TV: Living with Aids in Africa
Here’s the deal:
18 April 2006
SABC3
21:30
“Living with AIDS”
Special Assignment is proud to broadcast a fine documentary by award-winning journalist Sorious Samura. Over the years Sorious has travelled the African continent, reporting on many of the major issues of our times. Viewers will remember his shocking exposý of the terrible atrocities committed in the civil war in his native country Sierra Leone.
In Living with AIDS Sorious visits a small hospital in Zambia. Lewanika Hospital in Mongu, is like many other hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa: over half the patients are infected with HIV/AIDS. To bring viewers up close with the everyday reality of AIDS in Africa, Sorious worked for a month as an orderly there, swabbing floors, washing patients, even preparing the dead for burial.
The documentary gives us an extraordinary insight into what it is like to be infected with AIDS in Africa, for women and men, for adults and children. Samura finds that AIDS has found its “perfect victims” in Africa, where poverty, sexual taboos and the stigma attached to HIV, all conspire to create a ready breeding ground for the disease. But what most disturbs him is meeting HIV-infected men who see nothing wrong with continuing to have unprotected sex.
Living with AIDS is a powerful story about ordinary people. Some viewers may consider some scenes in it difficult to watch. Viewer discretion is advised.
***************************************************
22 March
Check out this fascinating episode of Special Assignment that investigates the realities of being a poor white person in SA. We live in interesting times and this just goes to prove that colour is only skin deep. Poverty exists in all communities… the question must be asked though – why do white people not help their fellow white people in the same way that Black communities help theirs? Mhmmmh. Selfish? Shame? Fear?
Good Question. Maybe because a lot of white people still believe that they are superior to everyone else. Then there are those that refuse to feel sorry for poor whites because they had every reason (thanks to Apartheid) not to land up like this… What do our readers think?
21 March 2006
SABC3
21:30
THE GREEN DAM… and other stories of the new poor whites
This Tuesday Special Assignment meets some of South Africa’s new poor whites. Disillusioned, isolated and often ill-informed, they are struggling to understand why they lost their privileges and trying to make sense of the political changes that have swept the country.
Koos Mitton never had it easy. As a child, he sometimes had to eat rotten meat and mouldy bread from dust bins. As a poor white under the apartheid government, Koos’s skin colour was supposed to get him benefits like free education, protected jobs and council housing. The system should, in fact, have propelled Koos from poverty to at least middle class comfort.
It never did. Like many others of a new generation of poor whites, Koos could never escape the poverty cycle. And with the demise of the apartheid government and all its support systems, more and more whites are squatting or living in squalor, struggling to adapt to a changing South Africa. According to some estimates, one in four whites now earns less than R1 500 per month and is regarded as poor. Figures show that wealthy white South Africans are getting richer by the day, but that the gap between wealthy whites and poor whites is, in fact, the fastest growing divide in the country
We visit the area traditionally known as “Wessies” or “Pretoria West” in Tshwane. This is where Koos shares a bed with his wife and five-year-old son in a wooden shack. Koos’s mother and her latest lover sleep barely a metre away in the same single-roomed structure. This is also where state controlled industries like ISCOR used to supply jobs to unskilled and semi-skilled whites – but they closed down one by one and the area plummeted. Here, poverty and its consequences are hidden away from the public eye in back yards, garages and the wooden sheds widely referred to as “Wendy’s”.
For many poor whites living here, these shelters are only a few steps away from the Green Dam… the place go to when you’ve lost everything and have no one to turn to.
