Actress Emma Thompson takes time off set on the next Harry Potter
film to talk to Rose de Freitas about her work in Africa with ActionAid
Photos: Jenny Matthews
Admired by many for her superb performance in and screenplay
for the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, British actress Emma Thompson
has been busy making more films this year. But she still found time to get
her hands dirty on diary patrol in Africa for ActionAid.
I’ve always been involved in this kind of work. I went to an ActionAid launch and I liked their politics and the kind of activities they were proposing.
I’m a big supporter of the charity world, because I think without it governments would never take responsibility for the crises we face and there would be far more disconnection from actual problems and trouble spots. So I signed up to ActionAid’s campaign about two or three years ago.
My job with ActionAid is basically to travel for them - one trip a year - to Aids-stricken places across the globe and write a diary of each visit. I’ve committed for 10 years and I go to a different place each year. This year I went to Mozambique and last year I travelled in Uganda.
Well obviously in Uganda there’s been successful Aids prevention work for some time and the devastation is not so overwhelming although it’s still very debilitated. In Uganda there is information and there are organisations. In Mozambique the situation is truly terrifying. Five hundred new HIV infections a day. Because the wars only finished as recently as 1992, there’s been very little Aids information available.
Usually the trip lasts about 10 days. I arrive and meet a key Aids activist - in Uganda it was Noerine Kaleeba and TASO who showed me around. I don’t stay in the capital, but drive up country. It’s sad but most people who impact on a country don’t ever see life on the ground because they just stay in big hotels near the capital. I’d like the trips to be longer, but I have a three-year-old daughter who’s too young to come with me. And I have to get back for her. When she’s older I’d like to take her, but there’s lots of injections and anti-malaria treatment involved in visiting places like Africa. It wouldn’t be fair to inflict this on her so young.
The
African Aids epidemic is the worst situation we face in the world. And it is
everyone’s human responsibility to deal with it. What we’re seeing
is the destruction of a continent. It is affecting the entire civil society
in Africa: nurses, doctors, lawyers, not just the poor. It’s complex,
hard to sum up in a nutshell without sounding trite. But my suggestion would
be for each G8 member to twin with an African country. Each rich country takes
on the responsibility of a poor country.
Say Great Britain twinned with Uganda, then it would be our responsibility to administer Uganda’s aid. It should start at the bottom up. We provide volunteers who are trained in Uganda on the ground.
You see, what I have come across is the absence of an infrastructure to disseminate information. Impoverished communities don’t have TV. They don’t have radio. So we have to work with local activists and empower them. There should be connections made between the rich country’s business community and the country being aided. There should be connections at top level between government ministers. If on one of Blair’s visits to Uganda, he and Museveni were seen publicly to go for HIV tests, now that would say something. If Bush went for one! Now that would make a difference. When serious work is done, it does effect change. It does help.
Sexual behaviour has to be addressed too. Another problem is dealing with each country individually. Not all African countries react well to the same prevention and treatment programmes either. For example, Noerine Kaleeba tried to start up TASO in Kenya and it just didn’t respond. In Uganda it was a success.
 Jenny Matthews’ photos of Emma Thompson’s diary trip in Mozambique have recently appeared in The Mail on Sunday. |
I’ve had lots of HIV tests. Considering the number of dodgy musicians I had encounters with in my twenties, they were essential! I have friends with HIV, some of who have died with Aids. I know about the difficulties in the gay scene here too. The fact that the success of ARVs and new drugs have helped extend lives makes a lot of young gay men more complacent. And I can see that HIV is sometimes seen as a badge of identity for gay men here in the West, but in poor countries, there is no interest in identifying with having HIV. A poor Ugandan mother will die of TB or something anyway, and not be seen to ‘have Aids’. It’s certainly not a status symbol to aspire to.
I think the UK is caught up like everyone else in the world in some kind of ‘psychotic disconnection’ from the real issues of modern human life. We’ve lost the plot here completely. HIV and Aids haven’t gone away and I’ve written to the government and will continue to do so to keep up pressure.
It’s certainly not just in poorer countries where this is a problem. Our whole attitude to sex and sexuality here has taken a terrible turn. Look at Teen Big Brother, for God’s sake!
Unfortunately, the poorest women often have no jurisdiction over their bodies especially in conflict situations or war zones. They are still being abandoned by husbands when it’s discovered they have HIV. There are still big issues with dry and wet sex, and huge problems with not disclosing to children until it’s too late. In places where there is very high HIV prevalence, sexual behaviour has to be discussed openly and with men and with younger children. It’s certainly worked in Uganda where behaviour and especially male sexual behaviour is changing and prevention is having a positive effect. But in Mozambique, I came across mothers who still wouldn’t tell their children about HIV until they’re older than 12; this just seemed too late in that kind of nightmare scenario. Having said that, the majority of Aids activists I met in Africa were women. So they are becoming more empowered. Of course, male sexual behaviour has got to change drastically.
I’m doing a few days finishing off the next Harry Potter film. A nice treat after torture in Argentina and Aids in America. (The contentious Imagining Argentina and the film version of the play Angels in America are both on general release soon). In Mozambique I did some fantastic pictures with war photographer Jenny Matthews who recently produced the photography book, Women and War [which we reviewed in PN 91]. And my Mozambique photo diary is due to be published in the Mail on Sunday any day. I think I will go to somewhere like Ethiopia next year to do a diary for ActionAid.
I’d love to keep more in touch!
