In the small community of approximately 2500 people with whom I live, one third are orphaned children uner the age of fifteen – children who have lost both parents to AIDS and opportunistic diseases as a result of AIDS. In the local school of six hundred students, over three hundred and fifty are orphans. These are children who are living with elderly grandparents or other surviving relatives. It is not uncommon to find a typical household consisting of grandparents age sixty or over, half a dozen or so middle aged relatives between twenty five and forty five, and as many as twenty or more grandchildren. In a nation where extremes of poverty exist, this places a huge burden on the grandparents and middle aged relatives left top care for these children.

We live in the midst of a pandemic of unprecedented proportions, yet for most of the world, it does not exist. At no other time in human history has any disease taken so many lives. HIV?AIDS is the scourge of this century. For the past twenty five years it has been destroying the lives and the economies of countries which have the least resistance to its devastating effects. It has been estimated that within the next ten years the population of Africa will be decimated. In Swaziland with a current population of 1.2 million, there will be fewer than half a million by the year twenty-sixteen. Nations are facing extinction.

I often hear and read about the supposed causes of the high rates of HIV?AIDS in Africa. “The Africans are lazy, immoral, promiscuous.” Along with many other negative and false assumptions. I write this blog to refute those statements. Amongst my many African friends in Swaziland, are some of the most diligent, hardworking and moral people I have met. I have found no evidence which would lead me to believe that they are any more promiscuous than the average man and woman in any so called first world country. The conclusion I have reached and which is now being recognised and admitted by the World Health Organisation, is that HIV?AIDS is far more likely to be transmitted between Africans because their immune systems are already deficient due to malnutrition and they are also genetically more vulnerable. Another factor is that the strain of virus in Africa is far more virulant than the strain we have in the west.

These are statistical facts for the reasons behind the high incidence of HIV/AIDS in Africa. A healthy adult in a first world country may be exposed to potential infection of HIV?AIDS ten times more often without contracting the disease than his/her counterpart in Africa. In Africa, just one incidence of exposure will almost certainly infect the exposed victim. These figures alone would account for the higher rate of HIV/AIDS. That this is a major contributing factor cannot be denied, yet it is not the only factor. It is not a simple case of cause and effect. There are many facets to this pandemic which even those who have spent years of study have yet to see all sides of this complicated equation.

It astonishes me that so called experts can still claim that circumcision will lower the rates or even eradicate the spread of HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile others in influencial roles including President George Bush maintain that abstinence is the answer or some other ridiculous, impractical, and improbable solution. I refuse to take anything seriously that is said by anyone sitting in a comfortable office who has not experienced the reality of life in Africa. Come and live in a small African community, listen to the people, hear their problems, endure their hardships, suffer their deprivation, and then and only then, begin to think of possible solutions.

To be continued. Comments welcomed.