Black Death: AIDS in Africa

by Susan Hunter

To the surprise of many, George W. Bush pledged $10 billion to combat AIDS in developing nations. Noted specialist Susan Hunter tells the untold story of AIDS in Africa, home to 80 percent of the 40 million people in the world currently infected with HIV. She weaves together the history of colonialism in Africa, an insider's take on the reluctance of drug companies to provide cheap medication and vaccines in poor countries, and personal anecdotes from the 20 years she spent in Africa working on the AIDS crisis. Taken together, these strands make it unmistakably clear that a history of the exploitation of developing nations by the West is directly responsible for the spread of disease in developing nations and the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Hunter looks at what Africans are already doing on the ground level to combat AIDS, and what the world can and must do to help. Accessibly written and hard-hitting, Black Death brings the staggering statistics to life and paints for the first time a stunning picture of the most important political issue today.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2003

Reviews

[Aaron Horton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was informative about the aids crisis in Africa. It started a little slow for me but was informative.

[Nick Huntington-Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very confused book. On AIDS in Africa, the author seems to have her facts together. Everything else is very odd. And surprisingly, there is a [i]lot[/i] of everything else.

I'm not sure what possessed the author to dedicate the majority of the book to a history of epidemics in general, or even more oddly to a biography of Charles Darwin. I can see how those things are related, but they don't really tell us much of anything that's actually useful. Most of the book is dedicated to this sort of tangent. And what's dedicated to AIDS is full of tangents as well - daily-life conversations from three people who are trying to organize their community in response to AIDS.

A whole book on AIDS by someone who seems to be pretty knowledgeable about the subject, but that spends most of its time talking about other things entirely, and when it does remember what it's supposed to be about, frequently lapses into local-news-"here's-the-story-of-One-Woman"-ism. The last chapter was more what I wanted the whole book to be like. If you pick this one up, be prepared to start skipping big chunks.

[Jennifer J. Thompson Burns, PhD · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy read put together in an interesting way. The author traces the AIDS epidemic in Africa by combining anthropological, historical, sociological and autobiographical approaches. It inculdes Darwinism, local Ugandans, poverty, colonization and decolonization, and global epidemic(s) history(s). When I first began I thought "ut oh," but as I continued it became very interesting (and easy to jump parts as necessary).

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book while working in an AIDS orphanage in Zambia and it really answered a lot of questions I had lingering in my head. If anyone wants to really understand the plight of AIDS, and poverty in Africa, this is a really good start.

[Rustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting view of diseases, viruses, and epidemics. It uses fictional characters dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and short commentary of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle and his subsequent as the backdrop, but spends an equal amount of time on the history of other viruses.