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Brought to stricken Zambia by Canada's Stephen Lewis to meet the lost children of Africa, Oprah Winfrey seems taken aback, STEPHANIE NOLEN reports from Lusaka. But not for long. Her day-long immersion in the great dilemma sends the doyenne of daytime TV home determined to seek a solution. Otherwise 'we are going to have social chaos'
There was a frenzy of preparation, and eight-year-old Nathan Mukwemba watched it in bewilderment. The drummers pounded out a final rehearsal, and the coach bleated on his whistle, putting the dancers through their paces one last time.
Nathan sat on a rough wooden bench in the beating sun with a dozen kids, all of them AIDS orphans in a grim neighbourhood of the Zambian capital. The Garden Centre, run by the aid agency CARE, is a low-key place most of the time; Nathan comes for games and informal reading classes and the occasional hot meal.
But not today. Today, there was a mood of rare anxiety, and Nathan watched as 11 huge Land Rovers pulled into the courtyard, disgorging a gaggle of hulking security guards and a stream of men with cameras and microphones and lots of shiny, clean foreigners.
In the middle was a pretty lady in a pink gingham blouse and pink flowered pants and pink shoes. She was clearly the reason for all this fuss, the Important Guest Nathan had been told was coming: there were lots and lots of cameras, all of them taking pictures of her. She came over and said "hello" to the kids, and just as they were taught, Nathan and his pals all stood up and responded, "Hello, and how are you?" in their best English. The lady in pink waved, and then was whisked onward.
Nathan watched it all, still a little puzzled.
"They say she is very, very important," he said seriously. "I know that she is rich, because they say she is on television."
He paused, and scuffed his bare feet in the dirt.
"I thought it would be a white lady."
But it was Oprah Winfrey, who blew through Lusaka one day last week to learn about the generation of children orphaned by Africa's AIDS pandemic. There are now 11.5 million orphans under 15 in sub-Saharan Africa, a figure expected to reach 20 million before the end of the decade. They are growing up uneducated, unsocialized and often unloved, producing a desperate generation. No one knows what to do for them.
For the orphans, Oprah is the great white hope.
Her Oprah Winfrey Show has been television's most highly rated talk show for 18 consecutive seasons, drawing an estimated 23 million viewers a week in the United States and millions more in the 109 other countries where it is broadcast. She heads Harpo Films Inc., which makes movies; is a co-founder of U.S. cable's Oxygen Network, and publishes the hugely successful glossy magazine O. For her fans, she is a deity; she can, with a single on-air remark, put America off Texas beef, transform an obscure novel into a bestseller, or spark a run on mammograms.
Key players in the fight against AIDS in Africa hope that the power of Oprah can be brought to bear on the orphan problem; that from the vast financial resources she commands and her massive influence on public opinion, some sort of solution will begin to emerge.
"Oprah's powerful, omnipotent clout could, indeed, save millions of lives, or at least bring them hope," says Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
There is no underestimating this. Brenda Cupper, also a Canadian and the country director for CARE Zambia, shares Mr. Lewis's sense of urgency "There is no greater challenge facing Zambia today than the plight of orphans," she said . "Given the attention and influence that Oprah Winfrey could bring to bear in North America, this visit could change the face of the future for 800,000 orphans in Zambia right now."
The frenzy around the visit, and the expectations pinned to it, illuminate one of the more startling aspects of the AIDS fight. Increasingly, the AIDS agenda is driven by celebrities: not governments, not the United Nations, but rock stars, ex-presidents and now the world's most successful TV host.
Irish singer Bono has become hugely effective both at lobbying Western leaders for assistance and at popularizing complex issues such as AIDS treatment and multilateral assistance. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has made AIDS in Africa a personal cause, jetting between capitals and brokering a key deal to bring cheap anti-retroviral drugs to the continent. Microsoft mogul Bill Gates is shaping the medical research agenda, pouring millions into the crucial hunt for an AIDS vaccine. His foundation made a $100-million (U.S.) donation to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria intended, in part, to embarrass governments into following suit.
And just two weeks ago, more than a dozen pop music stars from around the world, including Bono, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox and Beyoncé Knowles , descended on Cape Town to perform at an AIDS fundraising concert with former South African president Nelson Mandela as host.
"It is only because the world has failed so completely in the face of the pandemic that we need these people," Mr. Lewis said. "We wouldn't be pleading with them to lend their voice, if the West had stood up and responded as it should have."
And he would know: It was Mr. Lewis who brought Oprah to Zambia.
It was conceived as a "learning trip." Ms. Winfrey is a good friend of Mr. Mandela (whom she calls "my greatest living mentor") and his wife, Graça Machel. A year ago, they began to talk to Ms. Winfrey about how she might get involved with the AIDS orphans, an issue they consider crucial to Africa's future. They pulled Mr. Lewis, also a friend, into the conversation, and he then brought some of the top people working on the issue, such as Unicef chief Carole Bellamy and Alan Rosenfield, dean of the School of Public Health at Columbia University, to visit Ms. Winfrey in Chicago, her base of operations.
"The point was to try to encourage her to take on the role of the voice of orphans," Mr. Lewis said.
Ms. Winfrey wanted to know more, so he pledged to take her to ground zero for a crash course. She freed two days at the tail end of a visit to South Africa, where she attended the Cape Town concert and supervised work on a school for girls she is building in Johannesburg.
Mr. Lewis chose Zambia, a landlocked nation of 10 million, because one adult in five has HIV/AIDS and one child in three is now an orphan . He asked his assistant, Anurita Bains, and the Unicef office in Zambia to put together a program. After weeks of exhaustive planning, they felt they had everything: kids living on the street, babies treated in a clinic, and a project where young girls receive inspirational leadership training -- very Oprah.
The highlight, in Ms. Bain's eyes, would be Chikankata, a village two hours from Lusaka where a group of brave, if exhausted, grandmothers are each raising as many as seven orphans, the offspring of their own dead children.
Zambia would be Ms. Winfrey's first venture into the continent outside South Africa, where she moves largely in the rarefied world of Mr. Mandela. In Lusaka, she would stay in the presidential suite of the Intercontinental Hotel (where a team of chefs was sweating over what to make her for dinner) and travel by Land Rover. Even so, she would see something of a country whose average citizen lives on 84 cents a day.
The planning team felt Ms. Winfrey could not help but be moved, that she would get a sense of the breadth of the crisis. And if they were lucky, she would go back to the United States and bring it all home to her vast audience: the crucial American demographic that can change world policy by deciding to phone their members of Congress.
Mr. Lewis envisioned a brief fact-finding tour for a "scaled-down" group. (Oprah's people asked him to limit his entourage to, well, just him, but he brought Ms. Bains as well.) For Ms. Winfrey, however, scaled-down is 24 people. She left behind the hairdresser and makeup artist, but travelled with seven very tense security guards, her partner, Stedman Graham, press person Lisa Halliday, long-time executive producer Diane Hudson (and Ms. Hudson's husband, Mike, a professor of anthropology whom Ms. Winfrey introduces as the adviser on Africa for her Harpo Foundation), personal assistant Libby Moore, a photographer, two full camera crews, two TV producers and John Samuels, who heads Mr. Mandela's charitable foundation.
And from the minute her personal jet touched down in Lusaka, the cameras rolled. The two crews filmed her at every moment. It was, her producer explained, tape for a special appearance she made on CNN's Larry King Live this week, tape for an ABC network special with Diane Sawyer that is to air next Wednesday and tape for an Oprah segment scheduled for Dec. 22.
In fact, ahead of Ms. Winfrey, her show sent in a frenetic freelance producer whose résumé includes stints on such reality-TV staples as Survivor and The Amazing Race . When the big day finally dawned, she burst into the marbled lobby of the Intercontinental kitted out in clumpy snake-proof boots, combat pants, a huge khaki hat and wrap-around sunglasses, with a two-way radio dangling from her belt. Ahead lay the horrors of the airport VIP lounge; the producer was ready.
Just 8 per cent of Zambians own televisions, but when Oprah came, every foreigner in town wanted a piece of the action. Mr. Lewis's office struggled in vain to keep the visit low-key, having been warned that she detests formal protocol scenarios such as being welcomed by little girls with bouquets. The Canadian and U.S. ambassadors both called, pleading to meet her. Dozens of diplomats and senior UN officials clogged the tarmac, despite express orders to stay away. And the Unicef rep brought . . . a little girl with a bouquet.
The jet touched down, and the enormous bodyguards came down the ramp first, scanning the vast, cloudless horizon. Then there she was, a vision in pink. A small cheer went up from a group of British Airways employees when they caught sight of her. Ms. Winfrey bounded out. "Hi, Steve!" she called, enthusiastically embracing Mr. Lewis.
While Ms. Winfrey had her photo taken with the ambassadors, her people huddled around Ms. Bains, struggling to explain that they needed a little change in the program. They needed, in fact, to cut it in half.
After her stay in South Africa, "she's just really tired," explained Ms. Moore, the assistant.
"She just gives and gives and gives," added Ms. Hudson, the executive producer.
They had decided that Ms. Winfrey must fly back to Chicago early the next morning, cutting out the second day of the trip: She would not see rural Africa, would not meet the grannies struggling with the orphaned babies in Chikankata.
Ms. Bains stared back in evident shock.
"Can you call them and tell them we're really, really sorry?" Ms. Moore asked.
"There aren't any phones there," Ms. Bains replied faintly, and before she could say more, the Oprah road show plunged into Lusaka, with the 11-vehicle convoy tearing through the sleepy streets, escorted by police on motorcycles.
The first stop was the Chelstone Clinic, which treats pregnant women who have HIV and is one of just a handful of sites in Zambia offering what's known as "prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission-plus." The expectant mothers, and the newborns, receive a dose of nevirapine, a drug that dramatically reduces the baby's risk of being infected at birth. The "plus" is that the women (and their partners, if infected) also receive access to the lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs, so they can live long enough to raise the babies.
As the crowd swept in, director Moses Inkala cast a nervous glance at the boom mike the sound tech had dangled over him and then carefully explained the way the treatment works. Ms. Winfrey sat, listened intently and then said, "Tell me again."
"We're trying to keep the mothers alive, the fathers alive, the family intact," Dr. Inkala said.
"It's the real solution to the orphan problem," Mr. Lewis added.
"Okay, got it," Ms. Winfrey said with a decisive nod, and then headed out on a tour of the clinic. She was shown to a small room where counsellor Ida Mukaka was talking to a group of patients. They told Ms. Winfrey about how they struggle for jobs, for food, for the drugs to stay alive. She nodded, but kept looking around, checking her watch and trying to spot where her people were.
In the hallway outside, there was a drama. The freelance producer was having a fit: "I have to get a camera in there," she growled at the doctors, the nurses and Ms. Bains, who guarded the door. A clinic doctor gently tried to explain that there is an enormous stigma to being HIV-positive in Zambia, that these women are not public about being infected -- that they might perhaps be hesitant about talking about it on one of the most-watched television shows in the universe.
The subtleties were lost on the producer, steeped as she was in U.S. confessional television. "Can I shoot through the window?" she demanded.
Thwarted, she stalked back down the hall -- and soon cornered an American doctor who works at the clinic. The doctor got a bit teary as she talked about the struggles of her Zambian patients -- and the producer sprinted off to find the camera crew. "We need to go back and film right now, " she said breathlessly. "There's a doctor back there; she'll start to cry immediately when you talk to her."
Ms. Winfrey, meanwhile, was heading briskly for her van. "She needs to interact," her personal assistant said, looking concerned. "She's really going to need to interact."
But there was no interacting: There was no sign of the Oprah from TV, the great connector, the endlessly empathetic listener who can spark warmth with anyone. Ms. Winfrey hurried through the next three sites, looking tired and overwhelmed.
It was as though she found this Africa, the real Africa, shocking and unnerving. She struggled with the lilting Zambian accent, constantly asking, "Do they speak English?" as she was led forward to meet people. She recoiled in visible distress upon entering a classroom full of children: the room was dark and decrepit, and the children very grubby, to be sure, but Yasheni Homes is an impressive low-budget program doing vital things for the 219 orphans it serves. The UN wanted to show off the place, but Ms. Winfrey clearly was shaken by it.
Finally, at the Umoyo Training Centre, the TV Oprah made a brief appearance while speaking to 45 orphaned teenaged girls. "I was born in the U.S., in the southern part of the U.S. and I grew up poor in the U.S., with no running water, no electricity, and I was raised by my grandmother," she told them.
And they told her how they struggled to find food, how they could not go to school, how they had to earn money to feed younger siblings. "If I wasn't here, I would be a prostitute," one of them said. "That is what most of my friends are doing."
Ms. Winfrey went on to exhort the girls to read, and to "believe in yourselves. . . . I believed in myself, I believed anything was possible and that God was looking after me. With God, all things are possible."
Then the convoy bounced back out the dirt road, and the visits were over, almost two hours ahead of schedule. At the hotel, the UN staffers worried that the worn-looking Ms. Winfrey would cancel the next item on the agenda, a courtesy press briefing for the Zambian media.
But at 6 o'clock, she and her entourage bustled into a briefing room at the Intercontinental, and she greeted the assembled media radiantly. "Hello, everybody, isn't this fun?" It was as though giant heat lamps had been turned on in the room. The energy she gave off was a physical force; no one could take their eyes off her. She took the microphone and started to talk about her day, speaking with compassion, empathy, distress -- and with evident knowledge of the issues.
"What I was most impressed with today was that, no matter where we went, everybody expressed the idea that, no matter how devastating the disease has been for their community and mothers in particular, hope still lives," she said.
"Watching people who live in some of the most dire circumstances of anybody I've ever seen in the world -- the people fighting in the trenches, in the homes, holding the babies, trying to give the medicines -- if they can have hope, I can have hope."
And then she quoted Bono: "AIDS is the moral issue of our times." The U2 frontman, a good friend, has persuaded her, she said, that it is "necessary for every person who is conscious of this issue to fight for change, political, medically, socially."
Just then, a Zambian newspaper reporter asked politely why she thought African Americans have not done more to fight the pandemic in Africa, and whether she, as one of the richest African Americans, would be making a financial contribution. She interrupted him to clarify: "Not just one of the richest African Americans; one of the richest Americans."
Ms. Winfrey lit into the North American media, which have, she said, reduced the AIDS issue to statistics. "These are living, breathing people who are dying. . . . The very first time I followed a child home, a 10-year-old girl left to take care of an eight-year-old sister, with a bed and a heater in a shack, I thought, 'So this is what it is: When you are orphaned by AIDS, it means you have nobody.' ' I was under the impression that somebody was looking after these kids; we were under the impression that there was a system taking care of the children. . . . I followed that little girl and I saw the face of AIDS I'd never seen before. It was no longer just a number."
Now, she said, she was going to go home and make it real for Oprah viewers.
But 20 years into the pandemic, it is not as if hers were the first cameras to roll on the dusty, skinny AIDS orphans. Why, she was asked, will it be different when she does it?
She rolled her eyes at the question, and handed it off to Ms. Hudson, her executive producer. "There are real lives being destroyed one by one by one -- when you put that to people through the connection they have with Oprah, it's undeniable."
At this, Ms. Winfrey jumped back in. "The worldwide media has dehumanized the images of Africa, of poverty, sickness, children dying with flies on their eyes. It's so overwhelming for people. They think, 'That's not my child. My child couldn't be that way.' My goal telling these stories is for people to see these children as their children," she said.
"When our special airs, people will see African children as they have never seen them before. Their bellies are not swollen, there are no flies, these are beautiful, bright little stars. That's what they are. We get people to see the person first, not the disease. That is the difference between our show and others."
In fact, this type of insight is probably what's behind much of Ms. Winfrey's incomparable success. She understands what it takes to get an American audience to connect with a story. If she has to make a viewer in Nebraska believe that sickly AIDS orphan at a feeding centre is just like that woman's own child, in order to get her to care, then that is what she will do. Her show long ago left behind the cheating husbands and the serial dieters. Now, it bills itself as an unembarrassed force for change, a force for good.
Ms. Winfrey said she would put AIDS orphans on that agenda, asking her viewers, "Now that you've seen it, you can no longer pretend that you don't know. And now that you know, what will you do? What will you do?' . . . Once they know, I believe they will respond."
The Zambian reporters filed out (and splashed her on every front page and news show the next day). And Ms. Winfrey and her team proceeded to dinner, where all the agonizing over the menu paid off, and they raved about the food. Over her duck à l'orange and Nile perch, she mused aloud about what she should do for the children she met that day; she thought perhaps she would send sweaters or school supplies.
Then it was off to bed, and wheels up on her jet in the gentle Zambian dawn the next day.
Mr. Lewis stayed behind to meet the grannies out in Chikankata, while most of Ms. Winfrey's team went shopping at the market in Lusaka.
The producer, however, took the camera crew and exhaustively retraced the steps of the day before; they persuaded every HIV-positive woman at the Chelstone Clinic to talk on camera; they taped the girls at Umoyo telling their gripping stories of loss and survival; they went back to the Garden Centre and got Nathan Mukwemba and his pals to talk about life on the streets, begging for food and thinking wistfully of attending school. At nightfall, the producer returned to the hotel, glowing with triumph; she would make good TV.
Afterward, Mr. Lewis and company held their breath as they waited to see what Ms. Winfrey would do with what she had learned. "I get the sense, and it is confirmed for me by Graça and Madiba [Mr. Mandela], that she wants to make this the contribution of her lifetime," he said. "If Oprah can drive the world to some sanity on the issue of orphans, think of the impact."
The first sign of that influence came on Tuesday night, when Ms. Winfrey appeared on Larry King Live. Between talk about her book club and her film career, she touched briefly on the journey to Africa, announcing that she wanted to be the voice of orphaned children, that she was beginning to think this was the reason God gave her the gifts she has.
The moment lasted perhaps 90 seconds, but it was 90 of television's most-watched, most-influential seconds -- better air time than Africa's AIDS orphans had ever had before. "If we as a nation do not do whatever we can, we are going to have social chaos in 10 years," she said. Viewers must "write a cheque, write their congressman."
She touched on the importance of getting lifesaving drugs to the children, and she shared the lesson she had learned back at the Chelstone Clinic in Lusaka.
"Keep the mothers alive," she said. "That's one of the things I'm most interested in doing."
Stephanie Nolen is The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent. |