Free Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, a Country's Hope by Uzodinma Iweala Page A

workers,” Doc said, thrusting his chin in their general direction.
    The year before, during the Nigerian gubernatorial elections, I had interviewed a local Lagos politician about Nigeria’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. During our meeting in his dimly lit office, he had suggested that the disease was a problem of interstate truck drivers and female sex workers.
    “For instance,” he had said, “a tanker driver is supposed to leave from Lagos all the way to Kano to deliver fuel. Because of the kind of person he is—he’s very promiscuous—he stops at Ore. He has a ‘friend’ in Ore, and let’s say he picks the HIV virus up in Ore along the way. He’s infected. From Ore, he now gets to Lokoja, where he’s also promiscuous. There he has unprotected sex with somebody, casual sex. He leaves. He has infected a community there. He gets all the way to Kano, where he has another show and a shot of it, casual sex again. He has infected someone in Kano. Then from Kano he heads back again to Lokoja and Abuja, and the person he had sex with is not available at that point in time, so he has sex with another person. A single carrier can do such damage. Along the routes of transportation, different cells and communities of infected people begin to spread.”
    I found his words interesting because they seemed to externalize both the epidemic and its primary means of transmission—sex. By focusing on these groups of people that Nigerians traditionally consider promiscuous or of lax morality, he seemed to suggest that normal people with normal monogamous sexual relationships exist outside the reach of the virus. Or as one woman I interviewed, who had recently graduated from college, put it: “Everybody wants to believe that they’re very good and they’re too clean for all of that; that people that die of AIDS or have HIV are dirty people, people that sleep around or do rubbish and stuff, not our kind of people.”
    “Some of them are positive,” Doc said about the sex workers. He had just started offering testing and counseling services to the women along with education on safe sex practices and free condoms. The previous week, he said, some of the women had tested positive.
    As we stood watching, every so often a man would walk toward the women and the pair would disappear through a nondescript door in the side of a low cement wall. It was almost too perfect. It seemed that right before my eyes, this politician’s theory was being borne out.
    I followed Doc across the street to that same narrow door in the side of the wall. He opened it and we stepped inside. Behind the door was a labyrinth of corridors open to the sky with smooth concrete walls broken at regular intervals by metal doors, some shut tight, others covered by limp and grungy curtains. At the end of one corridor, a youngish woman swept rhythmically, stopping every so often to slam the head of her broom against the ground and even out its bristles of stiff, dried grass before starting her motion again. Otherwise it was silent. I’m not sure what noises I expected, maybe even wished to hear in some realm of my imagination—heavy breathing, moaning, the universal indicators of illicit activity. But there was nothing. There was no intrigue here, no color, no vibrancy—-just a bunch of dark rooms, each with a mattress and neatly arranged personal effects at its base.
    At the end of one corridor, Doc introduced me to two women he had come to know very well through his advocacy work. His words were quick and almost apologetic: “This is my friend. He has come to do research on HIV. Can he ask you some questions?” Then he disappeared into the maze of corridors.
    My new companions sat down on low stools in the corridor, their backs supported by the cement wall. I took a stool facing them and stretched out my legs as they had.
    One of the women puffed her cheeks wide before smiling at me. She was naturally radiant, the woman at the party who makes everyone feel comfortable