The Lion Sleeps Tonight by Rian Malan

Author:Rian Malan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

We all know, thanks to Twain, that statistics are often the lowest form of lie, but when it comes to HIV/AIDS, we suspend all skepticism. Why? AIDS is the most political disease ever. We have been fighting about it since the day it was identified. The key battleground is public perception, and the most deadly weapon is the estimate. When the virus first emerged, I was living in America, where HIV incidence was estimated to be doubling every year or so. Every time I turned on the TV, Madonna popped up to warn me that “AIDS is an equal opportunity killer,” poised to break out of the drug and gay subcultures and slaughter heterosexuals. In 1985, a science journal estimated that 1.7 million Americans were already infected, with “three to five million” soon likely to follow suit. Oprah Winfrey told the nation that by 1990 “one in five heterosexuals will be dead of AIDS.”

We now know that these estimates were vastly and indeed deliberately exaggerated, but they achieved the desired end: AIDS was catapulted to the top of the West’s spending agenda, whereupon the estimators turned their attention elsewhere. India’s epidemic was likened to “a volcano waiting to explode.” Africa faced “a tidal wave of death.” By 1992 they were estimating that “AIDS could clear the whole planet.”

Who were they, these estimators? For the most part, they worked in Geneva for WHO or UNAIDS, using a computer simulator called Epimodel. Every year, all over Africa, blood samples would be taken from a small sample of pregnant women and screened for signs of HIV infection. The results would be programmed into Epimodel, which transmuted them into estimates. If so many women were infected, it followed that a similar proportion of their husbands and lovers must be infected, too. These numbers would be extrapolated out into the general population, enabling the computer modelers to arrive at seemingly precise tallies of the doomed, the dying, and the orphans left behind.

Because Africa is disorganized and, in some parts, unknowable, we had little choice other than to accept these projections. (“We” always expect the worst of Africa, anyway.) Reporting on AIDS in Africa became a quest for anecdotes to support Geneva’s estimates, and the estimates grew ever more terrible—9.6 million cumulative AIDS deaths by 1997, rising to 17 million three years later.

Or so we were told. When I visited the worst affected parts of Tanzania and Uganda in 2001, I was overwhelmed with stories about the disease locals called “Slims,” but statistical corroboration was hard to come by. According to government census bureaux, death rates in these areas had been in decline since World War II. AIDS-era mortality studies yielded some of the lowest overall death rates ever measured in the region. Populations seemed to have exploded even as the epidemic was peaking.

Ask AIDS experts about this and they’ll say, This is Africa, chaos reigns, the historic data are too uncertain to make valid comparisons. But these same experts will tell you that South Africa

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