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Let us all be soldiers - Makeba
15/03/2008 10:03 - (SA)
Sofia Bouderbala
Kinshasa - "What I have seen here, I will tell the world in words and in songs," Mirriam Makeba promised women with smallholdings on the banks of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then threw aside her cane for a spontaneous song in the sand.
"Mama Africa!" responded an enthralled audience, joining the South African diva in her barefoot dance for a group of women who grow crops a few kilometres outside the DRC's capital, Kinshasa.
Makeba, 76, and clad in a smart black gown with a gold and garnet shoulder scarf, was visiting the women in her role as an ambassador of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which supported the Congolese charity Alpi in its stated aim of working "to free people living with HIV/Aids".
Since 2003, FAO assistance with implements and fertilisers had enabled the local non-governmental organisation to provide food security and help for the social reintegration of hundreds of women, explained Aline Okongo, the chairperson of Alpi.
'This has changed everything for me'
The 11 smallholdings between the DRC and the Makelele River were among a range of projects backed by Alpi, which was caring for 2 430 people living with the virus.
The vegetables and fruit grown in fields here were partly used to balance the diet of people with the virus, while the surplus was sold in the markets of the capital.
"This has changed everything for me," said Albertine Masuka, a 56-year-old widow bringing up six children by herself. "My children all go to school now and I can save a little to buy clothes and for the future."
Each family working in the often stifling tropical heat could cultivate up to 15 plots of land each sized two by four metres and manages to earn up to $250 a month when the harvest is good, according to Alpi.
However, Okongo said this was insufficient to pay for anti-retroviral drugs that were still expensive and hard to obtain, while the work could sometimes be "very difficult (because people) have to walk a lot in sandy soil" to reach fields far from any roads.
On Aids itself, Okongo called the disease an enemy of development and said that "in a few decades, the pandemic has claimed more victims in Africa than the slave trade. In the DRC, the official prevalence rate is 4.5%".
"Eighty percent of the sick are between 15 and 45, an economically productive age group," she said, calling for more investment by both the government and the international community.
"Let us all be soldiers, not soldiers to kill one another, but to kill everything which is against humanity. We are all in this together," declared Makeba, who paid for her own commitment to fight apartheid white minority rule in South Africa with 31 years in exile.
- AFP
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