The New York Times - Saturday, December 4, 2004
Sam Roberts

The boy was Xolani Nkosi Johnson. The reporter was Jim Wooten. And their friendship has now been chronicled by Mr. Wooten in "We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love," published last month by Penguin Press.

"We are all the same," the boy was repeating to himself the first time Mr. Wooten saw him in Johannesburg. This journalist writes: "He looked no more than 6 or 7 and yet there he was, rehearsing a speech I'd been told he would soon be making to an in-person audience of several thousand people, as well as to millions watching on satellite television. Of course, it was possible that he was not the right kid, not the one I'd come to Johannesburg to see. Either that or he was a midget."

Mr. Wooten made a mental note to confirm Nkosi's age, but he soon discovered that the boy he had gone to South Africa to interview was indeed larger than life. His tiny frame personified the ravages that colonialism and apartheid had inflicted on black African children -- Nkosi was born in desperate poverty in a shantytown -- rendering them fatherless refugees. Their mothers became unwitting vessels for the virus that causes AIDS, which they in turn transmitted to a generation destined to die as orphans.

The speech Nkosi would deliver to the 13th International AIDS conference in Durban in 2000 implicitly challenged the nonchalance of President Thabo Mbeki's government and elevated the young boy to a symbol of a pandemic that is decimating a continent.

"He was an irresistible child," said Mr. Wooten, an ordained Presbyterian minister who was a former reporter for The New York Times and is now a senior correspondent for ABC News. Until this assignment he had largely insulated himself from the wars and famines he covered by reflexively flicking the emotional switch that somehow allows a journalist to function without internalizing the horrors of his grimmest surroundings. And what he called Nkosi's "mystic good cheer" lured him into breaking the first rule of journalism. It was the first time, Mr. Wooten said, that he befriended a source.

He broadcast several stories about the boy and about Gail Johnson, his white foster mother who became an advocate for mothers and children with AIDS. And whenever he was in southern Africa, he would detour just to visit Nkosi.

"I'm an aging if not yet ancient reporter and should have known better, but even though I made an honest effort to keep a journalist's discreet distance, to remain emotionally uninvolved in what was seen and heard, I was powerfully drawn to this child and this woman, as much as I have been drawn to Africa itself," Mr. Wooten writes. "Almost before I understood what was happening, we became friends."

Mr. Wooten was persuaded by his friend David Halberstam, a writer and former reporter for The Times, to turn the story of his friendship with Nkosi into a book. He donated most of the advance and royalties to the AIDS foundation that Ms. Johnson established in Nkosi's name.

In December 2000, Nkosi announced that he would stop taking his medication because it seemed to be making him sicker.

"At last I found the nerve to ask about his spirit, his grit," Mr. Wooten writes. "I had avoided the subject until then because well, because it did not seem to be a question that a boy ought to have to answer."

No, Nkosi replied, he did not believe that he was particularly brave. "Actually," he recalled, "in 1998 I thought I was going to die then, but I said: 'I am not going to give up. I have a lot of work to do for the other mothers and children out there.' And I'm still not going to give up, because there is still a lot of work to do."

Nkosi lapsed into a coma. When he died on June 1, 2001, at age 12, he weighed 20 pounds. His obituary appeared on front pages around the world.

Mr. Wooten, who lives in Washington with his wife and is the father of five daughters, said he never discovered the source of Nkosi's grit, but the boy taught him other things.

"Here I am a senior citizen," Mr. Wooten said. "I'm now 67, and here's this kid from whom I learned several valuable lessons and was reminded of lessons I had learned early in life and overlooked. He had a mantra: 'Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are."'

Nkosi concluded his speech to the AIDS conference by declaring: "Care for us and accept us. We are all human beings, we are normal. We have hands, we have feet, we can walk, we can talk, we have needs just like everyone else. Don't be afraid of us. We are all the same."

Mr. Wooten said: "I don't think he was the same. He was a very different kind of human being. I regard him as superior to me."

*Article on unlikely friendship that developed between Xolani Nkosi Johnson, South African AIDS victim, and American television reporter Jim Wooten; friendship has been chronicled by Wooten in new book, We Are All the Same: A Story of A boy's Courage and a Mother's Love; photo (M)

South Africa; Johnson, Nkosi; Wooten, Jim; Roberts, Sam; Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Books and Literature; We Are All the Same (Book)

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