We leafed through one of the memory books he'd written. All the text was in rounded, childish letters. Everything except his signature and an admonition to "always live honourably and work hard".
He noticed that I could see the text had been written by various hands.
"I thought that even handwriting is a memory of a person. My handwriting is poor, the letters jump all over the place, but it's my handwriting. When I'm gone, my grandchildren can remember that this is how their grandfather used to write."
Then he started talking about how the fatal disease that had taken possession of his body had crept up on him.
"It came in the night. Illness never strikes when the sun is shining. Diseases, especially those that are serious and kill or blind or deform people, always creep up on you during the night."
I asked him what he meant by that.
"The mosquitoes start whining at night. They only suck your blood from sundown until the sun starts rising again. Mosquitoes carry death, malaria. Snakes and predators also roam in the hours of darkness, even if we haven't had any lions or leopards in these parts for the last ten or even fifteen years. We are convinced that disease strikes you during the night."
"A bite in the neck from a leopard can hardly be called a disease!"
"Everything that kills, be it visible or invisible, is a disease as far as I'm concerned. I know that you Europeans talk about something you call 'death from natural causes'. For us Africans that is a very peculiar way of looking at what happens in the dark."
But then he suddenly seemed to have lost interest in discussing his view that the night is the realm of death and illness. Instead he started talking about when he first realised that there was a new disease that was dangerous and invisible.
He had just started talking when the heavens opened. We took cover and sat in a part of the large house that he had to himself. One of his daughters, Laurentina, was very fat but moved gracefully and quickly despite her huge body. When we came in, she disappeared behind a curtain made from cut-up, old skirts. It was dim inside the room. Moses sat down in a sagging armchair from which he could keep an eye on what was happening outside while he spoke.
He said: "I was still very young. It was 1974, the year before Amin came to power and ruined our country. My father used to go often to Kampala to buy cheap clothes with factory faults that he put right and then cycled round the villages and sold them. One day he came home and told us about one of the young men he used to do business with in the city: he was now ill. My father said he had grown very thin in a very short space of time. He had lost his appetite, the glands under his arms had swollen up and were very tender, and now he was getting sores all over his body. He had been to the doctor, who had been unable to tell him what he was suffering from, nor could he give him any effective medicine. My father was quite sure about what he was saying. He had a keen eye, a good memory, and he often was quite certain about things before anybody else realised that something had happened. That was exactly what he said: 'Something has happened'. His business contact, Lukas was his name, was suffering from a disease that my father was convinced was something quite new. 'It has crept up in the night,' my father said. Lukas died, and his two wives also fell ill and had the same mysterious sores and one after the other they too died. Every time my father came back from Kampala, he told us about other people who had died from this same disease. Soon, so many had fallen victim to the disease that everybody was talking about why people all of a sudden became very tired and very thin and then died. But nobody knew what it was. I think that was the situation until the 1980s – in any case Amin was no longer around when the disease was finally given a name and it was understood how the infection could be spread. I was no longer so young by then. My father lived to be very old, and of course he was not surprised to find that he had eventually been proved right. What his friend Lukas had died of was a new disease that had crept up on us during the night. He had noticed it before anybody else."
Moses fell silent. Then he shouted something to his daughter. She came in with a bottle of water and two glasses. Moses poured, and assured me that the water had been boiled.
"It is a terrible plague," he said after a while. "In the night, in the darkness, when men and women come together, the disease wanders from person to person. There have been other diseases in the past that have infected people in the same way. But nothing as dangerous as this, nothing as painful. I have seen how people suffer before they die. I have listened to people in houses a long way away from here, screaming in agony before everything goes quiet, and they fade away into the other darkness, the one that never quite dissipates when the sun rises again. The land of death is a land without sun, that is the nature of it and we are all frightened of being forced to go there before we have lived for so long that we don't really care any more. Now I have the disease myself, and every day I look for signs to show that I am on the way to being overcome by this thing inside me, and every time I think about that day my father came home and was worried as he told us about his friend Lukas."
Moses stared at his hands.
"I didn't want to write these memory books. Not for a very long time. It was as if the moment I picked up my pen or started telling my story for my grandchildren to write it down, I was giving up all hope of not having to die as a result of this disease. Obviously, I don't have any hope. Everybody who catches this disease dies of it. But deep down there is another kind of hope, something you have no control over. It's as if there is an unknown being inside my body that is hoping on my behalf. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. But once I'd started to write those books, it was as if I'd accepted the fact that I was going to die. I dreamt about my father the night before I started preparing to write the memory books. He was coming back from the city on foot, just as I remembered it as a child. He always walked quickly, carrying a bale of clothes on his head. Now he was old and didn't have anything on his head. The worst thing was that he didn't stop. He didn't turn off the road and come back here. He just kept on walking until I could no longer see him. When I woke up the next morning and remembered the dream, it seemed as if he had instructed me to accept my fate. That was the day I started preparing the books."
Moses had finished his tale, abruptly, as if he'd told me too big a secret. Then he said with a smile that he was tired, and needed to rest.
We said our goodbyes, and I left. I didn't know if I would ever meet him again.
31
Lots of people have jokes to tell about the Aids crisis on the African continent. Some even try to use various anecdotes in order to prove that the basic problem is the inability of Africans to take in information. Many ignore the fact that the real problem is illiteracy. Instead, these unpleasant joke-smiths conjure up an image of stupidity, a peculiar lack of intelligence when faced with facts and arguments. The stories and the conclusions are downright racist. The implication is that it is the natives' own fault that so many Africans are HIV-positive. They ought to know better than to indulge in extra-marital affairs or to lead polygamous lives. If they are infected, there is not much that can be done about it. Let them die.
This is not said in so many words, of course. But I have heard the joke, told by a Scandinavian aid worker, about the European nurse who travelled to a remote African village to address them on the subject of Aids. She talked about condoms. To demonstrate how they should be used she stuck up two fingers and slid the condom over them. Whereupon all the men present, according to the Scandinavian teller of the tale, went home and applied a condom to their fingers before mating with their wives.
It is easy to make fun, racist fun, of African people. But misunderstandings about safe sex are not a result of stupidity. They are a relic of the tradition and heritage that Europeans have forced upon Africa. They have to do with the only golden rule that mattered during the four centuries of colonialism. Europe said: don't think, do!
Unsurprisingly, this attitude lingers on. It is neither stupidity no
r cowardice. It is a continuation of European pressure. Moreover, teaching people how to protect themselves is a very sensitive matter. In many African cultures you simply do not talk to strangers about your intimate sex life. It is completely inappropriate for a clumsy European to march up and gather villagers together, then make threatening gestures with his or her fingers and slide a condom over them. Being illiterate is not the same thing as being devoid of dignity.
I have met vast numbers of poor, ignorant Africans whose dignity far exceeds anything I have come across in the West. This is not a tendentious or far-fetched claim. Human dignity does not go arm in arm with material well-being or a high degree of knowledge. Human dignity is an automatic reaction in poor people who have understood why they are weighed down by poverty.
Informing people about how the infection is passed on is crucial, obviously, but the teaching has to be adapted to those who are to be taught. Those whose mission it is to impart this information must first learn to listen, and not seek to impose the solutions and rules of conduct that various Western experts and bureaucrats have decided are correct.
Thousands of people are dying of Aids today because of wrong, often downright arrogant methods of trying to make them realise how HIV is passed on. There is no doubt that one essential tool in the effort to reduce the rate of infection whether in young or rather older people would be the taking of steps to ensure that everybody has access to an ABC-book. For instance.
The statistics paint a complex picture, but they tell the same story. It is a lack of basic education that makes people more vulnerable to HIV infection.
32
There was one question which I put to everybody I talked to in Uganda. A question I had also asked people earlier in Mozambique, people suffering from full-blown Aids, or people who had just been infected and told that they were carrying HIV.
I asked them where they thought the virus had come from.
Replies varied. Astonishingly, many thought that it could very well be a disease the West had introduced secretly into Africa, and was making sure that it spread everywhere in order to reduce the number of poor people there. In other words, the disease was a subtle way of committing mass murder. The invisible gas chambers of a new age, a microscopic virus that could send people to their graves in a "natural" way. The people who believed this to be the origin of the HIV epidemic often replied very emphatically. They were absolutely convinced that the death they were facing had been deliberately planned. The whole of the West was made up of witches or medicine men bent on genocide.
There were some who introduced a religious dimension into their fate. Abandoned gods were spreading death and destruction all over an Africa that already seemed to be ripe for extinction. Famine, civil war, expanding deserts, malaria parasites and diarrhoea. And now Aids. There was a self-disgust about these people that doubled their suffering. They were often the ones who lived for the shortest time. Their immune system was unable to cope with the double pressure of the ravages caused by the virus, and their mental collapse.
These people gave the impression of using the virus as a means of committing suicide.
Most others knew nothing more than what the doctors had told them. A virus – whatever that is. Something that resulted from making love, from blood transfusions or from using dirty syringe needles.
Everybody seemed to agree that the suffering was hitting the African continent especially hard.
Christine said: "It's as if there's no end to it. I read about our continent. It is as if we Africans are concerned only with dying, not with living. But it's not like that, of course. Even if all these diseases hit us especially hard."
Of course there were many people who also maintained that the West was conspiring in some remarkable way with various gods. The overworld and the underworld had combined to destroy the African people with the help of this virus.
Christine again: "I've heard that some people think the disease originated in animals, especially the apes, and that we got the disease inside us when we ate meat from apes. But couldn't it just as well be that we have always carried the disease inside us? Maybe it has always been inside, us but it is only now that it has been given a name."
What did Moses think? He shrugged.
"Is it important? I can't tell you the answer, nobody can. Why should I spend my time worrying about that? My time is already limited. Death is wherever there is life. Death sometimes wears visible clothing, sometimes he makes himself invisible."
I spoke to everybody, including Gladys and Beatrice. The answers varied, but were always evasive.
33
In the end I spoke to Aida as well. We were in among the banana trees, but not to look at her mango plant: we were trying to find one of the black piglets that had decided to run away. Aida found it and pounced on it before it had a chance to escape her grasp. We carried it back to the pen. Then Aida went to wash her hands.
It was she who asked the question: "Where does it come from, this disease that Mum has?"
"I don't know. Different people think different things. But it's a virus, a so-called micro-organism."
"Why is it only people here who get it?"
"It isn't only here. People get infected just the same in the country I come from."
Aida thought about that.
"Where did it start? In your country or here in ours?"
"Probably here, but nobody knows for certain."
Aida seemed depressed. We walked back to the houses and the courtyard where a cockerel with an injured leg was limping about.
"I think the disease comes from somebody who wants to harm us," Aida suddenly said.
"Who would that be?"
"I don't know."
"Diseases don't come from 'somebody'. Diseases are there all the time. They develop and change. Eventually people start to die of them. It has always been like that."
Aida said nothing more. As we walked towards the raffia mat where Christine sat cleaning a wound on Aida's youngest sister's foot, she aimed a kick at the cockerel who fluttered away, cackling angrily.
Aida could get at the cockerel, but not at the 'somebody' she thought had inflicted the disease on her mother.
But I can't be certain what Aida believed or didn't believe.
34
There are many fallacies about Aids. Not least with regard to what happens in the critical stages that lead to death, what is known as "full-blown" Aids. One of the fallacies is that the really horrific aspect of the disease is the way it strikes in haphazard fashion, and often affects very young people. What creates angst in a person is the psychological torment of knowing that you are going to die early from a disease that you could have avoided. The physical symptoms, as the disease takes hold, are that you lose a lot of weight, grow very tired, might have a lot of sores, and then die of something like pneumonia when your immune system can no longer cope. There is rarely any mention of the fact that Aids can lead to a mental deterioration that causes suffering worse than practically anything else.
The people I spoke to in Uganda seemed to be aware of this, however. They didn't hide behind fallacies even if the illusion might have been a temporary consolation. It seemed to me that Moses, Christine, Gladys and all the rest approached what was in store for them with their eyes wide open. It was a duel they had already lost. Once again it was that dignity that I couldn't help but notice everywhere, and that I think of now above all else as I write these words. The dignity that was so important to all those who had been infected with the disease.
On one occasion we met, I told Christine a story. It was about something I experienced in the early 1990s in northern Mozambique. A few days later when I went back to her house, she asked me to tell her the story again. This time Aida was there too.
It was a story about dignity.
During the long and difficult civil war that ravaged Mozambique – from the early 1980s until 1992 – I made a journey to the Cabo Delgado province in the north. One day in November 1990,
I was in a place just south of the border with Tanzania. The area had been badly affected by the war. Many people had been killed or crippled, and starvation was widespread since most of the crops had been burnt. It was like entering an Inferno where misery rose like smoke all along the dusty roads.