vintage originals

Three Letter Plague
Johnny Steinberg
A Young Man's Journey Through a Great Epidemic

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa’s Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic. He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for Aids despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is his deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a complex and traditional rural community.

his forceful narrative, with sharp insights and value…has to do with the immense power of stigma, the ways in which we mirror the real or imagined condemnation of others, and of how easily stigma becomes entwined with sexuality - New York Times

Writing with tenderness and authority, Steinberg skilfully manoeuvres past the prejudice that so often muddles analysis of HIV/AIDS to capture the essence of the pandemic and how it threatens not just lives in South Africa but the future of an entire nation - Tim Butcher