Ophelia’s Journey: A Voyage Through The Hinterland Of HIV And AIDS.

Several weeks ago, my sister lent me a book, a signed first edition a friend gave her. The friend Rose is a Zambian, and the book is an autobiographical tale of her younger sister, Ophelia, who lives in Sweden and is HIV-positive. Ophelia wrote the book with the help of Swedish journalist Agneta Larsson. Since I always have so much to read, it was inevitable that I would pick up the book on a whim - something I did a couple of days ago. In a few hours, I devoured the 250-page book - it is a straightforward, engaging, if not exactly palatable, story. There is so much death and dying in the book, but there is a certain felicity and humaneness of tone about the writing that the momentum of reading it never slackens.

Ophelia arrives in Sweden in the early 1990s. She is several weeks gone, impregnated in Zambia by a young man called Mark, who left her for the young woman he was double-dating with Ophelia. Mark is a player; besides these two girls, he also sows his oats as promiscuously as possible. Ophelia discovers that Mark has infected her with HIV, and she is distraught and disconsolate. The story fans out from this revelation. In the beginning, instances of the all-too-human weakness which may have led her to contract the virus are revealed. Apart from Ophelia’s inability to be angry with Mark - she even met up with him again during a visit to Zambia - she also displays self-regarding (not in JS Mill’s sense) and a dangerous lapse of courage when she meets a young dreadlocked DJ, Stefan, after she has been diagnosed as a carrier of HIV. She and Stefan fall in love and move in together, and for months, Ophelia does not admit to the young man that she is HIV positive. She tells him at last, but luckily, the test reveals that the guy is negative, and they go ahead to have an HIV-free child together.

Although she cannot tell some of her nearest and dearest for years, Ophelia gradually begins to accept her condition, and finally, she becomes a tireless HIV/AIDS campaigner. She works with an NGO called Noaks Ark (Noah’s Ark). Apart from her relationship with Stefan, the book has many personal stories. Her deathless love for the man who infected her with HIV. Her experiences as an HIV-positive (black) person in Sweden. The overt and demure prejudices against carriers of the virus, despite Sweden’s sheen of ultraliberalism and renowned pedigree of progress. There are also the psychosomatic side-effects of the antiretroviral drugs, mood swings verging on out-and-out folie, physiological derangement, and how these affect her relationships. She writes about how she, in depressive doldrums, opens the door of the car her Swedish husband is driving at full speed and threatens to ease herself out - with her two children in the car.

Whatever one may have known about HIV/AIDS, it still boggles the mind to read the passages that treat how the malady called AIDS devastates lives in the part of Africa where Ophelia comes from and beyond. Almost half of Ophelia’s kin carry the virus. It kills a sister-in-law, a big brother, a father, several cousins, friends, and acquaintances. Despite broader administration of antiretrovirals, almost 100,000 Zambians died of AIDS in 2005. Today, nearly a million Zambian children have been orphaned by the disease.

The relative prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has always been a vexed, even ticklish, question. How does one, anyone, write about the virus and the disease without bringing up the ‘S’ word: Sex. The alibi of poverty was once used, but as Ophelia and Agnetta point out in the book, the freedom that comes with comfort and wealth often leads to casual risk-taking in Africa. Here is a quote: “In ‘A study of the association of HIV infection and wealth in sub-Saharan Africa,’ (2005) Vinod Mishra... demonstrates a connection between HIV and high-income, well-educated city-dwellers. This group travels widely, and ‘risk behaviour’ is common, particularly among men in extramarital relationships with multiple partners or acting as sugar daddies to young girls.’

This is true not only in southern African countries like Zambia. In West African countries like Nigeria and Ghana, upward- or turbo-charged mobility often translates into unguarded self-indulgence, if not whitewashed demi-debauchery. For instance, even if stories about men living in the diaspora coming over restive and frisky when they visit their ‘home’ countries are exaggerated, there is no doubt that a certain amount of thoughtless indiscretions happens. I can also write, without naming what journalists would call ‘sources,’ that a few of those deeply taken with this kind of cross-continental amatory ‘networking’ has come a cropper in the way of being infected with HIV.

Naturally, Ophelia’s Journey is sympathetic to all those who suffer from HIV/AIDS, but there is something about the naiveté and helplessness of the African women in the book which makes them stand in contrast to the men. The Lothario who gave Ophelia HIV continues to play around; Ophelia’s father only shrugs off the fact that he is positive; an HIV-positive man rapes a young early-teen girl he gave a lift, entrusted to him by her mother who is kept in the hospital because her HIV has become full-blown AIDS. In parts, the book reads like a kind of post-Eden dystopia, a cursed world in which God piles it on with: ‘Go and be fatally mortified with your flesh.’

In retrospect, I think it was a good thing that I read Ophelia’s Journey. Written in 2007, the book puts into perspective the causes, effects, and moral and physical costs of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Being a personal story, the life of someone I do know by a triangular connection, my mind cannot help itself returning to the story over and over again and asking questions which the book goes a bit far in answering.

At the very least, it is clear that a lax sexual lifestyle has a lot to do with the spread of the disease, just as poverty and rank carelessness. This is not to imply that African men are particularly or morbidly priapic or that the women are any more or less carnal than women elsewhere. The problem is that of attitude and style. For instance, if you refused to put the buffer of condoms between you and your multiple partners and knew full well that there was the risk of contracting HIV, then you should not be surprised if you found you were positive. And though women have to struggle against the odds in the presence of a man who may want to pay any price to raise the stakes for ‘raw’ sex, it behoves women, too, to exercise more responsibility and a sense of self-worth - that is for those who can, because the day has not yet come that I would preach to anyone about how they want to live their lives.  

Someone like Ophelia learned her lesson in a hard and costly way. However, aside from having the courage to publish her story, Ophelia is also doing an excellent job raising awareness about the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa. She has even spoken on the same occasion as Bill Clinton, Richard Branson and Jamie Foxx, and she met the late President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, who lost a son to AIDS in the 1980s (something she was proud of).

There is a woman in the book who impresses me a lot. Emma, Ophelia’s mum. The matriarch subtly bestrides the story with her foursquare presence, strength of character, authority, self-confidence and generosity. She mothered twelve children, and when her heavily philandering husband died, she became stronger still; she began to take AIDS orphans into her home in the village, feeding and caring for them. There is the story of how the sixtyish Emma and the younger wife her husband brought in 20 years after they married were being prepared to be ritually ‘cleansed’ of their husband’s spirit by one of the dead man’s nephews. Emma set her face against this leviratical practice, which would have finally seen her being ‘inherited’ by a far younger relative of her husband’s. She came up with the ruse that she - and the second wife - was HIV-positive (she was not) and that if anyone slept with her, he would be infected. Thus, the wise old lioness was able to tame the ardour of the young cub who wanted to overreach in the name of tradition and who could just as well be a conduit for any kind of disease (Oh, I remember Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel, although now it is Lioness and the Idiot).    

It was worthwhile reading Ophelia’s Journey, and for anyone who wants to better understand the problem of HIV and AIDS in Africa, this book will be useful. But when I tried to buy a copy of the book on Amazon (UK), I drew a blank and realised that if you googled the title, the book would not exactly jump out at you. Ophelia’s sister explained to my own sister that the book may not have widely circulated because it was not published to be sold - it was meant to be given away as a salutary awareness-raiser, especially during Ophelia’s lecture circuit.

Ophelia’s Journey is a testament to the fact that an unexamined life would willy-nilly become unworthy to the person who lived it. For her part, telling her story, educating people about HIV/AIDS, and helping and offering support to those who suffer from the disease is one way in which Ophelia is following the Socratic maxim that I salted up above, which is why she lives and finds life worth living. Writing about the book is a labour of love, but considering its distribution's contingent nature, you may or may not actually get to read it.

                                                                                           

      

Why President Obama Cannot Be Like Dr Martin Luther King.

I found myself reading two books about Martin Luther King just about the time of the commemoration of his birthday in January. Hampton Sides’ Hellhound on his Trail is a wow of a book. James Earl Ray, King’s killer, is the hellhound and Dr King is the prey, the target, the quarry. Sides is a pretty good writer, his delivery is an exemplar of tonal congeniality. With a kind of soft hand that has a firm sure grip, he saunters along with the reader as he trails both Dr King and his louche hunter. In a way more gripping and portentous, Sides keeps Ray close to his crime-writerlike field of vision from the time the somewhat simple-minded, if devious, man gets it into his bemused and prejudiced head to murder the Civil Rights leader, through when he shoots him on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel, to when he is captured in London, England. From the story I read, with the insights Sides provides, I wonder why some of Dr Kings relatives still refuse to believe that it was Ray who killed the great man.

I think it was Hellhound which made me wander back to Dr Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. I read the voluminous book many years ago. I own a copy of the autobiography and for some reason I had returned to the chapter which Abernathy devoted to his friend and leader of the movement, Dr Martin Luther King. Abernathy was King’s deputy and alter-ego, so if anyone was going to write truthfully about the assassinated leader it would be Abernathy. But then again, just as I felt the first time I read the book, I failed to see why Abernathy was demonised and damned - even by some of those who did not read the book. As it has been repeated by those who may have approached the book as dispassionately as I have done, what Abernathy did was to tell us that just like JF Kennedy, Dr King was very much human, a human being whose frailties did not stand in the way of his strengths, his single-mindedness and his lofty and rangy pursuit of Truth.

Okay, there are some exposition of how Dr King, more than any of his companions, succumbed to certain human needs, but these vicarious confessions are not untrue – and they are very much empathetic, it is not as if Abernathy set out to gain one up on the late Dr King or to appropriate moral mileage. What Abernathy wrote is by no means a salacious and vicious exposé of whatever relationship Dr King had with women, after all the dossier that J Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept (and still keeps) about King is far more damaging, and indeed deleterious to his reputation, than anything that Abernathy recalled. Anyone interested in knowing more about Dr King and the extraordinary life he lived should add Hellhound On His Trail and And The Walls Came Tumbling Down to her list of sources. However I did not intend to write a review of the books, I only mentioned them above as an intro to what I really wanted to write about.

Recently, something caught my eye while on the net. It was a story - a retrospective sidestory as a matter of fact - of how some of the people (African Americans, mainly) who went to the unveiling of King’ majestic granite-hewn image in Washington DC started to chant ‘Be Like Him’ to President Obama when they saw him arrive with his family. I had to reread the story to ascertain whether I had read it correctly.        

In spite of the slight ambiguity, it was obvious that the warcry of ‘Be Like Him’ was directed at President Obama, and the gist is simple: Obama should ‘be like’ Dr King, although the yodellers neglected to elaborate on how the President should be like the Civil Rights leader. So my interest was piqued, and not just because I am of the same colour and geohistorical ethnicity as both men but also that I am partial to moral philosophy and its uncertainties.

I found this rallying cry of ‘Be Like Him’ curious. All right, Martin Luther King was a great man, a hero, an icon, worthy of whatever secular (even spiritual) beatification bestowed on him, but like John F Kennedy he was flawed in more ways than one. And we must not forget that history has treated MLK kindly. Just as Hoover and his FBI minions never succeeded in their effort to smear and destroy King’s reputation when he was flourishing as a Civil Rights leader, generally historians and biographers have handled MLK with kid gloves. In Hellhound, Hampton Sides clarifies what happened the night before Dr King was shot, he writes that King only slept with one of his many mistresses and not two - and certainly there were no prostitutes -  and he did not beat any third woman up as that imaginative canard has it. Having said that, even though MLK might not be a saint (and I don’t think he ever strived to be one), he was a man full of energy, a brave soul, and again, a great man - he was unique in his own way.

There is a lot to be said for ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ but those who were hollering at Obama to be like King under the Sphinx-like image of the latter may have taken it too far. The likelihood is that in the early 21^st century world, if Obama had been like King - beyond oratory, fortitude and zeal - he would not have become the president of the United States, there would have been no sweeping under the carpet the evidence-backed dirt that would have been dredged up, and I don’t think it would have been easy for him to wriggle out of the ordure the way Newt Gingrich seemed to have done when a former wife accused him of suggesting to her the alternative of an open marriage, he would not have been allowed to get into the White House and try to out-Clinton Clinton, he would have become another fallen-man of American politics, a 21^st century Gary Hart.     

More than all, Barack Obama is of a completely different temperament from Martin Luther King. While Obama is calm almost to the point of being seen as somewhat phlegmatic, King was a dapper ambivert, a man who could easily navigate his way from being a mere detached observer to the soul of a party - that is why he now symbolises the Everyman of the old morality tales and a moral force for good. And there is the matter of selfhood, of personality - why must anyone be like another? The trouble with the ‘Be Like Him’ mantra is the high-pitched overtones of the substitution of emulation for mimicry, of the subordination of wisdom to wishful thinking. Personality is not a moveable feast which allows one to be Mr Obama today and, after drinking some magic potion overnight, become Dr King tomorrow. For all his faults, even flaws, I think Obama should be allowed to be himself. He is no Martin Luther King; he cannot be Martin Luther King - in the same way that King could never have been Malcolm X or Malcolm X King.        

Swedenborg And The Future of Africa

A few weeks after I wrote an article entitled God is an African in the Gambian Observer twelve years ago, I was frankly not surprised that around the time I was writing the piece, a picture had just been released back home in Lagos, Nigeria, and was named God is African. Even before I left home the Lagos film mill had begun to trot out dozens of ‘home videos’ a month - now it’s dozens a day - and I was not surprised that someone had also come up with anthropomorphic ‘God is African.’

Like films, evangelical churches had been growing exponentially before I left home more than a decade ago. Next door to the house I lived in Lagos there was a jerry-built Pentecostal church whose megaphonic service I willy-nilly followed for the better part of four hours every Sunday morning and on most weeknights. It was always as if the whole thing was taking place in my room, and of course there was nothing I could do to stem the outflow of the church’s thunderous nervy liturgy. And since I could not baffle this with any sort of noise or busyness, I had to eavesdrop on sermons, preaching, and prayers, even at the cost of being diverted from more earthly, and invariably worthwhile, things like reading a novel. A particular sermon was often repeated - the fact that Nigeria, even Africa as a whole, was now where the heart and soul of religion (particularly the Christian religion) was, where all must be joyous for the great number of people turning to God.

Even if the seed of secular humanism had not been planted in me since teenage years, if I had remained a Protestant, I would still have chewed over the relevance of celebrating the number of churches and ‘born-again’ Christians in my country. I didn’t really do much questioning until I wrote the article in the Gambia a couple of years later. At the time the immediate spur for writing the piece was a fellow Nigerian who came to my office and had made a great effort at persuading me to become born-again, he admonished me to join the bandwagon of rapturous Christianity as it arrived in Africa. He told me that a new age had dawned on the continent, the age of true Christianity, a fulfilment of a prophecy somewhere in the book of Isaiah. But I made him understand that some people had brought the Christian religion to us barely 150 years ago, after bearing its chequered weight for almost 2,000 years, and now that a good few of those people had turned away from it, what was the point of celebrating a boost in church-going in Africa now? With this the young man smiled - smirked, in fact - and clinched his point: The West’s loss of Christianity is our gain in Africa. The West has lost its way and we Africans have just found the straight and narrow.

While my own God is an African may just as well have been published in Ecumenical Lampoon, (if any such magazine does exist), the film that came out back in Nigeria had taken a more po-faced approach to God being African, it is considered a fact that everyone should take seriously. Just as in the film I had neglected to include the fact that Africa would come to marinate its chaste pristine soul in religion had been predicted many centuries before.

I came in contact with Emanuel Swedenborg early in life. The last of the trinity of primary schools I attended as I followed my headmaster father - like the boy in the earlier part of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Follower - from one workplace to another was New Church. The first was St Andrew’s Anglican; the second St Michael’s Catholic. If I had started school two years earlier I would also have attended African Church Primary. The African Church was an Episcopalian breakaway from Anglican, a church that sought to allow for such ‘Africanness’ as polygamy.

Even as a little boy the New Church had fascinated me. The church building was built on the brow of a hill beside the school. I was enthralled by the cathedral architecture of the building, especially the wooden portals which were busy with the bas-reliefs of heaven, paradise, angels, nameless patriarchs and a sprinkling of Swedenborg’s name.

Later as an undergraduate I chose an elective in theology because I saw the name Swedenborg in the course. My elemental interest in the man had decided this for me. This gave me the opportunity to read about the man and the New Church. It will be difficult even for the most detached atheist to tsk-tsk over Swedenborg’s transformation (not a Kierkegaardian leap) from scientist to Christian mystic, spiritualist and a visionary. Or maybe not. I think the ecclesiology of New Church wooden door that I knew had made a lasting impression. Even then, over the centuries, Swedenborg has influenced great thinkers and writers as varied as Balzac, Kant, Borges, and C. Jung. The latter had deployed one of the defining visions of Swedenborg to elaborate on his theory of synchronicity, a theory that may be illustrated, lightly, by the coincidence of me using the phrase God is an African at the same as certain filmmakers a couple of thousand miles away.

But for me, as an African, it was Swedenborg’s prophetic interest in the continent that concentrated my mind. At a time when even liberal thinkers like Diderot and Voltaire were not unreservedly charitable about Africans, Swedenborg was in a class of his own. He made certain constructive comments about Africans which at the time were considered too fey and fanciful, and even now they may be dismissed as a particularistic excess of a protoliberal. He wrote about Africans possessing the ‘light of illustration,’ the ability to ‘think interiorly,’ to receive truth. This would have been rich soul food for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, but somehow Swedenborg seemed to have escaped them. Or perhaps not. Someone like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jnr would have recognised Swedenborg’s good intentions, but taking this as part of the term of reference of his racially equalitarian struggle would have been problematic. It is the sort of thing that demagogues could twist out of context.

More significant for me was Swedenborg’s pronouncement that the European church was in decline and the God had shown him that it was in Africa that he would establish the next true church. In the late 18^th century followers of Swedenborg went to West Africa to establish the New Church. While the New Church movement did not take deep root in Nigeria, thanks to the synergy of Catholic and Anglican churches and a subaltern simmering of minor Protestantisms, evangelicals and spiritual churches began to appear in modest numbers in the early 1960s. The church building that adjoined the New Church primary school I attended some thirty-odd years ago was the first and last one I would see in the part of the country I lived.

But then even if the New Church did not grow, Swedenborg’s prophecy of Africa being the future nucleus of Christianity has been eminently fulfilled. Now there are millions of churches across the continent. Recently I watched a Nigerian stand-up act repeating a routine of how the alphabets had been exhausted many times over by those searching for names for their newly found churches. The thesaurus has also been ransacked in search of words like tabernacle, chapel, ark, minster, fount, haven, temple, the Judaist synagogue has long been appropriated, and words as quotidian as hall, house, and as tangential as mountain, Beulah. And founders have rejoiced under epithets like bishops, archbishops, primates, prophets, overseers, prelates, papas, mamas – everything has been exhausted.

It’s easy to segue into cynicism and even humour when writing this kind of thing - and of course there is nothing wrong with that. Even the theological thinker Soren Kierkegaard - one of the philosophers I often return to - would joke about this. But the speed with which churches and prayer-and-worship shacks are being established can only be beaten by the speed with which pastor-ridden ‘home videos’ are released everyday, numerous John Churchseeds ceaselessly plant houses of God on every kind of soil: rocky, humous, grainy, boggy and so on. You often hear people unwittingly echoing Swedenborg about how the West has thrown Christianity away and Africans have seized it. And no one seems to bother to ask: To what end?

Swaths of the continent have become veritable bible belts, really a country like Nigeria now wears flowing vestments of religiosity. As a humanist, I have always argued that I do not mind people following whatever religion they wish, so long as it is for their - and possibly, for the greater - good and well-being. But religion disserves its better ends when it becomes a fad, a mercenary activity, main chance, which is now the basis of most of new spawn of churches in Nigeria. The church that neighboured my house in Lagos used to be the only one in the street before I left the country, but now four plank-built lean-tos compete with each other with loudspeakers pouring out vociferous prayers and songs, pentecostal-speak and a number of other activities which are no more than parodies of inwardness. In Lagos there is only one bereft public library to about three million people, a city of about 12 million souls. And the number of churches? Well there is no knowing that. A million? More than a million? Less?

Whatever the number might be, certainly Immanuel Swedenborg’s prophecy is being lived out in Nigeria, houses of worship have become so many as to be invasive and socially constipatory. But was this sort of new church the man had seen in Africa’s future? Is the African continent truly the New Jerusalem? Now I would not let this posers go unanswered, they are not meant to be rhetorical. Truly, a lot Africans - whether conversant with Swedenborg’s prediction or not - seem to be revelling in this unfortunate presbyopia of seeing their continent as the jumping ground of spirituality in all its incarnations, and in spite of the palpable and overwhelming counterintuitive rewards of the whole religious project, the song and dance remain unabated.

I would not dwell on how dreadful or false Africa as New Jerusalem is turning out to be, how closer it is to some of the more accursed of Old Testament city-states ruled by a God-cursed principality, it would again turn out as no more than a rehearsal of the litanies of religious hypocrisy and imposture that a lot of people have griped about. Second-sighted Swedenborg might have good intentions seeing Africa as a future Christian arcadia, but I wonder whether he was able to foresee these pestilential hordes of happy-clappers, tongues-speakers, Bibleheads, hyperbolic Jesus-Freaks, counterknowledgeable hot-gospellers, all of whom have brought chronic benightedness to Africa - at least to Nigeria. With the way we are carrying on with mindless celebration of religion, at the expense of such staples of development like science and technology, our future will be far darker than pre-Swedenborg’s early Middle Ages in Europe when religion was placed on a pedestal even less unquestioning than that on which we have now placed it.