The Middle Ages
Africa's Demographic Crisis
Outpost Magazine, January 2006
   Click on the images to see the photo essay.
A TENDER GESTURE: Joice, her face contorted by river blindness, passes my hand to her boyfriend, Lumelo, who approximates eye contact as we shake. His blind gaze wanders skyward, giving him the aspect of a seeker after some remote truth.
I'm photographing the residents of the Maramba Old People's Home, a community project run on a shoestring in Livingstone, Zambia. They're eager to have their portraits taken, even though most of them are severely myopic or blind. One man tries so hard to see himself on my camera's viewscreen that his glasses clink against it. Very nice, he says, giggling. He's 93 and in good health, his caretaker tells me. She's young; lesions caused by Kapoisi's sarcoma, an AIDS-defining cancer, bruise her face.
The residents here are 'orphans,' elderly people who have outlived their adult children. It's a safe bet that most of them died of AIDS.
AIDS has precipitated a demographic crisis in East and Southern Africa. As the first generation of Africans who grew up with AIDS reaches middle age, its numbers hugely diminished, the impact of the pandemic becomes clearer and clearer. The very young and very old find themselves shouldering the burdens of breadwinning and childrearing. Households run by the eldest sibling or by a grandparent are becoming the norm, as are villages from which able-bodied adults are almost entirely absent. In Zimbabwe, nearly one million children — on in six — have lost one or both parents to AIDS. As populations skew younger and younger, already fragile economies threaten to bottom out.
In West Africa, where HIV has spread more slowly, most states lack the political will and the social and health infrastructures to deal proactively with it. Some are thought to be nearing epidemic levels of HIV infection already. Civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d'Ivoire have created conditions in which the disease thrives. Researchers project prevalence rates of 12% or higher in some areas of Liberia, and in one study conducted in Sierra Leone, one quarter of young men tested were HIV-positive. Post-war unemployment and illiteracy rates approach 80 and 50 percent in both countries, compounding the problem.
Few of the young people I met and photographed in Liberia on the eve of its 2005 elections understood how HIV is transmitted or knew that a person with the virus can look healthy. This was, after all, the least of their concerns: Some of them had been orphaned by the war and few attended school; all wanted badly to learn. They played like kids but talked seriously and thoughtfully about their futures, which they seemed to understand depended on circumstances beyond their control. They hoped against their expectations, which had been tempered by a fatalism they only partly understood.
I'm struck now by the contrast: the gravity of the young and the levity of the old. In front of my camera the kids grew serious, setting their jaws and fixing their gazes, while the residents of Maramba Home are relaxed and faintly amused. And yet there is a vanity, a pride in appearance, that neither age nor precocity nor even blindness can extinguish.
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