You have to be hard when you know your heart is going to be broken by the death of a child. Gail Johnson does not deserve the treatment she is getting, argues Charlene Smith The problem with Gail Johnson is that she has long red nails and wild red hair, she wears tight-fitting slacks over long legs, she chain-smokes and speaks her mind and she is white. In a land of politically correct hypocrisy, Johnson is not what we want. She is a Saatchi & Saatchi nightmare, a Peter Vundla hernia, and in the land of the hallowed stereotype she is unforgivably herself. She also happens to be the only real mother ever known to Nkosi Johnson, the boy newspapers dubbed “the South African icon” and “the real face of Aids”. When a newspaper syruply noted that it “takes a child to show the world”, it forgot to mention that no child can achieve anything without the backing of a remarkable parent. There are many remarkable HIV-infected children, but only one we all know. That was not just Nkosi’s doing. Gail Johnson began fighting for his rights long before Aids was a trendy issue in South Africa. Twelve years ago, when Nkosi was born to his HIV-positive mother, Aids awareness was not a fashionable issue. The child was born before medical trials had proved the efficacy of anti-retrovirals to impede mother-to-child transmission of HIV. This weekend an SABC woman announcer shamefully allowed herself to ask a bereaved mother, three days after the death of her child: “There are some who say you cared for Nkosi so you could make money out of him.” Johnson didn’t smack her. Instead, she answered: “My bank accounts are open for the world to see.” When Johnson adopted the very sick little boy, Nkosi had been given six to nine months to live. It was 1990, President FW de Klerk had just unbanned the African National Congress, Aids was something that happened to homosexuals in the United States, not to us or so most of us thought. When Nkosi came to South Africa’s attention in 1997 it was because his hellfire mother went to battle against a school that dared discriminate against him because he was HIV-positive. We thought she was brave. We said “ag shame” when we thought about her child and most South Africans believed this is something that happens to other people, not us. No one helped Johnson emotionally, financially, physically or in any other way with her adopted son not in 1990 nor in 1997. By 2001, with 250 000 people dead the previous year from Aids and an estimated 4,7-million South Africans infected, we are all experts, all judge and jury and still too few of us adopted children with Aids. Nonetheless, we all dare to judge her. How convenient. In 1999 Johnson and I were among the finalists in a Woman of the Year competition. On the bus taking us to the awards ceremony, a finalist from Sebokeng spoke of a family headed by a child in that area who was battling to survive. We all took details, we all promised to help. Within a week of arriving back, Johnson was the only one who visited that family in Sebokeng and who raised money to build a shelter this year for HIV-infected mothers and Aids orphans in the Vaal triangle. Johnson does not simper at video cameras or come up with profound soundbites she acts. She is a doer and not just a sayer. There must be less than a handful of her type in the country. “She seems so hard,” a friend observed. Well, what do you do when you adopt a small child, knowing he can die at any moment? You become outwardly hard to protect yourself against the heartbreak you know will follow. How would you behave if you knew your child was dying and that his death and the death of others like him could be prevented? How would you feel if you battled to get basic medication to keep him alive, to stop him living in pain?
It is a symbol of the racism in South Africa this time not white against black, but black against white and the denial around HIV/Aids that the Sowetan ran an article the day before Nkosi died quoting a reflexologist, who said Johnson was guilty of child abuse and Nkosi should be in school because all that was wrong with him was constipation. But we dare not talk of the inherent racist treatment of Johnson in this nation of hypocrites. The most important testimony to Johnson as a mother and a person came from an interview Nkosi gave to Radio 702 last year. The interviewer asked if he liked school. He said he loved school: “The teachers love me, the children love me. Some of the children were worried they would get Aids from me, but some of the others told them Nkosi is a gentle little boy, he will not harm you.”
Those are the words of a child who knew he was deeply loved. They are the words of a little boy told every day how special he was, how much everyone loved him, how proud he should be of himself. How ashamed he must be of those who pay tribute only to him and not also to the best mom an HIV-positive little boy could have had. If Nkosi is our hero, then Johnson is our heroine. Pity she keeps forgetting to put on her wings.