Chapter 5 The Future

CHAPTER 5

THE FUTURE AND AIDS

It is difficult to make predictions about what will happen in any society in the future, let alone Bangwa. Hopefully, the economic crisis will end and the relative prosperity which characterised the early 1980’s will be seen again. Menji perhaps will develop into a large town and other centres of population may also appear in different parts of Bangwa. Traditional authority will perhaps continue to fade as urbanisation overtakes rural culture (Sklar 1988:97) The old traditions may diminish into folklore and be replaced by new ones which will be more urban and more national. All these presume there will still be a population in the future in the area. They also presume that no great disaster will affect the Bangwa people.

The one precipitant of social change that is affecting sub-Saharan Africa particularly and has so far not been mentioned is AIDS. In early 1991 no cases of the disease had ever been reported in the Mission hospital in Lebang. In the space of one week one person, obviously in the terminal stage, was admitted for medical treatment and ten others tested positive for HIV. Since 1991 the number of people dying of AIDS has slowly increased. The first to die were Bangwa people who had lived in the coastal towns where the disease is more widespread. The cases which appeared in 1992 began to include Bangwa people who lived in the area but who frequently travelled to the large towns. Recent cases of those dying of AIDS have begun to include people who lived and worked in the Bangwa area and who did not travel to urban areas very often. The

numbers of resident Bangwa testing positive for HIV has substantially increased over the past two years.

One wonders if the scenes in villages in Uganda, Zambia and Kenya will soon be part of Bangwa society as well: grandmothers looking after twenty and thirty children whose parents have died of AIDS. Part of my work with secondary school students and later on as manager of the Catholic primary schools was to tour the schools and villages to inform people about the danger of AIDS. Although many were initially frightened and disturbed, I do not believe that my endeavours made any difference. Students that I have taught about HIV and AIDS have died of the disease. There seems an almost terrible inevitability that AIDS will devastate the Bangwa population if no cure for it can be found. All the social changes that I have outlined so far will seem of little consequence compared to what AIDS is capable of bringing about in Bangwa.

I shall end my examination of modern Bangwa with what I fear must appear a rather apocalyptic conclusion. Having witnessed the effects of AIDS on the rural population in certain parts of Zambia, I returned to Bangwa and soon found myself once again in a compound where I had been a few months previously. I was there for the same reason as before: to bury another son, the third, who had died of AIDS. A few days later I wrote this poem about the effects of AIDS on village life in rural Africa.

The Silent Hearths

The voice that cried in the wilderness
has ceased its wailing and lamenting.
The one who pleaded pleads no more
but sits in silence at the funerals.

Wasted
our humanity,
our weakness
come to light,
not just the greed or the poverty,
or the lust or the anger at life,
this thinning
of the soul
belies our deeper crime
and our deeper need:
to simply be consoled.

III

The wind is blowing in the eucalyptus trees,
blowing as it blew before our fathers came,
a restless rustling against the silent sky,
an image of our souls and eternity,
but the consoling call and answer
that passed from womb to womb,
the secret echo of our forbears’ power
has been silenced now by our barren death,
by we who have betrayed them.

The wind and the earth,
the wind and the earth,
the soil is blown from our father’s land
and we are the dust now borne away
by the winds of change in Africa,
over Africa we turn,
we turn
forever
locked
in silent clouds,
in full moon myths
and in long forgotten histories

Strangers who will pass this way
will wonder
who we were
and where we went,
will wonder
at the silence,
at the tallness of our unfelled trees
and seeking consolation
in out of the wind
in our abandoned homes
they will stir the ashes,
in our mother’s silent kitchens.