"I thought it great for anyone who recognizes the giant gap that exists within our first world perceptions and the reality of life. "
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/our-kind-of-people-uzodinma-iweala... ( )

As I read through Our Kind of People, I found myself comparing it to Stephanie Nolen’s similarly-themed 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa, which I read a few years ago. In the comparison, Our Kind of People comes up seriously short. It’s a small book, 240 pages of large-ish, generously-spaced type, and it just doesn’t offer the same depth as 28. Nolen’s book is organized around people, and she paints a vivid, detailed picture of each of their lives, really making the faces of the AIDS epidemic come alive. Our Kind of People is organized around general themes (stigma, sex, death), and the brief conversations that Iweala describes with various people often don’t fully manage to get across a full understanding of their lives. Maybe this is because Nolen is a journalist, while Iweala’s background is in medicine.

I think it’s worth providing a lengthy example of the sort of conversation that takes up much of Iweala’s book, so that you can quickly judge for yourself whether it’s the sort of thing you’d like to read:

‘Can we talk?’ I asked, finally relieved to have him alone and in a quiet space.
He nodded. ‘You want me to tell you what I know about the something?’ Ikenna rasped. ‘In fact I never knew about the something the first time I was very seriously feeling sick. They took me to hospital. I got OK,’ he continued as we walked away from the hospital buildings down a path trampled through the grass toward a road that looped around the hospital grounds. Gravel crunched beneath our sandals as we approached hazy shapes of bungalows set back from the road on long drives. ‘Within some weeks, it started again, and they say I should go for a test. They say it’s HIV. I say, “No, it can’t be. I have not been meddling with women for a long time.” So I resisted. I say, “No! I have to move to Kaduna to do another test.” When I got there, to one big military hospital, they tested me, and it’s the same thing. Since that time, I accepted it. It was the year 2000.’ …
At one point… I turned to him and asked, ‘Ikenna. Do you ever wish you didn’t have HIV?’
He answered very quickly. ‘No.’ … There was no hint of a fear of death.
‘Tot! Nah God gets us? Once they tell you, you have to accept. It is their job. So they told me. I have to accept….’

Needless to say, Iweala records these conversations verbatim, which does suggest a greater authenticity. But some may find the use of dialect problematic, and I do think it occasionally hindered my understanding a bit. More importantly, though, I’m not sure that the longer word-for-word recounting always adds a lot to our understanding of the issue being discussed; there were times when it just struck me as needlessly inefficient. The words that people speak in conversation don’t always make for the best narrative. Of course, it’s a tradeoff, and including direct quotes can often increase the power and poignancy of an account. I just think that Iweala takes it a bit too far, sometimes including quotes only for quotes’ sake and not because they really enhance the telling.

When it comes to Iweala’s own thoughts and analysis, I found myself largely disappointed as well. His Sex chapter in particular was a let-down, focusing more on supposed western misconceptions about Africans than on what’s actually happening in Africa today. We read, for example, that “the idea of African sexuality as Other in international dialogue begins first with accounts of Arab and Portuguese explorers in precolonial times. Themes of sexual aggressiveness, promiscuity, and strange sexual rituals addressed first in these early accounts have attached themselves to the sexualities of African and black peoples, coloring commentary on the subject for the greater part of the past millennium.” There follows a lot of discussion about how wrong various statements made by various westerners are, when I was more interested in finding out what was actually the case. It’s only after many pages have gone by saying that Africans are not actually promiscuous or immoral that we come to what for me is the real point, a partial explanation for the different paths that AIDS has taken in different parts of the world: “In the West, people tend to engage in sequentially monogamous relationships…. In sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria included—more emphasis has been placed on the idea of concurrent partnerships, sexual relationships that overlap in time.”

Of course, there are some very thorny issues here. It can be difficult to discuss cultural differences in a purely factual way, without judgement. Clearly, many people have gotten it wrong in the past. Still, I found that Iweala came across as overly defensive, and that what he did have to say about the plain facts didn’t ultimately add anything to what I already knew from earlier reading.

Similarly, I found his discussion of access to treatment overly simplistic. In response to the question, “How is it possible that years after people were getting treatment in developed countries, they still thought it was not feasible for countries in Africa to have access to treatment?”, Iweala says, “For Doc and many other HIV/AIDS activists, the answer was that Westerners had failed to see people in Africa with HIV/AIDS as similar to ourselves and thus deserving of proper medical care.” Of course, he doesn’t attribute this idea to himself; but neither does he bother to discuss the underlying reasons in any more detail, so that this is left to stand as the sole factor responsible. And yet there are all sorts of complicated issues even within western countries themselves when it comes to access to medical care and availability of expensive drugs, so the idea that “Westerners” (as a single, stereotyped group) just didn’t think Africans deserved medical care seems overly reductionist.

In short, I didn’t find that Iweala’s book provided many new insights; other books like Nolen’s 28 offer better treatments of the same material. If you’ve already read a couple of books that touch on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, you can probably give this one a miss. The one selling point may be the word-for-word reporting of conversations with people affected by the disease, but I personally found that even those weren’t very compelling. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the subject and looking for a brief introduction, the shortness of this book may be a draw, but I still think there are better options available. ( )