Category: Current Affairs - International; Current Affairs - Political; Current Affairs
Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
ISBN: 978-0-676-97822-3 (0-676-97822-3)
Pub Date: April 24, 2007
Buy HERE
Note: A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book in each country are being donated to AIDS support organizations in Africa.
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ABOUT 28 Stories of Aids in Africa

From an internationally acclaimed journalist comes an extraordinary book that puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa: twenty-eight vivid stories, one for each of the million Africans living with the virus.

For the past six years, Stephanie Nolen has traced AIDS across Africa, and 28 is the result: an unprecedented, uniquely human portrait of the continent in crisis. Through riveting, anecdotal stories, she brings to life men, women, and children involved in every aspect of the pandemic, making them familiar to us in a way they never have been before. In the process, she explores the effects of an epidemic that well exceeds the Black Plague in scope, and the reasons why we must care about what happens.

In every instance, Nolen has borne witness to the stories she relates, whether riding with truck driver Mohammed Ali on a journey across Kenya; following Tigist Haile Michael, a smart, shy fourteen-yearold Ethiopian orphan fending for herself and her baby brother on the slum streets of Addis Ababa; chronicling the heroic efforts of Alice Kadzanja, an HIV-positive nurse in Malawi; or talking to Nelson Mandela and his wife about coming to terms with his own son's death from AIDS.

These stories reveal how HIV works and spreads; how it is inextricably tied to conflict and famine and to the diverse cultures it has ravaged; how treatment works, and how people who can't get treatment fight to stay alive with courage and dignity against huge odds.

Writing with power and simplicity, Stephanie Nolen makes us listen, allows us to understand, and inspires us to care. Timely and transformative, 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa is essential reading for anyone concerned about the fate of humankind.

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An example of the 28 Stories copied from the author
Siphiwe Hlophe

When she went off to secondary school, Siphiwe was the only student without shoes, an offence for which the headmaster could have dismissed her. She hated this visible sign of her poverty, and after a few weeks she walked to town, to the office of the aid agency Save the Children, in through the door and right up to the director.

"I said, 'You know I'm poor, and I need to continue my education.' Impressed by her spunk, the director found a family in Finland to pay for shoes and the cost of boarding school. The Finnish family continued to sponsor her until she graduated from university in 1984. Back then she thought, "Maybe when I grow up I will take care of some orphans to pay back what they have done for me." She told me this with an amused little snort ­ funny how that worked out.
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COMMENDATIONS & REVIEWS

"A book of quiet yet overwhelming power, delivering a message of devastating moral authority. Moving, heartrending and uplifting, Stephanie Nolen's book bears impeccable witness to the 'unique and savage' phenomenon of AIDS in Africa." - William Boyd, author of Restless and Brazzaville Beach

"If a war had killed 20 million soldiers, and left 28 million more dying of wounds, we'd call it the worst such tragedy since World War II. This is the scale of AIDS in Africa. Stephanie Nolen brings this story to life in a moving, deeply human way. Through these portraits­shrewdly chosen, varied, and sometimes startlingly unexpected­she artfully puts a series of human faces on the greatest health crisis of our time." - Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains

 "The marvelous gift of Stephanie Nolen's 28 is that it allows the reader a chance to mingle, a chance to hob-nob, with fascinating and eloquent people from across sub-Saharan Africa. Professors and sex-workers, truckers and doctors, old ladies and orphaned children, celebrities and beggars, all raise their voices here. The music of these combined voices is intelligent and pained; it sings to us of suffering, stigma, compassion, courage, and heartrending love.- Melissa Fay Greene, author of There Is No Me Without You

 "AIDS in Africa is an enigma. The more it spreads, the less we see it. It is deadly yet deniable. It hides in full view of everyone. What this moving book does is to catch it by the tail and show us its face­ it is our own." - Christopher Hope, author of My Mother's Lovers

"According to UNAIDS, the number of HIV-infected people in Africa is 28 million.  But Nolen, veteran Toronto Globe & Mail Africa bureau chief, doesn't believe it: after nine years of reporting on the epidemic, she thinks that number is conservative.  Here she offers 28 searing portraits of Africans affected by the deadly virus.  Scattered across the continent from the slums of Lagos, Nigeria, to the bush in southern Zambia, these Africans present a mosaic of a continent in crisis and a collective cry for help.  She examines the role of soldiers, a "key vector" for AIDS, through the tale of Andeualam Ayalew, a commando who was kicked out of the Ethiopian army after testing positive for HIV.   He learned of AIDS prevention at a clinic, and, risking arrest, returned to his unit to teach his former comrades and other soldiers about using condoms.  Agnes Munyiva, a prostitute for 30 years, who has had contact with thousands of men in a slum outside Nairobi, Kenya, does not have HIV.  Her natural immunity has brought doctors and researchers from as far away as Canada to study her.  With a seasoned journalist's finesse, Nolen effortlessly weaves technical information -- health statistics, disease data, NGO reports -- into these deeply intimate glimpses of people often overlooked in the flood of contemporary media.  Nolen's book packs a real emotional wallop.

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London ~~ Sunday June 17 2007

Rage - and courage - for Africa's sick millions

Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of Aids in Africa tells the truth behind a continent's courageous battle, says Rebecca Seal

Buy Stories of AIDS in Africa at the Guardian bookshop HERE

This may not, at first glance, seem like an appealing book: 28 true stories of people in Africa who have HIV/Aids or have been touched by it - that's one story for each million of the estimated 28 million people infected in Africa. But in fact, it is both brilliant and enraging, and contains accounts of some extraordinary people doing courageous things to fight the epidemic which go a long way to counter other stories of hopelessness, ignorance and corrupt or inept government.

Stephanie Nolen is an award-winning Canadian journalist who has lived in Africa for six years. The way Aids was ravaging the continent became clear to her while she was covering the crises in Uganda and Sudan and the aftermath of conflict in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. Her work in those areas brought her into contact with agencies such as Medecins Sans Frontieres - one of the few organisations trying to bring antiretroviral drugs and other treatments to HIV/Aids sufferers.

In the developed world, pregnant women carrying the virus are given a simple treatment in labour, along with their baby, and discouraged from breastfeeding. This lowers the risk of transferring the virus to about 2 per cent. In Africa, fewer than 10 per cent of pregnant African women get such interventions and, unlike here, almost none are tested for HIV; 700,000 HIV-positive babies are born every year, and most die before the age of five.

Then, of course, there is the dispute between Aids campaigners and the drugs firms that oppose generic antiretroviral treatments; the reluctance of governments such as Thabo Mbeki's to accept that HIV is sexually transmitted, or that ARVs can diminish the impact of the virus; and the fact that long-distance truckers in Rwanda and Uganda believe that they need to have regular unprotected sex to stay healthy.

Thankfully, there are some stories that stop you from totally giving up on humanity - from the tireless doctors who treat Aids patients to the campaigners who refuse to buy their own medication until it is freely available to all. Christine Amisi, for example, left the safety of a UN compound to continue her work as a nurse for MSF, risking her life in order to ensure that her patients got supplies of drugs. Nelson Mandela took on his own successor, Mbeki, when he realised that South African policy on the disease was causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, including that of his own son. Dr James Orbinski, who was president of MSF when the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, says of the book: 'Read. Weep. Rage. And above all else - like those people described in this book - find the courage to do.'

This is a call to arms, to a battle that we should all have been fighting for a very long time.
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