Reporter's Notebook: John Battersby, Editor, Independent Newspapers Group, South Africa, Discusses His Experience With the Epidemic

JOHN BATTERSBY: The first time I became aware of the pandemic, or the epidemic, at that stage of HIV/AIDS, was actually a trip I did to Norway. It was the award of The Nobel Peace Prize to Archbishop Desmond Tutu in December of '84. As a child, my parents had some close friends--he was a Norwegian diplomat, consul general in South Africa. And I just knew, at that stage, he was suffering from this strange new disease.

And I visited him in hospital, in Oslo, on that trip. I had no idea what HIV/AIDS was at that stage, or very little idea. I mean, I'd kind of heard about it from out of the U.S. and so forth, but I had very little idea what it was. And I spent about an hour with him, so that was a kind of personal experience when this first thing really came home to me.

It was a long time after that that it really became--I mean, I'm struggling to find the exact moment, as an editor, because it would have been as an editor. Because when I was, up until '96, I was Middle East correspondent, and before that, I'd been also a correspondent for an American paper in South Africa. I was concentrating very much on the great story of the century, Nelson Mandela walks free, and everything that followed that.

And partly because of that, I suppose, and partly because of the legacy of the Apartheid Era and the repression of any kind of information or syndrome affecting black people, one wasn't very aware of it at all. And even during the Mandela presidency, actually, if one thinks back '94 to '99, one was aware of the disease, one was reading the statistics. I guess it's the scale of the reality that is just very, very difficult to deal with.

I mean, as we heard today, it was quite a sobering thought: it took seven years before an American president used the word "HIV/AIDS." And so, this was something that one was aware--I guess the moment at which it became real for me was when I started to see in our building Xeroxed copies of young black employees from the printing department, in the sort of 20 to 35 age group, and they would put these sort of signs up saying so and so passed away, his funeral will be there.

And I'd never really been aware of these before, and suddenly, they were getting more and more prevalent. And I guess that's when it became real to me, because it was in my work environment and it was, yeah, I guess that's the moment at which it really came home to me, and I became aware that there were a lot of people in the building where I was working who were affected by this disease, that were dying from this disease.

HIV is like a dark cloud which hangs over everything, because people they know are dying all the time, members of their family, communities. It, of course, affects urban and rural communities in different ways, but in urban communities, it's created whole different patterns, patterns of social behavior and meeting places.

For instance, some companies now have actually introduced a rule limiting their employees that they can only go to one funeral a week, because it was taking so much economic time out of the work time. And a lot of people now spend their weekends going to funerals. So, you'll find now that funerals are not merely sort of somber occasions where you go and pay your respects to the dead and go to the cemetery, but actually, there's a whole kind of a fashion. People are getting dressed up, they're meeting, and that's where they're interacting socially, because other social interaction has been reduced because of the amount of time spent going to funerals. So, all of this means that it's a very real thing, while on the one hand, it's an intangible. Because, of course, the very difficult thing for people to grasp in South Africa is that you can't die of AIDS, you can only die of a disease that's related to AIDS.

Special coverage from the XIV International AIDS Conference provided by kaisernetwork.org, a free service of the Kaiser Family Foundation.