CHAPTER 14

Parks Mankahlana rose from his deathbed to oppose this campaign against the President and the truth. He spoke in words that polite society, the friends of the Africans, considered unacceptable because they were not pretty.

And then he died, vanquished by the anti-retroviral drugs he was wrongly persuaded to consume. He suffered from anaemia and received dedicated attention from his doctor. Nevertheless he died prematurely, because some, other than his doctor, advised him to take anti-retroviral drugs.

The professionals who fed him the drugs that rendered his anaemia treatment ineffective by destroying his immune system, remain free to feed others with the same drugs. They live to tell us and the world that their patient, who was not their patient, died of a virus they had never found in his body.

And then came young Nkosi.

He, too, died, vanquished by the anti-retroviral drugs he was forced to consume.

But because he was too young to have a voice of his own, unlike Parks Mankahlana, the omnipotent apparatus gave him a new identity.

Ignoring his parentage and his family, it re-named him "Johnson". He became the property and the hapless dependent of a world to which he did not belong. He was reborn as a creature of the imagination and the resources of white South Africa.

This world decided to accord him the status of a hero, the new Hector Petersen murdered not by the apartheid regime, but by our country's democratic government. The pain of his unnecessary death, and the undignified media pictures of his suffering, were a platform that was used to market precisely the drugs that killed this child.

And then the call was made that we should all convene at his last place of rest to celebrate the fact that he had spoken words that adults had put into his mouth; to confess guilt that we had not fed him with anti-retroviral drugs, (which other 'benefactors' provided); to give thanks that others had taken him away from his family; to deify him, and therefore those who supervised his progression to death, as the new heroes and heroines of the struggle for a new South Africa.

And because this was a new struggle, defined and led by people other than his own, his ultimate name had to be Johnson!

As his grandparents watched his small coffin descend into his grave, they had to accept that their grandchild would be identified and remembered forever, not as their own, but the progeny of another, acceptable to the omnipotent apparatus - which they were and are not - Johnson!

In his speech at the Durban World AIDS Conference, the President did not say anything different from what the official WHO Sachs Commission has now said.

We wait to see whether the authorised and official WHO Sachs Commission will meet the same cruel fate as our President did at the hands of the omnipotent apparatus!

The English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a poem entitled "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty". It said:

" Ask why the sunlight not forever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, - why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?"

Perhaps, when our government asked the scientists to answer the questions that had not been answered, we expected too much of them. We expected them to help us to answer the questions that Shelley posed. We expected that they would give us the knowledge forever to weave rainbows over the rivers that spring in the mountains of Ukhahlamba.