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Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, A Country's Hope, by Uzodinma Iweala
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1488027 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Harper Perennial
- Published on: 2013-07-09
- Released on: 2013-07-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .54" w x 5.31" l, .40 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
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
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 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. On a remarkable journey through his native Nigeria, Uzodinma Iweala opens our minds to these stories, speaking with people from all walks of life: the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, sex workers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and always unflinchingly candid.
At once a deeply personal exploration of life in the face of disease and an incisive critique of our ideas of health and happiness, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines to illuminate the scope of the crisis and the real lives it affects.
About the Author
Uzodinma Iweala is also the author of Our Kind of People, a work of nonfiction. He lives in New York City and Lagos, Nigeria.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting, but uneven
By S. McGee
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.
So that lives become livable again
By H. Gerety
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.
Really????
By DJY51
I lost my best friend to AIDS in 1989, and I still miss him terribly. For years I was terrified of making friends with gay men for fear of losing them. I had lost three friends, and until the anti-retro viral treatments were available, I was worried all the time that other friends would be taken from me. After the cocktail that worked was readily available, my fears dissipated and now I have two friends with HIV/Aids who happily live their lives fully, without the fear (on their part or mine) that they will die a premature death. I've seen the fear it inspires, first hand, how some family members react and how miserable self-righteous prigs see this disease as a punishment from God. But, that was a generation ago. To read a book written today, that details all the crap people had to go thru who had HIV/Aids thirty years ago, as if it were breaking news, is mind numbing. I have known about the devastation HIV/Aids has caused to millions of people in different countries in Africa for almost as long as I knew about it here.
Iweala wrote this book as if it's a relatively new phenomena that needs to be addressed. C'mon. Wake up. This is not new or news. What is important is how millions of people in Africa are denied treatments because of either cost or inaccessibility to locations that administer treatments (the latter situation wasn't even addressed in this book).
There are snippets in this book that are compelling, but mostly it is dated material, poorly and very defensively written. Iweala constantly bemoans how we clump all the people and all the countries in Africa together and make grotesque generalizations. Make that point and move on.
I did, however, love the title of the book. Essentially, it asks, who gets HIV/Aids. And the answer is: People like us. Viewing the crisis that way keeps us from treating those people who are positive as "the other".
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