Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - Tuesday October 9, 2001
Ravi Nessman, Associated Press Writer
She was buried Tuesday in a funeral full of tears and prayers, but also full of defiance against what many mourners saw as the government's stubborn unwillingness to come to terms with a crisis that is devastating the country.
"What we are looking for is political leadership," Nkululeko Nxesi, director of the National Association of People Living with AIDS, told more than 100 people gathered in the dirt yard of Mteniso's Soweto house.
South Africa's government, which has been criticized for its policies on AIDS, has courted new controversy by declining to release new estimates showing AIDS is the leading cause of death in this country and by casting doubt on their accuracy.
The statistics, contained in a report by the Medical Research Council, a government-sponsored research organization, estimated AIDS caused 40 percent of adult deaths and 25 percent of total deaths in South Africa last year.
The disease will have killed 5 million to 7 million South Africans by 2010, said the report, which has not been officially released.
The report was leaked last month after President Thabo Mbeki ordered a review of health spending on the basis of 1995 statistics showing HIV accounted for just 2.2 percent of South Africa's deaths.
Officials of the ruling African National Congress questioned the report's credibility, and several Cabinet ministers issued a statement denying they were suppressing it, saying they did not have the authority to release it.
The statement insisted on further investigation of the report and expressed annoyance that council employees had placed themselves in "a hostile position vis-a-vis the government."
"It will be necessary for this serious situation to be attended to," the statement said.
An estimated 4.7 million South Africans, 11 percent of the population, are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Liz Floyd, the respected AIDS director for the Gauteng province that includes Johannesburg and Soweto, said AIDS deaths were hard to count because those infected often die of related diseases, and doctors rarely put AIDS on death certificates for fear the families will be stigmatized.
Because of the stigma, a funeral like Mteniso's is rare.
Her yard was jammed with AIDS activists singing songs of mourning, but also of defiance, demanding AIDS medicine the government says is too expensive.
Candles tied with red AIDS ribbons burned, and a blue blanket on the plain wood coffin bore a tiny beaded pin of the South African flag with an even tinier AIDS ribbon in the middle.
Mteniso, 37, discovered she had HIV in 1990 while she was pregnant. Her baby died of AIDS at seven months. Mteniso, a shy woman, later became an activist with the AIDS Care and Counseling Trust.
Her childhood friend Sarafina Moleme, 39, visited her recently in the hospital, where she was fighting tuberculosis and diarrhea.
"She was tiny, she was coughing," Moleme said.
Mteniso died Sept. 28 and was buried Tuesday in Soweto's Avalon Cemetery, amid rows of fresh graves of people in their 30s, 20s and, in some cases, their infancy.
Activists speaking at the funeral blended praises for Mteniso's strength with criticisms of the government, which they are suing to provide medicine for infected pregnant women that could help prevent their babies from becoming infected.
In an open letter published in The Sunday Independent, Rhoda Kadalie, a former member of the South African Human Rights Commission, urged Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to resign.
"How can we continue with verbal gymnastics when our people are dying?" she wrote.
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