AIDS Envoy Stephen Lewis: Eloquence on behalf of Africa
Whole villages with almost no adult women left alive
This year’s Massey Lecturer, Stephen Lewis, was invited by the Concordia Student Union as part of a speaker series on Canada’s place on the global stage.
Photo by Andrew Dobrowolskyj
AIDS is decimating Africa.
Most people barely register those words any more. Stephen Lewis has spent the last four years trying to get their attention.
Lewis is the United Nations Secretary-General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He spoke to a full house in H-110 on Nov. 10 with eloquence and urgency in an effort to convey the “prevasiveness of death” and its impact on the “resilient and courageous” communities across Africa who are surviving the pandemic.
Lewis’s presentation, “Race Against Time,” summarized his 2005 Massey Lectures. He mixed personal anecdotes with statistics to illustrate the toll of AIDS.
He described villages like Lusaka, Zambia, where there are almost no women still alive between the ages of 25 and 45. Instead of merely reciting statistics on the number of orphans, he described children who watch their mothers waste away and then become heads of households before they reach puberty.
Image by image and story by story he filled in the specifics of the impact of skyrocketing HIV infection rates. A situation worsened by limits to health and education resources imposed in exchange for resources from the International Monetary Fund across the continent.
As a simple illustration, he pointed out the pressure on African nations’ agricultural economy in the global markets. The European Union subsidizes each cow in its territory at the rate of $2/day. Meanwhile, between four and five hundred million Africans live on less than a dollar a day.
He encouraged his audience to pressure the Canadian government to honour its commitments for increasing foreign aid and setting clear targets and timelines. He also expressed support of the Clinton Foundation, which has helped get generic antiretroviral drugs into Africa and applauded the Canadian government’s move-ment in this direction.
He was invited here by the Concordia Student’ Union (whom he praised for their initiatives in Uganda), along with the Forum for International Cooperation and the Volunteer Abroad Program.