Stephen Lewis Was a Singular Man on a MissionA few weeks ago in Lusaka, I spent some time with old friends: activists I met nearly 25 years ago, reporting on the H.I.V. epidemic. Back then, they were young people locked in a desperate fight for survival. H.I.V. had long since become a chronic illness in high-income countries, but no treatment was available in Zambia. The diagnosis was a death sentence, and one in five adults in the country had the virus.
Those people survived. They won their battle for access to lifesaving medication, and over the years Zambia built one of the world’s largest and most efficient H.I.V. care systems. At the end of one dinner in March, we took a group photo, and I texted it to Michele Landsberg, who I knew was keeping vigil in the Toronto hospice room of her husband, Stephen Lewis. I was with Mr. Lewis all those years ago when I first met my Zambian friends, and I knew he would want to know I’d seen them, that they’re thriving. He played a huge part in keeping them alive. I met Mr. Lewis, who died on Tuesday at the age of 88, when he was the United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy for H.I.V./AIDS in Africa — a very grand title that made him roll his eyes. In the first article I wrote about his work (I was a reporter for The Globe and Mail at the time) I called him “a latter-day Cassandra for the 21st-century plague.” After a decade in politics, and time at the U.N., as Canada’s ambassador and later as deputy director of UNICEF, Mr. Lewis had been asked by Kofi Annan to take on the role of AIDS envoy for Africa. He had felt a deep affinity with struggling communities in Africa since he first visited the continent as a young man, 40 years before.
He took the envoy role literally, as a messenger. He traveled through the most-affected places at the height of the AIDS pandemic, and he took what he heard — from the activists, the exhausted nurses, the grandmothers raising a half-dozen orphans — to their own, sometimes indifferent, governments, and to the world leaders whose inaction infuriated him. He did not spare the U.N., an organization he loved but thought was failing people with H.I.V., and his piercing criticism alienated senior figures across the organization. [Read: Stephen Lewis, Leftist Canadian Politician and AIDS Activist, Dies at 88] That trip in Zambia in 2002 was the first of many I took accompanying Mr. Lewis in his envoy role. He was unlike any other public figure I have covered: He let me see all of it, the public face and the private rage. He used his clout to get me into the room with monarchs and presidents, because he thought journalists should have access. In countries where media laws were repressive, he insisted on doing a news conference with local journalists, and sometimes embarrassed government figures into taking questions, too. We went to a village called Mazabuka, where the leader, Chief Hanjalika, spoke to a crowd about the risk of H.I.V., flouting the traditional taboo on public discussion of sexuality. He used his ceremonial wooden staff to demonstrate how to use a condom. He handed the staff to Mr. Lewis, who gamely held it erect while the chief rolled down the prophylactic, to the mortified and hysterical laughter of the assembled Zambians. Mr. Lewis was delighted: He wrapped an arm around the chief and told the crowd, “I’m proud to stand beside such a man, because he is giving you such leadership.”
Mostly, though, that trip and all the others were a catalog of horrors. Once, in Eswatini, an activist led us to a round, one-room house, and I crouched beside Mr. Lewis in the doorway. When our vision adjusted we made out the face of a young woman who lay on a mat on the floor, her eyes enormous in her gaunt face. Then, farther in the gloom, we saw three small children sitting against the wall — watching their mother die. I heard Mr. Lewis gasp. “Oh Jesus,” he muttered. Those kinds of scenes, and the hundreds more like it, enraged him, and fueled him through his years in the envoy job. Near the end of our first trip to Zambia, Mr. Lewis said to me, “You could turn this thing around in five or six years.” I remember writing that in my notebook and thinking, You must be kidding. I couldn’t envision it, couldn’t imagine that drug prices could be slashed and activists could go door-to-door to teach people how to take the medication until, one day, the dying stopped. It didn’t even take five years. Mr. Lewis was right. And so H.I.V. barely came up as a topic when I met our old friends for dinner in Lusaka. When one of them, Ida Makuka, heard of Mr. Lewis’s death this week, she texted me. “A man that during the AIDS epidemic managed to help save us, and his name will forever be written on Africa,” she wrote. “He told me, ‘Ida, take medication so that you can attend my funeral’ and here I am.” Trans CanadaThis section was compiled by Shawna Richer, an editor on the International desk at The Times.
Stephanie Nolen is the global health reporter for The Times. She lives in Nova Scotia. How are we doing? Like this email?
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