A reticent, opaque man who seldom reveals what he is thinking or feeling is how author Jonny Steinberg describes the central character in his latest book, Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic (Jonathan Ball).
Sizwe is a straight black man living in a rural and impoverished part of South Africa — and a guide and key voice in Steinberg’s investigation of the effects of HIV/Aids on the community.
Ostensibly there is little similarity between Sizwe and the author, a gay white man from Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. But to an interviewer Steinberg also presents a politely detached persona, rather than seducing a questioner into giving him good copy. And, Steinberg acknowledges, he discovered similarities as he probed why Sizwe would not test for HIV.
“I don’t think anybody’s interior is unavailable to a good writer. But I very much came into it thinking this is a straight black man from a rural area from peasant stock. He couldn’t be more different to me, and so this is very much about him … I really struggled to understand why he wasn’t testing and … it dawned on me that there was this huge, huge overlap, that when I was much younger I also struggled. I had forgotten that I had struggled to test. It was a big chunk of my life that got repressed because it was very horrible and uncomfortable.”
Steinberg bears a resemblance to French philosopher Michel Foucault and speaks with the precision of the academic he says he doesn’t want to be. He is the product of a secular Jewish upbringing in Illovo in Johannesburg. The youngest of three children, his father was an accountant and his mother is a professor of communications. There is pride in his voice when he talks about his mother, who had to start her academic career as a mother of three because her conservative immigrant parents stopped her going to university after school.
A man with a reputation as focused and hard-working, Steinberg relaxes by reading, and says after hesitation, “watching soccer”. He is a resentful Liverpool football club supporter, an allegiance he says is an albatross about his neck that dates from the days when, as a six-year-old, he worshipped his bigger brother.
Steinberg came back to South Africa a decade ago after a stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford doing his doctorate. He rapidly began to shine in the country’s literary scene as a journalist before moving on to books and a column.
Unlike many writers with the liberty of 1 000 words all of his own, he kept his column readable and relevant and steered away from publicly indulging his ego. Steinberg made his name by getting into the lives of others, usually those in particularly dysfunctional or difficult areas of society, such as prison gangs and the police force.
Three-Letter Plague — the title comes from a local euphemism for the disease — is about the effect of HIV/Aids and antiretroviral treatment in the rural Transkei town of Lusikisiki. The book was conceived during a research trip to the Eastern Cape seven years ago, when Steinberg says he recognised that no one had detailed the “avalanche of death” that HIV/Aids was causing in rural areas. He chose to write about Lusikisiki because this was where international NGO Médecins sans Frontières decided to demonstrate that mass antiretroviral therapy was possible in poor rural areas.
“What I really wanted to know is what happens to the meaning of Aids when treatment comes along … Before treatment arrived most people were saying people were dying of witchcraft. Along come clinics that are now treating all these diseases as opportunistic infections of Aids and treating them as biomedicine and it’s working.
“Suddenly the definition of what is Aids increases dramatically … Whether they come and get treatment is another thing.”
Steinberg says one of the reasons for the failure of HIV-prevention programmes has been the failure of social movements to speak meaningfully to heterosexual black men and that Sizwe’s situation is an illustration of this.
“Here is one young man, Sizwe, he looked at this treatment movement and he saw it as a cult. He saw it as a really crazy bunch of young people from whom he wanted to flee. And what they did was they entirely unintentionally brought out his feelings of shame.
“What they were telling him was there is no need to keep this secret, come out entirely and we’ll protect you, and he saw it as the latest version of the hundreds of cults that wandered through the Transkei over the generations.”
Steinberg sees lack of discussion about male sexuality as a fundamental problem in prevention and treatment campaigns. “When it comes to HIV there are special difficulties with men. It’s not that women don’t feel shame and stigma, there’s a huge amount of shame and stigma, but this virus is really experienced as a vicious and direct assault on masculinity. I think it hits men in very particular ways. I think because it’s carried in the semen, because it’s about sex, about the very heart of masculinity, I think that men struggle with it profoundly.”
The most high-profile person to raise the issue of male sexuality and shame and Aids was President Thabo Mbeki. Steinberg says denial about this issue is part of the problems surrounding Mbeki and his attitudes to the disease.
“I think that’s the arena in which he was in denial. There’s kind of been this myth generated that he’s this eccentric out on his own and when you defeat him politically the problem’s over. And in fact on the one hand he’s a leader, on this issue a terrible leader, and on the other hand he reflects things.
“I think he reflects the very deep and powerful pain in South African society that men are basically experiencing this virus as an attack on them sexually, an attack on their masculinity, and he is the most unfortunate and the most powerful symptom of that trend. And when he is no longer president it’s still all going to be there; still something we need to deal with.”
Steinberg says one of the benefits of treatment in Lusikisiki is that it brought the epidemic into the open. “You’re defining what the epidemic is, you’re getting people to talk about it, you’re making sick people visible and I think that’s a route into prevention and, where everything else is failing, that’s a very powerful route into prevention.
“It’s not a sure route into prevention; Botswana has great treatment but prevention is still failing, so it’s not the answer, but in this arena where there are so few answers and where almost nothing has worked it’s a good route to go. And I think it’s something the TAC needs to acknowledge; it’s done wonderful work on a range of issues, it hasn’t done wonderful prevention work.”
One of the consequences of writing his latest book has been to force Steinberg to look more at issues about his own sexuality, even though being gay has not been central to his identity. “It’s just something I carry with me, it’s built in, it’s part of who I am. It’s very much part of me. But it’s probably not the thing I think about most about myself. It’s probably more important than I’ve given it credit for. Who we are sexually is incredibly important to everybody and I’ve discovered that a little from writing this book. I had to nibble a little at who I was sexually 20 years ago, 15 years ago and it’s very tough.”
Steinberg moved to the US, where he’s writing a book on an immigrant community in New York, due for delivery to his British publisher in 2010.
“I’ve been here 10 solid uninterrupted years and written three books all about this place and I kind of need to grow, and that means moving and writing about somewhere else. I didn’t want to write yet another non-fiction, character-driven book about South Africa … I don’t want to live in one country all the time.”