SEVERAL CONSIDERATIONS WENT into the decision to return to my home country, South Africa, from my extended stay in the United States of America. First and foremost, besides the fact that I missed home and my family, I recognised that my writing was rooted in South Africa and things South African. I felt I needed to reconnect, be ‘on the spot’, as it were, so as to be more in tune with what was happening in the country day-to-day, rather than relying on reportage. I seemed to be bombarded daily with reports of the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life, especially young life. But this was a consideration I acknowledged mostly unconsciously, as I didn't say to myself: I’m going home to join the fight against HIV and Aids. Yet the pandemic troubled me to the core of my being.

In the early days, when Aids was still but a rumour, I attended my first Aids conference in the early 1990s in New York. A South African nurse, Nonceba Lubanga, had organised this. At the time, I knew very little about the disease. That was the time we still held the mistaken notion it was something that killed gay men. The only reason I attended the conference, held over a weekend, was because Nonceba is not only a loyal friend but one of those people you don't say no to – you’d better do as she says, or else …

What I learnt from that conference left me numb. Looking back, I know I had still not grasped the magnitude of what was about to befall us. I remember the spine-chilling words: ‘By the year 2000, there will hardly be a family, in South Africa, not touched by Aids …’. Hardly a family …

I can still recall the palpable, overwhelming sense of doom with which I left the conference.