KITWE, ZAMBIA — Stanley Chinoya wants nothing more than to go to school. He has mastered the alphabet up to E, and he would like to learn the other 21 letters. But Stanley's parents are dead; his exhausted grandmother, caring for him and another orphaned grandchild, can't afford to send them to school.
Stanley was born with HIV, which has left him, at age 10, half the size of other children his age and chronically ill. So no one sees much point in spending money on him. He is one of several hundred grubby orphans loitering in the streets of his slum neighbourhood in this Zambian copper-belt town.
At the primary school Stanley cannot attend, there are 125 children in the Grade 2 class. Teachers keep dying and no one replaces them. Up the road, at Kitwe Central Hospital, the medical wards are overflowing with patients who all look the same: stick-thin, covered in lesions, gasping. Kitwe Central is supposed to have more than 600 nurses. It currently has 245. At the local Home Affairs office, people seeking passports or death certificates sleep overnight in the doorway, hoping to be first in line when the one or two remaining employees show up the next day.
In a village half an hour's drive away, Buluma Ngusa finds herself raising five grandchildren under the age of 5. At 69, she is twice the national life expectancy. She had six children of her own; four of them have died in the past two years. There is no one else left to work the family fields, so she leaves at 4 a.m. to walk to the family plot. She grows about a quarter of what the family had when her children were alive and able to work the land.
Buluma Ngusa, 69, has lost four children to Zambia's AIDS crisis and tends the fields alone while raising her orphaned grandchildren. 'It's amazing what this human race can do in the face of the most adverse conditions,' says her country's education and health minister (Stephanie Nolen / The Globe and Mail)
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"That's how it is now, with the young people gone," she says. She has two sons left, but one, Lakson, has been too sick to work since February. The other is off trying to find a job at a sawmill. If he finds work, his wage will buy food, but it won't extend to a trip into town, where Lakson could get an HIV test.
Things in Kitwe are terrible. The situation isn't new, and to most of the world, it isn't even that interesting. The intriguing question is this: In Kitwe, and places like it, why aren't things worse?
In the late 1990s, as the world woke up to what AIDS was doing to Africa, international agencies began to make increasingly alarming predictions. The World Bank and United Nations pointed out that the disease was robbing sub-Saharan countries of the precious development gains they had made over the previous couple of decades -- that child mortality was rising, not dropping, that life expectancies were in free-fall.
They began to predict that the continent's frail economies would not only fail to grow, but that they would contract as the most productive workers died. That police services and militaries would buckle as their young, male ranks got ever thinner. That gangs of unsocialized orphans would turn to crime and violence. That people would starve as farmers grew too sick to work. That governments, robbed of their civil servants, teachers and nurses, would no longer function. That citizens weakened by illness or the demands of caring for others would withdraw from public life.
Experts began to predict the imminent collapse of the worst-hit countries.
Here's the World Bank in 2003, commenting on South Africa, the continent's most robust economy and the world's most-HIV-infected country: "If nothing is done to combat the epidemic . . . a complete economic collapse will occur within three generations."
And here's Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy on HIV-AIDS in Africa, in 2002: "I wouldn't discount the possibility, 10 or 15 years down the road, of failed states."
The phrase "failed states" evokes images of a country in complete anarchy. But sometimes states fail more quietly, when they cease to be able to provide any level of services to their people, or to control their territory in anything but name. This sort of collapse began to seem particularly plausible in southern Africa, where three countries have HIV-infection rates approaching half the adult population and even those qualifying as "better off" have one in four adults infected.
To a great degree, many of the worst predictions have come true. By 2004, troop strength in Malawi's military had fallen below 50 per cent of what the government said was needed to maintain national security. In Botswana, life expectancy declined by about 30 years, to 35, between 1990 and 2004. Africa's share of world trade declined from 6 per cent in 1980 to less than 2 per cent in 2002. Africa is the only region of the developing world where food production fell over the past 20 years.
