. If everybody came here, if the young and the old of Ithanga were crammed into a single room, all drinking beer, he would, he believes, be courting disaster. The television set is a thought animated by great ambition. It would make him rich in a matter of months. But in sober moments, he fears he would be inviting catastrophe.
There is also no waterborne sewerage or running water in Ithanga. Fetching water from the river is a woman’s job. Sizwe’s sister, Lindiwe, does it once every three days. It takes her much of the morning to carry it from the valley basin to Sizwe’s hilltop perch; she fills a bucket holding over six gallons and balances it on her head.
Most important, from Sizwe’s perspective, is that there are no roads in Ithanga, just scarred and rutted paths that heavily laden four-by-fours negotiate in dry weather. Twice a week, he hires a pickup and is driven to the town center of Lusikisiki about twenty miles away. He goes to the massive wholesale stores on the main street, buys as many goods as can be piled into the back of the pickup, and is driven home. When the ground is hard and dry, the pickup ventures into Ithanga, crosses the river at its lowest point, and makes a slow and perilous journey up the hill to Sizwe’s shop. When the ground is wet, the pickup is offloaded at the end of the road on the outskirts of the village; a posse of schoolboys is waiting, and each of them carries Sizwe’s wares into the village on his back.
A few months after I met Sizwe it rained for more than a week without respite. The river grew deeper, the current menacing. By the third day, it was not possible to carry anything heavy across the torrent, not even on the backs of schoolboys. The stock on his shelves began to thin. His customers grew irritated. When walking through the village with Sizwe, both of us wearing shin-high Wellingtons and long, shapeless raincoats, his customers would stand in the doorways of their homes and reprimand him.
“Where are my candles?” a woman’s voice called through the rain. “Are you trying to humiliate me, making me eat my supper in the dark?”
Sizwe kept his head down. “For you, Granny,” he replied dryly, “I will swim to town and back.”
Sizwe and Jake
Sizwe is twenty-nine years old. He began growing his hair shortly after his twenty-first birthday. He is not, by my reckoning, a vain person: he is mild and contained—within himself. Yet he has invested a great deal in his dreadlocks and it is common cause that they are beautiful; they are his signature.
“Tell me about your hair,” I say. “Tell me a story which says something about what your hair means.”
I am driving us away from Ithanga; he is in the passenger seat of my car. He swipes a sideways glance at me and smiles cautiously. I am playing, and he likes to play, but the question is a little invasive: his hair is to be admired, not interrogated. He takes a moment to decide whether to partake in this game. He chooses not to. He chuckles and turns his head away from me and stares out the window into the forest.
He does answer me eventually, though; he does tell me something about the meaning of his hair. Not today, but a few weeks later. And not in response to this question, but to another.
We have been talking about HIV in Ithanga. I ask him whether somebody close to him has died of AIDS.
Again, we are driving, this time back to Ithanga. My voice recorder is on. He takes the microphone and holds it close to his mouth, hunches his shoulders, and grows very serious. He begins to tell me about Jake.
Jake and Sizwe grew up a few hundred yards from each other. They must have played together from their earliest times, yet Jake is strangely absent from the stories Sizwe tells about his boyhood. Jake only begins to appear in Sizwe’s stories of his late teens or early twenties, in the mid-1990s.
It was a lean, difficult time for Sizwe, the only time in his life when there were days he went hungry. At their mother’s insistence, he and his younger brother, Mfundo, had taken themselves off to school. But the effort they expended to stay there was truly Herculean. Buyisile, their father, was in the midst of his seemingly interminable training to become an igqira, a diviner-healer. Buyisile had no income. School was some twelve miles from home, and the family did not have money for public transportation. On Sundays, Sizwe and Mfundo would dig for sweet potatoes and potatoes and mealies (Indian corn) from their parents’ garden until they had filled a sack. They would wake at two o’clock Monday morning and begin the long walk through the forest to school, arriving at daylight.
During the week they lived together in a bare room close to their school on the property of some distant relatives. They would stay there until their mealies and potatoes and sweet potatoes ran out, and then they would walk home to collect more food.
It is into this life that Jake makes his entrance. He does not go to school, but he sometimes arrives outside Sizwe’s classroom unannounced. He is there waiting when the school day ends. Jake and Sizwe spend the afternoons and the early evenings hunting for girls. Jake arrives at school prepared; he has done sufficient reconnaissance to keep them busy the rest of the day and night. There is an athletics meeting at Palmerton, and the girls from Dubana will all be there. There is a girl in Malangeni who has invited them over.
Sizwe is not a man to boast of his sexual prowess, but he has agreed to tell me his story, and in the interests of testimony he tells me that he could not possibly count the number of girls he and Jake slept with during that time.
“You were not a shy boy,” I say.
“I am very shy,” he replies mildly. “I was always very shy. Especially with girls. If the teacher asked me to read in front of the class, I could not do it. If somebody asked my opinion in a room full of girls, I would want to run away.”
He is right. There are times I have watched him try to disappear, times he has closed his shoulders together and shrunk.
“But when it came to sex,” I say, “you were not shy.”
“It’s funny,” he says. “When you are young, things don’t make sense. I was making big sacrifices to go to school. I experienced big pain to stay in school. And I knew why. I knew from early on what it meant to be uneducated. But when I was at school, all I could think of was girls. I was no good at schoolwork. I was confused.”
It is 1995, perhaps 1996, and Jake hears so
me exciting and unexpected news. Ithanga is three miles from the ocean. On the sea cliffs there is a cluster of cottages where rich white people take their holidays. Among them is the wife of a senior executive at a gold mining company. Jake hears that she has arranged for a hundred people from the area to be employed at a mine up in Johannesburg.
It is a gesture filled with pathos. For four generations, the men of Pondoland worked in the gold mines. There is barely a man here over the age of forty who did not spend a considerable period of his life six hundred miles from home in the single-sex hostels on the Witwatersrand. But in the 1980s, the gold mines began to retrench. By the time democracy came to South Africa, the industry’s labor force was almost half the size it had been in its heyday. Few of Ithanga’s young men go to the mines now. Many find no work at all.
The woman at the holiday cottage is perhaps signaling her acknowledgment that a long history has ended badly. On her vacations, the sea is in front of her, the mud-brick huts of the black people behind her. They once lived off the wages paid by her husband’s company. Now young men spend listless afternoons sitting outside the spaza shops. They cover their eyes with cheap sunglasses and they drink one quart of beer after another.
“When Jake heard the news,” Sizwe tells me, “the first thing he did, he borrowed a bicycle, went to my parents’ house, and told them he wanted to fetch me so that I could register and go to the mines with him. There were people coming from all over the place to be registered. People were coming from as far as Port Saint Johns. The taxis from town were full. Not everyone was going to be employed. You would be lucky to be employed. My mom said no. She said Sizwe must stay in school. No matter we don’t have anything, he must stay in school.”
Her decisiveness is a story in itself. Hers is a home with barely two coins to rub together. At the mines, Sizwe would earn as much as two thousand rand per month, an income that would bring her family considerable relief. And yet, despite the fact that her grandfather, her father, and her husband chose migrant work over school when they were young, she has read the meaning of the changing times, and her son must stay in school.
Jake goes to the mines alone, and they do not hear from him for nine months. And then, out of the blue, Sizwe and his brother Mfundo arrive home at Ithanga from school one weekend, and he is there. He is smiling from ear to ear. He is very pleased with himself. He is clearly happy. They spend the weekend together, talking through Friday and Saturday night, and he tells them they must miss school on Monday. They must accompany him to town. They demur. They must go to school, they say. No, Jake replies. He is excited. He cannot contain himself. They must accompany him to town.
“So we went to town with him,” Sizwe recalls, “and Jake had money because he had been working for nine months, and he went from shop to shop buying things for me and Mfundo.”
“What sort of things did he buy you?” I ask.
“All sorts of things. Canned soup and potatoes. A tape recorder. A pair of trousers. Lots and lots of things. All these things were just gifts. He wanted nothing from us. He was working and we were very poor, and he wanted to share. I am so sorry that I did not repay him.”
The second time Jake comes home from the mines, he is sick. What started as severe lesions in his crotch has spread to his genitals; they are scarred and they itch incessantly. He has been to see a doctor at the mines. The doctor has prescribed medicine and it had worked for a while and then stopped working. Jake goes to see Buyisile, Sizwe’s father. He is a diviner-healer. His father and grandmother were also healers, and they specialized in sexually transmitted infections. Buyisile treats Jake. His medicine helps a little. The scar stops growing. But it does not go away, either.
“The next time he came home,” Sizwe recalls, “the scar had started to grow again. And that is how he died. It spread to cover his whole penis, and then his whole crotch. The skin from his penis was peeling off. And in his pubic area, where there should be hairs, there were no hairs. As a black person, he was dark like this.” Sizwe holds up his forearm for me to see. “But in his private parts,” he continues, pointing at my forearm, “he was white like that.”
I try to get Sizwe to mold a chronological narrative, a sequence of symptoms. He begins telling me of the time Jake spent in the hospital, but he has no enthusiasm for my question and soon loses interest in the story he is telling. He is not thinking of sequences. He is thinking of a single moment.
“How did you know it was AIDS?” I ask.
“The whole village thought his uncle had bewitched him,” he replies. “Jake had money and could be generous with people. His uncle had no money and could not be generous. He was jealous. And the rash in the crotch—it is a common means of witchcraft. The jealous one slips the muthi into Jake’s girlfriend’s food. The next time Jake has sex with her, he gets the poison. It is especially for him.
“One day, when Jake was very ill, he confided in me. He had gone to a doctor in Port Elizabeth who had taken his blood and told him that he had tested HIV-positive. But the way Jake put it to me was to say that the doctors do not know what is wrong: ‘they are saying I am HIV-positive.’ He was denying it even while he was saying it.”
“How did you respond to this?” I asked.
“He was in big pain. He was crying from the pain. All I could do was calm him. And during the times the pain went away, we would talk about other things, things to take him away from his pain.
“Then there was one time, I think it was a few months before he died, when he finally admitted what was wrong with him. But he did it in a very strange way, in a very sad way. I was sitting and he was lying and he started staring at my hair. There was a different pain in his eyes. Not from his body, but from his mind.
“He said to me, ‘You are a rasta. Look at your hair. You are a rasta.’
“I said, ‘Yes, I have dreadlocks.’
“‘You are a rasta,’ he said. ‘Nowadays, the times are bad. Your dreadlocks talk. They say you are looking for girls. They say you are beautiful and you want girls. This hair of yours is attracting girls because you are looking beautiful.’
“I understood what he was saying. He was in trouble. In his mind, his trouble was becoming my trouble. He was so angry. He was so upset. He was looking at me and crying. He was desperate to protect me. He pleaded with me to cut my hair.”
“He wanted you to be ugly?”
“He wanted me to be very ugly, to be so ugly that the girls would not want to look at me.”
“What did you think of what he said?”
“I felt sad for him. I knew from my side that whether I have beautiful hair or whether I have no hair, if I sleep with girls it is because I have chosen to. And if I don’t, it is because I have chosen not to.”
A HAPPIER MOMENT in my car. We are driving to or from Ithanga, I don’t remember which. This time, the mood is light. There is giggling and laughter. We are giving a lift to a young woman called Phumza. I am practicing my Xhosa on the two locals, particularly the words whose meanings have changed over time, the words that no longer mean what they did in the early-twentieth-century ethnographies I have been reading.
“If I call a middle-aged woman idikazi,” I say, “will I be insulting her?”
They shriek with laughter. “It will be a very big insult. You will be accusing her of stealing other women’s husbands. It is almost like you are saying she is a prostitute.”
There is silence for a while. Sizwe is happy. When he is happy, he is playful.
“Do you know the word isishumane?” he asks.
“No.”
“If I tell you I am isishumane,” he says, “do you know what I am saying about myself?”
Phumza giggles. “He is insulting himself,” she says. “He is saying he has no girlfriend, or maybe just one. He is saying he is too frightened to look for more girlfriends. It is as much an insult for a man to be isishumane as for a woman to be idikazi.”
“I am isishumane,” Sizwe says. “And I am very proud.�
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More than five years have passed since Jake died. Sizwe is about to marry. His lover is pregnant with his child. He sleeps with no one else. When Jake was dying he looked into Sizwe’s face and saw his own death transported into his friend’s body. Sizwe looked into Jake’s dying face and saw himself. For a moment in that room, the boundaries between the two men dissolved. Who lay on the bed and who stood up healthy and strong was merely a question of chance. It was an unusual moment, one that embodied an attitude to AIDS that Sizwe would struggle to re-create in time to come. For it is not an easy thing identifying with the dying and the dead. Among our deepest responses to them is an unacknowledged feeling of triumph.
“I did not cut my hair,” Sizwe tells me. “But I have been true to Jake. I have tried to cash in on my luck. I hope I am lucky. I hope there is no virus in me.”
It sounds clean and simple when he says it, but it is just the beginning of the story. Why he does not know whether the virus is in him is a large tale, a tale about so much.
Testing Day
Jake died in 2000. By the end of 2004, the people of Ithanga had, in whispers and behind closed doors, attributed five other deaths among their ranks to the virus.
“How did you recognize that these people had AIDS?” I asked Sizwe.
“The pimples on the body. The person getting thin. The diarrhea. There is always diarrhea but the stomach is never sore. It runs and it does not stop.”
Notably absent from this list are the symptoms of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cryptococcal meningitis, the most common causes of death among AIDS sufferers in these parts. Ithanga did not yet have sufficient knowledge of the epidemic to recognize it, for many of its symptoms were identical to illnesses the village had known for many generations to be the work of witchcraft. A person who contracted cryptococcal meningitis or suffered from AIDS dementia was said to have had a demon sent to him by an enemy. A person suffering from shingles—a common opportunistic infection triggered by immunodeficiency—was said to have had a witch’s snake crawl over her skin while she slept. It was only much later, when people with shingles went to the clinics and the nurses diagnosed their condition as an AIDS-related infection and treated them successfully, that the definition of AIDS in Ithanga began to expand.