orthodoxy. It was the deaths of those around him.
"My three older brothers died aged 43, 33 and 31.
I lost my younger sister when she was 33. Out of 12 friends in my neighbourhood,
only two were left, and soon their wives died too. Last year, Zambia lost
1500 of its teachers.
"I thought, if Aids is only caused by poverty, how come middle-class
teachers are getting sick?
"You've seen TV coverage of famines in Africa, refugee crises. Who
do you see dying? The children. But in Zambia it's the healthy, sexually-active
parents who die, not the kids. If Aids is 'just' TB, as some dissidents
claim, and not something that makes the TB 100 times worse, why are the
only people I know who die from TB adults?"
In February 2000, when Zulu stopped taking his meds, his CD4 count was
536. In March 2002, when he started again on the same combo, it was 34.
He is awaiting the result of another precious test to see if his CD4s
have bounced back.
"Within a month of taking my meds again, I was out of my wheelchair,"
and the phoneline crackles with messianic force when he says: "And
that's what I'd like to say to everyone. I'm BACK, and I want people to
know that Aids denial is REAL, that it KILLS, and that I've been through
the heart of it and survived. Now my biggest energy goes into combating
stigma.
"And I want to make Aids public. It is hidden away. In downtown Lusaka,
you don't see people with Aids, you see healthy people walking around.
But their relatives are dying at home. You ask any one of those people
what they did at the weekend, and
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they will say, 'One thing I did was visit a very sick friend'."
