To most people, AIDS is an abstraction: a disease that happens to someone else, somewhere else. And a lot of reporting about AIDS in Africa doesn’t do much to detract from that. But, 28 Stories does. Stephanie Nolen (@snolen) spent years working on a book that’s about real problems, and also real people. She tells the stories of the women, men, children and grandchildren in vivid and sensitive detail. And because of this, the book is so much more important than any 28 people, anywhere.

Stephanie Nolen is the New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, the national newspaper of Canada. From 2003 to 2009 she was based in Johannesburg as the Globe’s Africa correspondent, with a specific mandate to cover the African AIDS pandemic. In 2007, she published 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa in 14 countries and six languages; it was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction Literature.

See previous Context Africa posts:

• Alex Halperin looks at the Mzungu Thing
• Katine project brings village life to the mainstream media
• Candace Feit captures Senegalese wrestlers in monochrome
• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

One of the things that I like the most about “28 Stories” is it manages to give a face, or several of them, to an epidemic. How did you balance individual story telling in the context of a global health crisis?

Setting out to write 28, I was battling the impression of virtually everyone I spoke to in the developed world that Africa’s AIDS pandemic was an overwhelming, numbing problem, that the scale of it, the numbers of people affected, were so big as to be ungraspable. The only way to counter that was through the stories of individual people – to remind people that behind the huge statistics were people, who were, in fact, much like them. Each story in the book tells the reader the personal story of one person (it’s one story for each million of the 28 million then living with HIV in Africa.) But each story also (subtly, I hope) introduces you to one issue or one key piece of information (such as how vaccines work, or how militaries are implicated in the pandemic, or HIV denialism) that you need to understand the African epidemic.

You tell 28 individual people’s stories, but how many did you interview in the course of writing the book and researching HIV?

I couldn’t even begin to guess – zillions. I covered the issue with frequent trips to Africa from the late 1990s, before I moved there, and then full time for six years – so I’ve interviewed people in support groups and hospitals and villages and township clinics and government offices – for years.

Is there any one of the stories that sticks with you specifically today?

Truthfully, they all do. A few of the people in the book have since passed away and I think about them. Most of them became friends, and I hear from them often – about new babies and new jobs and marriages and kids graduating from school … In most cases, the people concerned have taken HIV and made it into a positive force in their lives and it’s inspiring to watch them go from strength to strength. In a few cases, people are sick, and struggling to get access to meds or health care, and them I worry about – it makes me feel very far away.

AIDS is highly politicized. You manage to both engage with that set of politics and avoid letting it become the focus of the book. What do you recommend to people who feel the politics of it all prevents them from understanding individuals?

It’s interesting, to characterize it as “political.” I think often people tried to cloak the pandemic in language of politics, as a way of complicating it and excusing inaction. But it was a pretty straightforward issue of people being denied life-saving access to treatment, denied access to information and basic health care to protect themselves, because they were Africa, because they were poor. And then there were the abstinence campaigns, and the condom prohibitions from the churches, especially the Catholic church, which I suppose could be considered political; and the whole swampy mess of denialism from the Mbeki government in South Africa, which had to do with race and Western ideas of black sexuality – also “political” in some sense. Mostly, though, I felt it was about equity issues – about Africans being entitled to the same drugs and the same access to condoms and information and primary health care – as people in the West – about the responsibilities of those in the developed world, and of African governments. And I don’t think basic justice or equality is particularly political. And when you make the discussion about Mfanbela, in the village, whose wife and children are dying because they can’t afford $5 in transport to get to the clinic in town, or Andualem, who is fired from his job because he has HIV, or Tigist, who is 14 and raising her brother on the streets of Addis Ababa because her parents died – they’re not political.

How did you see the face of the epidemic change as your reported on it, and how would you characterize it now?

When I began reporting on HIV in Africa, no one, absolutely no one, whom I met had access to anti-retrovirals – even though people I knew with HIV at home in North America had had the drugs for six or seven years. A diagnosis as HIV-positive really was a death sentence, and the story I told, at the beginning, was quite simply a story of death and destruction. And then came the amazing fight for access to treatment in Africa, and people – often the most impoverished, most marginalized people in a country – battling their governments and pharmaceutical companies for access. And governments got engaged, and the story became one of fighting back, of survival, of trying new and innovative ways to compensate – obviously, not always successfully – for the impact of AIDS. It became a very dynamic story. Those fights are ongoing in many places, and obviously millions of people continue, inexcusably, to get infected or to die without access to treatment – but I would say that there is a slight easing of the sense of panic at this point.

Images courtesy of John Morstad.