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Many books on HIV/AIDS in Africa have virtually uniformly acquired an inductive approach that I have come to abhor simply out of its repeated and lacklustre application. Too often authors on HIV/AIDS begin their books with the inductive description of some emaciated, good-for-nothing, over-the-wall, swept-under-the-carpet human being that is on the verge of dying of AIDS. This, they say, is the face and image of AIDS in Africa. This, they monotonously maintain, is what AIDS in Africa is all about. This is the heinous fate, they say, that awaits millions in Africa. In fact, they eventually conclude, the African continent is dying, self-destructing. Some of these soporific, fly-by-night, unimaginative researchers have become little more than academic parasites who feed on the potent and heart-rending portrayal of people perishing of HIV/AIDS in resource-poor settings in Africa.
Who cares? AIDS in Africa is only slightly different, yet the difference is substantial. In the customary inductive manner Susan Hunter does commence every chapter with the stories of people battling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet here we do not encounter the unknown patient, the helpless victim or the dehumanised semi-corpse, instead we are acquainted with the experiences of Molly, Pauline and Robina as they shaped one of the first community responses to HIV/AIDS in Uganda in the late 1980s. In addition, by divulging selected anecdotes Hunter allows the reader to travel with Charles Darwin on his global voyage aboard the Beagle during the early 1830s. By collating the stories of Molly, Pauline and Robina in Uganda with those of Darwin in the nineteenth century, Hunter fuses an inductive frontage that she utilises to indicate how humans universally need “to explain and respond to wide-spread disease, to the changes epidemics make in human communities, and how these responses shape the evolution of the human species.” What this denotes is that in Who cares? AIDS in Africa Hunter at least attempted to circumvent the old-hashed, gravytrain, bandwagon approach of focusing solely on the more apparent negative aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic without engaging in more comprehensive research to unearth the underlying constructive and positive facets of people’s responses to the adversity engendered by HIV/AIDS.
With chapters couched in-between the anecdotal narratives of Charles Darwin and Molly, Pauline and Robina, Hunter sets out to analyse the varied complexities of how and why HIV/AIDS came to assume such pernicious global proportions, and with an informative section outlining the social and economic history and the political and economic development of the African continent (I mean, how the fly-by-nighters and the tragedy leeches would be galled to find more than the few obligatory few sentences on historical background in a book on HIV/AIDS! So just the fact that Hunter has devoted such attention to such apparently permissible yet in fact crucial underlying issues is impressive for a book on HIV/AIDS), Hunter endeavours to illuminate Africa’s crucial historical vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS. By her own admission Hunter describes in the introduction that “The emergence of HIV/AIDS in Africa is a result of the convergence of long-developing trends in human history, technology, philosophy and evolution.” Hunter deliberately skirted the conventional modus operandi of assessing HIV/AIDS in an analytical vacuum, and instead sought not to evaluate the epidemic in isolation from its decisive historical, social and cultural antecedents. Now this, I would venture to posit, is what books attempting to effectively delineate on HIV/AIDS should be all about.
In line with her dictum to elucidate how humanity explains and responds to wide-spread disease, in Who cares? AIDS in Africa Hunter also outlines how humans have for the last hundred years developed effective (or not so effective) responses to diseases. Hence we encounter harrowing tales of the plague in Europe, sleeping sickness in Africa, leprosy in both Europe and Africa, and the global cholera epidemic – and how humanity was affected by and responded to the epidemiological challenges. After dealing with sexually transmitted diseases in a similar fashion, Hunter scrutinizes the nexus between the complexities of evolution and the occurrence of diseases, and also investigates the development of modern responses to diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS. Written in an unassuming style, Who cares? AIDS in Africa presents a wealth of information that never ventures near the abominable albeit prevalent modus operandi of denigrating HIV/AIDS as an issue in isolation from pertinent cultural, social, historical and economic antecedents.
In a further break from the bleating critical mass of most HIV/AIDS authors, Hunter portrays people living with HIV/AIDS in her book not as villains or hospital fodder, but as normotensive human beings. Thus in the introduction Hunter writes that “Our feet are planted firmly on the ground as we create more and more ways to study AIDS but few ways to address it…As we procrastinate, women like Molly, Robina, and Pauline are learning to address their holocaust, facing the incredible odds of their struggle with clarity, perceptiveness, and humanity, with no place to turn but their faith – and their pluck, inventiveness, creativity, and intelligence.” By her own admission, Hunter envisages only for Who cares? AIDS in Africa to “fill a gap in the knowledge base, and that it will provoke controversy, study, counter arguments, and action.” By venturing beyond the conventional confines of folly and daring to be an HIV/AIDS iconoclast, and by imbuing in her book a wealth of information and deep reflection, Hunter has certainly filled some gap in the study of HIV/AIDS: in-between a lot of hot air and smoke Hunter has produced a ray of rational illumination.
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