The nurse pointed at the long funeral procession coming down the slopes of the Drakensberg. “We are dying,” she said.
For the past 30 years Me Makaoe had been riding up into the highlands on her Basotho pony, to treat the sick. The villagers trusted her, she had grown up with them, and they wanted her to be the one who tested them for HIV.
I had arrived in North West province in a Piper Cub, landing in a fallow maize patch, the only way to reach Mathibestad when the Senqu river was high. That night, Me Makaoe sat me down in a stone house and, in the figurative language she used to explain things to the people of the mountains, she talked me through the hard science of CD4 counts, viral loads and how HIV causes Aids. Nearly 1 900 metres above sea level, it became my moment of truth.
As a journalist, Aids stories had been part of my routine but not part of my conscience. I knew the clichÃ