Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, A Country's Hope [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Uzodinma Iweala (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 10, 2012

In 2005, Uzodinma Iweala stunned readers and critics alike with Beasts of No Nation, his debut novel about child soldiers in West Africa. Now his return to his native continent has produced Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis that is every bit as startling and original.

Iweala embarks on a remarkable journey in his native Nigeria, meeting individuals and communities that are struggling daily to understand both the impact and meaning of the disease. He speaks with people from all walks of life—the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, sex workers, shopkeepers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and surprising, and always unflinchingly candid.

Beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines of an unprecedented epidemic to show the real lives it affects, illuminating the scope of the crisis and a continent’s valiant struggle.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“At last, an account of the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the people most affected by it—men, women and children of Africa, who are not simply victims but are heroes and scientists as well.” (The Daily Beast )

“A stunning inquiry into the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. . . . Iweala evokes the human cost of AIDS, and this is where Our Kind of People excels. . . . . Iweala’s focus on narrative, on sharing voices and experiences, becomes an act of redemption.” (The Los Angeles Times Book Review )

“Iweala’s arguments are well reasoned. By making generous use of the voices of many Africans, Iweala’s writing possesses an immediacy that makes his message powerful and compelling.” (The Boston Globe )

“Iweala tells the stories of those whose lives - and deaths - make up the numbers in a measured, accessible tone. The end of the story of HIV/AIDS is not yet written, but in Our Kind of People we see the beginnings of normalcy.” (Bono )

“In this unassuming but important book, Uzodinma Iweala gives the AIDS pandemic not just a human face but a human voice. . . . Remarkable.” (The Times Literary Supplement )

From the Back Cover

In 2005 Uzodinma Iweala stunned readers and critics alike with Beasts of No Nation, his debut novel about child soldiers in West Africa. Now his return to Africa has produced Our Kind of People, a non-fiction account of the AIDS crisis every bit as startling and original. HIV/AIDS has been reported as one of the most destructive diseases in recent memory—tearing apart communities and ostracizing the afflicted. But the emphasis placed on death, destruction, and despair hardly captures the many and varied effects of the epidemic, or the stories of the extraordinary people who live and die under its watch.

Our Kind of People opens our minds to these stories, introducing a new set of voices and altering the way we speak and think about disease. Iweala embarks on a remarkable journey through his native Nigeria, meeting individuals and communities that are struggling daily to understand both the impact and meaning of HIV/AIDS. He speaks with people from all walks of life—the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, sex workers, shopkeepers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and surprising, and always unflinchingly candid. Integrating his own experiences with these voices, Iweala creates at once a deeply personal exploration of life, love, and connection in the face of disease, and an incisive critique of our existing ideas of health and happiness.

Beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines of an unprecedented epidemic to show the real lives it affects, illuminating the scope of the crisis and a continent's valiant struggle.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st Edition, 1st Printing edition (July 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780061284908
• ISBN-13: 978-0061284908
• ASIN: 0061284904
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Travel > Africa > Niger & Nigeria

More About the Author

Uzodinma Iweala is the acclaimed author of Beasts of No Nation, which received the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Public Library Young Lions 2006 Fiction Award, and the 2006 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2007, Iweala was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. A graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he lives in New York City and Lagos, Nigeria.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but uneven August 16, 2012

By S. McGee TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Not giving this short look at AIDS in Africa (and specifically, the experience in Nigeria, the author's home country) more than three stars feels a bit churlish. But however moving the individual stories it contains may be, the book itself is far from flawless.

My principal problem with the narrative surfaced early on, when Iweala makes the case that the West has a difficulty in understanding Africa's AIDS crisis because we are blinkered by ages-old prejudices. Certainly, those prejudices exist, especially among those who have never spent any time in sub-Saharan Africa. But Iweala then proceeds to undermine his own case by showing that many of these preconceptions may have some basis in reality. For instance, he discusses the nature of sexual relationships as being more likely to be concurrent than consecutive (he talks to a man who defines fidelity to a girlfriend as cutting the number of his other girlfriends from eight down to four, and then only to one other woman, for instance.) Forget labels and judgments: as Iweala and the physicians he talks to for this book comment, that kind of approach is more likely to result in the kind of dramatic spread of AIDS that the world has witnessed in Africa. He doesn't want traditional African beliefs criticized -- and yet some of those, too, have negatively affected the lives of Nigerians with AIDS, as they are excluded from the community and shunned our of a kind of fear that AIDS is spread via some kind of miasma.

Where does the line lie between the West patronizing Africans by offering assistance and offending them by not doing enough? Iweala refers to African HIV/AIDS activists and their belief that Westerners don't see African AIDS patients "as similar to ourselves and thus deserving of proper medical care." What popped into my mind at that point was the number of Americans I've encountered who view their fellow Americans (of any color) in a similar way: anyone imprudent enough not to provide for health emergencies isn't their responsibility, I've heard it argued. This is a human issue, not simply a West/Africa issue, sadly, although in the case of Africa it may be complicated by history. Still, it isn't specific to Africa; similar perceptions have taken root in Asia at times.

I didn't expect Iweala to provide answers to any of these very difficult questions that lie at the heart of the relationship between Africa and the West -- but given that he raised them, I was disappointed he adopted what struck me as a narrower view. Had the core narrative been stronger, these issues wouldn't have niggled at the back of my mind as they did. Are the portraits of the Nigerians who are battling the disease moving and compelling? Absolutely. Are the tales inspiring. Certainly. Is Iweala's core message -- that we should see each other, positive or negative, African or Western, as humans first and foremost -- important? Without question. Of course we must work to cross these boundaries. But I wonder whether the people who will read this book and respond to that message have already accepted this? How many North Americans and Europeans -- those who are willing to listen -- are going to find that at all revelatory or fresh? Perhaps it's true, however, that some of those observations that I found to be self-evident -- that we all should help those struggling with HIV to simply lead their lives -- are those that bear the most repetition.

What this book does do well is to provide readers with a compelling oral history of AIDS in Nigeria. The portraits of the individuals Iweala encounters are vivid and he does a great job of blending their stories with the necessary facts and figures. Nonetheless, Still, this book didn't accomplish nearly what it could have. By brushing away the difficult questions -- dismissing a CNN story of a town of AIDS orphaned children in Kenya as melodramatic (fair comment) and as being about Kenya and thus irrelevant because Africa is more than just Kenya (well, Kenya is a part of Africa... and the village did exist...) -- Iweala undermined some of what he otherwise accomplished in my eyes.

This probably won't be a majority view, and that's probably just as well, as this is certainly a powerfully human book that deserves readers. Nonetheless, I remain underwhelmed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars So that lives become livable again May 16, 2012

By H. Gerety VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Iweala is an excellent social critic, and has a way of neatly deconstructing past and present attempts to fight AIDS. While the scope and depth of this book is much smaller, Iweala's ability to point out the flaws in common (particularly foreign) attempts to eradicate AIDS reminded me very much of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Vintage). What he is a bit short on, however - and this might be owing, again, to the scope of the book - is concrete solutions.

I appreciated how current the book was: I remember seeing one particular ad campaign that he criticizes just a year or two ago. I also liked how he succinctly explained how rapidly AIDS has become an "African problem" - because I'm too young to hardly remember it being considered as anything else.

I think my favorite passage in the book, which summed up so much of what's hard about relief efforts of all kinds, discussed how the most help that's needed isn't swooping in and rescuing a dying child in the nick of time - it's helping someone live their life. Their everyday, mundane life - the one we take so much for granted:

"People from Nigeria and abroad don't want to hear that their donations and aid work are going to support another person's ability to do the things we all have to do, but this should be our goal in the struggle with HIV/AIDS: to mitigate its impact so that lives become livable again." (p. 50)

I will admit to being disappointed by Iweala's treatment of sex. While he points out the stereotype of Africans being oversexualized - "We are left to conclude that even if HIV/AIDS isn't the result of someone having sex *with* a monkey, it has certainly spread because Africans were having sex *like* monkeys" (98) - he also capitulates to it, by sweeping away the value of abstinence and/or faithful monogamy with the Nigerian saying that one should wait until marriage, "but body no be wood!" (112) Iweala would probably counter by saying this is true of people everywhere, regardless of place, time, or culture, but it seems nihilistic to give in to the idea that people are merely slaves to their desires. I don't think it would be nearly so palatable, for example, to say that while men should treat their wives with love and respect, we should just be realistic and assume they'll likely beat them.

On a slightly less important note, I appreciated Iweala's vivid rendering of each character's speech - I've never traveled to Africa, but speaking with people who have, Iweala's rendering seems respectful, accurate, and highly evocative of the place where he was and the people to whom he was speaking.

While I didn't agree with Iweala on every point, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I feel like he makes many new, interesting, and necessary points on our attitudes towards AIDS and our efforts at fighting it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars AIDS in Africa: humanizing the epidemic and strategies for recovery June 10, 2012

By Robin Wolfson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

In "Our Kind of People," Uzodinma Iweala takes a hard look at current attitudes and approaches towards the African AIDS epidemic, and he identifies some disturbing truths as well as some promising approaches. It's an important book.

According to Iweala, rather than tossing drugs and condoms at the problem or swooping in at the last minute to rescue orphaned children, we should be focusing on treating the epidemic as part of larger societal problems, especially poverty and abandonment. He argues, quite persuasively, that much of the West's approach to African AIDS is tainted by an essentially racist (my word, not his) approach that regards Africans, and especially Africans living with HIV/AIDS, as both Other and lost. Back when I was really keeping up with AIDS issues (it is, after all, a fascinating disease), far too many people in the back corridors of power in the fields of public health and global politics and money were whispering, "Africa is lost." The argument generally went: (a) African sexual practices are spreading HIV/AIDS more rapidly than anywhere else in the world, (b) too many Africans are already infected, (c) even if we pour drugs into Africa for those with HIV/AIDS, the rate of infection is already so high that the rate can't be reduced, (d) no matter how many condoms are available, most Africans won't use them, (e) drugs are the only way to slow the rate of infection, and (f) there's not enough time or money to save those with full-blown AIDS, let alone treat those who are only, as yet, HIV-positive. "Our Kind of People" (from the phrase "Our kind of people don't get AIDS"), argues that,in fact, Africa is not lost. Iweala suggests a different way of approaching the problem, one aimed at stabilizing entire communities, reducing the rate of infection through community-building and education, and focusing more than we currently are on treating those who are HIV-positive. After all, treatment for "positive people" can reduce the rate of infection by itself by reducing the individual's viral load, thereby reducing the ability of the virus to spread.

Providing assistance to positive people, Iweala argues, helps to stabilize the community by enabling them to return to health and work. It is widely agreed that AIDS is a disease of poverty (not exclusively, but to a great extent). Therefore, getting people back to work strengthens the work force and reduces dependency on already strapped resources for support. The goal, he suggests, should be three-fold: treating those who already have full-blown AIDS, providing anti-retroviral drugs for those who are HIV-positive, and reducing the spread of infection through community action and education. In places in Nigeria (the central focus of the book) where such a three-pronged approach has been implemented, infection rates have already begun to drop, making his position hard to argue with.

Iweala's focus on treatment for those who are HIV-positive raises some issues that some may not want to discuss: treating people who are not already ill with full-blown AIDS. As he says: "People from Nigeria and abroad don't want to hear that their donations and aid work are going to support another person's ability to do the things we all have to do, but this should be our goal in the struggle with HIV/AIDS: to mitigate its impact so that lives become livable again." Those who argue against this approach explain that, after all, there is only so much money, only so many drugs, only so many doses.

Much of the difficulty the West has in dealing with the African AIDS crisis, Iweala argues, stems from centuries-old prejudices against Africans as Other. Their lives are different, their sexual practices are different and perverted, and they're too uneducated to be able to appreciate all the wonderful things white people want to do for them. Iweala provides some excellent discussions of the world's attitudes towards Africans, especially Westerners' attitudes toward African sexuality. In fact, he has an entire chapter titled simply "Sex." He references sources back to Joseph Conrad and earlier that describe African "otherness." At the same time, at least some of the antipathy towards treating HIV-positive people stems from the kind of deer-in-the-headlights blindness caused by the extent of the suffering and death. Overwhelmed by the catastrophe, our instinct is to focus on helping the sick and dying, an approach, unfortunately, which does not focus on reducing the rate of infection or stabilizing local economies.

So where do we go from here? Iweala's primary argument is that we need to "humanize" the epidemic in Africa. Rather than treating the continent as "lost," we need to focus on eliminating the stigma of HIV/AIDS by, among other tactics, talking about it. Back when AIDS was considered the "gay plague," almost no one in America wanted to talk about it. And, yes, I do remember those days. If you don't, read Randy Shilts's brilliant history of the first years of the epidemic, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition.* Once people started talking about the problem (especially when non-gay people realized it wasn't just a gay disease), infection rates started to fall. Iweala's chapter, "Speaking of AIDS," focuses on the difficulties of getting Africans to talk about AIDS, as talking about AIDS inevitably means talking about sex, not a popular topic of polite conversation in Africa. Gosh, sort of like America in the eighties, when the "gay plague" first began to get people's attention.

The key to humanizing the epidemic, Iweala insists, is to remove the stigma of HIV/AIDS, treat the infected as well as the sick, and integrate those living with HIV/AIDS back into their local communities: including jobs, social supports, and medical treatments. In the chapter "Healing," he focuses on a number of programs aimed at doing just that. His examples and the testimony from "positive people" are compelling.

"Our Kind of People" is an important book. Because it is limited to Nigeria (where the infection rate is only 4%, compared to 20% in Botswana and South Africa), it's a short book and, thanks to Mr. Iweala's lovely style of writing, a quick read. But don't let its brevity fool you; there are critical lessons here. So read "Our Kind of People" and then tell everyone you know to read it, as well.

*For the science wars, see Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo. Excellent analysis of big science in action.