Changing the face of AIDS in Zimbabwe

Lynde Francis, an outspoken Zimbabwean AIDS activist who was the first to go public that she was HIV positive. She turned her home into a drop-in center where people with HIV and AIDS got counseling and support in nutrition and stress management. (Photo courtesy of Ondine Francis)

PRETORIA, South Africa — Lynde Francis was a Zimbabwean who turned despair into hope.

First her own, upon learning she was HIV-positive back in 1986, when AIDS was a death sentence in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, she was determined not to give up and she blazed a path of optimism and health for herself, and for many others.

Those were the dark, lonely days when AIDS was seen as a plague, when African governments were silent about the epidemic, when families rejected HIV-positive relatives. Antiretrovirals were a just a dream.

Francis's initial reaction was fear, rage, denial and depression: “I was angry with God, with the government, with my partner and with myself,” Francis said.

She made a will, named guardians for her children and obtained a Final Exit kit — pills to commit suicide — for she dreaded the opportunistic infections of AIDS.

Twenty years later, the kit was still lying around in a drawer in her home, a souvenir “past its sell-off date,” she said with a laugh in 2007. And Francis was “still fat and healthy, past my own sell-off date.”

Her keys to life were three books about food and health lent to her by a business associate, a vegan macrobiotic. Correct nutrition and spiritual well-being was the only anti-AIDS therapy available then in Africa.

Francis bet on a balanced life to live longer. She got healthier. She gained weight. She regained her feistiness. She thought a lot about AIDS and people and Africa.

It was a lonely battle then. Zimbabwe's general population had very little information but a great deal of fear. 

In 1991, when her partner committed suicide, she felt free to disclose she was HIV-positive in the media — the first white Zimbabwean to do so.

Instantly, she gave AIDS a new face: An attractive, middle-class woman, a mother, a business owner, the country’s first registered female journeyman, a concert promoter with 25 years in the music industry, a staple in the concert and party circuits, who lived in a comfortable, rambling house in a leafy suburb of Harare.

“I live with HIV and so can you,” was her message. AIDS no longer had a scary, emaciated, black face in Zimbabwe, where about a quarter of the population of 12 million was infected.

Working from her sitting room, Francis turned her home into The Center, where HIV-positive people and their loved ones found support and advice.

At the time, hers was a revolutionary message. Live positively and you will live longer. Eat nutritious local food. Share your grief. Manage your health. Know your status. Have safe sex. Have hope. Avoid self-pity, despair and victimhood. Take control of your life.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa-at-large/090405/changing-the-face-aids-zimbabwe