Some 14 million children have been orphaned in Sub-Saharan Africa and in six years time the number will be nearer 25 million. The Most Revd Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Primate of Southern Africa and Archbishop of Cape Town, gave this statistic during an interview with ACNS on Wednesday taking time out from round-table discussions on HIV/AIDS with the Royal African Society (RAS) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). The HIV/AIDS situation is a catastrophe, he continued, but said that hope was still strong and his current visit to London was an effort to consolidate international strategies to fight the disease.

“Statistics tend to dazzle us,” said the Archbishop. “But if you concentrate and think about just one aspect in turn and address each issue methodically, we can move forwards.” The issue of children he added however, was an overriding concern as any hope for the future required them to be cared for and brought up as normally as possible. “These children have been traumatised, had the natural cycle of their lives – from the beginning – overturned. The opportunities of family life and education have been denied to them,” he said.

Pleased to be at the talks, he stated that it meant that multi-national leadership against the disease could now be more strongly motivated. “We can revisit and develop the idea of international leadership in the fight against the disease with direct input from the British Government. The UK government in the coming year is in a unique position to help, and through partnership with prominent Africans, other governments, the Church and aid agencies we can all try to make a difference,” he said. The UK is soon to chair the European Union and the G8 summit. Archbishop Ndungane is attending the meeting at Marlborough House in Pall Mall at the invitation of Baroness Jay (RAS) and Lord Holmes (ODI). In June he is also to attend a consultation at St George’s House Windsor, also on HIV/AIDS strategies.

“In the battle against AIDS many have been good at advocacy against the disease, but often implementation has been slow. Through this meeting we can push advocacy to continually ensure that resources keep coming.” Through European intervention, he added, the disease’s root cause – poverty – could also be alleviated. “By addressing poverty, parents would be able to get the drugs to live longer, and the children would have fuller lives, more akin to normality. We can also extend our Church networks to target young people with education – teaching responsible sexual behaviour – and to reduce the danger of stigma, which stops people getting tested earlier.”

African leaders, he said, had now become strong promoters of anti-AIDS programmes and were leading by example. Many leaders in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa had recently taken AIDS tests, he highlighted, to make it more socially acceptable and visible. Internationally, the global fund for the fight against AIDS, for which the US Government had pledged US$15 billion, and the much more understanding attitude of pharmaceutical companies, could also mean that anti-AIDS strategies might no longer be stalled. “By this partnership, I hope there can be a renewed confrontation with the disease.”

He added however that it was vital the Church now leads, and particularly the Anglican Communion as a whole. “We are all one body. When part of the body suffers, we should all feel that pain,” he said. “The Anglican Communion is right to highlight the issues facing Africa – we have life and death situations facing us every day, whether AIDS, poverty, or war – and we need people to feel this across the whole Anglican World, to be one with us. In an ever-globalising world, the Anglican Communion Office keeps us all in touch and aware of each others needs. The strength of the Communion is that we are all bound together by the bonds of affection. By all feeling, and so by all acting, we can defeat this disease and all of Africa’s problems.”

The Archbishop was also keen to speak of the many good things happening in the Anglican Churches in Africa, especially at how the Church was expanding. “There is a deepening in spirituality as well as a growth in numbers, despite the adversity and conflict that many African Church members suffer. Church numbers are rising in Mozambique and there is now a missionary diocese in Angola. We should be joyful about these things and we need to demonstrate this to the Anglican Communion to show what Africa can offer to the global family.”

Archbishop Ndungane was specific however about the responsibility for the root cause of many of Africa’s problems. “Poverty is the underlying issue, and the responsibility for this is not just with one group, but with all of us,” he said. “In the spirit of globalisation, we need as a world to think of imaginative economic solutions, not just follow the current fashion that guides us, making the rich into the super-rich and the poor ever more desperately poor.” But he was keen to point out that this should be a worldwide initiative, on both local and international levels.

“Half the South African population still lives in poverty but now we have given the government an incredible mandate for change and we hope that they will flex their muscle to address these issues of poverty in a much more concentrated way…we have attained political liberation but we still need to attain economic liberation,” he said. “We hope that President Mbeki will rise to the challenge.”

Internationally, basic economic facts also had to change, he continued, to make Africa’s development more manageable. “Courageous thinking is needed. If a fraction of the money spent on arms every year were changed into humanitarian resources, what difference would it make,” he asked.

“Africa has a great deal to offer the world. We don’t believe in the split between the spiritual and the secular worlds. They are the same thing. This is true even in everyday meetings and conversations: ‘I am because of you’ is our understanding of the world. In the Church of Southern Africa we are a spiritual family, with no one outside. Our Church was born in conflict and difference, and in spite of this conflict and difference we are still together, and by this are continually enriched.”

The Most Revd Njongonkulu Winston Hugh Ndungane is primate of the oldest province in Africa. British Anglicans met for worship in Cape Town after 1806, with the first Bishop appointed in 1847. The twenty-three dioceses of the Province extend beyond the Republic of South Africa and include St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha, Mozambique (Lebombo and Niassa), the Republic of Namibia, the Kingdom of Lesotho, the Kingdom of Swaziland and Angola.

Article By Michael Craske