Analysis Of John Illiffe's The African AIDS Epidemic: A History

Historical fiction has the ability to make facts personal and statistics real in a way that an academic history cannot, however every work of historical fiction cannot capture the sum of a moment in time only the way in which it might have been experienced. The inherently idiosyncratic novel and forthrightly impersonal academic work can partner to provide the reader of both with a more complete understanding. Though John Illiffe’s The African AIDS Epidemic: A History is nonfiction and Margaret Ogola’s The River and The Source is a fictional work, they provide complementary pictures of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/ Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic on the African continent.

A core focus of Iliffe’s history is that

She dies of AIDS at the age of 33. Unlike Iliffe’s history, the vehicle of the novel allows The River and The Source to give its reader a sense of witnessing the loss of a family member to HIV. Ogola describes the appearance of the once beautiful Becky as she approaches death as “a mere grotesque shadow of her former self.” Her “lovely eyes were dimmed, the beautiful face was a death’s head mask, the mouth excoriated to the quick, the limbs wasted and the skin was covered with unsightly blemishes.” (Ogola, Ch. 6) In her will, Becky echoes the moralistic perception of the disease as “the price” for her way of life, while at the same time insists she has no regrets. (Ogola, Ch.

The River and The Source depicts the entire history of a family over the course of the 20th century from the birth of Akoko in a village in Colonial Kenya to the story of her surgeon great-grandson and his medical school professor wife with an international reputation. Illiffe discusses how the colonialism and interconnectivity in Africa both relate to the epidemic. Colonialism establishes a system of labor migration throughout southern Africa. Transportation systems, which allowed for mobile populations and economic growth across the continent also allowed for the mobility of the virus and growth of the