More questions than answers
Made rounds in my old neighbourhood the other weekend and had a mini tour of the favourite haunts of the old boys. Still found the usual crowd and met some ladies I knew back then from the generation of my elder siblings. I knew them then as selling their souls to the Devil as some ultra-Purists would put it, no doubt to the ire of feminist writers and scholars – and Hon. Tabitha Khumalo even! I found them still at it, ostensibly enjoying lagers which they apparently liked hot because it seemed to take them hours to down a 330ml pint of their “favourite” booze! But then I learnt a long time ago that it is always easy to moralise about these issues and expose your own hypocrisy, yet it got me thinking about the dynamics of economics meets want, want meets disease and how we as mere mortals can tread that very thin line and come out of it all unscathed.
The thing is that I am one of many people who have over the years been diagnosing folks ailing from whatever ailment by just looking them. And the advent and eventual ubiquity of HIV/Aids became easy play for me and other such types. So it was here during my little pub crawl that I met these two ladies who this one time were at the centre of ghetto gossip that they were literally die-hard types seeing virtually all their friends and former lovers had succumbed to HIV/Aids. And the two were themselves at one time written off because of their poor health with every Simba and Saru seeming to be in the know that they each had one foot in the grave because they were visibly ailing “with all the signs of HIV/Aids.” Yet here they were looking as strong as horses and obviously loving the attention from the ogling eyes of all types – skinny tipplers with rapidly aging faces because of rabid gulps of undiluted spirits, and the pot-bellied types who seem to flaunt this rotund protrusion of their abdomens as a sign of living the life. But I figure living the lie is more like it! So as I stopped by for a chat, and naturally perhaps, they asked that I buy them a couple of pints of lager and I obliged, perhaps like people who last saw each other do. Just as I was placing the beers in front of them, a chap I knew back in the day as having gone to school with one of my older brothers came along carrying three pints of lager. Pleased to see him, I extended my greetings, but the chap was mysteriously peeved, pointing a finger at me with words like “wena mfana wena” which translates to “you young man, you better watch out.” Turns out he wasn’t concerned about my health seeing the company I was in! The three lagers were in fact for him and the two prostitutes! Turns out he was imagining I was muscling in on his action as the two laughed out and told him “no, no, no, he is our younger brother!”
This little incident got me thinking about the dynamics of HIV/Aids and how easily it spreads. If this chap was pissed off seeing me talking to these women, he surely knew that he had competition from other young men who couldn’t wait to take the ladies home for some good old hanky panky as soon as he took his eyes off them! I am a product of these mean streets where prejudice seems to be second nature, where sex and cash have a logic of their own, yet there are issues that remain etched in one’s mind that tend to present one as a sanctimonious prick even, yet for me, the greatest tragedy of our time is not HIV/Aids in itself, but how some individuals have come to accept HIV/Aids as an inevitable “gamble” every sexually active adult has to live with. Once upon a time as a naïve young man I thought I had all the answers to the world’s problems, now as a grown man with kids of my own, I take some time off to mingle with other adults and I wonder if my juvenile idealism still has a place at all in this cruel world. Am I moralising? Maybe. Am I worried what kind of world my three little boys will grow up in? Damn right I am! But what can I do? I just watch the world pass me by and muse “what if?”