SIZWE'S TEST: a young man's journey through africa's aids epidemic

AT the age of twenty-nine, Sizwe Magadla is among the most handsome, well-educated and richest of the men in his poverty-stricken village. Dr Hermann Reuter, a son of old South West African stock, wants to show the world that if you provide decent treatment, people will come and get it, no matter their circumstances.

Sizwe and Hermann live at the epicentre of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic. In South Africa alone, nearly six million people in a population of 46 million are HIV-positive. Already, Sizwe has watched several neighbours grow ill and die, yet he himself has pushed AIDS to the margins of his life and associates it obliquely with other people's envy, with comeuppance and with misfortune.

When Hermann Reuter establishes an antiretroviral treatment programme in Sizwe's district and Sizwe discovers that close family members have the virus, the antagonism between these two figures from very different worlds — one afraid that people will turn their backs on medical care, the other fearful of the advent of a world in which respect for traditional ways has been lost and privacy has been obliterated — mirrors a continent-wide battle against an epidemic that has corrupted souls as much as bodies.

A heartbreaking tale of shame and pride, sex and death, and a continent's battle with its demons, Steinberg's searing account is a tour de force of literary journalism.

NOTES FROM A FRACTURED COUNTRY: THE BEST OF JONNY STEINBERG'S BUSINESS DAY COLUMNS

IN this selection of columns, Jonny Steinberg walks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes he sees in the jail’s corridors why the US’s impending war in the Middle East will fail. He meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension maintaining a black Mercedes-Benz, and explains why this shows that government’s welfare programme is working. He tells us why he thinks Thabo Mbeki is an Afro-pessimist and why a South Africa ruled by Tokyo Sexwale will be as riddled with corruption as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.

Steinberg has an eye for the strangeness of our fractured country. For the last five years, he has been recording the things he sees on his travels across South Africa in his fortnightly column on Business’s Day’s leader page. Here are the best of those columns.

ON 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa’s oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in robbery and rape.

In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future, and life in a household of eight adults and six children, none of whom earned a living.

Author Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and Steinberg had spent more than 50 hours discussing his life experiences.

The Number is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg’s journeys to the places and people of Wentzel’s past. It is a tale of modern South Africa’s historic events seen through the eyes of the country’s underclass. The book is an account of memory and identity, of Wentzel’s project to make some sense of his bewildering past and something worthy of his future.

In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, a young white farmer is shot dead on the dirt road running from his father’s farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder is the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen, no forensic evidence like spent cartridges or fingerprints left at the scene. Journalist Jonny Steinberg travels to the midlands to investigate.

Local black workers say the young white man had it coming. The dead man’s father says the machinery of a political conspiracy has been set into motion, that he and his neighbours are being pushed off their land. Initially thinking that he is to write about an event in the recent past, Steinberg finds that much of the story lies in the immediate future. He has stumbled upon a festering frontier battle, the combatants groping hungrily for the whispers and lies that drift in from the other side.

Right from the beginning, it is clear that the young white man is not the only one who will die on that frontier, and that the story of his and other deaths will illuminate a great deal about the early days of post-apartheid South Africa.