Nigerians are not known as a quiet people. “In the beginning,” writes the Nigerian essayist Peter Enahoro, “God created the universe; then He created the moon, the stars and the wild beasts of the forests. On the sixth day, He created the Nigerian and there was peace. But on the seventh day while God rested, the Nigerian invented noise.” Ours is a noisy country, so loud sometimes that, even in rural areas, it can be difficult to hear your own thoughts above the constant commotion of Nigerian life. At all times, somewhere someone is offering greetings, arguing, partying. The streets of our cities and the dirt roads of our small towns teem with a million conversations held over the background noise of music blasting from car speakers or twanging out from tiny handheld radios, as well as the nearly constant rattle and rumble of ubiquitous standby generators. We are opinionated, and we are loud even when wrong. We protest and we riot. We do not shy away from controversy. And perhaps because we are rooted in an oral culture, we revel in the sounds of our own voices: introductory remarks take up volumes; toasts leave raised arms trembling; speeches, if they ever end, never end before the speaker’s time is up. But for all the talking we do, until relatively recently, we have been noticeably silent on the subject of HIV/ AIDS.
If the current HIV/AIDS epidemic has a characteristic that sets it apart from other epidemics, it is that this is the only mass outbreak of disease that has happened quietly. In fact, so quietly did it spread that for the first twenty years of the epidemic, as a society we had to question whether HIV/AIDS was actually real. This is changing. Recently there has been more of a collective acknowledgment that HIV/AIDS is very real. It is now a term that everybody knows something about, and this is reshaping the way we behave toward the virus and people who have it. Speaking more openly about the disease, while not a solution to the epidemic in and of itself, is an important first step.
This is a disease that thrives on silence. The virus is a quiet pathogen without any specific disease markers that make it easily differentiable from other illnesses. It usually displays symptoms that announce its presence only at the very end of an infected person’s life. Those who have it and those who have recently contracted it don’t necessarily know they have it unless they specifically ask. Those who do know they have it are often quiet about their status because of stigma and discrimination.
In Nigeria, the most prominent person to die of HIV/AIDS was the popular Afro-beat musician Fela Kuti, whom I mentioned earlier. Fela was one of the country’s most flamboyant entertainers and loudest activists, a perpetual voice of protest and a constant thorn in the side of Nigeria’s ruling elite. He often performed his songs of social commentary and protest shirtless, sometimes in nothing more than a pair of skimpy briefs. The author of songs like “Shuffering and Shmiling,” which chronicled the indignities of everyday working-class Nigerian life, or “Zombie,” which articulated many a Nigerian’s disgust with a succession of oppressive military regimes, Fela came as close as possible to representing what one might call the voice of the people in a chaotically pluralistic country like Nigeria. He also lived what has been called a “safe-sex educator’s nightmare,” swearing off condoms and maintaining a rotating system of twelve wives after initially marrying twenty-seven women in one ceremony. Despite his brother’s role as minister of health during the 1980s and the architect of Nigeria’s initial response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Fela refused to believe that he had the condition, let alone to speak out about its presence and impact on Nigerian life. Some have criticized him for this position, given his stature and great influence. In 1997, he died from Kaposi’s sarcoma—an AIDS-related cancer—and through his death probably did more to galvanize a fledgling HIV/AIDS movement in the country than he ever could have while alive. The announcement by his brother, Dr. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, that Fela had died from AIDS was the first time many Nigerians had ever heard of the disease, despite its long existence in the country.
“When my father was diagnosed with HIV/ AIDS, we couldn’t understand,” Fela’s son, the world-renowned Afro-beat star Femi Kuti, said to me when I met him at his New Africa Shrine in Lagos. The shrine was built on a concept similar to his father’s earlier Kalakuta Republic. The Shrine, as it is simply and commonly known, is a concert hall with living space and offices in the back, in the heart of the Ikeja section of Lagos. It is open to all regardless of status. More than anything else, the New Africa Shrine resembles a large open-air warehouse with a stage at one end, a bar at the other, and plastic tables and chairs haphazardly arranged on the concrete space in between.
When I spoke with Femi Kuti, the air was heavy with the smell of marijuana and music pulsed from large speakers near the stage. I sat with Femi on a balcony overlooking the scene below. He held a shining brass saxophone in his lap and fingered the keys as he spoke. It was somewhat disconcerting to sit across from him because he bears an uncanny resemblance to his father: the same high cheekbones, skeptical eyes, and semipermanent frown.
“We didn’t understand what they were talking about,” he said. He was surprisingly soft-spoken for a man with such a large stage presence. “His case was the first case that was publicly told. Nobody understood what they were talking about. Our generation could not understand that because of sex you will die today. If the brother [Olikoye] who was minister of health could not convince his own brother [Fela] that HIV was real, then …” Femi laughed somewhat bitterly instead of finishing his sentence. “There were hardly any cases. The only case that was in the paper was my father. A lot of people were dying, but they were lying it was malaria or typhoid. Nobody told the truth. Nobody still tells the truth. It’s still even a big taboo. Even worldwide, it’s still a big taboo. It’s not a subject that anybody really wants to talk about.”
But the announcement that Fela’s death resulted from HIV/AIDS cracked the silence in Nigeria and reverberated across the continent. Even if it did not immediately convince everybody that the disease was real or provide a deeper understanding of the epidemic, it allowed conversation to happen. People sat up. People started talking. A number of prominent activist organizations, such as Journalists Against AIDS, were founded at this moment to encourage more conversation about HIV/AIDS.
Death can advance quietly only so far before it inspires speech. The conversation develops slowly, beginning as an intense private reckoning that a person affected (not necessarily infected) by HIV has with himself or herself, before emerging in the public sphere.
For Samaila, the northern Nigerian HIV/AIDS activist and former policeman, the conversation started when his wife was hospitalized with end-stage AIDS. It was the same time he discovered that he too was HIV positive. “Saddiq, my oldest child, got to know when she was still in the hospital. Two weeks’ stay is a very long time,” he told me. “Saddiq’s school was near the hospital, so he could come after school, still in his uniform. My daughter was too young. She couldn’t comprehend. During that time, it was very hard for me and hard for them too, but it was then that I told him what was wrong with his mother. We were at home, in the house, sitting on the bed, when he asked me, ‘Is my mother going to die?’ I said, ‘She may die.’ Saddiq was around eleven or twelve when I found out I was HIV positive. He asked, ‘Will you die too? Are you also going to die then, Daddy?’ I had to tell him the truth. I said, ‘I may die.’” He fell silent and crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course, at that time, I did not have the information I have now,” he said, emerging from his recollections. “I thought God will take care of everything. If bad, it is the will of God. If good, it is also the will of God. I kept asking myself, ‘What will happen to my children? What will become of them?’ I grew to love them even more because I knew I would leave them. We would watch the television, walk around the countryside, sit on a stone and talk, explore their interests. But I kept asking myself, ‘What will I do? How will I look for a cure?’”
He opened his palms to me and let them rest on his lap.
“I also decided to educate myself about HIV. I was reading a lot about HIV/AIDS. Anything I laid hands on about HIV/AIDS, I read. It was from the papers that I realized the federal government had planned to treat ten thousand people in the country. Also in the papers, I got to know about three people who were campaigning actively. Two of these people were also HIV positive like me, and their names always came out in the papers. After my retirement had been approved, I went to Lagos to claim my benefits. I took that opportunity to see those people. I went to see those people through an organization called Journalists Against AIDS. I followed an address that I got from the newspaper, and I went to their office. They asked me to go back to where I was staying and start a support group for people living with AIDS, so that when the drugs come, it will be easy for them to get the required number.
“So I decided that certainly if I’ve got this information, I have to impart this information to other people. I started giving people information about HIV/AIDS, the stigma, drugs, positive living, and things like that within the communities in which I work—the Hausa Muslim communities of northern Nigeria. It was an uphill task getting to know other people who were HIV positive. People refused to come out. But by the end of the day, I was able to get ten, and then we started a support group. I went on television in my locality. I tried to organize workshops. Some of us took the bull by the horns and, as I said before, decided to come out public with our status and maybe in that way galvanize some sort of response from the government, philanthropists, and donors who could come to our aid. If we hid and the virus was not seen, if we didn’t give a face to the virus, certainly there wouldn’t be anything done on our behalf. And so some of us, including me, my humble self, decided to come out with our status.”
After speaking with a number of people who have gone public with their HIV status, I realized that Samaila’s movement from internal contemplation to public disclosure is one that many people experience in their own ways. That moment of first disclosure brings an internal wrangling with the idea that HIV causes death and will cause one’s own death, which after time can grow into a desire to understand whether this new force in life, HIV/AIDS, actually means life’s end. This process usually occurs simultaneously with the heavy task of speaking of one’s condition to family, friends, and loved ones, knowing that disclosure can have a profound emotional effect on the people who have been informed. Finally comes the realization that your story is a powerful tool if used publicly and communicated properly. But public communication is difficult for all who choose to engage in that conversation. It requires navigating the tension between the powerful negative messages about HIV/AIDS that already exist and the desire to spread new messages that humanize the epidemic.
Journalists Against AIDS has been a major force in shaping public discussion about HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. The group was founded shortly after Fela Kuti’s death by the late Omololu Falobi, the former features editor at the popular Nigerian newspaper Punch. Its initial mission was to use journalism as a means for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS, but it has since grown into a major advocacy and capacity-building organization with programs that provide economic opportunities for people living with HIV/AIDS. At the group’s headquarters in a house on a quiet side street in the Ogba area of Lagos, I met with a program officer named Jessam Nwaigbo, whose work focuses on evaluating media reporting on HIV/AIDS.
“For me, I pick up a newspaper and I see ‘deadly scourge’—some say ‘dreaded disease,’ ‘an AIDS victim languishing’ or ‘lamenting’—it gives me a very negative sense, and I might not want to read that further. Some say when writing about HIV, they use the scary red. We all know that the color red is danger. When it comes to HIV, you now use red and bold; so you’re rather scaring me than passing off any useful information.”
She took a moment to secure behind her ears her black and blond braids, which had come loose as she gestured passionately while she spoke. Every so often while emphasizing a point, she placed a palm on her heart, covering the silver design of her T-shirt.
“The people we are communicating with, they are a very large audience. You may not know who is picking up that magazine today. We are the third highest in terms of burden,” she said, referring to the fact that Nigeria has the third largest population of HIV-positive people in the world. “A lot of people will be reading that newspaper. Your terms are not friendly. You would rather be reporting scary messages that will be scaring your audience rather than bring them forward to know their status. If they are reading issues that are so stigmatizing, they will say ‘Of what use I should know my status when I know that I am going to die,’ or ‘I don’t have hope. There is nothing hopeful for me in this life.’ We’re not saying you should not say the truth, but people who have HIV—they are not victims. I hardly fall ill. I can stay throughout the year without falling ill. So how am I a victim? Do I run to you begging you for money or help? Did you rush me to the hospital or something? It’s not a very friendly language. So we train the media on how to communicate this issue without using terminology that may be offensive.”
Jessam’s choice of work was the direct result of the negative conversation and messaging that she encountered when she first discovered her positive status in 2004. She heard people speaking about HIV/AIDS in her church, in the media. There was no question that the illness existed, but the level of judgment and stigmatization bothered her, as did the use of discussion about it as a tool to enforce existent moral norms. Her involvement with Journalists Against AIDS was a way of both renewing her commitment to life and reshaping the conversation that she heard happening around her.
“I wanted to do the work because I didn’t want other people to pass through what I went through, both the psychological, the physical trauma, the emotional pain,” she said as we sat in the darkened office conference room. The blinds were pulled shut over the window to block out the intense sun and keep the room cool. “I have been in that position where I thought probably dying should be the best option for me. And I overcame it, and I’ve met people in the course of my work who are saying, ‘Ah, Jessie, do you think I can live? Do you think anything good can come of me? Don’t you think I’m going to die tomorrow?’ And I’m telling them, ‘Is it a dead person who is talking to you? I am positive.’ And they say, Are you sure, are you sure they did not give you money to stand in front of us? How can you be positive and you’re looking good?’ It’s something that you ought to give back to society. Because I was given, I have to give back. I never can tell who is listening to me and will make a U-turn like I did. Real-life experiences goes a long way to combat the spread of HIV and mitigate the impact of AIDS.”
“Real life” in the conversation about HIV/AIDS need not be limited to the experiences and stories of people living with the disease. It can also mean pulling the disease from the realm of idea, where it exists for most people, and molding it into language and a form to which people can relate. In Nigeria, broad-based social marketing done by NGOs like the Abuja-based Society for Family Health plays a large role in bringing the conversation about HIV/AIDS to the people through radio announcements in native tongues or pidgin English and posters that can be found in nearly every health center around the country. But even they would admit that such efforts are not nearly as effective in generating discussion and awareness as locally produced events and peer-to-peer interactions.
In May 2007, I flew from Abuja to Owerri in southeastern Nigeria to visit Felix, an HIV/AIDS program coordinator and activist I had met earlier that year at the national stakeholders conference in Abuja. He had already introduced me to Hope, one of the clients of his program, but this time my visit was to attend an AIDS Awareness Day program he had organized in his village just outside the city. He picked me up from the airport in a burgundy Toyota Corolla, its speakers blasting a man’s falsetto voice crooning “You Give Me Fever.”
When you meet Felix, you realize that everything about him is dramatic. His whole person seems carefully produced for maximum impact on whomever or whatever he meets. He has intense brown eyes that lock onto people and hold them captive. His deep voice, depending on his point, either rumbles into a heavy laugh or pinches into a brief squeak of concern. But it is his body language that is most convincing, his constantly moving hands in fists or palms as he speaks, his head cocked ever so quickly to the side, his brow furrowed when he makes a point that he wants you to find important. Felix had wanted to study acting in college, but his parents had pressured him to drop it. Acting is not generally considered a respectable profession in Nigeria, especially not for a first son and future family head. He ended up taking a degree in management technology. After graduating he worked a number of jobs, first producing documentaries for a rural branch of the national television authority, then working on a freight ship that hauled goods between West African port cities, and finally supervising the transportation of construction materials between cities in Nigeria. A run-in with armed robbers while on a job transporting rebar to Lagos led him to give up the trucker’s life and focus on building a career in his hometown. That’s how he came to work on youth programs and HIV/AIDS education.
He slowed after we passed through a four-way intersection with tall green grass growing at each of its corners. We slipped around a corner and pulled into an impromptu driveway created by tire tracks that had compacted the soft grass into the red mud and hardscrabble weeds. A large bungalow sat at the end of the path. Felix’s father had started construction on the house but died before it was finished. Felix had scrimped and saved to complete it. His family didn’t live there; they stayed in his apartment in town, but he kept the place because it gave him a presence in the village. I helped Felix drag an old diesel generator from a storeroom out onto the front porch. From there we carried it across the grass and loaded it into the car, which creaked and groaned under the weight.
Felix’s village was like many others in the area. There was a paved street with low houses on either side, some behind concrete walls spiked with broken glass, the corrugated tin roofs just peeking over the wall’s sparkling edge. Others were exposed, their front doors open and coughing out the young and old alike to sit in the hot sun, or swallowing them as they took respite from the heat. Off the paved street were dirt roads and paths people had trampled through the grass or bush. Villagers wearing colorful traditional fabrics walked home from church or from home to visit friends and relatives. All seemed unaware of the program Felix had created for them. In fact, the whole village appeared rather unconcerned with issues of HIV and AIDS until we rounded a bend in the road and found a chaotic mass of teenagers milling about by the roadside seemingly without agenda, some with laughter on their lips, others with more serious faces, fully aware of this particular day’s importance. A group of older girls, dressed identically in black skirts and tight white tops, tried desperately to arrange young men and women into orderly lines across the soft eroded red earth and in front of a low bungalow that served as a village meeting place. The building was much used but well cared for; it had a fresh yellow coat of paint. Little children dangled their feet from the low concrete walls of the veranda as they watched the teenagers—their older siblings, cousins, maybe even aunts and uncles—prepare for the production.
When Felix finally pulled his car to a stop just beyond the throng, a mighty shout rose up, as if a great hero had arrived. Felix slipped into his role, moving from group to group, offering greetings, teasing and cracking jokes with kids, whose smiles widened and eyes brightened in his presence. He was electric, inspiring and controlling at the same time. Within moments of his arrival, lines formed with the loose regimentation of people unused to order. They unfurled a white banner with red, blue, and green lettering that encouraged the community to FIGHT AIDS! A song erupted, led by a young woman; her tight yellow shirt carried the slogan ZIP UP! It was a flirtatious appeal to abstinence.
“We are the world. We are its children,” she sang. “We are the ones to make a better place, so let’s fight AIDS now. We march in unity. Fighting H-I-V AIDS. We are the ones to make a brighter day, just you and me.” The group behind her followed along in disorganized, democratic harmony.
From nowhere a young man appeared in the middle of the road, arm raised to his forehead in frozen salute. He wore a white cloth around his waist. The rest of his body was painted white from head to toe, and he wore black wraparound sunglasses. The word AIDS was painted in green across his chest, and when, after a long pause, he finally turned around, I saw that slogan found in so many social marketing campaigns—AIDS IS REAL—dripping down his back in the same green paint. He began a slow comical imitation of a soldier’s march down a small stretch of road. The first regiment of youths followed him closely, holding candles in their hands with flickering flames that, in broad daylight, were almost invisible. The village road filled with young bodies, and the air grew heavy with a feverish call: “Fight fight fight AIDS!” The shrill voices of young women came to the point of cracking at the last minute, bolstered by young men’s deep and rumbling call to arms: “Fight fight fight AIDS!” Together they sang, “Today, today, tomorrow no more! If we fight AIDS today we go fight am no more!” They clapped, stomped, and ululated.
The whole group blobbed from one side of the road to the other as curious drivers slowed to observe the commotion. I wasn’t sure if the younger marchers in the procession, the ten-year-olds, understood exactly why they were marching, but they seemed overjoyed to be a part of something larger than themselves. They weaved among older kids, who seemed equally thrilled by the moment. Today they could speak so freely about something so taboo. As the group proceeded down the village road, the noise they generated called people from their houses to porches and front steps. A man appeared in his doorway in green slacks and an undershirt, his eyes dull with sleep. His two young daughters stood beside him in white dresses and head ties, all three captivated by the shouting, singing youth. After a moment, he smiled, clapped his hands, and shouted words of encouragement. All along the road, this scene repeated itself. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends: they appeared at windows and on front lawns, on porches or in the cars sliding by, and they cheered, they clapped, they honked. I looked for Felix. He cautiously navigated the open gutter’s edge by the side of the road as he tried to provide subtle direction while letting the youths lead the way. His shirt clung to his body in places where the heat and humidity made him sweat.
“This is amazing!” I said to Felix when I managed to work my way through the mass of people over to him.
“My brother, eh!” was his only reply. He turned to face a car approaching the group and waved to the driver to slow down. “Have you seen this? Believe me. Young people are looking for something to say. They are looking for people to come out and lead them. They know that these problems are here, and they are looking for somebody that will come out and tell them, ‘Let’s start doing something to fight this problem.’ This is creating a lot of awareness in the community. People who have seen are going to be touched by this. Young people who have been affected by HIV and AIDS are the people carrying out this message. Young people will learn from each other, and they will say, ‘Who am I when my mates are actually on the road shouting anti-HIV/AIDS songs? Why wouldn’t I join them?’ And before you know it, behavior change starts to set in, gradually gradually.”
Earlier, on the drive from the airport when he had first picked me up, Felix had said, “Young people tend to do things they hear from their mates. I’m a peer-education trainer for UNICEF, and when I go for peer-education training programs, I use myself as an example. I tell them they are very lucky, because all things I learned about sexuality, I learned on my own. My father never talked to me about it. My mother never talked to me about it. The real experience was when I visited a brothel. I had an inquisitive mind. I wanted to know exactly what it was like, because every day on my way to school, I would always pass through that brothel area, and you see young girls, you see guys drinking beer as early as seven thirty to eight in the morning. I was seeing people smoking, drinking—very rough faces—and I thought it was one wonderful thing. That first time I went, I felt like I was into something the big boys do. When I came out, I regretted the whole move. You know, sex is one thing; the excitement is that when you haven’t done it, you haven’t done it. There is vagina; you want to put your penis in it and know you’re doing it. But by the time you know, you come, and you’re like, ‘Is this all? Is this all?’ And you’re paying money!
“I got gonorrhea and I didn’t like it. When I was having pains, I didn’t even go to my father. I didn’t go to my mum. I went to my schoolmates. I went and talked to a young guy that was actually in my class. The guy was like, ‘Don’t worry! It’s a very small thing!’ He told me I should go and buy schnapps, kai-kai [a local moonshine], and drink a bottle of Coke filled up with kai-kai. I believed him. I took it, and it didn’t stop. But where we were living, there was a pharmacist, and I went to him and said, ‘Look. This is what is up.’ The guy gave me an injection, and it stopped.”
He smiled sheepishly and added, “So the concept of peer education actually comes from the fact that young people tend to influence each other more.”
It’s not a new concept. Popular culture, progressive attitudes, and new ideas around the world are usually generated by and promoted through the conversations and interactions of younger people. This often requires speaking loudly about precisely the things that make an older generation uncomfortable. Especially in Nigeria, youth voices often smash right into the stubborn will of the gerontocracy. Elders in our societies are treasured not only as people but also as textbooks of history, philosophy, ethics, and practical matters. Their life experience and their wisdom are the experience and wisdom of the whole community; therefore, they can readily, and in some cases justly, respond to agitating youth with the question “What do you know?” But a primary reason the HIV/AIDS epidemic exploded in Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is an unwillingness to seriously discuss issues that clearly affect youth. In many places around the world, the talk and action on HIV/AIDS and related issues, such as safe sex or treatment, have been driven by youth movements eager to bring attention to and find solutions for their concerns. The feedback, even if contentious or slow, often produces positive results.
When I asked Felix what the older people in the community would think about the day’s events, he responded, “They are very happy about it. You’re going to see them at the hall. They are all watching. They know that these problems are here, but they don’t know how to tackle it. That’s the problem. You see, when young people begin to do things themselves, the older people now come in. I have been able to sample their opinion, and I know that they are very much interested here. They like what is happening.”
Indeed, when the youth march returned, the newly painted hall was filled with adults, who sat in the dimness fanning themselves. They were either unaware of or chose not to comment on the fact that the balloons dangling from the ceiling above them were actually inflated condoms. As each marcher entered the meeting hall, he or she dripped a bit of wax onto a concrete platform a single step off the ground, which served as a stage, then fixed his or her candle to the ground to the right of the platform until they had formed a large blazing AIDS ribbon. Then once reassembled onstage, they broke into religious praise songs. Even the elders clapped and lent their voices.
Suddenly a young man with a black Kangol cap turned backward and stepped toward the audience as the chorus behind him hushed down to a resonating hum. With an exaggerated strut, he approached a girl standing in the corner with close-cropped hair and prominent dimples on her nervous, smiling face. He peacocked around her, made sweet overtures, and stroked her cheeks, but she offered a forceful resistance. The audience chuckled knowingly as they gave the couple their full attention.
“I no want die. I no want catch AIDS!” the girl said loudly. “So make we wait until marriage or use condom.”
The audience clapped while mm-hmm-ing and aha-ing at this message of responsibility appended to a plea for abstinence. Abstinence is, after all, the best way to prevent the spread of HIV and certainly an appreciated message in so religious a country as Nigeria. The skit also highlighted the complexities of messaging in communities that extol traditional values. In order to be effective, the conversation can push the limits only so far. As a messaging expert from the Society for Family Health explained to me, Nigerians are easily offended. As a country and within our separate cultural groups, we are still not ready to have explicit discussions about sex, as is done in the West. This is slowly changing, however, as new technologies allow a younger population access to a wider range of experiences and attitudes as well as more direct ways of communicating with one another.
In the darkness outside, thunder rumbled in the distance when the keynote speaker finally took the stage. He was a slight man with light brown skin, a pencil-thin mustache above his upper lip, and sweat soaking his clothes from the exertion of clapping and shouting in affirmation. His forehead was a glistening arc in the hall’s dim light. For a moment before he spoke, the room was completely still. The chorus had stopped humming and stood silently behind him, next to the flickering candle AIDS ribbon. He wasn’t from the village, and no one had seen him before. The way his white garment caught the candlelight, how his face shone, and the intensity of his gaze in that sliver of a moment before he opened his mouth made me feel that I had stumbled into a séance. In a sense, he was a seer because he was HIV positive, he said. The room hushed because none of us had known. You would never have been able to tell by looking at him.
“AIDS!” he shouted. “AIDS! Am I Doing Something? AIDS means ask yourself, Am I Doing Something?’”
Nigerians have a talent for inventing alternative meanings for acronyms. NEPA, the old Nigerian Electric Power Association, quickly became Never Expect Power Again and when renamed the Power Holding Corporation of Nigeria (PHCN) was popularly called Problem Has Changed Name. Despite the heat and the late hour, which had drawn the sound of tree frogs and crickets from the surrounding foliage, the audience perked up. “Am I doing something? Should I be doing something?” their newfound attention asked. “What can I do?”
The speaker stalked back and forth from one side of the stage to the other, fluidly switching between English and Igbo, tossing long strings of one language out to the audience along an accusatory finger and then punctuating them with short syllables from another, his “Yes oh!” and “Enh enh” mirrored in stereo sound by the villagers in front and the youthful chorus behind.
“AIDS. Am I Doing Something?” the speaker asked again.
“Am I Doing Something!” the audience responded for the last time before the speaker released them, putting an end to the night. The villagers filed away into the night, chattering about what they had just seen and experienced.
Felix and I hung around after the last of the villagers had departed. I helped him take down the balloons.
“I didn’t actually know they were condoms,” he said, laughing. “Can you imagine these youths?”
We finished by scraping the expended wax bits from the candlelight ribbon off the floor. Outside it was raining heavily. We stood at the door, watching the large drops batter the car windows and turn the red earth into a shifting mass.
I asked Felix what it means to “do something,” and he said, “I often tell people, ‘You know, you don’t really need money to do the little things that you think are not really making some impact in people’s lives.’ But by the time you now do it a hundred times, two hundred times, and you put them together …” He trailed off. “All I know is that I’m actually doing this thing with my whole heart. I like what I’m doing. It’s giving me joy. The little money that is going into my pocket, I am satisfied with. My salary is five thousand naira. There’s a lot of my mates that are going home with one hundred thousand naira, working in better places. There’s a lot of my mates that work for one business or another making their millions, but I think this is what my heart appreciates. I have a calling. Maybe I could say that this is a calling because I think my mind, my whole spirit, is appeased with what I’m doing. I feel I am impacting on somebody’s life. I feel I am doing good. I’m in love with it.”
“You’re in love?” I was taken by his choice of words and the passion in his delivery, his insistence. His face was something different at that moment, his eyes wide, nostrils flared, his lips a thin, thoughtful line.
“Yes! You know when you are in love with a woman, you can actually do everything for that woman. You give the woman your time. You give the woman your life. You are patient. When you are in love with a woman, you will always want to do everything for the person. That is the way it is with me.”
“Do you think programs like this actually change things?” I asked.
“I’m very hopeful,” Felix said after some time. “I believe that the prevalence of it [HIV/AIDS] will still have to come down, but that will be dependent on the level we are taking this work to. We need to get more committed to this work. It has to go beyond rhetoric, just talking about it because you ‘feel.’ People have to be committed to it. People have to start realizing that local action, involving the community members, is what will really work. That’s the only way it can be sustained. For people to really modify their behavior, you need to keep bombarding them with the same information, and as long as this information is coming from members of the same community, it makes a whole lot of sense.”
The more we Nigerians—indeed, everyone in the world—speak about the disease, the more it weaves its way into everyday life. It begins to exist not just as a topic of discussion planted by public health officials and activists, but also as a genuine driver of and topic in our cultural expression. It appears in the films we watch, in the art we produce, and in the music we make.
For Femi Kuti, that HIV/AIDS should find its way into his music and artistic expression was part of a natural evolution. I first saw him perform live at a Boston nightclub in 2001, on my nineteenth birthday. Watching him perform with his Positive Force band and dancers is an amazing experience. His set that night was intense, fast paced, with frenetic drums beating the polyrhythms characteristic of Afro-beat and aggressive horns complementing his saxophone and singing. It was impossible to remain still. His music filled you up and made your body twitch and gyrate. It made you sweat—especially his song “Stop AIDS”—and only afterward did you realize what you had just been listening to.
With music designed to move your body in a way that suggests sex and lyrics designed to move your mind by expressing the fear, confusion, and hope associated with that activity in a world with HIV/AIDS, the song seeps into your consciousness in a way that direct messaging never could.
When I spoke with Femi about the song almost ten years later at his Shrine, he said, “Every night, even to now, I always make sure I play that number. The thing about music is you know that sometimes you don’t have to say anything. You just give it a title. Just give it a title like ‘Stop AIDS.’ Even if I didn’t sing any lyrics, just because of the music, everybody would know that it’s about AIDS. It becomes a slang.”
“So do you consider yourself an activist?” I asked him.
“Why are you calling me an activist?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. If you are concerned about mankind, they say you are a humanitarian. These are just stupid titles people give themselves because they want to be important. ‘Oh, I’m a humanitarian. Oh, I’m an activist.’ If you pick up a gun, you become a rebel or a terrorist. We just like titles. I just did or do what I felt I should do. I don’t think I’m an activist. I’m just human.”
HIV/AIDS is part of the human experience, part of our cultural experience. AIDS is everywhere. The last time I flew out of the Lagos airport, a friend and I noticed a poster hanging on a wall near the security checkpoint. In bright red letters, it read AIDS! NOW THAT WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, HAVE A SAFE FLIGHT AND REMEMBER, PLAY SAFE. It was an interesting display—all the more so because of its total irreverence. The conversation is developing slowly and organically—sometimes in the wrong direction—but always in the direction of more noise. The more noise we make about it, the more real HIV/AIDS becomes. The more real AIDS becomes, the more we consider it an aspect of our existence that we can engage with rather than an evil to run away from. That is the first step in treating the epidemic.