By Erv Dyer
CAPE TOWN, S.A. -- Actor and drama professor Jimmie Earl Perry sits in his small office at Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. On the walls around him are posters and other reminders of his theater past in America and Europe. Perry last worked in Germany, but a new mission brings him to Stellenbosch, a spacious, manicured campus considered to be the Stanford of South Africa. Perry, probably most known for his role as a loving husband in the erectile dysfunction commercials, is here to teach drama, but his efforts take on more significance than simple entertainment. He tells visitors he’s creating theater as a tool to reach out to South Africa’s colored population, a demographic most often ignored when it comes to messages of prevention, awareness and inclusion regarding HIV/AIDS. South Africa’s tortured 46-year history of apartheid split the country apart. Under the discriminatory policies, white citizens created for themselves a world of privilege. Stuck at the bottom and forced to live in sprawling shantytowns were millions of native Black South Africans. Pushed into the middle were the nation’s “colored” citizens – the millions of Indian, Asian and mixed-raced people who had straight hair texture and didn’t consider themselves either black or white. Apartheid ended in 1994, with the election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president. But the race and class divisions did not. With the HIV pandemic, which struck hardest in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s attention was focused on its devastation in black communities. Poorer, less educated and victims on already crippled medical systems, South African black people were easy targets for a sexually transmitted epidemic that spread like a fire through crowded urban districts and rural communities. Wealthier white communities struggle with HIV, too. But usually there is access to medicine in their communities. Nobody, it seemed was talking about health services and prevention to South Africa’s colored people populations. Until now. Here comes Jimmie Earl Perry. Recruited from Germany, where he was working in musical theater, Perry came to be director of educational theater and creative arts at the Center for HIV/AIDS Management at Stellenbosch. The center’s mission is provide graduate teaching, research and community services to address the HIV crisis in South Africa. In a post-apartheid Africa, “colored people,” Perry said, “were left out of the loop of funding and intervention. It seems as if the whole country buried its head when it came to them.” For a demographic that has illiteracy rates approaching 60 percent, Perry believes that music, dance and theater are perfect storytelling methods to raise awareness on HIV prevention and tolerance. Within three months on campus, Perry auditioned the colored students and founded a six-man troupe. A veteran of the musical “CATS” and “Pearlie,” he worked with an African American playwright and developed a 30-minute story that offers humor, facts and emotional messages on how HIV is contracted and how it can be prevented.
His program has been funded $1 million a year by a local tobacco company. The money helps with the play’s production, the creation of training manuals and DVDs. Funds also cover the expenses for the students to travel to neighboring nations, such as Namibia, to present the drama.
But in an area of Africa where the church and religiosity have strong cultural influence, Perry’s play took some criticism because it talks about using condoms. In the play, Lucky, a township playboy, becomes aware of the high rates of infection by listening to the radio. Lucky gets tested and discovers he is HIV positive. He is shunned by his best friend. It’s a bitter lesson, but Lucky then becomes a superhero of sorts by changing his ways and going around the township spreading personal messages of prevention and tolerance. Because he is popular, his influence helps to change people’s hearts, especially other young men. The play is presented in Afrikaans, a language native to South Africa, and in English. Perry is no stranger to HIV/AIDS. In 1972, his college roommate became infected. Ten years ago, his younger brother, an intravenous drug user, died of AIDS. His mother cared for the brother and Perry was called on to educate her. “Like most Americans, she was ignorant as hell,” he recalled. “She’d scrub down the toilet and wash up after my brother with scalding water.” So, now, once a year in South Africa, he reaches out beyond Stellenbosch University to educate the whole community: white, black and colored. Every World AIDS Day, he hosts a music concert that draws on the best singers in South Africa and abroad. Now, he’s brainstorming a presentation that will reach the Cape Town area farmers and vineyard owners, who are usually white and, in the recent past, did not think HIV was a problem. Now, so many workers, who are black, are sick with HIV that wine production is threatened. “The bottom line of our efforts,” said Perry “is to get people tested.” Right after the play, when patrons are most inspired, there is on-site testing. It’s one way to help battle the stigma that is such a large barrier to preventing HIV care. Perry grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Hamilton, N.J., so he does not try to ignore the churches’ messages. But he believes that an abstinence-only message is unrealistic. In South Africa, poverty drives young women into the arms of “sugar daddies,” older men who buy them food and pay for school fees in exchange for sex. There is also a prevailing myth that sex with a virgin will cure men of HIV, so forced intercourse with young girls is a too frequent problem that the country is working to address. “There are too many children and young ladies becoming pregnant and infected,” Perry said. “We have to talk about it.” Ervin Dyer is a writing living in Pittsburgh who covers African American health and spiritual issues.