Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Chicago Tribune - August 21, 2006
Jeff Long, Tribune staff reporter, jjlong@tribune.com
Named for the hometown of its early German settlers, the South African town also was ravaged by ignorance regarding the disease.
Few of the village's 3,500 residents knew anything about AIDS. And they didn't want to know anything about it, Mangwane said.
"People were dying in our village, but they didn't know what they were dying of," she said. "They thought they were bewitched. There was a rumor going around that someone was sprinkling AIDS powder."
Mangwane, who now manages an AIDS clinic in Hamburg, was in Chicago on Sunday with others from her village to unveil a remarkable piece of artwork.
A mix of embroidery, beadwork and photographs, the 13-foot-by-22-foot "Keiskamma Altarpiece" will serve as backdrop for the altar at St. James Episcopal Cathedral at Wabash Avenue and Huron Street for the next month.
Named for the river valley where Hamburg sits, the altarpiece, in bright colors and fine detail, depicts the widows and orphans of AIDS, the grandmothers who must raise children who have lost parents to the disease and the somber funeral for a pock-marked victim.
But in panels that fold outward like a cupboard are also scenes of hope and new life--of birds and the flowing river. Such hope, and new life, is already coming true, Mangwane said, with the help of medicine from the U.S. that has made the disease less of an automatic death sentence.
Her own daughter and 4-year-old grandson are HIV-positive but have responded well to anti-retroviral drug treatments. Her daughter began the treatments in April 2005, and her grandson--named Lithemba, or "Hope"--just last month.
Mangwane and about 120 women in Hamburg who have been affected by AIDS made the altarpiece over six months in 2004 and 2005.
It comes to Chicago after a stop in Toronto for the 16th International AIDS Meeting.
Dr. Carol Hofmeyr, also at the unveiling in Chicago, helped found a trust fund that brings AIDS medicine to the Hamburg clinic and works in the clinic and two others in the region. It was her idea to create the altarpiece, based on the Isenheim Altarpiece commissioned in the early 1500s by the religious order of St. Anthony to celebrate the region's deliverance from a plague.
Hofmeyr called her government's response to the AIDS crisis "embarrassing." But fear of AIDS and denial were deep in the culture--not just the government.
The altarpiece was unveiled at Sunday services at the Episcopal church and is next scheduled to visit Los Angeles. More stops may be scheduled as well.
The tour is sponsored by the AIDS Institute at UCLA. Its executive director, Edwin Bayrd, told St. James members of cutting-edge research that may lead to drugs that can stop an HIV infection.
But many in South Africa are concerned with the much more basic problems of surviving AIDS and coping, he said.
"One hundred twenty women fight back against a viral firestorm that was sweeping across their village with the only weapon they had because they had no drugs," Bayrd said as he introduced Mangwane. "But they had embroidery needles."
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