God, AIDS, Africa & HOPE

Bartholomäus Grill

History: The minister recommends beetroot – The long silence and the mainly scandalous Aids policy of the South African government

The first time I heard the joke was in Cape Town’s Company Gardens, the exquisite park in the heart of the city which the Dutch settler Jan van Riebeeck had planted after landing in Table Bay in 1652. In one corner of the Gardens, as the locals call it, there is a Victorian toilet block. Sitting on a bench in front of it, a young man told his joke. “Did you hear? The toilets are going be converted into an anti-Aids station so that everybody who has just had sex can shower off the viruses.”

To understand the gag one must know that Jacob Zuma, then the former vice-president of South Africa and a top leader in the ruling African National Congress, had been charged with rape. The accuser, a family friend of Zuma’s, is HIV-positive. Asked by the trial judge whether he wasn’t concerned about having had unprotected sexual intercourse with his accuser, Zuma answered that he had protected himself by taking a shower after the act. Since then, many South Africans have mocked the future ANC president for his “delayed precaution”. But the tragic truth is that quite a few people regard it as a valid protective measure.

I have heard the Zuma joke in Namibia and in Kenya, even in a remote village in Lesotho. It is emblematic of how the African élite deals with the disease. Many ministers and parliamentarians carry the virus, but so far few have mustered the courage to out themselves publicly. There are notable exceptions: Zambia’s former President Kenneth Kaunda publicly revealed that his son Masuzgo Gwebe died from Aids-related causes in 1986. Later, Nelson Mandela openly acknowledged that the death in 2005 of his last surviving son, Makgatho Mandela, was Aids-related, as did Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi after losing his son, Prince Nelisuzulu Buthelezi, the year before.

The ubiquitous silence is especially striking in South Africa, the country with the highest prevalence rate on the continent. The Mbeki government’s Aids policy was marked by expurgation, minimisation and bluster, and several members of the cabinet simply denied the facts. They held on to the wisdom pronounced by the former leader of the influential ANC Youth League and member of parliament Peter Mokaba, who said in a 2002 interview with The New York Times: “HIV? It doesn’t exist.” So the virus doesn’t exist, it’s a fiction, and Aids is an invention of “white” pharmaceutical corporations who want to force poor country to buy their wonder drugs. Mokaba again: “Where the science has not proved anything, we cannot allow our people to be guinea pigs. Antiretrovirals, they’re quite dangerous. They’re poison actually. We cannot allow our people to take something so dangerous that it will actually exterminate them. However well-meaning, the hazards of misplaced compassion could lead to genocide.” Making the rounds in ANC circles was a 144-page document which spoke of a “syndicate of white interest groups” which supposedly directs a massive political and commercial campaign for antiretroviral drugs; that “omnipotent” body seeks to subjugate, exploit and kill Africans with their poisonous medicines.

No wonder that the South African author Rian Malan – who has written nothing worth reading since his international best seller My Traitor’s Heart – was roundly applauded by the ruling faction when he claimed in the British journal The Spectator that a “powerful alliance” of pharmaceuticals, Aids activists, aid organisations, economists and hysterical journalists deliberately inflate Aids statistics. The multinationals, Malan maintained, are driven by naked greed. Such conspiracy theories are common in South Africa, and the people have good reason to think the worst. During the apartheid years one Dr Wouter Basson, a cardiologist, led a research team commissioned by the racist regime to investigate ways to sterilise the black population or to exterminate whole townships under the cloak of deliberately unleashed diseases.

Mokaba, the firebrand Aids denialist, died from Aids-related causes. Every ANC comrade knows it, but nobody will say so. Presidential spokesman Parks Mankahlana shared Mokaba’s fate. His family bars the press from writing the truth. “He died of an illness,” it said in the officially sanctioned obituary. R.I.P. – requiescat in pace – nobody must speak ill of the dead.

Under Mbeki, South Africa’s high and mighty pursued a culture of denial, so it isn’t surprising when the wildest rumours circulate amid the population, and when particularly rural people, misled by government policy, solve the problem in their own ways. There is the story about a young girl from Bergville, in the northern Drakensberg, who was stoned to death after revealing her HIV status. There is the old sangoma who announced that he can cure Aids in liaison with the ancestors. There are the unhinged pastors who consider Aids “God’s punishment”. There are any number of sugar daddies – older, prosperous gentlemen – who are absolutely convinced that they can immunize themselves from HIV by having sex with virgins. There are two-year-old infants who are raped by men who believe that their barbaric crime will guard them from the virus. And everywhere in the private sphere that silence, even though no other state spends so much money on public Aids education. “Nobody talks about it, which I’ll never understand,” says the American anthropologist Susanne Leclerc-Madlala, who married a South African. One only whispers about “this thing”.

That silence has followed us to the top: into the chanceries of bishops, the ministerial office, the presidential setting. Question time in South Africa’s parliament in Cape Town, October 2001. President Thabo Mbeki is scheduled to discuss his cabinet’s Aids plan. But he doesn’t answer any questions. He just reads his prepared text, monotonous and unwavering, with a shot of the arrogance which comes with power. The president expresses doubt about South Africa’s high rate of infection and quotes outdated statistics from the World Health Organisation. The foreign observers in the press gallery shake their heads in disbelief. How can the president of the country with the world’s highest number of HIV cases – even then already 4,7 million people – trivialise the situation? What makes him dispute the causal relationship between HIV and Aids? What is he trying to accomplish with his statement that he doesn’t know a single South African who has died of Aids?

The pundits offer simple explanations: Mbeki is acting like a typical African – he is obstinate and stubborn. He is, the commentators say, like so many politicians on the continent, a disciple of “voodoo science”.

But is it really that simple? To understand Mbeki’s stance we must once more take into account how the Aids pandemic is perceived around the world: as a “black” condition which emerged into the light at the end of the 20^th century from the medieval darkness of Africa. It was here that the virus jumped from beast to man; it was here that it began its morbid passage around the globe. In the popular imagination, the catalysts for the calamity were primitive jungle people who eat monkeys. It is further received wisdom that Africans spread the virus through their uncontrollable sexuality. They just like to screw around, say the chattering classes and the debate societies around the office water coolers. But these prejudices are peddled even in sophisticated circles. They correspond with the preconceived image of Africa, backed by a long tradition in Europe. Africans project the wild, brutish, uncivilised – “because a black man is something abominable”, as it goes in the libretto of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

A politician like Mbeki, who drafted the vision of an African renaissance – a continental regeneration – must be anguished by these perennial stereotypes. As an African man he already has fundamental difficulties speaking about sexuality. Add to that the fear of racist prejudice by whites who, as Mbeki sees it, regard Africans as rampant sex beasts who can’t control themselves. And what is he supposed to think when he receives an e-mail from a white engineer declaring that Aids can’t spread fast enough so that all the “kaffirs” might die? Mbeki belongs to a generation which dedicated its life to the struggle against apartheid, a system that cultivated such perverse mindsets. Now that apartheid has been conquered, the liberated are dying. Hands are wringing in search for an explanation. And in the process one discovers the hypotheses of David Rasnick or Peter Duesberg, two of the so-called Aids dissidents from the United States. They speak about the “virus lie” and “deadly deception”. They dispute that HIV is sexually transmitted or that it leads to Aids. They insist that poverty is the real reason for the accumulation of deaths. South Africa’s power élite lapped up such false doctrines, because these allowed them to ascribe the pandemic to the abject living conditions that are a legacy of apartheid.

The most outlandish rumours are making the rounds about the origins of the pathogen. According to one, it was spread by white doctors in the guise of a polio vaccination drive in Congo. Or the Pentagon in Washington developed it for military purposes and tested it on black people. Or Aids is a phenomenon of the perverted culture of the North, a gay disease spread by Californian men who are at it like dogs on heat (incidentally, that kind of nonsense is also bandied about beyond Africa). The ostensible proof for that dull-witted theory is that the virus was first isolated in the blood of homosexuals in 1981. The lowest common denominator in any of these conspiracy theories always refers to the mortal danger having originated elsewhere, from those who also perpetrated slavery and colonial terror. Hell always is other people – a classic defence manoeuvre in Africa.

The residents of the townships are all the more receptive to these tales because Mbeki’s minister of health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, believed them. For years she blocked the authorisation for the use of antiretroviral drugs because she considered them harmful and even deadly. It required a judgment in Pretoria’s High Court, upheld by the Constitutional Court in July 2002, to force the government to change course. Tshabalala-Msimang, a medical doctor by profession, continued to insist that too little was known about the toxic side-effects of anti-Aids cocktails. In any case, she declared, her country offered adequate medication in the fight against opportunistic infections which Aids patients suffer. She recommended garlic, beetroot, olive oil – preferably cold pressed, that is really cheap in the slums.

The stubborn health minister should become the Ambassador of Blondes, one acerbic columnist suggested, referring to the stereotype of blondes as being not very bright, which also persists in South Africa. The president shielded his health minister, and shared many of her cranky beliefs, and so she could continue in her office for the rest of Mbeki’s term to commit all manner of nonsense.

Stefan Hippler had the opportunity to speak with Tshabalala-Msimang at a national Aids conference in Durban. The exchange was initially rational, but when the conversation turned to antiretroviral drugs the minister reverted to the fantasy world that has caused her to become an international joke.

And all the while an estimated 2,000 people were infected every day in South Africa. The government was not prepared for the disaster and reacted much too late. Dr Mamphela Ramphele, now a director at the World Bank in Washington and previously the head of the University of Cape Town, criticised the Mbeki-government’s Aids policy as “irresponsible, bordering on criminal”. The world can learn a lot in South Africa, about making hair-raising mistakes and culpable negligence, about abjuration and denial and trivialization, about taboos and myths, about superstitions and obtuse conspiracy theories, about culpability and opprobrium and humiliation in the shadows of a tragedy. But the world doesn’t learn, because it is a member of a cartel of silence and disavowal.

It was not until World Aids Day on 1 December 2006 that the Mbeki government adopted its dangerous health policies, presenting in alliance with representatives from business and civil society a new Strategic Aids Plan. This was announced by Vice-President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who was commonly regarded as a key figure in the fight against the pandemic. For the first time since apartheid a top official document acknowledged the dramatic situation, noting that the increase in mortality rates among mothers and children belong to the most devastating consequences and represent a massive threat to South Africa’s ability to accomplish the Millennium Goals of development. After years of denial and trivialization, such an admission signified a radical transformation of the national Aids policy. In 2010 the government of South Africa under President Jacob Zuma acknowledged before the Soccer World Cup 2010 the magnitude of the pandemic and changed complete course, initiating a country-wide drive for testing and treatment which continues until today. The game has certainly changed in our days, but it took too long and the cost was too high.

Translation from:
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Hardcover: 207 pages  –  Publisher: Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH (August 31, 2007)
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3462039253  –  ISBN-13: 978-3462039252
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Paperback  – Bastei – Luebbe  –
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3404606159  –  ISBN-13: 978-3404606153

Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, HIV Treatment, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, Medical and Research, Networking, Politics and Society, Reflection, Society and living environment, Aids, bartholomaeus grill, book, cape town, Catholic, catholic church, Church Matters, gott-aids-afrika, hiv, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, moral theology, oekonomia, people living with the virus, pope, sexuality, south africa, stefan hippler, theology, Theology

Stefan Hippler

Silently into the grave – Why those with Aids don’t want to know the truth

No, no, it’s fine. Everything’s okay. Whenever we ask Maggie* how she is doing, she always gives the same answer. But we can see that she is getting thinner and weaker by the day. It’s obvious that she struggles to clean the rooms in our guesthouse, she visibly strains just shaking pillows or emptying the bins. And yet she insists: Don’t worry about me. Maggie has worked at the Mediterranean Villa for two years. She is 48 years old. Her husband died in 2004, and since then she has had to find her own way with three children. The two older daughters don’t work, the youngest smokes Tik – crystal methamphetamines – which is all the rage in Cape Town’s drug scene. It’s disastrous for the whole family. While the mother works, the daughter sells all the household’s possessions to buy more drugs. But the money is never enough to gratify her addiction. Maggie’s daughter enters a vicious cycle of crime: she steals, she is arrested, mother bails her out, she does not reform, is arrested again, etc. And Maggie works and earns the money needed to bail her out.

But soon Maggie won’t be able to do that any more, because there is a disorder about which she doesn’t want to talk. She also doesn’t want to see a doctor. All our efforts at persuading her are futile. She makes excuses: “Let it be, it’s fine, I have no time for doctors, it’s just the stress.” Both of us know that it isn’t stress, but the stigma. It’s the dread of being marked out and ostracised if her neighbours in the township should know what ails her. That disease: HIV/Aids. It’s always others who get infected – neighbours, strangers, outsiders. The stigma is remorseless. It draws on ignorance, rumours, credulity and moral failure. It leads to the exclusion of the affected. “Don’t touch me”. “Use another toilet.” One hears such phrases every day. And sometimes: “You’re not one of us any more.”

It’s like a social death penalty – and that happens in a culture which proclaims the principle of ubuntu. A keyword in Africa’s mutually supportive societies, it can be defined as one being human only through other people.
Aids. Maggie won’t even say the word. Her husband’s death certificate also doesn’t say what exactly caused his death. He just was very ill. Nobody needs to know more. And that’s why so many people refuse to go to a doctor. “No problem; it’s not that bad.” Always the same excuses, the same pleading, the same silent complaints, and sometimes also tears – and it goes on like this for weeks. Finally, in November 2006, I prevail and take Maggie to the doctor for a blood test. She refuses to accept the result. No, she doesn’t have this sickness; she isn’t ill. The doctor puts her off work for six months. She gets weaker and weaker, her body is falling apart; it’s too late for the medications which could extend her life. Soon, on a sunny January morning, she dies. The fear of stigmatization killed Maggie – a fate shared by many thousands of her fellow HIV-positive South Africans.

* name changed

Translation from:
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Hardcover: 207 pages  –  Publisher: Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH (August 31, 2007)
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3462039253  –  ISBN-13: 978-3462039252
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Paperback  – Bastei – Luebbe  –
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3404606159  –  ISBN-13: 978-3404606153

Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, HIV Treatment, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, Medical and Research, Networking, Politics and Society, Reflection, Society and living environment, Aids, bartholomaeus grill, book, cape town, Catholic, catholic church, Church Matters, gott-aids-afrika, hiv, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, moral theology, oekonomia, people living with the virus, pope, sexuality, south africa, stefan hippler, theology, Theology

Bartholomaeus Grill

Nothing new in the South  – HIV: the biggest weapon of mass destruction of our time
A reflection in 2007

An infection by a lethal virus every six seconds. Every day 8,000 Aids deaths. In 2006, five million new infections. Worldwide almost 40 million HIV-positive people. These figures are frightening; they exceed the powers of our imagination. These are the annual statistics from the United Nations. In the West they may be noted with resignation or they are just ignored. The pandemic does not register as a threat there because the numbers of infections – 275,570 reported cases in Western Europe’s 22 countries in December 2006 – are small in global terms. The threat of Aids death has lost its shock value in the West because of a false notion that antiretroviral medication can cure the disease. Those not affected by it tend to trivialize or even evade the pandemic.

First it was the “gay cancer”. Then it came for the prostitutes and the drug addicts. Eventually it came for the blacks. In between, in the 1980s, a shock wave took hold briefly when it was realised that actually everybody was in danger. Nevertheless, in the collective consciousness of the rich parts of the world, Aids – the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – has remained a curse which afflicts others: the deviants, the failed, the poor, the Africans. Like the medieval Black Plague, the Aids pandemic is inexplicable – it seems to rage in another place, at another time. And because, to paraphrase Albert Camus, a dead man weighs something only if one has seen him dead, history’s millions of Aids-corpses are “nothing but the smoke of the imagination”.

The African must surely feel like those people in Camus’ novel The Plague who are quarantined in the coastal city of Oran. A giant sightscreen surrounds their continent; they suffer and die unnoticed. But the virus transcends fortress walls and state borders. Unlike the medieval city, the expanding citadel of affluence, the European Union, cannot close its fortified gates and hope to be spared. Aids is another phenomenon of globalisation; at least the virus takes on its characteristics. It travels around the word like jet planes, data streams, cash flows or waves of immigration; it is fast, unpredictable and knows no frontiers.

The pandemic connects the North and the South, but also separates the two hemispheres. The HIV-infected in affluent countries reach older age thanks to better therapies; Aids has become a chronic illness. In developing countries, immune deficiency is fatal; it claims ever more lives and depresses life expectancy. For those who are literate the threat diminishes. Those who cannot afford to acquire costly medicines die. “The truth about Aids is a universal truth about the world today,” as the Swedish author Henning Mankell wrote.

The epidemic is spreading almost uncontrollably and at a high-speed in countries such as Kazakhstan, Estonia, Russia and the Ukraine. The rate is even more dramatic in India, where 2,5 million are infected. The new economic superpower has one of the world’s highest numbers of infected, steadily catching up with South Africa, which still tops the table in the death statistics. But those governments that remain indifferent or uncertain can observe in South Africa and its neighbours what will befall their societies if they fail to take swift counteraction. In the southern African region, the pandemic has already entered its devastating phase. There are images of overcrowded hospices, endless funeral processions, overflowing cemeteries. The general rate of infection in Swaziland is 39%, and 56% of pregnant women are infected – these are distressing world records. The average life expectancy in Botswana has dropped to 34,9. In Zambia, twice as many teachers die every year than are being trained at colleges. In Malawi families go hungry because of shortages of agricultural labour. The army of Aids orphans has swelled to 12 million.

Aids exacerbates misery. Aids leads to exploding health costs. Aids consumes growth. Aids undermines development. As the virus destroys the immune system of the human body, so does the epidemic contaminate the fabric of society. In the end, villages will fall silent, just as they did in Europe during the Black Plague, when Petrarch of Verona reported: “No more can you hear voices, sorrow, cries of pain, weeping.”

The American secret service, the CIA, in spring 2001 called HIV/Aids the “biggest threat” to democracy, security and stability in Africa. Then came the autumn, the 11^th of September, and since then the biggest threat is something quite different: global terrorism. But billions of people feel no threat from terrorism. They are threatened by poverty, hunger, disease. From their point of view, the most dreadful weapon of mass destruction is called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Since its discovery in 1981, about 25 million have fallen victim to the pathogen. You don’t have to be Cassandra to prophesy that in 30 years the epidemic will have extinguished more lives than the Second World War. These are depressing prognosis, but they don’t seem to concern the world powers much.

Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy for Aids, explained in 2002 during a trip to Ethiopia: “On September 11, 2001, 3,000 people died in a horrific terrorist act and within a few days, the world was talking about hundreds of billions of dollars to fight terrorism. But in 2001, 2,3 million Africans died of Aids and you have to beg and plead to find a few hundred million dollars to spend.” The angry Canadian ex-diplomat accuses the smug, satiated rich regions of the world of mass murder by complacency. In that light the global hysteria that greeted a few thousand cases of SARS or the panic about bird flu seem absurd.

Beyond Africa, the pandemic’s social, economic and security “collateral damage” is not understood. It shatters nation-states and ruins economies. It aggravates crises and conflicts. It jeopardises the stability of entire regions. But it seems as though the world’s elite will not learn from Africa’s experiences. They have more important things on their minds than to deal with the most devastating catastrophe of our time. Their indifference, as Stephen Lewis puts it, is obscene.

Translation from:
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Hardcover: 207 pages  –  Publisher: Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH (August 31, 2007)
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3462039253  –  ISBN-13: 978-3462039252
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Paperback  – Bastei – Luebbe  –
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3404606159  –  ISBN-13: 978-3404606153

Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, HIV Treatment, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, Medical and Research, Networking, Politics and Society, Reflection, Society and living environment, Aids, bartholomaeus grill, book, cape town, Catholic, catholic church, Church Matters, gott-aids-afrika, hiv, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, moral theology, oekonomia, people living with the virus, pope, sexuality, south africa, stefan hippler, theology, Theology

Stefan Hippler:

Was that it? – What I expected from being a priest and how I became an Aids activist in Africa

I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was in July 1986, shortly after my ordination to the priesthood. I was driving from Koblenz to Trier, in south-western Germany. Suddenly a strange anxiety gripped me: was this all there was?

The beautiful scenery of the countryside of Hunsrück and the Eifel flew by, and it felt as if I was confined to a golden cage. My priestly future seemed to be limited to a few precise, definable coordinates. A parish, service to the Church, pastoral duties – I saw my life flashing before me. In the end, a small obituary would say: “Well done, thou faithful and loyal servant…”, and with it a catalogue of parishes and other stations of importance, and a note of appreciation from the bishop of Trier. But I managed to shake off this sense of confinement and lack of direction, and reported to my first post as curate in Münster-Sarmsheim. I was ready to follow the promise I had made at my ordination, to experience the glorious freedom of God’s children.

At the same time I was also intensively engaged in the peace movement – much to the distress of my Episcopal superiors. I took part in a sit-in at the American nuclear depot in Hasselbach, and was promptly arrested, along with a couple of high-profile protesters. The officials of my diocese were less than impressed when they watched the TV footage of their vicar being bundled into a police van. And so just six months into my priesthood my career, in as far as there is such a thing in the Church, was already on a slope.

When the first Gulf War broke out in the early 1990s, I was serving as vicar in Andernach. My parish of St Peter’s became a regional refuge of spiritual resistance, and again the superiors were irritated by my peace activism. At the same time it bothered me, as a young priest, to be preaching Sunday sermons at my congregations without having been exposed much to real life – I felt that I needed real life experience before I could act as a proper pastor. So I applied for a year’s leave. The sabbatical turned out to last five years during which I didn’t always work in the vineyard of the Lord, but also in other pastures. A McDonald’s drive-in restaurant taught me how to prepare burgers. After the Berlin Wall fell, McDonald’s offered me a lucrative managerial post in eastern Germany. I turned it down: I wanted life experience, not a career.

Instead I went to work for 18 months on a finca in Spain to learn various farming skills, such as harvesting and the processing of almonds. After that I returned to Germany to work as a care assistant in a hospital ward for final-stage cancer patients. And then I was joining as a volunteer of he organisation Pax Christi to care for refugees in Croatia. In Mostar I began to fully understand the horrors of war. My next station was Frankfurt, working at the international airport in the social services department which attends to stranded refugees and asylum applicants. My primary function was to take care of unaccompanied refugee children. That experience marked a turning point in my life. I quickly learned that Germany’s Constitution (or “Basic Law”) ended at passport control – as not infrequently did human rights.

I had to witness how children would be traumatized as they were arrested at machinegun-point by border patrols and then be put into a sort of Ikea-jail in Terminal 2. Or how a two-year-old refugee boy was refused entry as a security threat to the Federal Republic, even as his mother was granted an asylum seeker permit inside Germany. Or how some people in their despair attempted to commit suicide. After such experiences I began to think of Germany in some aspects as not better than as a banana republic. That time-tested my view of humanity, and by extension of God. On reflection I am thankful for these experiences – without them, I would not be the person I am today.

The key event was my massive clash with the then-minister for the interior, Manfred Kanther. The conflict centred on seven Sudanese men who protested against their expulsion with a weeks-long hunger strike. On three occasions the Constitutional Court ruled, at the last-minute, against their deportation. But then Kanther ordered the seven to be put in leg irons, placed on a chartered jet and flown to Khartoum. During their eight-week hunger strike I had become particularly friendly with one of the seven, a quiet, reticent young man, whose claims to having been tortured in Sudan appeared to be highly credible. But having been tortured was not good enough grounds for securing asylum, so I had decided to shield the poor guy by way of adult adoption. But he and his six friends were now back in Sudan. A reporter for the magazine stern (which once attracted attention for publishing the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler) established through instant research that they had just been economic refugees. Minister Kanther must have been delighted, because the article seemed to vindicate him.

I decided to fly to Sudan to determine the facts of the matter myself. My employer, Caritas, also had an interest in the matter: if we were proved right, we would at least be able to claim a moral victory. I succeeded in locating and visiting all seven of the deported men, and could now verify that stern’s account did not correspond with the facts. For example, the reporter worked a pure miracle by interviewing, without the aid of modern technology, the mother of one of the seven from a distance of 400km!

My research did not please the Sudanese officials, and even less so their German counterparts. When I landed two weeks later in Frankfurt, border patrol units surrounded the aeroplane. My companion to Sudan and I were detained. At the station I noticed an Interpol wanted poster…for me! I realised that the situation was serious: I was being investigated for suspected human trafficking and formation of a criminal ring! An attorney secured my release. Shortly after a telephonic message from Caritas: “Your employment is terminated with immediate effect.”

The confrontation with the might of the state, the falsehoods peddled by the press, the inhumane asylum policy – all this shook my set of values to their core. I prevailed in my legal case against stern, and after half a year the investigation against me was closed. Caritas welcomed me back on duty, but only after I had threatened them with a complaint in labour court. But Germany had become too restrictive for me; I knew I had no future there.

In 1997 my diocese allowed me to continue my pastoral service abroad, for which I remain grateful to my then-bishop, the late- Hermann Josef Spital. So I went to Africa – and arrived, to the shock of the parish sister, with another man, namely my Sudanese friend, whom I had adopted. It is obvious, she told me, what it means when two men live together. And right off I had another problem: the parish sister immediately informed my superiors in Bonn. In the end, a brief clarification was enough to smooth things over.

Now I began to meet a great challenge: the renewal of the stagnant German-speaking Catholic parish in the Cape. It had neither a church nor a presbytery, the parish register consisted of a hand-written list. I set about visiting families, asking for addresses and contacts, and then founded a parish council. I also bought a building called the Mediterranean Villa for the church, to serve as a presbytery, a parish centre, and also as a guesthouse, because I was also in charge of the pastoral care for German-speaking tourists. The proceeds from the lodgings were intended to cover the running parish costs and to finance social projects. Confirmation, Easter vigils and Christmas Mass were reintroduced, and slowly the somnolent parish found a new life. A decade later, the 400 square kilometre wide parish is running smoothly.

Besides my pastoral ministry I was also eager to develop social activities: outreach with parishes in black townships, partnerships and development projects with people who remained disadvantaged even in the new, democratic South Africa. Soon one matter occupied the focal point, and I couldn’t let it rest: HIV/Aids and its devastating consequences.

Why do I write at such length about all of this? Because one can understand certain thoughts I express in this book only against the backdrop of my life story. Perhaps only those who understand the harsh realities of everyday life will follow my doubts and questions, and empathise with the abyss which so demoralise me as a priest.

Only those who know my life’s journey will appreciate that behind my cries from the conscience I have an absolute desire for dialogue and, yes, a longing to be taken seriously. The texts in this book are not intended as a gratuitous critique of the Catholic Church, but as a serious enquiry which cannot be dismissed simply with reference to God’s will or the classic “It was always so; why should we do it any differently now?” This is more about the challenges of real life, about questions to which we must find answers. It’s about being confronted by the insights of natural science – and by the ancient sources of our Christian beliefs.

The suffering which has visited millions of people – and also millions of Christians, millions of Catholics – obliges us to enter into a new dialogue with St Augustine, for example. That Church Father’s principles concerning sexual morality and sin have been carved into the Catholic stone, so much so that they seem unassailable. I am not interested in dispensing with all that is old, conventional and traditional for the sake of modern wisdoms. I am looking for an honest inquest and dialogue which must be open for the New which God wants to give us again and again by trusting in the guidance of the Holy Spirit.. In doing so we must conquer our fears, with trust in God. Benedict XVI, the present pope, is a brilliant theologian. Those in the know suggest that after almost three decades in the Vatican he has lost touch with the realities of common life. I understand why that may be inevitable, but I wish that the highest authorities in our Church might listen to its specialists on the ground, instead of closing their minds from the start.

I offer no patented solutions. I also have no intention of rebuilding the Church, never mind shaking it to its foundation. But I would like the Church to consider my practical experiences and intellectual insights in its development of a theology of a people-friendly, loving God. The time in our Church when people would be condemned for thinking independently categorically should be over. I expect to receive the same spiritual respect I offer others, because that shows respect towards those people whose lives and sufferings this book deals with. They are all daughters and sons of God; they are all respected and loved unconditionally by Him.

Translation from:
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Hardcover: 207 pages  –  Publisher: Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH (August 31, 2007)
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3462039253  –  ISBN-13: 978-3462039252
Gott – Aids – Afrika
Paperback  – Bastei – Luebbe  –
Language: German  –  ISBN-10: 3404606159  –  ISBN-13: 978-3404606153

Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, HIV Treatment, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, Medical and Research, Networking, Politics and Society, Reflection, Society and living environment, Aids, bartholomaeus grill, book, cape town, Catholic, catholic church, Church Matters, gott-aids-afrika, hiv, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, HOPE Cape Town Trust, moral theology, oekonomia, people living with the virus, pope, sexuality, south africa, stefan hippler, theology, Theology