Warrior Princess: Fighting for Life with Courage and Hope by Princess Kasune Zulu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
You are a young girl growing up in middle class Zambia. You have dreams of becoming a broadcaster, and you are named Princess because your family is connected to tribal leaders. You begin to see people around you, mothers and fathers, grow thin, sicken and die from a mysterious illness. Children are orphaned. Then, first your own father, and then your mother succumb to the same illness. At the end of your mother’s life you make a desperate day’s journey to a hospital to obtain miconazole (a drug you can buy at any pharmacy in North America for athlete’s foot) only to arrive home to find she has passed. Now you are an orphan, caring for your siblings and trying to make your way.
The temptation is to secure help from “sugar daddies”, providing sexual favors in exchange. Eventually you marry a man who has had several wives because he can provide for you and your family. Meanwhile, you learn that the mysterious disease that took so many loved ones is HIV/AIDS and it becomes an urgent matter to know your status, even though your husband forbids it. Finally you learn that both you and your husband are HIV positive.
This story, and the amazing response of the author to this news is the narrative of this book. Princess, growing in her faith during this time, resolves “I shall not die before I die.” She educates herself about the disease, for which at this time there is no treatment. She realizes education and prevention are crucial and so starts a school in her home for orphaned children. She poses as a prostitute to educate truckers who were prime vectors of the disease. On one of her hitchhiking trips, she is picked up by a physician who has been looking for an HIV positive person to share her story to educate others. This leads to a radio program (remember that broadcasting dream?) called “Positively Living” that begins to educate her country about the disease.
She receives a prophecy that she will speak to world leaders and see the flag of the United States standing still. I won’t give everything in the book away but this prophecy is fulfilled in striking fashion.
The book is honest. Princess makes no attempt to cover the marital difficulties that led to her eventual divorce. Some may not approve of the choices she made in this marriage, or of tactics such as posing as a prostitute (yet of such is the human lineage of Jesus made up). Some may object to the fact that the book doesn’t take an “abstinence only” stance to prevention.
Yet this book is valuable in understanding the human cost of HIV/AIDS in Africa and the particular plight of women (who make up the majority of AIDS patients and often contract this from spouses). It also can help us grasp the powerful impact that a combined approach of development, education, and treatment and prevention aid can make in lowering disease incidence and improving the life of our fellow human beings in Africa.