The defining moment in my life that shifted the way I was thinking...and brought me to ubuntu.
Great question. Tough to answer.
In the sense of living and breathing and working and playing.
Well I was just sent this article called, "Out of Africa" written by Stephanie Nolan, a Globe and Mail Africa correspondent, about her time in Africa and how she feels about leaving the country and taking her new post in New Delhi, India.
If you have a few moments, do read the whole article. It talks about how she bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her.
If you don't have a few moments, read over my quick summary of the article below. It truly touched me and I hope it, in someway, will touch you.
The article discusses how Stephanie was one of the first original correspondents in Africa covering the big stories. How for 99% of the stories there, including the recent commence of the war in the Congo, she had been almost entirely alone. She's been there for five years. Unfortunately, because of recent attacks within Africa, the Globe and Mail has officially opened a post in India and she will be moving to this post.
The article than goes on to tell of how she fell in love with South Africa and mostly Jo'burg:
"I had an old and dear friend in Jo'burg, Ngaire Blankenberg, who is the daughter of South Africans forced into exile by apartheid. Ngaire was born in Canada and we became friends in university. She moved to South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994, and she told me in our crackly long-distance phone calls about the changes happening here, the sense of opportunity and possibility. She made me want to live here.
Johannesburg was also a logical place to station a bureau that would focus on Africa's AIDS pandemic, which at that point was one of the most important yet least-covered stories in the world: South Africa had the highest rate of HIV infection anywhere, with five million people living with the virus. Plus, the phones and electricity were reliable and the airline connections were good.
The night my partner and I landed, Ngaire and her two young children picked us up at the airport, wedged us and our heap of luggage into her Hyundai and whisked us toward the bright lights of the city I soon learned to call Jozi.
That first night, she took us to a party for a television show she was producing. We walked through the door of a bar into the Rainbow Nation that I thought existed only in tourism commercials.
The sound system throbbed with kwaito, the homegrown blend of hiphop and blues. There was a long buffet table that mixed the traditional foods of all of this country's different cultures — sour samp (a mash of crushed corn kernels) and beans, spicy Cape Malay curries, stewed pumpkin and spinach in peanut sauce.
A great polyglot mix of people, all of them stylish, were swaying on the dance floor and calling out to friends in a mishmash of languages.
That night, I fell for Jo'burg."
The article also discusses the constant challenges in living in such a robust environment, such as purse-snatchers, home invasions and constant hi-jacking. It talks about the constant stream of politics that is discussed there, from the janitors midnight coffee talks to the ladies at the hair salon. It talks about the hope that South Africa exudes, the people's sunny smiles, the potential for greatness that exists.
Unfortunately, one day it all took a turn for the worse:
"Then one day this past May, I found myself in the township of Ramaphosa, just a 20-minute drive from my house, looking at a charred, smouldering heap of ash where a mob of South Africans had beaten a man to the ground and then burned him alive hours before, because he was a foreigner.
I followed a couple of other Mozambican men through the narrow dirt streets of the township to the ruins of their tin-scrap house, where they frantically gathered up the few possessions that remained and made ready to flee for their lives.
I could hardly to bear to be inside the shack, where a framed kindergarten-graduation photo of a chubby child grinning in a shiny blue gown was the only thing left on the wall.
I stepped out into the alley, rounded a corner — and came face to face with a mob of about 20 men carrying huge clubs and spears, smashing their weapons into tin walls and screaming out their claim on power. I turned and fled the other way, ran to my car, drove a few blocks, shut the car off again and sat with my hands trembling, feeling horrified, heartsick — and betrayed.
This was the kind of story I covered in other countries — Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe. Not here. Jo'burg was the place I came home to, the place that kept me hopeful. How could this be happening?
It was a childish response. I bit back my hurt feelings, got out of the car and interviewed people. Over the next few days, I travelled through a dozen more township neighbourhoods, trying to understand the wave of xenophobic violence that erupted first here and then across the nation, leaving 62 dead and displacing at least 40,000 others.
They were almost all refugees and immigrants who, like me, came to this country for the promise it holds. Many came from the same countries that once sheltered and supported the people who fought to set South Africa free."
The decision came that it was time to move on to India, and this is where Stephanie reflected.
"When I leafed through the rest of the clippings in my small sunny office, I was reminded that much has come right here, not just in South Africa, but across the continent. Many of the stories I have told in The Globe are successes.
In Zambia, a thieving president was chased from office and tried for corruption; a capable successor was elected in his place. In Angola, voters went to the polls in record numbers and peacefully elected a new government this year; the last time the country had tried to vote, in 1996, civil war left Angola in ruins.
In South Sudan, where I travelled with a rebel army through villages where people owned not even a bucket or a single set of clothes, a peace deal was signed and that rebel army became a government that struggled gamely, with some success, to tackle that poverty.
A few years ago I interviewed drug-addled, 14-year-old Liberian soldiers who spoke with numb insouciance about gang rape. But Liberia made peace and elected the continent's first female head of state, the dynamic, brilliant Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who threw herself into rebuilding and healing her nation.
I realized that in my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for — seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening — sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.
I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. When I arrived in Jo'burg, I had to face the suspicion of African journalists who were sure I was there to serve up more bad news based on a limited understanding of the place. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.
In Mali, Fifi Tembely, with a small group of local women and a will of steel, persuaded her Dogon people to end female genital mutilation. "Tourists can still come and see the places where our ancestors are buried — that won't change — but the life of women, that's got to change," she told me firmly. "We want women's life to change, for them to be healthy, for them to educate their kids and take care of their families."
Many countries, with the help of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, gave out bed nets and better drugs and cut their deaths from the age-old and crippling scourge of malaria in half.
Rwanda, despite the ugly legacy of genocide, decided to reinvent itself as an information technology hub — it set out to wire the entire nation to a broadband network (the first country in the world to do it) and moved aggressively to get a "$100 laptop" in the hands of every school child.
A small group of committed politicians and police officers in Nigeria were working on innovative ways to try to stop rife government corruption.
Lucy Lanyero, who endured torture at the hands of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army after she was abducted at the age of 9 and then ostracism when she escaped and came home, had organized — with no money at all — to take care of former rebel girls like herself in a circle she called Empowering Hands.
"We're trying to restore relationships that have been lost," she told me in her tiny rented room in Gulu. The two little children she bore when forced into sex in the bush were playing nearby as we talked. "We wanted to show the community that we can contribute something. We wanted to say, 'We can go to school or do something.'" Many of the poorest nations, from Chad to Madagascar, have used a series of low-cost innovations such as vaccinations and Vitamin A drops to reduce child mortality dramatically; Alfred Malunga, a health worker in Malawi with a Grade 10 education and a $36-a-month salary, proudly showed me his village ledger, which listed pages of healthy and flourishing children.
The biggest change of all came in AIDS, the story that I was sent to Africa to tell. When I moved to Johannesburg, fewer than 100,000 people on the entire continent of Africa had access to antiretroviral drugs — today about 2.4 million are on them. That's still only about 30 per cent of those who are so sick they need the drugs to stay alive.
But when I started this job, no one but a handful of crazy activists and supportive doctors and nurses believed it would be possible to do treatment there at all.
Treatment, the experts said, needs labs and electron microscopes and cold chains and sophisticated patient-tracking systems. The unspoken corollary was that Africans with AIDS who didn't have those things — that is, pretty much all Africans with AIDS — would therefore have to die.
People such as Zackie Achmat and the amazing Médecins sans frontières proved that was nonsense. They pushed and pushed until African governments began to believe that maybe they could do treatment. The Western world engaged too — U.S. President George W. Bush created an emergency plan for AIDS that gave unprecedented money and technical assistance to a dozen hard-hit countries.
The Global Fund, brand-new and struggling when I moved here, pushed out billions in AIDS funding. Canadians gave millions of dollars in small donations to Stephen Lewis's foundation for Africa and gave of their time and skills to volunteer in clinics and orphanages in Tanzania and Lesotho.
And African health-care workers and activists did the work. Zambia, where one in four adults has the virus, is treating 170,000 people. Malawi — tiny, poverty-racked Malawi, where the major national public hospital had precisely one doctor the first time I went there to write about AIDS — has 117,000 people on the drugs, back to work and raising their children. Malawi is still desperately short of skilled people, but it has pioneered many of the breakthroughs, showing that nurses and even well-trained volunteers at the local, rural level can do much of what we once thought had to happen in city hospitals.
Dr. Beetroot, as the former health minister is scornfully known, was deposed after Mr. Mbeki's ouster and replaced by a supremely capable ANC veteran named Barbara Hogan. On her third day she took pains to travel to a major AIDS-vaccine conference in Cape Town and to say the magic words: "We know HIV causes AIDS." She said the government would make fighting the virus its top priority.
Last week, I went with my friend Thokozani Mthiyane to his monthly clinic appointment. No more overcrowded hospital waiting rooms with gaunt and desperate people in endless lines: We drove into bustling downtown Jo'burg and walked into a clinic called Zimphiphilo — "get healthy" in isiZulu — its waiting room painted tangerine and with chic steel sofas in polka-dot fabric clustered around a plasma-screen TV. Thokozani's doctor is a brisk young woman named Thuli Ngwenya who believes the clinic must provide efficient service that does not inconvenience working people, like my pal, who just happen to have HIV. Thokozani gets his drugs and his viral-load tests and whatever else he might need for about $40 a month, subsidized by the U.S. government."
At the end of the day, her time spent there meant so much, that these two lessons make it all seem so humble,
"I take other things away from Africa, such as patience — there's nothing like the Nigerian Ministry of Information to teach you patience. I also found a greater capacity for rage, although my partner gently points out that mine was already considerable. It drove me nearly mad to spend weeks in the depopulated villages of Swaziland or barren clinics of Malawi and then fly home to Canada on a rare visit and find that no one knew or cared that the people I had just spent time with were going to die, for no reason other than that they were African.
My old friend Ngaire was offered a great job in Toronto and moved back to Canada a few months ago. Now, our crackly, long-distance phone calls go the other way. Dreading her first Northern Hemisphere winter in 15 years and pining for the blooming jacarandas, she tells me all the things she misses about Jo'burg, such as people going out of their way for a mother with young children. No one ever scoops a stranger's toddler up into their lap on a bus in Toronto. There's that thing about South Africa, she says — a place so screwed up in so many ways, and yet it produces people who become moral touchstones for the world."
An amazing article, an amazing five years and an amazing country with spirit and hope like no other.
If you have a few moments, do read the whole article. It talks about how she bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her.
If you don't have a few moments, read over my quick summary of the article below. It truly touched me and I hope it, in someway, will touch you.
The article discusses how Stephanie was one of the first original correspondents in Africa covering the big stories. How for 99% of the stories there, including the recent commence of the war in the Congo, she had been almost entirely alone. She's been there for five years. Unfortunately, because of recent attacks within Africa, the Globe and Mail has officially opened a post in India and she will be moving to this post.
The article than goes on to tell of how she fell in love with South Africa and mostly Jo'burg:
"I had an old and dear friend in Jo'burg, Ngaire Blankenberg, who is the daughter of South Africans forced into exile by apartheid. Ngaire was born in Canada and we became friends in university. She moved to South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994, and she told me in our crackly long-distance phone calls about the changes happening here, the sense of opportunity and possibility. She made me want to live here.
Johannesburg was also a logical place to station a bureau that would focus on Africa's AIDS pandemic, which at that point was one of the most important yet least-covered stories in the world: South Africa had the highest rate of HIV infection anywhere, with five million people living with the virus. Plus, the phones and electricity were reliable and the airline connections were good.
The night my partner and I landed, Ngaire and her two young children picked us up at the airport, wedged us and our heap of luggage into her Hyundai and whisked us toward the bright lights of the city I soon learned to call Jozi.
That first night, she took us to a party for a television show she was producing. We walked through the door of a bar into the Rainbow Nation that I thought existed only in tourism commercials.
The sound system throbbed with kwaito, the homegrown blend of hiphop and blues. There was a long buffet table that mixed the traditional foods of all of this country's different cultures — sour samp (a mash of crushed corn kernels) and beans, spicy Cape Malay curries, stewed pumpkin and spinach in peanut sauce.
A great polyglot mix of people, all of them stylish, were swaying on the dance floor and calling out to friends in a mishmash of languages.
That night, I fell for Jo'burg."
The article also discusses the constant challenges in living in such a robust environment, such as purse-snatchers, home invasions and constant hi-jacking. It talks about the constant stream of politics that is discussed there, from the janitors midnight coffee talks to the ladies at the hair salon. It talks about the hope that South Africa exudes, the people's sunny smiles, the potential for greatness that exists.
Unfortunately, one day it all took a turn for the worse:
"Then one day this past May, I found myself in the township of Ramaphosa, just a 20-minute drive from my house, looking at a charred, smouldering heap of ash where a mob of South Africans had beaten a man to the ground and then burned him alive hours before, because he was a foreigner.
I followed a couple of other Mozambican men through the narrow dirt streets of the township to the ruins of their tin-scrap house, where they frantically gathered up the few possessions that remained and made ready to flee for their lives.
I could hardly to bear to be inside the shack, where a framed kindergarten-graduation photo of a chubby child grinning in a shiny blue gown was the only thing left on the wall.
I stepped out into the alley, rounded a corner — and came face to face with a mob of about 20 men carrying huge clubs and spears, smashing their weapons into tin walls and screaming out their claim on power. I turned and fled the other way, ran to my car, drove a few blocks, shut the car off again and sat with my hands trembling, feeling horrified, heartsick — and betrayed.
This was the kind of story I covered in other countries — Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe. Not here. Jo'burg was the place I came home to, the place that kept me hopeful. How could this be happening?
It was a childish response. I bit back my hurt feelings, got out of the car and interviewed people. Over the next few days, I travelled through a dozen more township neighbourhoods, trying to understand the wave of xenophobic violence that erupted first here and then across the nation, leaving 62 dead and displacing at least 40,000 others.
They were almost all refugees and immigrants who, like me, came to this country for the promise it holds. Many came from the same countries that once sheltered and supported the people who fought to set South Africa free."
The decision came that it was time to move on to India, and this is where Stephanie reflected.
"When I leafed through the rest of the clippings in my small sunny office, I was reminded that much has come right here, not just in South Africa, but across the continent. Many of the stories I have told in The Globe are successes.
In Zambia, a thieving president was chased from office and tried for corruption; a capable successor was elected in his place. In Angola, voters went to the polls in record numbers and peacefully elected a new government this year; the last time the country had tried to vote, in 1996, civil war left Angola in ruins.
In South Sudan, where I travelled with a rebel army through villages where people owned not even a bucket or a single set of clothes, a peace deal was signed and that rebel army became a government that struggled gamely, with some success, to tackle that poverty.
A few years ago I interviewed drug-addled, 14-year-old Liberian soldiers who spoke with numb insouciance about gang rape. But Liberia made peace and elected the continent's first female head of state, the dynamic, brilliant Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who threw herself into rebuilding and healing her nation.
I realized that in my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for — seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening — sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.
I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. When I arrived in Jo'burg, I had to face the suspicion of African journalists who were sure I was there to serve up more bad news based on a limited understanding of the place. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.
In Mali, Fifi Tembely, with a small group of local women and a will of steel, persuaded her Dogon people to end female genital mutilation. "Tourists can still come and see the places where our ancestors are buried — that won't change — but the life of women, that's got to change," she told me firmly. "We want women's life to change, for them to be healthy, for them to educate their kids and take care of their families."
Many countries, with the help of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, gave out bed nets and better drugs and cut their deaths from the age-old and crippling scourge of malaria in half.
Rwanda, despite the ugly legacy of genocide, decided to reinvent itself as an information technology hub — it set out to wire the entire nation to a broadband network (the first country in the world to do it) and moved aggressively to get a "$100 laptop" in the hands of every school child.
A small group of committed politicians and police officers in Nigeria were working on innovative ways to try to stop rife government corruption.
Lucy Lanyero, who endured torture at the hands of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army after she was abducted at the age of 9 and then ostracism when she escaped and came home, had organized — with no money at all — to take care of former rebel girls like herself in a circle she called Empowering Hands.
"We're trying to restore relationships that have been lost," she told me in her tiny rented room in Gulu. The two little children she bore when forced into sex in the bush were playing nearby as we talked. "We wanted to show the community that we can contribute something. We wanted to say, 'We can go to school or do something.'" Many of the poorest nations, from Chad to Madagascar, have used a series of low-cost innovations such as vaccinations and Vitamin A drops to reduce child mortality dramatically; Alfred Malunga, a health worker in Malawi with a Grade 10 education and a $36-a-month salary, proudly showed me his village ledger, which listed pages of healthy and flourishing children.
The biggest change of all came in AIDS, the story that I was sent to Africa to tell. When I moved to Johannesburg, fewer than 100,000 people on the entire continent of Africa had access to antiretroviral drugs — today about 2.4 million are on them. That's still only about 30 per cent of those who are so sick they need the drugs to stay alive.
But when I started this job, no one but a handful of crazy activists and supportive doctors and nurses believed it would be possible to do treatment there at all.
Treatment, the experts said, needs labs and electron microscopes and cold chains and sophisticated patient-tracking systems. The unspoken corollary was that Africans with AIDS who didn't have those things — that is, pretty much all Africans with AIDS — would therefore have to die.
People such as Zackie Achmat and the amazing Médecins sans frontières proved that was nonsense. They pushed and pushed until African governments began to believe that maybe they could do treatment. The Western world engaged too — U.S. President George W. Bush created an emergency plan for AIDS that gave unprecedented money and technical assistance to a dozen hard-hit countries.
The Global Fund, brand-new and struggling when I moved here, pushed out billions in AIDS funding. Canadians gave millions of dollars in small donations to Stephen Lewis's foundation for Africa and gave of their time and skills to volunteer in clinics and orphanages in Tanzania and Lesotho.
And African health-care workers and activists did the work. Zambia, where one in four adults has the virus, is treating 170,000 people. Malawi — tiny, poverty-racked Malawi, where the major national public hospital had precisely one doctor the first time I went there to write about AIDS — has 117,000 people on the drugs, back to work and raising their children. Malawi is still desperately short of skilled people, but it has pioneered many of the breakthroughs, showing that nurses and even well-trained volunteers at the local, rural level can do much of what we once thought had to happen in city hospitals.
Dr. Beetroot, as the former health minister is scornfully known, was deposed after Mr. Mbeki's ouster and replaced by a supremely capable ANC veteran named Barbara Hogan. On her third day she took pains to travel to a major AIDS-vaccine conference in Cape Town and to say the magic words: "We know HIV causes AIDS." She said the government would make fighting the virus its top priority.
Last week, I went with my friend Thokozani Mthiyane to his monthly clinic appointment. No more overcrowded hospital waiting rooms with gaunt and desperate people in endless lines: We drove into bustling downtown Jo'burg and walked into a clinic called Zimphiphilo — "get healthy" in isiZulu — its waiting room painted tangerine and with chic steel sofas in polka-dot fabric clustered around a plasma-screen TV. Thokozani's doctor is a brisk young woman named Thuli Ngwenya who believes the clinic must provide efficient service that does not inconvenience working people, like my pal, who just happen to have HIV. Thokozani gets his drugs and his viral-load tests and whatever else he might need for about $40 a month, subsidized by the U.S. government."
At the end of the day, her time spent there meant so much, that these two lessons make it all seem so humble,
"I take other things away from Africa, such as patience — there's nothing like the Nigerian Ministry of Information to teach you patience. I also found a greater capacity for rage, although my partner gently points out that mine was already considerable. It drove me nearly mad to spend weeks in the depopulated villages of Swaziland or barren clinics of Malawi and then fly home to Canada on a rare visit and find that no one knew or cared that the people I had just spent time with were going to die, for no reason other than that they were African.
My old friend Ngaire was offered a great job in Toronto and moved back to Canada a few months ago. Now, our crackly, long-distance phone calls go the other way. Dreading her first Northern Hemisphere winter in 15 years and pining for the blooming jacarandas, she tells me all the things she misses about Jo'burg, such as people going out of their way for a mother with young children. No one ever scoops a stranger's toddler up into their lap on a bus in Toronto. There's that thing about South Africa, she says — a place so screwed up in so many ways, and yet it produces people who become moral touchstones for the world."
An amazing article, an amazing five years and an amazing country with spirit and hope like no other.
0 comments:
Post a Comment