AFRO-NETS> Newsweek: AIDS in Africa (2)

[Ron MacInnis <RMACINNIS@globalhealth.org>]

Newsweek: AIDS in Africa (2)
----------------------------

AIDS Ignores Racial and Geographic Boundaries. But African-Americans 
Can - And Should-Play a Role in Battling the Scourge.

By Ellis Cose

No one (at least no single human being) is to blame for the existence 
of a plague. Yet ultimately people must accept the task of dealing 
with its consequences. And when it comes to AIDS in Africa, the ques-
tion of black Americans' role, and black leadership's responsibility, 
becomes unavoidable. To what extent are the burdens of Africa also 
the burdens of African-Americans? Do American black elites have a 
particular duty to lead the battle for assistance to the AIDS-ravaged 
souls of the sub-Sahara? 

No one has been more outspoken than Eugene Rivers in arguing that 
they do. Indeed, the Boston-based minister and activist goes much 
further, accusing black American leaders of collectively turning 
their backs on those suffering in Africa. Prominent African-
Americans, as might be expected, are not greeting Rivers's words with 
a hale-and-hearty amen. They are more likely to argue that the fault 
lies not with them but elsewhere. 

Randall Robinson, head of TransAfrica, a Washington-based nonprofit 
that promotes African causes, agrees that not enough is being done to 
fight AIDS in Africa. But he blames the Congress and the Clinton ad-
ministration, not black American leadership. The U.S. government's 
stinginess with humanitarian aid, and its pressure on developing 
countries to adopt market-oriented policies, has made African nations 
focus more on debt repayment than on fighting AIDS, Robinson says. "I 
don't think black Democrats and black leaders generally have known 
what to do about it." 

Granted, black American groups don't have the wherewithal to solve 
Africa's problems. But they could have done much more to mobilize 
against AIDS, both internationally and domestically. One reason they 
haven't is that the full extent of the crisis in America-let alone in 
Africa-has only recently begun to sink in. Hershell Warren, director 
of Meharry Medical College's Elam Mental Health Center in Nashville, 
recalls that when the center started its AIDS outreach programs in 
the early '90s, "We had a lot of resistance, particularly in the 
faith-based community." Most black preachers wanted nothing to do 
with activities focusing on condoms, drug use and homosexuality in 
their communities. And such attitudes were hardly peculiar to Nash-
ville. 

Now, says Warren, black churches are clamoring to get involved. At a 
time when blacks account for 37 percent of diagnosed AIDS cases in 
the United States, denial is no longer an option-a point that high-
profile blacks are making with increasing frequency. Indeed, the past 
few months have seen an explosion of anti-AIDS activity. Last Nov. 
30, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher led a conference- beamed via 
satellite to several historically black colleges-devoted to the im-
pact of AIDS on minority communities. Shortly before that, the NAACP 
announced its own drive to raise awareness about the disease. Next 
week the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black 
think tank in Washington, will host a conference on "Mobilizing to 
Fight AIDS in the African American Community." And though African-
American voices have not dominated the international HIV debate, sev-
eral individuals, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to former congressman 
Ron Dellums (who has crusaded for an "AIDS Marshall Plan for Africa") 
have spoken out against apathy to the crisis in Africa. "Unless we 
are outraged ... at what is clearly the greatest holocaust in the 
last 100 years, no one else will be," observed NAACP president Kweisi 
Mfume. 

Still, Joint Center president Eddie Williams doesn't find it odd that 
black Americans focus more on the domestic threat than on the plague 
in Africa. Credibility, he suggests, begins at home. "I don't know 
how you place emphasis on a disease that is ravaging a continent when 
you don't place emphasis on one that is ravaging your own community. 
"Also, AIDS in Africa, by its very nature, is a much harder issue to 
rally around than, say, apartheid. Apartheid, after all, had an obvi-
ous villain and an equally obvious-albeit politically complicated-
solution. Nor is AIDS comparable to a natural disaster. In the after-
math of a devastating tornado or flood, the world finds it relatively 
easy to get engaged for the brief period of time necessary to help 
people pick up the pieces. AIDS is an unrelenting plague, with no 
single evil face to unite against and condemn. 

But it is no more a black problem than ethnic cleansing is a white 
problem. To define it as some sort of black issue is to misunderstand 
both the nature and the magnitude of what needs to be done. In India, 
some 4 million people are infected with AIDS. In Russia, the inci-
dence of HIV has doubled in the past two years. In the Caribbean and 
much of Latin America, AIDS numbers are rising to frightening levels. 
The problem of AIDS is global and multiracial. That said, Rivers has 
a point. America's black leadership does have an obligation to take 
on the issue of African AIDS if only because Africans have no other 
natural constituency in America; if only because the situation in Af-
rica is so dire; if only because black Americans know, from personal 
experience, what it means to be a people desperately in need of 
friends.

--
As the New Century Begins, AIDS Tightens its Medieval Death Grip on 
Africa. The Anatomy of an Epidemic-And its Rising Human Toll. 

By Jeffrey Bartholet

In 1991, a visitor to rural Uganda could peer through the portals of 
hell and glimpse the holocaust to come. It took a little work then. 
You had to hire a Jeep and drive from the capital of Kampala to the 
Rakai district in the south of the country, then the epicenter for a 
burgeoning AIDS epidemic. There you'd enter a world of private hor-
rors. A skeletal man with festering abscesses on his skin, hidden 
away in a shack only slightly larger than an outhouse that reeked of 
sickness. A spindly grandmother who had lost all of her four sons and 
four daughters-in-law to "slim disease" and was caring for 20 grand-
children in a house without electricity or running water. An HIV-
infected child, in the lap of his dying mother, antidiarrheal medi-
cine mixing with tears on a small face that had no power to grasp the 
scale of the tragedy building around and within him. 

The warnings were as clear as the terror in that 3-year-old's eyes. A 
UNICEF-sponsored study at the time predicted that in 10 hard-hit 
countries of sub-Saharan Africa, up to 5.5 million children under 15 
would lose their mothers to AIDS during the 1990s. Rakai, the experts 
warned, would become a perverse model for communities across Africa. 
Millions would perish in a plague of medieval proportions. 

Now that the decade is over, it seems the warnings were somewhat mis-
taken. A full-blown crisis is upon us, and it's worse than expected. 
The global death toll from AIDS was 2.6 million last year alone. 
Roughly 85 percent of those deaths occurred in Africa. Even as the 
corpses were buried, some 5.6 million more people-mostly African-
became infected with HIV during 1999. Although AIDS is viewed as a 
tragedy that people often bring on themselves, many of the victims of 
the pandemic have done nothing more harmful than enter the world. By 
the end of this year an astonishing 10.4 million African children un-
der 15 will have lost their mothers or both parents to AIDS ú 90 per-
cent of the global total of AIDS orphans.

In a continent already ravaged by wars and mired in poverty, AIDS is 
wiping out much of a generation. Families are being destroyed, 
skilled workers cut down. The disease began in Africa and spread, in 
part, because of social instability-via migrant workers, refugees and 
women who had few other means to support themselves than prostitu-
tion. Cultural factors also played a role: superstitions spread in 
some areas that the best cure for an HIV-infected man was to sleep 
with a virgin. 

Now the disease sows further instability that, in turn, ensures the 
kind of desperate conditions where AIDS flourishes. For the rest of 
the world, this may seem to be a purely humanitarian tragedy. But as 
AIDS wrecks Africa's already crippled political and social institu-
tions, instability on the continent may demand more intervention from 
the outside than medicines and educational programs. "The spread of 
this disease could not be contained in Africa, and the destruction of 
Africa from AIDS will not be limited to the continent," says U.N. Am-
bassador Richard Holbrooke. "If we don't work with the Africans them-
selves to address these problems ... we will have to deal with them 
later when they will get more dangerous and more expensive." 

Today we argue over past atrocities, hoping to draw lessons. Could 
Roosevelt or others have done more to save 6 million Jews from exter-
mination during World War II by absorbing European refugees or bomb-
ing the railways to Auschwitz? Yet we face a new holocaust now-of a 
very different character, yes, but on an even larger scale of human 
destruction. While, for example, life expectancy in the United States 
jumped by 30 years over the last century, in southern Africa, life 
expectancy at birth is projected to plunge. A recent U.N. report 
forecasts that expected life spans in the region will drop from 59 
years in the early 1990s to just 45 by 2010. Yet precious little is 
being done to stop the disease. That may be about to change. 

There is new urgency: this week, with the United States taking its 
turn to chair the United Nations Security Council, the first topic on 
the agenda is AIDS in Africa. Beyond putting the issue on the world's 
radar screen, new government money will be pledged to combat the dis-
ease. Bill Gates's philanthropic foundation has committed $28 mil-
lion-a small amount compared with the billions that experts say is 
needed, but a help to vaccine development and AIDS prevention. In re-
cent months The Boston Globe and Village Voice have published sear-
ing, multipart accounts of the tragedy. And in Boston, an outspoken 
preacher named Eugene Rivers is challenging American blacks to do 
more and speak out forcefully in this election year.

Why the upswell of interest after more than a decade of relative apa-
thy? First, dire warnings have become hard reality. It's axiomatic 
that predictions of humanitarian tragedy-like forecasts of famines-
rarely compel the world toward mass action. It's only when catastro-
phe hits that people get energized. 

Scenes on the ground in much of Africa these days are more graphic 
than any charts or tables could suggest: lines outside cemeteries as 
families wait to bury their dead; morgues that operate 24 hours a 
day, seven days a week. "The number of people who have gone into the 
coffin-making business-that is something you can see without being an 
epidemiologist," says Godfrey Sikipa, a program-development officer 
for Geneva-based UNAIDS, the lead U.N. agency dealing with the epi-
demic. 

Some prominent visitors to Africa have returned to the United States 
with an overwhelming sense of mission. Rivers's epiphany occurred in 
December 1998, when he was in Zimbabwe to lecture the World Council 
of Churches on youth outreach and crime prevention in the United 
States. A Roman Catholic activist named Michael Auret took Rivers 
aside during the meeting. "I am appealing to you as a Christian, in 
an appeal rooted in faith," Auret told Rivers. The message: alert 
Americans to the destruction of a continent. "The mandate was to 
plead the cause of the widow and the orphan," Rivers recalls, quoting 
the prophet Isaiah's exhortation to "defend the cause of the father-
less." 

Rivers-relentless and media-savvy-soon launched a minicrusade. He 
lobbied newspaper editors and approached black leaders in Washington 
and Boston about the crisis. To his surprise, many were unaware of 
its scope. Rivers believes that even some of those in the black elite 
who do grasp the situation may worry that highlighting AIDS in Africa 
reinforces negative stereotypes. "As I talked to folks around the 
country," Rivers says, "there was a sense that we can't handle an-
other story about blacks as basket cases." 

He and other activists later issued an open letter to U.S. black re-
ligious, intellectual and political leaders castigating them for do-
ing too little: "What verdict will our descendants render upon their 
ancestors who stood by silently as a generation of African children 
were reduced to a biological underclass by this sexual holocaust?" 
the letter asked. 

Ambassador Holbrooke had a revelation of his own during a visit to 
Africa last month. He had been well briefed on the African AIDS cri-
sis, but, Holbrooke says, "the trip gave it the reality of faces, 
lives, people lying there dying, orphans who had no place at night to 
go except on the street, people who were scared to death to be 
tested." He travelled with his wife, the journalist Kati Marton, who 
says both she and her husband "got religion" on the issue during 
meetings with AIDS sufferers. 

Shortly after Holbrooke returned, he put African AIDS at the top of 
his agenda for the Security Council session he'd chair in January-
despite the fact that the Council had never before dealt with a 
health issue. The ambassador also invited Vice President Al Gore to 
open the session - the highest-level politician ever to do so - and 
asked a host of other big names, including World Bank president James 
Wolfensohn, to help attract attention to the cause. 

NEWSWEEK has learned that the administration's new Africa aid pro-
posal was originally planned as part of Clinton's Jan. 27 State of 
the Union speech. But the president has made Gore's election a prior-
ity and is keenly aware of the veep's need for black and gay support. 
At Holbrooke's suggestion, Clinton decided that Gore should take up 
the issue himself at the United Nations "on the grounds it would get 
more attention," says a senior administration official. 

In this election year, political pressure has also been building on 
the U.S. government and pharmaceutical companies to ensure greater 
African access to AIDS treatments. Governments in the rich world have 
long supported the drug companies' claim that they have the exclusive 
right to license their drugs. But Clinton signaled a policy shift at 
the recent World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, announcing 
that the United States would now exercise "flexibility" on the issue. 

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, activists in South Africa plan to test 
Washington by importing pirated drugs from Thailand. 

SOURCE: Newsweek
With Michael Hirsh and Gregory Vistica in Washington, Tom Masland in 
Cape Town, Christopher Dickey in Paris, Rod Nordland in London, Clau-
dia Kalb and Gregory Beals in New York and Michael Cadman in Johan-
nesburg


--
Ron MacInnis, Director
Global Health Council 
Global AIDS Program 
1701 K Street, NW Suite 600 
Washington, DC 20006 ,USA
Tel: +1-202-833-5900 
Fax: +1-202-833-0075 
mailto:RMACINNIS@globalhealth.org
http://www.globalhealth.org


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