It was February 2002, the place was Mt. Claire Hotel and resort in Nyanga Hills, Zimbabwe.
And the setting is a small room in a hotel with eight of us cramped together. We were the only 8 amongst more than 40 who attended this retreat for religious leaders working in the field for the filed of HIV and we were the only eight who knew and declared that we were HIV- positive. That was where I first met Phumzile.
At that time, knowledge about HIV was beginning to expand but nowhere near where we are today. It was standard practice during that time to say to HIV positive women that they should not have children, that to have children was somehow a disgrace.
It meant that they were not taking the life of their unborn child seriously. PMTCT was in its infancy and not yet a term that have been coined. In many places, HIV positive women were routinely sterilized against their will and yet here in the room with me was Phumzile, clearly pregnant and clearly in charge of her own life.
We discussed her pregnancy and we discussed the risk to the baby and Phumzile understanding much more than I was already taking experimental medication to reduce the risk of transmission to her yet unborn child.
Phumzile was familiar with pushing boundaries. I next actively encountered her working as the Gender Justice Expert for NCA in Pretoria at a time where gender justice was an emerging theme, Phumzile was already a champion and even then in the early 2000s, Phumzile understood that gender was about more than women.
Phumzile followed me as the Executive Director for INERELA+ and brought to the post much that I never could. She was rare in so many ways. She was a religious leader who also happened to be a woman. She was a religious leader who also happen to know the trauma and truth of childbirth. She was a religious leader who being true to herself took her antiretrovirals religiously. She knew within her own family the mental cost of taking treatment and the devastating cost of not.
All this she was able to bring to a job that demanded advocacy on all of these areas. But one final truth was Phumzile’s final undoing and that was the fact that access does not mean equal access and Africa and Asia and other parts of the world defined as developing are forever sucking the hind tit of the world’s medical supplies. And so with no access to the vaccine and with limited access to therapeutics in this age which is now the COVID age, Phumzile paid the prize of being an African woman.
May she rest in peace and rise in glory and may the lessons of her life inspire our advocay work as we jointly continue to work for a world free of HIV-related stigma, shame, and denial. A world free of medical apartheid and inequality in healthcare.
