Asunta Wagura is a well known name in Kenya and abroad.
She was among the first Kenyans to boldly go public about their HIV status. Her case is all over internet — you can read about it.
I first met her when we were students at Olkejuado High School in the 1980s. She joined Form Five when I was in Form Six. We associated closely because she was an active member of the school’s Writers Club, where I was chairman.
To the holier-than-thou moral police and haters, at school Asunta was a staunch Christian and top in discipline and she was made dormitory prefect and later the school headgirl. We lost contact after high school.
It was 12 years later when we bumped into each other in Nairobi streets. As we hugged and said happy to meet again, I noticed something odd about the Asunta I knew back in the day.
She was not the bubbly, radiant girl I knew in school. I confirmed that when we pulled off the street to exchange the where-are-you-now, where-have-you-been stories.
She wasn’t comfortable about that and my instinct told me to avoid that line. I gave her my contact and we agreed she call to say when we could meet.
It took a couple of months before she called. When we met, again she was cold and let me do much of the talking as her mind wandered in the distant horizon.
I knew better than to ask for another date. I was yet to know her HIV status.
One morning about two years later, I woke up to read in the newspaper a story where she had opened up about her HIV status. I immediately sought her out.
To my surprise, this time when we met she was the old all-smiles girl I knew in school. She began with apologies for being cold to me in the past two meetings.
It was now off her chest, she said. Then she told me her story — how and when she became HIV-positive and how her world suddenly turned upside down to a point she contemplated suicide.
A new dawn came when she first accepted herself and the fact that she had to live with her condition. Then she boldly told it to the world.
She went a step further. She sought as many others in her situation and told them: “Wait a minute, who said being HIV is a death sentence? Fold up your mats and walk!” And so they did.
It is during one of our conversations in the aftermath of her disclosure that I challenged her that since she was a good writer — I knew it from our high school days — why not start writing and not just telling her story.
She took the challenge and until a few years back she was a much-read columnist in the Nation and later in the Standard newspaper.
The last time we met about five years ago, it was on the 10th birthday of her HIV-negative son, whom she conceived and delivered against all odds, a daring venture she called “Project Joshua”.
I asked her what next and she told me she would be pursuing further education and get a PhD.
I reminded her we were approaching our fifties and it was time to slow down. She looked at me straight in the face and said: “Kamau, you know it is a lie that life begins at 40. It actually starts at 50!” I had no answer.
The second case history vivid in my memory is about a friend and colleague whom I won’t mention by name but will refer to as patient two (P2).
P2 and I had a lot in common. We were age-mates and employed in the same profession at about same time — he as a photojournalist — and concurrently worked for the same media houses.
We would be listed on the same assignment. In one media house where we worked, our boss Joseph Odindo (later group editorial director at Nation Media Group) had nicknamed us the “two musketeers”.
In turn we secretly referred to him as SD (“the slave-driver”). Later, when we disclosed to him the code name we had given him, Mr Odindo laughed loudly and said: “Really!”
Like Asunta Wagura, P2 was of a good upbringing and well-behaved. When on overnight weekend assignments, he would have in tow his trusted girlfriend to avoid temptations.
Once when on assignment in Eldoret and without his girlfriend, I thought we would be trapped into a compromising situation at a discotheque when he came up with an escape plan.
On his way to the washrooms, he secretly cleared our bill and waited for my turn to go to the washrooms, from where he whisked me and we spirited away unnoticed by our strange “companions”.
Then, suddenly, P2, who had since gone into self-employment, went off radar. I checked with all mutual friends I knew and nobody had an idea what became of him.
It wasn’t until two years later that we received invitations to attend a fundraiser to pay for his hospital bill.
He had been admitted in a small cottage hospital faraway from the town centre the previous six months. We raised the money but it was too late. He passed away.
As we drove to his burial with a colleague, we felt guilty and bitter at the same time that we hadn’t intervened early enough and, perhaps P2 would be alive today.
Our bitterness was that we weren’t informed in good time. It happened that when P2 found out about his HIV status, he went into self-pity, hated himself, and decided to avoid friends whom — in his own thinking — he thought he had offended by getting sick!
I went out of my way to dig out the case history of my friend P2. Later, when I shared it with a medic friend, he told me that at the time P2’s condition was diagnosed, it was very possible to manage it before it spilt to a point of no return.
On the right diet, right mental attitude and adhering to the prescribed medical regime, my medic friend told me, HIV/Aids wouldn’t have killed P2.
I was very sorry I wasn’t there for my friend in his hour of need. Only a few years earlier he had gone out of his way to comfort me when bedridden with a dislocated hip joint.
I remember one afternoon when he came to my bedside with the memoir of world-famous cameraman Mohamed Amin, and opened to the page where the latter says once when recuperating from a road accident and one leg in a plaster from knee to toe, he sneaked from his hospital bed, camera on shoulder, to go out shooting because he was “irked by boredom of convalescence”.
P2 wanted me to take cue from Mohamed Amin and “do copy” (journalese-speak for write stories) from my hospital bed!
And now here was P2 gone, and I did not do anything to possibly stop his early death. I shed tears.
Ties that bind …. and live
The third case has to do with the first Kenyan to go public about his HIV status — Joe Muriuki. As with Asunta Wagura, his story is all over the internet — you can read it.
It isn’t Muriuki’s story I want to tell. It is that of his wife, Jane. I knew her before they met and became husband and wife.
On leaving high school, she briefly worked as untrained teacher (UT) in my home village in Laikipia. She was a smashing young beauty.
I know many of my contemporaries who watered their mouths to either deflower her or take her home to their mother — preferably both.
They never got far, because soon she vanished to Nairobi, where we heard she got married to a man called Muriuki.
I next saw her years later when at their family home in Nairobi. I didn’t immediately connect that it was the same Jane I knew from the village, or that this was the same Muriuki we heard had snatched her away from the village “hungry hyenas” who wanted to “eat” her.
It is during the small chat after the interview that I mentioned off the record that my mother lived in Laikipia. She told me she was once a teacher in my rural village.
I took a close look at her and asked whether she was the girl called Jane who got married by a Muriuki from Nairobi. She replied: “Yes, I am the one and this is the Muriuki you heard about!”
Now the interview and story turned on her (not the husband): when and where did you meet him? Was he HIV-positive when you married?
How did you react when you learnt of his status? What made you stay when others would have fled and let him die alone?
Her answers were: he wasn’t HIV-positive when they met, married, and were blessed with three children. When the husband tested positive, the first thing was that she and their children took tests. None was positive.
As to why she chose to stay, she answered that it is because on rereading their wedding vows, she found that it remained “until death do us part”.
So why walk away on my dear Muriuki when he was still alive and kicking! They are still living and happily married.
Won a battle; back in the trenches
The last case history is about my friend whom I will call P3. He has allowed me to tell his story but not disclose his name.
P3 telephoned me one afternoon 15 years ago and said he had an urgent matter to discuss that evening, and insisted the meeting be in his house. He sounded distressed.
When I got there I was surprised not just to find him all smiles, but with a big bottle of nice whisky on the table.
“Can’t be serious you called me and sounded so tensed because of a bottle of whisky,” I protested. “Cool down man,” he said.
“I know you media people like breaking news. I have one for you: this morning my doctor told me I am HIV-positive!”
My friend can go overboard in taking things easy but this time I thought he had gone bonkers. Before I gave him a piece of my mind, he thrust the laboratory report on me.
I read it and went numb. “Why sulk?” he asked me. “You should be happy; the doctor told me I can — and I’m determined — to live to be a 100!”
In short, here is the story. My friend works for a blue-chip company in Nairobi. That day 15 years ago he’d gone for his annual medical check, which is mandatory where he works.
Among the tests is HIV status, for which he had to be counselled before disclosure. The doctor/counsellor told him he had tested positive but — barring other factors — he could live to be 100 if he kept to the rules.
The bottle of whisky he had called me for was to make an advance toast to his 100th birthday, he said. Last year he was promoted and is a stone’s throw away from the top.
When Covid-19 landed in the country a few weeks ago, P3 donated Sh100,000 to buy sanitisers, gloves, masks and related paraphernalia for a community home for underprivileged children.
He also set up a WhatsApp group for friends to chip in to help similar establishments. As I wrote this article, he had raised over Sh1 million to fight the pandemic.
He won the first battle in the fight against HIV/Aids. Now he is back in the trenches to combat Covid-19.
He is an inspiration, that is, determined and together, we shall overcome. Wherever you are, whoever you are: first stay safe by obeying the rules, then chip in with whatever you can to beat Covid-19. Pamoja tuangamize korona!
