Flew to Johannesburg with South African Airlines. I was quite impressed with the service. I was picked up by Arup’s driver Moses who took me along a well-built highway that reminded me of Miami and briefly to the hotel to drop off my belongings, and then to the Arup office so that a local Arup-ian could lead me to the Witwatersrand University campus, where I was meeting sociology professor Devan Pillay. The campus (to me) appeared to be an intertwining intestine with very little clarity. I kept stopping to ask for directions, but it only seemed to get us to another stopping point. Eventually we found our way to professor Pillay’s office. I called him on his cell, and waited for him outside his office door. Aidan politely stayed by my side until the prof showed.

Devan then spoke to me about his interesting experience with South Africa. A former ANC activist, he had spent 20 months in prison. During his imprisonment he began studying spirituality, as it provided the only means of connecting to neighboring hardened criminals. Devan was also the first to question the relevance of HIV/Aids stats. Maybe I’m a dissident, he explained, but based on prior projections made while I was in government in the mid 90’s, half of the South African population should have been wiped out. He also pointed out that little was known of the upper-middle class teen neighborhoods in the north, where sexual activity was clearly going on without any sense of the implications to HIV/Aids stats. The association of HIV to sexual promiscuity among young blacks was an ongoing reference that some within the South African government and community are trying to dispel. I recalled seeing a billboard on a Jo-burg highway that read: “Aids likes to sleep around”.

The most interesting element of our meeting was that it was the first time anyone had raised the possibility that the methodologies being used to report on the scenario in South Africa were perhaps imperfect and needed modification. You can count on a dissident to raise questions and eyebrows.