Two HIV positive Africans with dramatically different stories talk
to Gus Cairns about their
experiences of life, gay love and prejudice
Samuel
When I interviewed Samuel (not his real name) he had a migraine to add to
the nagging pain of TB in his chest. Bradford’s cold and damp was killing
him, he said.
And to be frank, so is the Home Office. When I visited, he had just lost his
appeal for leave to remain in the UK. He has since been moved to Gosport immigration
centre and expects to be deported to Africa any day. Back in his home country
he will be persecuted for his sexuality and face the prospect of progression
to Aids through lack of access to HIV treatment.
When I visited him in 2004, Samuel was trying to live on £38 a week
and spent most of his time in his room. “Sometimes I think it would
be better to go home to Africa, but if you don’t have a job there you
can’t get HIV drugs. You have to bribe someone for them.
“I was about to go on a treatment programme funded by, you know, that
Irish musician. Then I lost my job.”
‘Lost his job’ is an understatement. Samuel was physically hounded
out of his job and his country, chased from the villages where he used to
work as a respected HIV counsellor. He was jeered, stoned and ostracised by
colleagues in an award-winning Aids support organisation, because they found
out that he was gay.
He’s known since he was 16, from the night he went to a dance in the
capital city with Jimmy, his schoolmate. Jimmy had to stay over.
“He followed me into the shower. He said ‘I want us to do...everything’.”
They were lovers for 12 years until Jimmy died in 2002, not from the HIV they
both had, but run over by a truck. One other person knew they were lovers:
“My mother. But she’s never accepted it.” The girl Samuel
married as a ‘cover’ was dead by that time too, of Aids, like
so many in his country.
Handing out condoms in the night clubs and shebeens, he got to know there
were other gay guys out there because they’d ask for lube.
“It’s condoms everywhere in my country. But the charities, the
UN agencies, they think hetero. Condoms don’t come with lube.”
Knowing a gay group wouldn’t be acceptable, he got together a men’s
support group. Within the 50-strong group were 16 gay men, trying to support
each other in a country saturated with HIV awareness but which deemed gay
life as ‘counter-cultural’.
Everything unravelled after Samuel spoke about himself and his work with gay
men at a conference in another African country - where he thought he’d
be safe. But by the time he returned, his sexuality was common knowledge.
He was heckled by villagers, his clients were taken away from him. He was
sacked and told he was bringing the country’s entire Aids effort into
disrepute, so he fled to England.
Secret lives
We have no idea how many gay, HIV positive Africans there are like Samuel
in the UK. New HIV diagnoses in heterosexuals doubled between 2000 and 2002
with nine out of 10 acquiring their infection abroad, the vast majority in
Africa. This has caused consternation in government and fury in the press
who have branded asylum seekers with HIV as a ‘public menace’
and ‘health tourists’.
Meanwhile HIV cases in gay men have risen by 35 per cent too. But we have
no idea whether any of those positive gay men were immigrants. The Health
Protection Agency, which collects HIV figures, carefully enquires of every
heterosexual whether they think they acquired HIV in the UK or abroad. But
it seems to assume gay men catch it here. The HPA last year issued a ‘guesstimate’
that about one in six new HIV infections in gay men may have been caught outside
the UK - not just in Africa but in other gay HIV hotpots like Latin America,
South-east Asia and Russia.
A piece of research on the needs of HIV positive Africans in London found
one in five men questioned said they were gay. If you are gay and from a country
where one in five have HIV, well, chances are you’re likely to have
it too.
Thando
Thando Mphotulo, a boyish 32, keeps stressing he’s not a health menace
to anyone.
“If guys sleep with me without a condom I know exactly what the possibilities
are. I feel we have a responsibility to our host community.”
But he also blames the way black men are objectified by gay men - and gay
organisations. “Stonewall has to understand that being an African gay
in England means more than just fucking with someone. All they think of us
is as safer-sex targets.
“And I feel gay men and positive men should take us more seriously.
All they see is a big black dick.
“That confuses the closet guys, the ones who think of themselves as
‘Men who have Sex with Men’ instead of gay. I think that label
demeans people; if all you are good for is sex it’s easy to be bullied
by a white cruiser into doing it without a condom.”
Thando was a journalist for 10 years in South Africa. He’s from a black
middle class that existed even before the fall of apartheid. His parents were
psychiatrists.
Like every educated black lad, he was an ANC activist. At college he edited
the student newspaper. Around that time he also had his first, bruising encounter
with a man.
“I’d known I was gay since I was six. There was this out gay ANC
guy, a shop steward. I went to him and said ‘Look, I’m gay. Where
do I go?’ “Well, he lost no time in getting me to bed. He was
HIV positive and he knew he was going to die and he fucked me without a condom.
I still hate him.”
But it wasn’t HIV that brought Thando to the UK, though he was diagnosed
at the age of 20. Even in the new South Africa there are lines you don’t
cross, and Thando crossed them good and proper. He fell in love with a Nazi.
“His name is Wimpie (say ‘Vampy’) van Roy. He’s a
big, rough Afrikaner. He’s in the (white supremacist) AWB.”
“I still love him. We talk on the phone every day. He hates blacks,
and he loves me, and he does both with all his heart. He dismisses my activism,
says the boys in the township are not my problem. But he’s got something.”
Deciding he ‘had no future’ in South Africa, he came to the UK.
Now a civil servant, he first volunteered for refugee and African HIV organisations.
“I worked for IVO, the African HIV place in Tottenham. Gay guys would
turn up there, and I’d get a call: ‘Can you help them meet some
people?’”
“You know who I really worry about? The Muslims. I have this Pakistani
fuck-buddy. He’s having such a tough time reconciling being gay with
his religion. That’s my next project: the Muslim boys.”
Club Afreaka
It is clear being gay and African means you’re burdened with a double
whammy of racism from your host country and bigotry from your home. Your bishops
and presidents call you ‘worse than pigs and dogs’ and if you’re
HIV positive too you’ll get no treatment or support. Trevor Phillips,
chair of the Commission for Racial Equality not so long ago lambasted the
African community for failing to acknowledge gay black men. Citing government
alarm about rising HIV figures in the community, Phillips said: “African
men say ‘[HIV] is a gay thing, African men aren’t gay, so it’s
nothing to do with us’.” So how come this is going on?”
It’s a Thursday night at the Black Cap in Camden and the room is throbbing
to the sound of N`dombolo, Makossa, Zouk and R&B. Gradually the room fills
with men from all corners of Africa. Here’s a type you meet on the gay
scene, the slightly louche older man with lots of jewellery and a silk shirt,
his arm round a pretty Asian boy. Only this one’s Nigerian. Sam says:
“I love it here. I’ve lived in London for 30 years but this is
the first time I’ve been to a gay club that played music I can dance
to.”
Club Afreaka is probably the only gay club night in the UK funded by a health
authority. But it wouldn’t work unless it was fun. And straight African
men turn up too. Decidedly heterosexual Simon Mwendapole, a Positive Nation
columnist, went along. “What I found calmed my fears,” he said.
“I have learned that ‘sodomy’ is not witchcraft. I saw love,
compassion and a great feeling of freedom and security.”
• Form more information about Club Afreaka ring 0207 530 6336
or 07957 721 679.
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