Chanda's Secrets

This is a documentary novel for teenage readers about the problem of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Given its clear educative purposes, it manages remarkably well to be a convincingly human story also. The message drives but does not overwhelm the medium. And though the theme and many events are grim, there is such diversity and vitality in the African community depicted that the overall effect is not depressing.

Chanda is a 16-year-old girl in an imaginary southern African country. Her parents married for love, against parental wishes, and were forced by family disapproval to leave their home community for the town. All was well until Chanda’s father and older brothers were all killed in a mining accident. Chanda’s mother was then forced into a series of relationships, successively ended by male misconduct, death, and AIDS, until she eventually contracted HIV herself. This is the story of Chanda’s brave and undefeated efforts to cope with her sick mother, her young half-brother and half-sister, her prejudiced community of neighbours, her school work, and her closest friend, who also contracts HIV. Chanda is intelligent and hungry for an education. Through her eyes we see the superstitions, misguided religious bigotry, and social ostracism that combine to stigmatise HIV/AIDS sufferers, driving them to shamed concealment. Chanda herself is not entirely convincing: she is at 16 too much the independent, shrewd observer and critic of her own community to be plausibly a member of it, but through her eyes we see a colourful, vibrant, deeply troubled society where it is all too easy to understand how and why the tragedy of AIDS has happened, and goes on happening.