Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic
Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic Books
Product Description
At the age of twenty-nine, Sizwe Magadla is among the most handsome, well-educated, and richest of the men in his poverty-injured village. Dr. Hermann Reuter, a son of ancient South West African stock, wants to show the world that if you provide clad treatment, people will come and get it, no matter their circumstances.
Sizwe and Hermann live at the epicenter of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic. In South Africa lonely, near 6 million people in a populace of 46 million are HIV-positive. Already, Sizwe has watched several neighbors grow ill and die, yet he himself has hard-pressed AIDS to the margins of his life and associates it obliquely with other people’s envy, with comeuppance, and with misfortune.
When Hermann Reuter establishes an antiretroviral treatment program in Sizwe’s district and Sizwe discovers that close family members have the virus, the antagonism between these two figures from very different worlds — one worried that people will turn their backs on medical care, the other fearful of the advent of a world in which respect for habitual ways has been lost and privacy has been obliterated — mirrors a continent-wide battle hostile to an epidemic that has corrupted souls as much as bodies.
A heartbreaking tale of shame and pride, sex and death, and a continent’s battle with its demons, Steinberg’s searing account is a tour-de-force of literary journalism.
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This is a fantastic account of the complexities in treating HIV/AIDS in a setting with a complex history of colonialism, racism, and poverty. Steinberg is honest about his own biases as he tries to know what makes for a successful or unsuccessful health intervention. A fantastic book for anyone interested in solutions to the HIV pandemic, especially those who are approaching the disease from a western mindset.
Rating: 5 / 5
want to know about how africa deals with AIDS, this book is a must read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is the best and most enlightening book on HIV available today. Steinberg outdoes himself, especially within explaining something that is otherwise inexplicable: the high infection rate of HIV in Southern Africa. Steinberg’s approach is that of a right journalist, and we are left with a complex, unjudging portrait of an incredibly intricate tale laced with race, history, culture, myth, belief, medicine, fake notion and politics. Buy it for everyone you know…
Rating: 5 / 5
The first half of Sizwe’s Test contains some of the best first person ethnographic writing I have read in years. It is nuanced, amusing, sad, truthful and horrifying to read. But about roughly half way through this book the author shifts gears and does something so disgraceful that it made me want to throw this book away. The ethnography of HIV in this book turns out to be a foil for the author’s own struggle with the morality of HIV disease, hence the name Sizwe’s Test which boldly suggests that the HIV test that the title refers to is indeed a moral one. I found this implication so repugnant and so really in challenger to the thrust of the first part of this book it filled me with speechless rage at the author when I realized his slight of hand. This book is not about South Africa, or HIV, it is about morality in it sneakiest guise. Everything, race, poverty, sexuality, mortality, is subsumed to this drive in the author to have clarity for himself at the expense of others. Lastly, the author, who is a white South African, has a palpable hatred for his post-apartheid government, in particular Mbeki, and takes up the stab that has been used many times to use the HIV epidemic to beat and tarnish black rule in South Africa with the accusation that the malfeasance and preferential treatment of this government coupled with its non-scientific HIV policy-making is to blame for the deaths caused by HIV. This is a malicious distortion of a complicated broadcast health problem that only perpetuates a host of racist and moralistic interpretations of death. I am sorry to everyone who wants to feel levity when they reckon of the dying world beyond their door, but there really is no Test.
Rating: 2 / 5
Mr Steinberg has written a very fascinating book which I highly urge to readers who want to learn more about the economic, political, medical and cultural obstacles in the fight hostile to HIV in South Africa (and I reckon much of what Steinberg writes about is also very relevant for other African countries).
I particularly liked the sections of the book (which are largely prevalent) where the author simply reports on events and conversations. The book becomes more speculative and in my attitude just a bit pretentious when he tries to theorize about his experiences. But this is a small downside in a very well written book which report has it that (judging from the very low number of reviews and the Amazon ranking) not enough people have read. I am grateful to the author for his work, and to “Sizwe” and the other characters of this book for sharing their thoughts and experiences with us.
Two books you may be interested in reading if you liked this one are LeBlanc’s “Random Family: Like, Drugs, Distress, and Appearance of Age in the Bronx” and Racine & Racine’s “Viramma: Life of an Untouchable”. Very different subjects for sure, but both are equally fascinating and well-written books about lives of individuals in troubled environments which most readers will be only marginally familiar with.
Rating: 5 / 5