SWAZI AIDS DOCO HITS AMERICA

Here’s news about another documentary about Swaziland that Swazis probably will never get the chance to see.

This one is a lot less controversial than Without The King, but it still paints a bleak picture of life in Swaziland.

The documentary called ‘Today the Hawk Takes One Chick’ has been described by the Boston Globe newspaper as balancing ‘despair and a gutted sense of hope’.

The documentary, which is being shown in Boston, Massachusetts, US, this week, looks at how HIV AIDS has devastated Swaziland and focuses on a group of grandmothers or ‘gogos’ who ‘have picked up the slack of their society’s near-total breakdown’.

In a review of the documentary published in the Globe Ty Burr calls the documentary ‘heartbreaking but in none of the obvious ways; rather than disease per se, the subject is the vast and wrenching social consequences of epidemic’.

The documentary visits Maria Shongwe: Seven of her nine grown children have died from complications of HIV, and one more is near death. In their absence, she’s the sole caretaker for her 10 grandchildren.

‘The film implies this is the norm across the continent: an entire generation vanished, with the surrounding generations left to pick up the pieces. Swaziland, and by extension Africa, is a ghost land,’ according to the Globe.

The review goes on, ‘There's no narration or soundtrack music; none are needed. Women like Maria, Albertina Skhosana, and a heroic nurse named Thandiwe Mathunjwa are seen fighting a daily battle to keep children fed and disease checked as best as possible.

‘Few illusions are left. After two decades of epidemic, everyone knows how the disease is spread, and the older women are the first to lecture their wards on the dangers of sexual promiscuity and the need for condoms. Their warnings fall on partially deaf ears: One of Maria’s older granddaughters has just had her second baby (the father's nowhere to be seen) and chalks up her own mother’s death to “evil spirits.” The recklessness of youth continues to have lethal consequences.’

The documentary was filmed in rural homesteads, ‘one of the film’s points being that the inhabitants of urban areas have returned to their ancestral lands to die as AIDS has burned through the population. You notice the eerie absence of grown men, the absence of people. During a visit to a children's hostel, we learn that 85 percent of the kids have lost both parents,’ the review states.

‘The film balances despair and a gutted sense of hope. Constant blood tests and an educated populace are clearly understood to be the only ways to combat the spread of ignorance and disease; at the same time, the gogos will not be around forever.

‘“We are leading to a different world,” says one, “where children will be doing whatever they feel. They will be wild.” Confirms the nurse, “If they don't take care of themselves, Swaziland will cease to exist.”’

See also
SWAZILAND ‘REVOLUTION' DOCO ON DVD