AIDS is real,” the driver said, pondering the notion for a moment while gnawing the end of a bleached wood chewing stick. He spat a gob of wet pulp out the car window before turning back to me. He was probably the driver for one madam living in the same Victoria Garden City neighborhood of Lagos where my family has a house. Now that he had dropped his employer at work, he had the time for a leisurely kindness otherwise unknown to constantly grinding Lagosians. I had never met him before, and I probably shouldn’t have accepted. In Lagos you don’t get into just anybody’s car. All the same, I was appreciative when he offered me a ride after seeing me walking from our house to the Lekki Expressway where I could catch a taxi. I fidgeted in the passenger seat of the air-conditioned SUV.
In the distance, the mini-skyscrapers of Victoria Island and down at the city center near the marina shimmered against an embankment of low clouds, and I remembered an uncle’s sarcastic statement that from afar, Lagos actually looks like a wonderful city. Like New York, Lagos is a city of islands. From the air, you can see the massive lagoon that separates the sections of the city on the mainland from the two large islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and the city’s latticework of paved highways, occasional red-earth side streets, and tin roofs looks deceptively peaceful. In truth, this megalopolis, though impressive in scale, is frustrating beyond belief; it simmered around us as we sat in the famous Lagos go-slow (traffic jam). Cars and trucks stretched for miles ahead of us toward the city center and miles behind us toward its outskirts, where developers couldn’t build houses fast enough for an exponentially growing population. Street hawkers roamed among idling vehicles and thrust everything from chilled soft drinks in perspiring bottles to steering wheel covers up against car windows. Lagos, the joke goes, is the one city in the world where, because of the traffic, you can accomplish all of your shopping on the way to the market. That morning the only forward movement came from the okadas (motorbike taxis), which buzzed through tight spaces between cars, leaving behind a trail of suffocating black exhaust as they passed.
I was on my way to see Rolake Odetoyinbo, the head of Positive Action for Treatment Access (PATA), an advocacy group for causes related to HIV/AIDS. I was going to be late, even by Nigerian standards. PATA’s offices were in the Ikeja section of Lagos on the mainland. Though I had budgeted two hours for what should be a half-hour drive, an accident on the road blocked movement. As the car idled in traffic, the driver and I had struck up a conversation about HIV/AIDS.
“AIDS is real,” he said again after he removed the chewing stick from his mouth. His eyes flashed with a knowing excitement before he spoke again. “It has been here for generations with our forefathers,” he said in the blasé tone of someone for whom besiegement is ordinary. “We have a word for it. Atogbe,” he mouthed the Yoruba word slowly.
“Atogbe,” I repeated and then wrote it down. He sighed appreciatively.
“Yes. Atogbe, someone who urinate until he die. And until when the death comes, he has six or seven sickness at the same time. We have known this thing since the olden days, but now the whites, them come call it AIDS.”
The first reported case of AIDS in Nigeria was diagnosed in 1985 and presented at the second International AIDS Conference in Paris the following year. According to the case reports, the patient in question was a thirteen-year-old female street hawker from Lagos. I could find out little about this girl or how she contracted the virus that causes AIDS—which at that time was called HTLV-III (human T-lymphotrophic virus III) or LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus), depending on whether you followed the American or the French researchers. I could determine only that it was in Lagos that HIV supposedly first appeared in Nigeria and, as far as some are concerned, from this city that HIV spread to the rest of the country.
“It is from those in the coasts, the towns like Lagos, Port Harcourt. Big cities with the white men, the seamen, those who work with the ships, or soldiers—police, too,” an old retired civil servant said to me as we sat on his veranda sipping bottles of Coke. We had met in a small town in eastern Nigeria. “At first, when this thing was noted in this country, our people, they discountenanced it. They said, ‘What is that? What is AID? Oh! Nah—sickness for the whites and those up there.’ Some, in order to enjoy themselves how they want, they say there is nothing like AIDS.”
When it first appeared in Nigeria, AIDS was rejected as a nonissue by the successive military governments, as well as by the general public. At less than ten thousand dollars, the original budget for the first AIDS-related government body in Nigeria, the National Expert Advisory Committee on AIDS (NEACA), was laughable. The military dictators took a stance similar to that of other African leaders at the time: AIDS is not a problem here. In popular thought up until the late 1990s, AIDS was also considered a nonissue, sometimes referred to as the American Invention to Discourage Sex, if referred to at all.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Nigeria—indeed, most of Africa—began to wake up to the crisis brewing in our midst. I remember the summer of 1997, when the great Afro-beat musician Fela Kuti died and over a million people marched his coffin down the streets of Lagos. I was fifteen then and remember watching the procession on television with my family in my uncle’s living room. There was total silence. “Fela,” said Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, his brother and the former minister of health, “had died of AIDS.” People couldn’t believe it. For weeks afterward, there were whispers: “How can a great man like Fela die of AIDS? It’s not possible!”
But the revelation that Fela had lived with and ultimately died from HIV/AIDS did spark some change. Also important was Nigeria’s return to democracy and the election of Olusegun Obasanjo, who was very concerned about HIV/AIDS as president. I remember when billboards with public service announcements about it (now ubiquitous throughout the country) first appeared on buildings and by highways. They displayed slogans like AIDS NO DEY SHOW FOR FACE next to the smiling face of musician Femi Kuti, Fela’s famous son, or KNOW YOUR STATUS next to images of happy couples in traditional dress. Newly elected President Obasanjo spoke openly of the “HIV/AIDS pandemic that continues to bring havoc, misery and hopelessness on humanity, especially in Africa where the pandemic is threatening to wipe out entire generations.” He made public appeals to the citizens and members of the military and police to get tested. Something, however small, in the country’s attitude toward HIV/AIDS was changing.
I could hear it in the discussions about HIV on the radio or in the comments my cousins in college made about safe sex. Once, during a visit home the summer after I graduated from college, I overheard two gentlemen pondering the process of HIV transmission in a Lagos nightclub: “If a man get am and a woman get am, then any child they get must surely catch am.” His companion offered a laughing rebuke. “No. No. No. It neva pass like that.”
By the early part of this century, HIV/AIDS had become part of the national consciousness. Certainly I could see now, as this kind driver and I rolled slowly along the main thoroughfares of a hustling, bustling, choked, and congested city, it had become part of the landscape as well. Billboards and posters lined the highway. I saw the universal awareness symbol, a red ribbon, painted boldly on the backs of transport trucks. AIDS was now real to Nigerians but, as it is to most of the world, in an abstract, “I’ve heard about it and know it’s there” kind of way.
The demographics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria and worldwide are such that people need not knowingly encounter someone who is HIV positive every day. The most recent data collected by the Nigerian Ministry of Health reveal that about 4 percent of Nigeria’s population is HIV positive. This is a small percentage when compared to the 20 percent of the population that is positive in countries like Botswana or South Africa. However, 4 percent of Nigeria’s 150 million people means approximately 3 million Nigerians are living with HIV, the third-largest population of positive people in the world. With such enormous numbers, it seems inconceivable that someone could not know an HIV-positive person, but Nigeria is a geographically and demographically large country. Likewise, though there are approximately 34 million positive people in the world, this is actually less than half of 1 percent of the total global population. This means that most people in the world today have not and will not knowingly encounter someone living with HIV. Under such circumstances, it is hard to convey the diversity of experiences that constitute the reality of HIV. In my own case, when I started writing this book, despite having a background in health and time spent working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, I was not close to anyone of known positive status. I had yet to see what the day-to-day reality of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria was like.
One of the first conversations I had about HIV/ AIDS in Nigeria when I first started writing was with my good friend Femi Adegoke. At the time, he had just finished a master’s degree in public health at Harvard and returned to Abuja to work for Columbia University’s International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs. He has since moved on to work for a number of HIV/AIDS-focused organizations in Nigeria. Indirectly, he was the reason I ended up getting an appointment with Rolake Odetoyinbo. One night in early 2007 as we sat on the rooftop bar of the British Council, a common hangout for diplomats, expats, and aid workers in Abuja, watching the power flicker across different neighborhoods in the common practice of load sharing, he said to me that in Nigeria, “We don’t see AIDS patients. We need to be faced with this reality to move forward. We need to see these things every day.”
That same week, there happened to be a very visible HIV/AIDS presence in the capital. Every two years, the major groups involved in HIV/AIDS-related work convene at a conference sponsored by the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), the government body charged with rationalizing and coordinating Nigeria’s response to the epidemic. With community-based organizations, advocacy groups, NGOs, and state government agencies traveling to Abuja from each of Nigeria’s thirty-six states, as well as a strong representation from international organizations, the conference is anything but a regular affair. It is not designed to represent the daily reality of HIV/AIDS, but to allow those who work on the Nigerian epidemic the chance to come together to share experiences, debate related issues, and ultimately speak with one voice about the direction the country needs to take to improve the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and prevent more infections from occurring. Femi urged me to attend, saying this would be the best place to gain a broad understanding of HIV in Nigeria and perhaps meet people who might be of good help.
Later that week, I drove to the Abuja International Conference Centre, where the meetings were already under way. I had been to the massive structure, with its sweeping arc of a roof and immaculate glass facade, a couple of years earlier for the wedding reception of a cousin. Then, the speckled red granite floor of the grand entrance hall had boasted a red carpet and numerous tables covered in white cloths and pink napkins. Bridesmaids in pink danced among the tables, inviting all who were seated to join in the festivities and move to loud music echoing from the wall speakers.
The day of the conference was an altogether more serious affair. The entrance hall still sparkled but remained unfurnished. Instead it bustled with people in dark suits or traditional Nigerian prints, attaché cases or files of documents in hand or under arm. The attendees were mostly domestic. They stood in clusters, locked in serious conversations. They folded their arms across their chests or cupped their chins in the space between thumb and index finger. Occasionally greetings would break up the exchanges as smiles and laughter erupted when people working on similar issues in different parts of the country made their annual reconnections and collided into hugs and handshakes.
Femi had told me about the conference after the completion of registration, so I attended without accreditation. I slunk around the conference hall from table to table, picking up literature, pocketing brochures, and engaging in casual conversation with the representatives of various NGOs and SACAs (state AIDS control agencies) who had arranged their tables and booths to emphasize the strengths or needs of their various organizations. All of Nigeria’s thirty-six states were represented. At the Kogi State table, tended by a wiry man with tinted lenses in his metal frames, the emphasis was on counseling and testing programs for sex workers. Kogi borders Abuja, and its capital, Lokoja, sits near the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. Any truck heading toward the southwest must pass through this city. Where there are long-haul truck drivers, the conventional wisdom goes, there are sex workers, and in these places, there tends to be a higher rate of HIV transmission. The Plateau State booth boasted a whole set of educational materials for primary schools, with a group of young women hardly enthusiastic to explain the process of creating them. They told me they were members of the National Youth Service Corps, recent university graduates completing a mandatory year of national service. Mass communication, not HIV/AIDS, was their specialty. They looked more disoriented than I was.
After an hour of wandering from table to table, I stumbled from the main hall back into the lobby with an armful of brochures and a pocketful of business cards. I had met a few interesting people, some of whom I intended to contact immediately, but for the most part, I was tired and confused. I recognized that there was a certain absurdity about not wanting to sensationalize the HIV/AIDS epidemic while desperately searching for some charismatic HIV-positive figure to introduce me to its reality. I had no idea where to begin. This overload of voices, colored brochures, screaming posters, and videos was not helping.
I made my way toward a set of stairs that led to an over-air-conditioned cafeteria. As I ascended, I briefly locked eyes with a young man with uncombed curls of hair, dressed in a dashiki and descending the staircase.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I stammered, concerned that he was a conference organizer who would realize that I had no right to be around and promptly usher me out.
“Dapo,” he introduced himself, extending a hand. “I work with PATA.” He noticed my blank look and added, “Positive Action for Treatment Access. We’re based in Lagos. Who are you with?”
“Oh, I’m not really with anyone. Just trying to get an idea of what AIDS is really like in this country.”
He nodded knowingly. “So you’re a journalist.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t necessarily want this to be a journalistic endeavor, but journalist seemed more acceptable than “personal crusader” or “interested party.”
“Well, I work for my sister Rolake, who founded the NGO. If your work brings you to Lagos, be in touch.”
I had heard about Rolake Odetoyinbo but not her organization. She is a well-known and well-regarded Nigerian AIDS activist who has had no qualms discussing her HIV-positive status on television, radio, and in the regular columns she writes for newspapers and magazines. I was in luck.
The PATA offices were in a dingy four-story building set back from the noise of Awolowo Way, a busy street in the Ikeja section of Lagos. The noise of the building’s standby generator was relative calm compared to the horns of the traffic-clogged road yards away. It looked sturdy, but the structure had clearly seen better days, a condition that became all the more apparent when I entered a dimly lit staircase with plaster flaking off the walls. But inside the office, the sunlit rooms were a whirl of bright fabrics as women participating in a PATA-run support-group meeting flitted about with plates of food, conversing and laughing loudly over the unrelenting rumble of the generator two stories below. The walls were sparsely decorated with informational posters advertising new HIV medications and encouraging safe sex. Powerful standing fans made the posters flutter against the walls.
Rolake appeared moderately peeved, if also understanding of my tardiness.
“Go-slow,” I muttered, invoking the traffic jam as an apology.
She offered me a plate from a table full of rice, fish and beef stews, and fried plantains. Then she led me to a corner of the room away from the commotion.
She was, as she had been described to me by a university student who had seen her speak in a seminar, “Big. Healthy-looking. An average person.” Her round face was indeed full and healthy with smooth, plump cheeks that folded into creases under her eyes. She traveled constantly, and though she wore it well, the fatigue was still written on her face. Before she became an HIV/AIDS activist, Rolake was a relatively successful baker who sold her pastries in fast-food joints and other venues. It wasn’t her ideal job—she had studied dramatic arts at one of Nigeria’s premier universities—but her husband’s career moved him from place to place, and she needed something flexible to earn money. She lived what she calls a relatively normal life until testing positive for HIV in 1998.
In an interview for the Nigerian newspaper Punch, she called the first four years after she tested positive the “worst years of my life” because “for four years I was waiting for death.” She said, “I was so sure AIDS was going to kill me,” and told the interviewer, “It was four years of living in fear, silence and stigma, not knowing what to do and not having access to the right information.” Then in 2002, she attended an AIDS conference in Barcelona, and it changed her life. “I didn’t know much about HIV. In fact, I wasn’t open about my status. I went to Barcelona with the knowledge that HIV was a death sentence. I felt that while I was alive, let me just get the best out of life,” she said in a 2004 interview with the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard. “The conference for me wasn’t so exciting. It was the people I met that made the world of difference. I met people who had lived with HIV for 20 years and couldn’t tell they had HIV. So Barcelona challenged my mentality. It also helped me see HIV/AIDS in a different light.” In the Punch interview, she had said, “I realised that if I wanted to die, I could do a better job jumping in front of a moving train because HIV wasn’t in a hurry to kill me.”
Two months after she returned from Barcelona, tired of the silence, shame, and fear and wanting more from life, she gave an interview to a major newspaper disclosing her HIV status. Her life changed dramatically. From speaking to conferences and support groups, she went on to found PATA (Positive Action for Treatment Access), a group that seeks to empower women living with HIV and AIDS, prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and build awareness and understanding of the epidemic in the general population.
“My face is the face of HIV,” Rolake said to me as we struggled to get comfortable in metal folding chairs we had removed from a circle set up for the support-group meeting that was to follow. In many ways, she is a prominent internationally known face of HIV. She sits on a board at the powerful Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She is a regular speaker at conferences around the world.
Her words brought to mind a poster produced by the Keep a Child Alive Campaign. The poster features a dozen American celebrities in face paint designed to simulate “African tribal markings,” all set above the legends I AM AFRICAN in bright yellow and HELP US STOP THE DYING in danger red. It is one of the more offensive HIV ad campaigns I have encountered, something akin to a nouveau blackface that in one fell swoop manages to incorporate a whole host of stereotypes and negative ideas about the continent—the exoticization of the other and this idea of a primitive beauty, as well as the subtle, unintentional suggestion that to be African is to be HIV positive and thus close to the brink of death.
Rolake has consistently positioned herself against such messaging. “We”—Rolake opened her arms as she spoke to indicate the international activist community—“have sold ourselves short. We have created the impression that Africa is poor, hungry, beggarly children. And this glamorizing poverty to whip up sentiment and fund-raise? It’s emotional blackmail. HIV is not a disease of the poor. It’s a disease of the working class.” I understood her words not as a denial of the link between HIV/AIDS and poverty but rather a statement that people with HIV/AIDS are not totally helpless creatures so far removed from life.
“My face won’t bring money. But it should,” she continued. “My face should tell you that if we have access to treatment, we will remain productive. That’s what I want to do in my work, present a portrait of strength.” It was hard not to be excited by her feistiness and aggressive pushback against the status quo, by her desire to reduce the representational distance between people who have HIV and people who do not.
“I don’t want to go out and look like HIV,” she told the Vanguard interviewer. “When we were hearing about AIDS 10 years ago, the picture was all gloom and doom. We were hearing of people dying in the UK and America. We don’t hear that anymore. Is it that they’ve eradicated HIV/AIDS from that part of the world? No, they have access to treatment and HIV has stopped being a death sentence. It has become like high blood pressure, which has no cure but can be managed with medication. So for me, the most important issue is for HIV/AIDS to stop being a death sentence. We can live with HIV.”
Rolake’s work has gone a long way toward normalizing HIV/AIDS, for both those with positive status and the rest of the population, by presenting a reality that is not all sensation, gloom, hardship, and death. A recent university graduate I interviewed in Lagos told me that hearing her speak had transformed the way she thought about HIV/AIDS because people like to think that “people that die of AIDS or have HIV are dirty people, people that sleep around or do rubbish and stuff, not our kind of people,” while Rolake just looked so normal. If her aim is to desensationalize the disease and therefore make it livable, tangible, and real for Nigerians and the world, then perhaps her relentless campaigning is generating results.
She stood up. My notebook hung open over one knee, pen secured safely in its binding. I had arrived too late for an extended discussion. She had her support group to attend to. Before she excused herself, she said, “If you want to know what things are really like, you should talk to women like these,” and opened her palms toward the women assembling in their seats.
The reality of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria and Africa is a diversity of experiences. There is no archetypal story, no single defining theme. For all people who experience the disease, whether HIV positive or not, the reality is influenced by who they are as individuals and the communities to which they belong. The HIV/AIDS epidemic does not exist outside of regular life. Rather, it is shaped by regular life, just as it shapes our everyday experiences.
A few months after I met Rolake, I visited a woman named Hope who lived in the capital of Imo State, a city called Owerri. Owerri is an eight-hour road trip east of Lagos and sits in the middle of an area of the country populated predominantly by members of my Igbo ethnic group. My father grew up in a village only an hour away. When I was younger and we used to do the grueling drive from Lagos to my grandparents’ village, Owerri was one of the last stops along the way. It never seemed to come fast enough. Whereas Lagos is all over-the-top grind and hustle, with the larger-than-life atmosphere of a developing world megalopolis, Owerri is much quieter, “cooler,” as people from the town like to say. The city is definitely more laid-back. The buildings don’t rise as high. There are fewer car horns blasting at any given moment, and all around there is green, the remnants of what used to be massive primary-growth rain forest.
Hope lived in a compound of several similarly constructed one-story buildings in what appeared to be an unfinished housing estate. These low houses were partitioned into multiple one- or two-room living quarters with outdoor kitchens protected from the elements by low-hanging eaves. It seemed that work on the estate had halted some time ago, because rusting construction machinery, tractors, backhoes, and earthmovers sat disintegrating in pools of dark water. The grass that could grow shot up through bits of debris, a rich and lively green. Dragonflies buzzed around the waving grass stalks and above scattered puddles. Behind it all loomed the city’s dilapidated cathedral.
Places like this are unsettling, but I was troubled more by my reaction to the surroundings than by the environment itself. This kind of place speaks of an unglamorous struggle where daily life is a steady stream of inconveniences—no running water, no electricity, and no money for a diesel generator, with the threat of catastrophe lurking in the background. As a person of relative privilege in Nigeria, I find such environments unsettling. They remind me of the extreme nature of my own privilege and how disconnected I am from the experiences of the many people in Nigeria who live on less than two dollars a day. At times I catch myself slipping into romanticizing the suffering, marveling at what seems an inhuman ability to survive what we call inhumane conditions. I struggled to collect my thoughts.
Hope saw me from her window and opened her door before I had a chance to knock. She had tried her best to make the hot, dark one-room apartment hospitable. Plastic flowers adorned the security bars guarding the window. Pictures in frames—her wedding day, children, and assorted other family—hung on shadowed walls. Still more stood atop a dusty television and sparkled when a little light touched them. She invited me to sit down on a purple couch striped by the light entering through the open window and cracked door. There was no electricity, thus no fan. A large hanging curtain that separated the area where she and her children slept from where we now sat languished in the stillness, shifting occasionally with a breath of air from outside.
“The time my husband was alive, we live in three-bedroom flat,” she said almost as an apology. “We just use one room to pack foodstuffs. If you enter my house, you will just serve yourself—enjoy. You will see rice in bags, fruits, everything. Every week, he’ll be giving me ten thousand naira and saying, ‘Use it that anything you like you can buy.’ My children, every three-three months, I will take them to market and get what they need. Weekend, I will take them to this fast-food joint, Mr. Bigg’s. But now, there’s nothing like that. I have to manage, as he’s not around now.”
I noticed for the first time just how young Hope looked. Her eyes were closed in remembrance. Her face was plain and without makeup. She wore her hair natural and unstyled, secured in a tight bun that stretched the skin of her forehead and emphasized her high cheekbones. She appeared to have weathered the stresses of life after her husband’s death relatively well.
“Even as I’m here, I don’t have anything doing. I’m just managing myself. The only thing I do now is to sell Pure Water around this place, NNPC [Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation] filling station. If I get something like three hundred naira or anything, I will just use it and manage. Then my parents do help me, but you know, even if they are giving you one million naira a day, you’re supposed to have something doing.”
She had settled now into a routine that included scraping together an income from her petty trading, raising two young teenagers, and focusing on her HIV treatments, all while living somewhat in the shadow of her previous life. Her apartment walls seemed to have an inordinate number of pictures from the past, mostly of her wedding. I soon found out why.
Hope sighed, reached for her wedding album beneath the glass coffee table, and carefully opened it before us. When she reached a picture of her and her husband standing on the red earth at the bottom of a staircase leading up to a double set of church doors, both of them dressed in a white that matched their broad bright smiles, she turned to me.
“He went for operation. There is one thing that do him on his head here. Look at it here,” she said, pointing to a bulge atop her husband’s cropped hair that transformed his otherwise round head into an oblong structure. “He wanted to remove it. In Nigeria here, before you do any operation—anything—any hospital that you enter, you must test that HIV test. They told us they would do test.”
“This happened before your wedding?” I scrutinized her husband’s face in the picture. “When did you get married?”
“I wedded in 2001—in a church.”
“But,” I said, looking at the two children, a boy and girl standing with her and her husband. They resembled the children in a photo hanging by a clock on the wall. “Your children …”
She stopped me with an anemic wave. “I did my traditional wedding 1993, and then I wedded in church in 2001 after getting my issue,” she said and pointed to her children in the picture. “Here now, I’m up to twenty-something years before I wedded in church. I was fourteen when I did my traditional wedding.”
Hope had grown up in a relatively strict household. Her father, a trader in the local markets, though loving, was perhaps driven to fear on behalf of his family as a result of his hyperacute sense of danger. Rather than have daughters subjected to the indignities of this world, namely premarital sex and all its risks, he decided that they would be better off married early—in Hope’s case, very early.
“My dad, he do always say this is what he wants,” she said. “He just put it in prayer, ‘God, I don’t want any of my daughter to stay here and become pregnant. My prayer is that if I train my children, let them grow up in a good way, that they may train me at the old age. It’s better that they marry and go to their husband’s place so that they will be more glad than to stay at home.’” This is not a typical sentiment among the Igbos, who tend to marry later in life. I could, however, understand the reasoning, the preference for an honorable marriage over the shame of a dishonorable pregnancy, or worse yet, a killer disease. His actions revealed desire for a solid definition of decency in a world of rapidly changing social and sexual mores.
Hope’s older sister introduced her to the man who would become her husband. He was about fifteen years her senior and already established as a relatively successful tractor-trailer driver who shipped goods around for many of the important local politicians and businessmen.
“I don’t know him before I went to his place,” Hope made clear to me, meaning that she had not had sex with her husband. “I said, ‘OK, you know that I’m still a small girl, quite all right, and you, you’re older than me.’ I asked him, ‘Why did you decided to marry a small girl like this?’ He say, it’s how he decided. All those grown-up girls, he don’t like the person that he will brought in. The person may not respect him. He will want to start from the smallest so that the small girl may respect him and he will teach that girl. It’s just he wanted to brush the person up by hisself.”
“You weren’t afraid?” I asked.
“I was not afraid. How can I be afraid?”
She looked at me directly for the first time. Her eyes were clear and bright, even in the dimness, her face rough with something approaching indignation.
“No. I was not afraid, ‘cause I go in to pray. After introduction, then he pay my bride price—-just twenty thousand naira as of that 1993.” She paused to emphasize the absurdity of inflation. In 1993 twenty thousand naira was almost a thousand dollars. Today the same sum is less than one hundred and fifty dollars.
“He now do my traditional wedding. Ah!” She rocked back and forth for a moment, her mind and body caught up in the music and celebration of so long ago. “They danced now! We called Band Eze. We invite them there. Another person, a singer, from Owerri—I do forget his name—we invite him too. It was very tough! I was happy! He pulled crowd. Even commissioners, they were there. The PDP [People’s Democratic Party] chairman in this state, all of them are there.”
She was smiling now and even clapped her hands when remembering the music they had played that day, almost fifteen years earlier. For a moment, I could see the woman she might have been before, excited, voluble, full of emotion that showed in her wide smile.
Hope’s two children were born in quick succession after her marriage and life settled into a pattern of relative comfort and prosperity as her husband’s business thrived, but it seemed that he was seldom around. Such are the lives of interstate truck drivers. Some years later, in 2001, probably after her husband had saved a good chunk of money, they decided to have what Nigerians call the white wedding. In Nigeria the traditional wedding is considered the most important ceremony. As my mother says, you can get married in as many churches as you want, but unless you have your traditional ceremony, no one will respect your union. If finances are tight, most people will do their traditional wedding first, and later, sometimes years later, when they find the money, they perform the white wedding.
“I wedded in January 2001. Then we discovered this thing September 2001,” she explained. “At the moment they find that thing out, he was not happy. He said, ‘Hai! What will I do?’ I said, ‘There’s no problem. I’m your wife.’ The moment he found out, the man, he got confused. If you’re advising him, just relax, that the thing has never started—-just relax—they just find it out, he said, ‘No! A man like me, a popular person!’ Because he do deal with big-big men. He say he won’t stay watching himself let people know that he has this problem. It’s better that he die. It’s better he just die,” she said softly. It was hard not to detect a hint of resentment in her appraisal of her late husband’s behavior—as if his conduct was somehow unbecoming of a man of his status.
“Likewise, my own, I discover it by the year 2001, December. After they tested him, he said I should go, and I tested positive. When I discover it, I thought that my own has finished, but later, later on I could withstand it. First of all, I went to my pastor and say, ‘Pastor! What is going on?’ He say, ‘Relax. Everything depends on God. With God, all things are possible,’” she said, again lost in those past moments, speaking quickly as if to get through the worst parts of a bad situation.
Their lives transformed from the usual work, children, and church to a new norm of seeking treatments and hiding their conditions. “Somebody directed me and my husband to Abuja,” she said. “We went to a doctor there who promise is that he’s going to do everything, that everything will be settled, that he can take care of that. We continue giving him money every time. Any trip—we were going there every month—we would go with one hundred and fifty thousand naira* We started taking some root, something medicine. We take it over a year and there’s no way, no improvement. Instead of improvement it would be going worst.”
“Did your relationship with your husband change?” I asked. “Were you angry with him?”
“I wasn’t harsh on him. I know that something may occur and let God give us a solution. No other thing. He was the one that worried himself, but I was not angry with him. I know that he didn’t do me anything wrong.
“I used to advise him that he should take everything easy. He was thinking, thinking. Later-later, he just developed high blood pressure. I was feeling strong. He was still feeling strong. I feel like nothing is happening to him, no fever, no headache, but he say, ‘How can a somebody like me be included in such a thing?’ That he won’t allow such a thing to happen. He said, ‘The day the thing will occur on my body and people will just be watching me like this?’” She shook her head and looked away from me. “My husband, he stay just one year before he finally give up. Maybe he took something. I thought that he take something, because he was very healthy. He was very healthy. That’s why I say he took something.” She closed the album and replaced it beneath the table.
“So as I am now,” she said after a long pause, “I’m not feeling any pains. The only thing that I do is to take my drugs. I started taking drugs two years ago. Two years ago, I force myself to take drugs. I just want it like that, because I feel that if I’m not taking the drugs, along the line I will break down or something like that. I take ARV. I’m living healthy. I watch the kind of food I eat. I place myself on vegetables, fruits, all these local-local foods—dry fish, crayfish. I just press myself on it. Then every month, I make sure I take malaria drugs. I deworm myself. If I stay something like three months, I will went to test and check my CD4 count. That’s how I used to do.”
She stretched and yawned, suddenly so casual, so ordinary.
Such is a reality of HIV/AIDS. It is an immensely transformative process that can dramatically change a life or lives—from prosperity to poverty, from popularity to a marginalized existence near the edge of a city. Yet the reality is that even with HIV, life can go on, and in the most boring of fashions. There may be a new normal to which one must adjust, but if that adjustment can be made, then chores must be completed, money must be earned, children must be cared for. There is nothing sexy or dramatic about a life lived normally. When considering HIV/AIDS, people want to see a dramatic change. They want to feel that they have rescued someone from the verge of death, but the reality of dealing with HIV/AIDS is as Rolake suggested, that effort should be put into making sure people maintain their level of existence. People from Nigeria and abroad don’t want to hear that their donations and aid work are going to support another person’s ability to do the things we all have to do, but this should be our goal in the struggle with HIV/AIDS: to mitigate its impact so that lives become livable again.
“The only thing I know is that as I am now, I’m not going to die because of this problem,” Hope said to me shortly before we parted ways. “I know that this problem will not kill me. As of now,” she said, “I find it like malaria. When malaria comes to you, you go to hospital and take drugs; it will stop. Instead of me to have cancer or diabetes, it is better I will be into this problem because it doesn’t disturb me. Nothing. This is just like ordinary sickness.”