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SOUTH AFRICA IS the country with the highest number of people living with HIV in the world – some 6.1 million.
Of the estimated 34 million people living with the virus globally, about 23.8 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Swaziland has the most severe level of infection in the world – one in four adults there is HIV positive.
The prevalence of HIV in South Africa is generally higher in townships, the informal settlements where black South Africans were sent to live during Apartheid.
In April of this year Masetjhaba Monaheng started a support group for people living with HIV in Kayamandi – a township of Stellenbosch, located less than an hour from Cape Town.
Three in ten people there have HIV.
Monaheng worked as a HAST (HIV, Aids, TB & STIs) counsellor at the local clinic for nine years before founding an NGO, Setjhaba Youth Awareness (SYA), with her partner Vuyokazi Ngcwembe Makalima, late last year.
SYA runs health education workshops in the local community to help tackle the high rates of teen pregnancy, STIs, substance abuse, violence and HIV in the area.
Monaheng said the support group is “very, very important because … there are people who are still struggling to accept that they are HIV positive … We are sharing, we are supporting each other. There are those who still have anger, [asking]: ‘Why are they HIV positive, what did they do wrong?’
Everybody there is sharing their experience and also motivating each other how to disclose to their family or to their friends and why it is so important to use a condom when you are HIV positive.
Every Tuesday morning, about 10-15 women meet in the local child welfare office to share their own experiences of living with HIV. The group is also open to men, but only one attends – infrequently.
The prevalence of physical and sexual abuse against women in South Africa is one of the highest in the world. One in three women there have been physically or sexually abused. Every day, three women are killed by their partner or husband. Some 40,000 women were raped there in August alone.
A number of the women in the support group have been raped and beaten by their husbands or partners – for some, this is an ongoing occurrence.
Lack of condom use is one of the main reasons HIV is so common in Kayamandi, which is primarily comprised of the Xhosa community. There is an employment rate of just 10%.
“The married women are dominated by men. If the man doesn’t want to use a condom, they haven’t got a say,” Monaheng noted, adding that she is aware of many situations where are a woman has asked her husband to wear a condom and been beaten or raped for doing so.
He is going to be angry with you because [men] have got that attitude that their voice is the last voice and they tell you what to do. Even if a man doesn’t sleep at home, you are not supposed to ask him ‘Where did you sleep?’
Bertha Koro (57) was diagnosed as HIV positive in 2004. She said she got the virus because her husband was “in love with many girls”. They separated in 2005.
“[When I got the diagnosis] I was so sad because I thought ‘I’m going to die’ and my baby at that time she was still young, she was 10 years old … I was really worried,” Koro said.
She has let go of the anger she initially felt towards her husband and moved on with her life: “I don’t want us to blame men, we are in this pandemic [situation] together.”
Koro’s 33-year-old son is also HIV positive. She said that having someone else in the family who also has the virus has provided an extra level of support for her.
The mother-of-six and and grandmother-of-nine encourages neighbours who have been newly-diagnosed with HIV to visit her home so she can give them advice about living a healthy life and taking their anti-retroviral (ARV) medication correctly.
She said that being HIV positive is lonely at times as people often treat you differently once they find out your status.
“When you visit somebody and ask for something to drink … you can see they take that cup separately, then you are not feeling alright … When you cough, they don’t want to sit next to you.”
Koro deals with people who gossip about her head-on.
Maybe they say ‘Why did she lose the weight?’, ‘Why is she so dark?’ I go straight up to them and say: ‘No lovey, don’t gossip because maybe tomorrow it could be you.’
Xoliswa Thembani (51) was diagnosed with HIV in February 2008, before beginning anti-retroviral treatment (ART) in June of that year.
Thembani was drinking heavily prior to discovering her status. Having watched many friends die from AIDS, she struggled to accept the news and contemplated suicide before coming to peace with her diagnosis.
However, she stopped taking her ARV medication after a few months because she believed God had cured her.
At the beginning of this year she became extremely ill and almost died. Her CD4 – the cell that HIV attacks – count was below 100. An average count ranges from 800-1200.
She went back on medication and within months her viral load had become undetectable.
“God made me have HIV so I can realise that God is alive and there,” Thembani stated.
Thembani is a single parent to six children, all of whom are HIV negative.
HIV doesn’t kill someone, you must just take the treatment right for the rest of your life because this [motioning to her body] is flesh. You must believe in God but this is flesh, you have to take your treatment.
Monaheng said that men often don’t attend HIV support groups, or go to get tested in the first place, partly because they do not wish to talk to women about sexual issues.
“In our culture it is not easy to talk to men [about sex].” During her time at Kayamandi clinic, the only men working there were the receptionist and the cleaner. Monaheng is hoping that a male-only support group will be set up in the township to encourage men to discuss their HIV status.
She noted that gay men, who are not widely accepted within the Xhosa community, never identify themselves at the clinic, instead attending health centres in nearby Stellenbosch – a more urban setting.
Lynette Rademeyer-Bosman is the executive manager of @heart, a NGO that conducts HIV testing, awareness raising and counselling in Stellenbosch and beyond.
She says it’s not easy to answer why the rate of HIV in Kayamandi is more than double the local rate of 13-14%, noting some possible reasons as poverty, violence, recreational sex and the large number of migrants moving there from the Eastern Cape.
You know when you’re poor and you’re frustrated then it often, I think, manifests in behaviour … violence, rape … where women will actually stay in a relationahip for economic reasons, but we will find that same kind of behaviour in the rich community as well.Women stay in the rich community, or the privileged community, for exactly the same reasons but the prevalence [of HIV] is higher [in poorer communities].
Rademeyer-Bosman, who has been working in the area of HIV for 20 years, said that there are many cultural issues that need to be addressed, including misconceptions about condom-use such as a belief that they kill sperm and make men infertile.
She remarked that people in Kayamandi often do not test readily so are unaware of their status. Many of those who know they are HIV positive choose to keep it to themselves, for various reasons.
If you test a 16-year-old girl positive for HIV, the chance is good she’s not going to tell her partner, she’s not going to tell her mother. In that particular culture, in the Xhosa culture, to tell your mother … is bringing bad news to your parent and that’s actually just not done. So you’ll have a girl living with HIV until she’s very sick and only then disclose their status.
@heart runs numerous programmes that target at-risk groups such as intravenous drug users, sex workers and farmers. Rademeyer-Bosman noted that there is a huge alcohol dependency issue on farms in South Africa, leading to workers engaging in unprotected sex and further spreading the virus.
Rademeyer-Bosman admits that her work can been disheartening at times, but says she is nowhere near ready to walk away from it.
“Many people in this field – doctors, nurses, counsellors, different professions, community workers – have often said: ‘I’ve now had enough: this disease is not letting up. We started in 1981, we’re now in 2014. We’re still sitting with exactly the same issues as we we’ve done before. We’re nowhere nearer – well, maybe we are nearer, but we feel that we’re nowhere near an answer so we we’re dealing with exactly the same things.’
Anti-retroviral treatment is better, there’s a lot that we can do. People are living full lives but some people feel that they need to actually leave this field. I often tell my staff and I tell myself this: ‘While people living with HIV cannot walk away from this, we do not have the luxury to walk away from this. We can’t leave people behind.’
“While I’m still so angry at this disease sometimes, I know that if I’m still angry or if I feel so passionate about it, then I haven’t done enough. I must still figure out what it is that is enough.”
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I’m pretty sure James Joyce is the literary equivalent of revolut, those you have read it look down on those who haven’t and those who haven’t don’t see what the fuss is about.
@Gerard Martin: well said. It made me smile
@Gerard Martin: Revolut’s pretty handy though and I’m not exactly loaded
@Gerard Martin: it’s actually the opposite. Those who have had read Joyce are looked down upon by those who haven’t. And those who have read him understand what the fuss is about.
@michael: and those who said they have read and finished it are liars.
@Breda Kelly: Ulysses.
@Breda Kelly: Nice passive-aggressive sweeping statement. I’ve read it and finished it. Not all in one go mind. Am I a liar?
@Breda Kelly: absolute nonsense. I have read three times over a long period and ad a Dub enjoyed it hugely.
@Breda Kelly: There was no category for “tried but didn’t finish”. Had that been available, it might have been the top answer. For many of us “yes” is the technically correct answer to the question posed but “no” is the more honest answer.
@michael: Well said. People should maybe approach Ulysses through an audiobook. It’s a lot of fun :)
@michael: You just endorsed the comment Gerard posted.
People should try ‘Dubliners’ first, Ulysses is a far bigger challenge.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a good read and Dubliners is a nice collection of short stories. Neither have the infamous ‘Joyce an prose’, that stream of consciousness style that is so difficult.
@sean o’dhubhghaill: Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist do have stream of consciousness but not to the extent of Ulysses (or the impossible Finnegan’s Wake). They’re both really accessible and enjoyable to read.
Where’s the option for “I tried but couldn’t manage it and gave up”
Worth reading Dubliners and specifically The Dead even if you’re not inclined to try out the other novels.
YES
NO
have read the Dubliners, the dead and half of ulysees; gave up on ulysees as whilst could admire the descriptive detail, book is just not enjoyable; the dead is similar but shorter; Dubliners much better read.
would compare joyce to uncle colm from derry girls, a lot of rambling stories with no real narrative an little interst to majority listening
@Steve Clancy: the Dead is one of the short stores in Dubliners, is it not?
A better poll would be:
1. “Have you ever started to read Ulysses?”
2. “Did you finish it?”
@Ronan Quinlan: I use my copy as a doorstop, always a silver lining.
I have read and loved Ulysses. The language is beautiful and evocative. I find all of the hype and hot air about Joyce around this time of year intensely irritating. Joyce himself probably would have had great fun making fun of the whole Bloomsday lark.
Parts of Ulysses are easily read and enjoyable. I particularly like the scene in the pub at Glasnevin where the Citizen (said to be based on Michael Cusack, a founder of the GAA) swears at Leopold Bloom for saying that Jesus had been a Jew.
@Patrick Brompton: The pub in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses that includes that encomtrr between Bloom and the Citizen is Barney Kiernan’s in Little Britain Street, sadly no longer a pub.. An empty shell of a building.
No but I’d like to (but will never bother).
Read The Dead and you will understand the fuss. Only 60 pages long.
Yes I’ve read Dubliners, it’s quite accessible and not difficult to read, plus it’s short stories so you can read it in bite sized pieces, as it were.
I got as far as halfway through the first chapter of Ulysses. I was proud of that.
half way through Ulysses audio book , quite an experience . really enjoyable.
Dubliners is very enjoyable. I read it first as a teenager and he highlighted all the traits I hated in adults.
Portrait of the Artist is the best place to start ..
So many characters in Ulysses of the type still thriving today. Joyce even anticipated the safe-in-their-bubble know-alls of the commentariat here who end their comments with a “Jesus Wept.”
This from Chapter 3 of Ulysses: His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not? My consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother
Stephen lately? No? Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt
Sally? Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us,
Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I married into! De
boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the
cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And skeweyed Walter sirring
his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by
Christ!
My mam was delighted I was born on Bloomsday yet neither of us have read it as far as I know – I certainly haven’t anyway
Would it be as hard to read as Tolstoy’s War and Peace? incidentally, Tolstoys original title to War and Peace was ‘War, What Is It Good For? Thats how the song came about!
@Pauline Gallagher: Easier character names than Tolstoy’s, there’s that.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: ah ok. I was joking about the book title btw.
The Most Dangerous Book in the World about how difficult it was to get Ulysses published is very interesting
Trying to read Ulysses at the moment. Cannot get the hang of it at all. I’ve three chapters read and it just appears to me to be the insane ramblings of a semi-senile old idiot. Nothing makes sense in it, no story line. Will probably finish it just to be able to say that I have read it. How it is regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century is beyond me. Nora Barnacle was right when she said to him “why don’t you write books that people can read”. This book to me is totally unreadable. I dread to think what Finnigans Wake is like.
@John Cassin: if you want a traditional storyline there’s literally millions of other books to choose from, I think it’s safe to say that Joyce was trying something different with Ulysses. He wasn’t senile or old when he wrote it, it’s all very carefully put together. I’d recommend listening to the RTE audiobook first, but if you really hate it just don’t read it. Simples.
@John Cassin: I read it in a group at a library with a coordinator who was familiar with the book (and probably an expert). Pretty sure I would never have read it on my own. If you have to go it alone maybe read online summaries of the chapters first. You could probably skip a few and come back to them another time.
It’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ NOT ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. It was surely that apostrophe that hastened the good man’s end.
Yes, but I preferred Beckett.
Yes I said yes I have yes.
Ulysses..complete drivel….give me Irvine Welsh anytime
I actually read 1000 pages of it and gave up. Lets be franks, it is impenetrable b*ll*cks. You can clearly see why Joyce is lauded, but it really is just a trudge. My version of it had a 250 page introduction. There is also a stint without full stops for God knows how many pages.
Posters here seem to be mixing “read Joyce” with read Ulysses”
I have read Dubliners and really enjoyed it, got through 100 pages of Ulysses, kinda liked it but have a life so wasn’t motivated to read the final 899 pages, might do one day though.
have your say