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CHAPTER ONE The first time I met Fana, he asked me to marry him. While I was struggling to come up with an appropriate response, he asked if I had any daughters. Then, without waiting for an answer to either question, he declared: “I drive around Soweto and I look at all these women with their HIV positive children and I think: they’re all mine, mine and God’s.” By then I was beginning to feel more like his mother than anything else. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. A look of profound loneliness creased his face. I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him everything would be okay. Except of course, it clearly wouldn’t. “God has struck me down with lightning,” he whispered. We were having lunch at a restaurant in the Cresta shopping centre, one of the more soulless of the sprawling malls that constitute communal life in suburban Johannesburg. The meeting place had been his choice, not mine. Or, at least, it was the choice of his current minder, an albino called Marlon, who described himself as a “motivational speaker”. Marlon had initially designated a coffee shop in the centre of the mall but then changed it to a place nearer the parking lot. Fana, he said, was having difficulty walking. When I arrived at the restaurant, a waiter was helping Fana make his slow and painful way to a table at the far end of the near-empty restaurant. It was my first glimpse of the man in the flesh and I snuck surreptious glances at him as he approached the table and slowly eased himself into a seat. He was tall-ish and slim, but not gaunt. His face was angular, quite dark in colour, and had a mottled appearance. I had barely stammered out my name and what I was doing there when he fired off his marriage proposal. At first I assumed this was to disconcert me, to 37 reassert the power balance between us because I had seen him so weak and frail. When I came to know him better, I understood that he sexualised most interactions with women. But more of that later. I explained that I was writing an article for Poz. Marlon asked if there was a fee in it for Fana. To help feed his children, said Marlon. Apart, presumably, for a small commission for himself. Fana looked down at this plate. I said Poz didn’t pay for interviews and Marlon let me go ahead anyway, amusing himself with a magazine while Fana and I continued our conversation. Conversation was not quite the correct word. I watched and struggled toextract a narrative as he see-sawed between despair and a manic bravado, only a tenth of which made any sense. All the while, he was hailing waiters with increasingly bizarre demands. “I’m feeling shaky. I need raw garlic!” Then he asked for olive oil. The waiter who brought it broke out in a delighted grin when he recognised Fana. “How are you, sir?”, he asked with feeling, touching his hand. His grin reveals a large gap between his two front teeth. “Close the garage door, man!” quipped Fana. The waiter did not appear offended. He walked away, still smiling. A little later, Fana started muttering about amazing grace. I thought at first he wanted to pray over the plate of food that had just been put in front of him but then he urged Marlon to go to the car to fetch the amazing grace. A reluctant Marlon prised himself from his magazine and returned a few minutes later with a plastic bag full of red and yellow pills. Fana swallowed a couple and began to eat. I examined the packet. They were labelled Amazing Grace with the sub-title “Super Immune Booster. An extract of natures (sic) pure natural herbs. Recommended dosage: two capsules three times a day”. 38 During the course of the next hour or so, I gathered the following information from Fana: that he had had sex with countless women (“sometimes there would be three waiting outside my room while I was busy with the one”); that, as penance for his womanising, he would abstain from sex for three years (there were still two to go); that he had had a difficult childhood and his father had not exactly been a good role model (“I remember when I was a small child telling the police he was hiding behind the stove when they came to arrest him for beating my mother”) and that, despite all the women, he felt deeply alone. “What I want is a soul mate. A woman to live with me, cook with me, pray with me. And when we are 60, we will retire and run a centre for people with HIV.” Dirk Hartford had told me that he was refusing to take anti-retroviral drugs. Why? I asked Fana. He pretended not to hear the question. I felt exhausted when I finally left him: from the inevitable absorption of his pain and distress and a deep sense of inadequacy: I felt I had merely scratched the surface of a life so different from my own that I couldn’t hope to fill in the gaps. But I was sufficiently intrigued now to want to follow up the story. Preoccupied with other work, I kept in intermittent touch with Dirk, whose emails were increasingly despairing. Fana was on a roller coaster to self-destruction and no one seemed able to stop him. The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research advertised a writing fellowship and I applied for it, suggesting Fana as my subject for research. I got it. The fellowship started in February 2004 but I knew by then that Fana would quite likely be dead. In November, I went to see him again. He was back in his mother’s house in Emdeni, Soweto, the house he had been born in and grew up in. 39 I did not know my way around Soweto and Dirk suggested I employ the services of Satch, a taxi driver who did a lot of work for Y and was a close friend of Fana’s. I was to get to know Satch pretty well but my initial impression was merely of a plump, friendly, middle-aged man and an extremely dilapidated car. On that first trip to visit Fana, Satch said in a speculative way, as if trying out his theory on me: “A man told me that Aids was manufactured by a man named Apollo. He injected it into black people or into things they eat, like oranges. They wanted to kill black people.” I said I didn’t think that was true; that the generally accepted understanding of the origin of Aids was that humans had caught it from eating monkeys in central Africa; that it didn’t make monkeys ill but it tended to be fatal to humans. He waited politely till I had finished speaking and then continued: “This Apollo: he wanted to make money out of making people well again but then he died. They have a cure in New York but they want lots of black people to die first.” I had assumed that my perception of Aids was a universal one: that HIV is a virus that is passed on mainly through sexual intercourse. Once contracted, the virus will replicate itself and it will progressively consume your immune cells, rendering you vulnerable to a variety of illnesses such as meningitis, candida, pneumonia and a form of skin cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. Eventually your immune system will give out altogether and you will die. You can however take anti–retroviral drugs which will attack the virus and allow your immune system to recover but they are very toxic, have unpleasant side effects and have to be taken indefinitely. They greatly improve the quality of your life but cannot rid your body of the virus altogether. In other words, the individual has some control over the disease: they can avoid it by changing their sexual 40 behaviour. If they contract it, they can, to a certain extent, fight it off. This conversation with Satch about “Apollo” was my first indication that the understanding of Aids could be entirely different. It was just over three months since I had last seen Fana and in the interim he had acquired another minder through whom I had had to arrange the interview. Tine van der Maas, it transpired, had been sent personally by the Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala Msimang, to take over the care of Fana. She met us at the front door: a large, barefoot, earthy woman of 49 in loose cotton shirt and cotton pants. The outside door led directly into the small lounge, which was dominated by a single bed down the centre, on which Fana lay, propped up on pillows. His body was covered by a clean white sheet pulled up to his chin but it was evident that he was much thinner than when I had last seen him. His skin seemed much smoother and darker and it had a sweaty sheen, as if he had a fever. He did not remember me but his manner was gentle and very polite. The head of his bed faced the front door which led out onto a small, pretty rose garden. Beyond that was a narrow street, on the other side of which was Zwelethini higher primary school, Fana’s alma mater. The sound of children shrieking and laughing carried through into the house.

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