MALARIA KILLS US, BUT AIDS MAKES US EQUAL
The East African (Nairobi) Nairobi - Last month's summit on malaria in Abuja, Nigeria, came as a pleasant surprise. The malaria toll in Africa is staggering. Last year, more than 500 million cases of acute malaria were reported, five times more than all cases of tuberculosis, Aids, measles and leprosy combined. Malaria is responsible for one in every four childhood deaths in Africa! Yet the disease remains unfashionable. It was knocked off the top of the charts by Aids. The show at Abuja told us as much; there were no colourful demonstrations by troupes of fellows with dreadlocks, multiple rings in their noses, tie and dye dresses and leather sandals demanding that governments spend more on fighting malaria, as would have been the case if the Nigerian summit was on Aids. Aids has hogged the headlines partly because it is a very "democratic" disease. Unlike other diseases, at least in Africa, it has no respect for class. It kills peasant and bourgeois, rich and poor alike. The continent's privileged elites had become used to ignoring the afflictions of the masses, like malaria. Aids put their lives on the line too. Outside of soccer in Uganda, no other cause has been able to bring such a broad range of classes together as Aids. It gets better. There is no other disease, unless you consider troubled marriages and broken hearts to be illness, which has allowed so many ordinary folks to become stars. In 1989, the most sought after woman in Kampala was Noerine Kaleba. Her husband died of Aids, and she decided to live positively and teach us what that means and to care for Aids patients, at a time when some people wouldn't sit in the same room with someone suffering from the disease. Kaleba has since gone on to bigger things in international anti-Aids work. She has left us The Aids Support Organisation (Taso), a prestigious country- wide non-governmental organisation which over the years has won more international prizes and awards for its work than it can remember. Yet Kaleba isn't even a doctor. Then there was the singer and trumpeter Philly Bongoley Lutaaya. His battle against Aids is told in the film "Born in Africa." He helped break the main taboos around Aids, and got young people to listen up like they had never done. The night "Born in Africa" was first televised on Uganda Television, sometime in 1990, you could hear a pin drop in Kampala. We all locked ourselves in our houses and wept before the TV screens. Then, of course, there is the vast army of quacks who have made money feeding people soil from anthills, lizards' tails mixed with flour, name it, promising they were miracle cures for Aids. While the progress Uganda has made against Aids is impressive, I suspect it has been oversold. But if US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary think we are the most successful example in the Third World, why spoil the party? Today's equivalent of Kaleba and Lutaaya is an amiable army officer, Maj Rubrema Ruranga. He is living testimony of how far we have come. His vocation is teaching people that you can't know who is HIV-positive by looking at them. Maj Ruranga dresses sharply, has a wonderful sense of humour, a little money, and a glossy prosperous looking skin. He usually teases his female audience thus, "If I came up to you, looking as good as I do, and I flash you my smile, would you think I was HIV positive?" "No", they roar back. "How many of you would date me, then?" he asks. "All of us," they shout. "So be careful, my friends," he says. Ruranga however doesn't have the cult status of Lutaaya. Typically, some Ugandans are jealous that he's having the best of two worlds -- a star who's not openly suffering the pain that Lutaaya did. Still, Maj Ruranga can any day drum up a far bigger crowd than anyone talking about boring old malaria.
 TORONTO
tel/fax:(416) 406-HEAL
INDEX
Search our web site (400+ pages)
|
