After waiting so long for peace and stability, there is something almost vindictive in the timing. A plague potentially more deadly than any battle is seeping across Angola just when people had reasons to hope.
Open borders, family reunions, trucks of food and goods have been granted, but with them travels HIV/Aids, a killer that scythed through sub-Saharan Africa but spared Angola. For all its horrors, the 27-year civil war had one virtue in that it blocked borders and restricted population movements, creating a cocoon through which the virus struggled to pass.
The guns are silent now and the government wants to ‘normalise’ the country. But what passes for normality in this part of the world are infection rates of 20, 30, 40 per cent of the adult population. Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Swaziland, Lesotho and Namibia are at peace, but their graveyards fill more quickly today than if they were at war. That, short of a miracle, is Angola’s grim future.
‘It is a really scary situation for us,’ said Susan Shulman, who runs the Luanda office of Population Services International, the non-governmental organisation which is leading Angola’s battle against HIV/Aids. ‘Here we are with a one-off chance to prevent the explosion and nobody wants to give us money until the explosion happens.’
Statistics in such a devastated country are unreliable, but Shulman, extrapolating from tests of pregnant women, suggests a national infection rate of 8 per cent. Appalling by Western standards, wonderful compared with some neighbours, which are up to five times worse off.
Visit Zambian towns such as Kitwe and you find skeletal people on bedroom floors waiting to die. Visit Angolan towns such as Mavinga near the Zambian border and you find sick, malnourished people but little evidence of HIV/Aids.
‘We don’t have the means to test, but I think it must be low. We had one or two cases which might have been Aids and that’s not a lot,’ said a field medical officer for Médecins Sans Frontières.
Matungu, a camp for demobilised Unita rebels and their families, lacked condoms and HIV testing kits, but the camp doctor, Wilson Sidonio, said by far the biggest killer was malaria.
Many believe that will change as Angola’s economy and society improves. The trucks trundling across the newly opened frontiers bring the virus along with urgently needed supplies. ‘Because of Aids our drivers are dying faster than they can be trained,’ said a Namibian haulier, pitching camp in Mavinga.
Angolan troops, including those who returned from foreign engagements with the disease, are being demobilised and sent home, prompting the commander of the military health service, Dr Francisco Ernesto, to predict an ‘explosion’ in numbers.
Even the street children of Luanda could be carriers, said Justin Cuckow, of Goal, which runs clinics for prostitutes and the homeless. ‘People are talking about HIV spreading into the provinces. The further you go from Luanda, the less people know about the disease.’
Sex can be bought for $3, a sum the children who clear rubbish and wash cars can sometimes pay. A group of urchins in the São Paulo district who attend Goal clinics claim they always use condoms, yet unwanted pregnancies are common – proof of Angola’s enduring adage that you don’t eat a sweet with the wrapper on.
‘Once I didn’t have any condoms, so I used a plastic bag,’ laughed one boy, Juao Matthias. With the war’s end he hoped to return to his village.
‘During the war social barriers broke down, people had sex earlier, there was more prostitution, there was rape, now they’re going home.’ Shulman said.
She believes that Aids is such a threat that population movements should be suspended but, acknowledging the likelihood of that is zero, wants to distribute more condoms and sponsor more Aids awareness through Brazilian-style soap operas which have proved television hits.
She criticised the international community for not focusing on a preventable disaster and the government for not even trying: ‘They don’t care about anything really.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â