I started this blog to highlight the work of Africans who are providing new or alternative perspectives about the continent. But I also started it to support the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s A Dare To Remember Campaign, which assists communities in Sub-Saharan Africa dealing with HIV/AIDS.
AIDS is not an “African” issue – it’s a global one. Nor is it the only health issue facing Africans. But HIV/AIDS is part of the picture for all too many people.
December 1 is World AIDS Day. So I’m going to write today's and tomorrow's posts about people who are dealing with the challenges of HIV and AIDS in their daily lives.
In yesterday’s post I referred to the value of listening to the stories of communities. Stories are important: they help us imagine ourselves in someone else’s place. Stories allow us to glimpse each other’s realities. That’s the first step in understanding not only how other people’s lives are different, but how they are similar to our own.
Here’s one story: that of Maria Mhlongo, a grandmother in South Africa.
Pius Adesanmi, a Nigerian writer and academic who has written about the idea of “Africa” (and who I'll feature in an upcoming post), commented to me that some things that we think of as “African” are on closer look, human qualities.
Some people reflect those shared qualities. I want to mention in particular the "Kilimanjaro Grannies." They are six Canadian grandmothers living in and around Ottawa who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2007 to raise money for HIV/AIDS. The climb was the idea of Gisele Lalonde Mansfield, who decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in memory of her brother Michel who died of AIDS in 1995. She heard two African grandmothers interviewed on Canada AM and contacted the Stephen Lewis Foundation to offer support.
Mansfield was joined on the adventure by Liza Badham, Trudy Stephen, Tina Cuerrier, Barbara Carriere and Janet Carrière. Together they’ve raised $84,000 for the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign. They’re also raising funds to build a camp in Eastern Ontario for people living with HIV and AIDS, and their families. The Kilimanjaro Grannies have written a book about their experience, called Kilimanjaro: A Purposeful Journey. More information is available at www.kiligrannies.com.
AIDS is a global issue, and caring and supporting are univeral traits.
One storyteller is Tsitsi Dangarembga. A novelist and filmmaker, she portrays the lives of people, family relationships and women’s situations in Zimbabwean society with candour and sharpness. Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988) and her films Neria (1993) and Everyone’s Child (1996) have blazed a trail in Zimbabwean literature and cinema.
I had the opportunity to see Everyone’s Child in Harare shortly after it was released. The film tells the difficult story of four children whose parents have died of AIDS, and underlines the value of community support.
Tsitsi Dangarembga continues to make films and her novel The Book of Not came out in 2006. She founded the International Images Film Festival for Women in Harare in 2002. In early 2010 Dangarembga was appointed portfolio Secretary for Education for the Movement for Democratic Change - Mutambara in Zimbabwe.
Statistics? Stories? I could tell you that the UN’s just-released figures on HIV/AIDS say that 22.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are living with HIV, including 2.3 million children under 15 years old. Or that although new infections are declining in many countries, 1.8 million people were newly infected last year, or that 1.3 million people in Africa died of AIDS in 2009.
Or, I could suggest that you listen to their stories.
The Stephen Lewis Foundation has information about the organisations it supports that are working to strengthen communities dealing with HIV/AIDS. (They can tell you the stories better than I can.)
One more story before I go. This one is a real-life story about how one community in Kenya is supporting its members coping with HIV/AIDS. (The video features Francis Muiruri, the Nyeri District Coordinator of the Kenya Network of Women with AIDS, and was written, filmed and edited by a Canadian, the multi-talented Jasmine Osiowy, and narrated by educator extraordinaire Rod Osiowy, for the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, Canada.)
"Art is political. Without art there are no free men."
Sembene Ousmane is considered the "father" of African cinema. His La Noire de… (Black Girl) released in 1966 is said to be the first feature film by a Sub-Saharan African director. His Mandabi (1968) was the first film made in a local language, Wolof, rather than in French in his home country, Senegal. He is credited with influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers with his film style and his portrayal of an African identity that asserts the dignity of people.
Sembene Ousmane wrote several novels and short stories before turning to film. His movies and books are renowned for their depictions of ordinary people, their social commentary and their challenge to authority – whether French colonial rule, traditional authority or post-independence government.
He worked as a fisherman, mechanic and bricklayer and served in the French army in World War II, and was also a dockworker and trade union activist. Many of his books draw from these experiences, like his Le docker noir (The Black Docker, 1956). At age 40 he began making films in order to reach more people.
Sembene Ousmane's pioneering work is remarkable, but also noteworthy is the fact that for a long time I hadn’t heard of it. Maybe it was because much of his work is in French and I grew up in an English-speaking environment, but it also raises questions for me. How is it that someone who reached out to and moved so many people, like the filmmakers who subsequently took up his challenge to make indigenous films, or the Kenyan I know and admire who named one of his children after Sembene Ousmane, is not a household name around the world? How is it that my wonderful local library with its over 2 million books and other materials appears to have only one of his works, his last film before his death in 2007, Moolaade?
The library did help me track down a copy of Sembene Ousmane’s 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood (Les bouts de bois de Dieu). It’s a fictionalised and vivid account of the strikes that took place on the Dakar-Niger railroad line in 1947-48, in which Sembene was involved. Sembene’s characters are complex and sensitively portrayed – the railway workers and their families as well as the railway bosses. The novel is striking also in that it has several significant characters, and dozens of additional characters -- men, women and children -- rather than a single main character. As his African Film Library biography states, "the novel has no true hero except the community itself, which bands together in the face of hardship and oppression to assert their rights." Reading God's Bits of Woods helps understand the enduring appeal of Sembene Ousmane.
A grandmother from Nyaka
Photo: Tinyan Outomagie
Courtesy Stephen Lewis Foundation
I was working on today’s post when I received an e-mail message from the Stephen Lewis Foundation – intended, I think, as moral support for those of us doing A Dare To Remember (which was the impetus for this blog – see "About A Dare to Discover" on the right).
The e-mail message contained a report from Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, the executive director of the Nyaka AIDS Orphan School in Uganda. Nyaka is one of the grassroots projects that the Stephen Lewis Foundation supports. It runs schools for children orphaned by AIDS and support groups for the grandmothers who look after the children.
Twesigye Jackson Kaguri writes:
"I just came back from meeting with the Grandmothers. One of the Gatherings had more than 7,000 grandmothers. I was overtaken by tears watching these women who have worked so hard but never had any breakthroughs in their lives. When they thanked Nyaka for helping them build their houses, I told them about the Foundation. The grannies then took us to see their new homes. It started raining while I was standing in one grass thatched house. A grandmother said to us, ‘Whenever it rains, I go to the toilet.’ It was the toilet that Nyaka had constructed for her. It was the only structure with an iron sheet roof, the only refuge from the rain for her and her grandchildren. I often hear from the grannies that their grandchildren sleep with their shoulders hunched over their school uniforms so they can protect their uniforms from getting dirty and wet from the rain coming in through holes in their roofs. As we come close to finish visiting their homes, we are reminded of those who are still in need. Our hope is to raise more funds so we can continue to build more needed houses for these lovely grannies. Thank you for your love, care, and support. The best is yet to come."
I did a bit more research and discovered that Nyaka has a website. Twesigye Kaguri also has an interesting story. He was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the U.S., with a promising career ahead of him, when he learned that his brother had died of HIV/AIDS. He returned to Uganda to look after his brother’s children, and then the child of his sister, who died the following year. He and his wife built a school for local AIDS orphans, then realised they also had to provide health care and other services for the community so that the children could stay in school. The Nyaka website quotes Kaguri putting a new twist on a familiar saying: "It takes children to raise a village."
I don’t know the Nyaka project, but I do know that HIV/AIDS is a heavy burden on people in the region. When I was working with a development organisation a few years ago that had projects in Uganda, I watched not one but two colleagues – both university department heads – become ill and pass away. I was at a loss as to how to help their families; but I know it has something to do with strengthening support systems in communities, and improving access to health and social services, not just for people who are ill but for their families and extended families as well.
The Stephen Lewis Foundation’s message to me ends by saying, "the money you raise has a concrete and long-lasting impact on the lives of grandmothers, women, and children orphaned by AIDS. Your money goes directly to these projects that resurrect life and restore hope. Now that is something courageous worth doing!"
I don’t feel too courageous except when I ask that you consider making a donation to the Foundation through my Dare page. Or look through some of the other dares and support someone whose dare appeals to you – or sign up for your own dare! Or at least come back and visit this site again. I’m grateful for any time you can spend here!
And the post I had been working on before I got the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s e-mail message? Well, let’s just say I have a head start on tomorrow’s post.
