Canada's former United Nations ambassador, Stephen Lewis, who serves as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, has been named by Time magazine in its April 18 issue as one of the world's 100 most influential people. No one who knows him doubts that he finds a certain irony in his selection.
Driven by his mission of advocacy for Africans suffering from or threatened by HIV, he travels constantly, urging the gatherings he addresses and the world leaders he meets to pay attention, to engage, to do more. Whether he is delivering the keynote to conferences large or small, as he did this week at a Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington, DC, or making a cameo appearance, as he did last week in New York, at the Clinton Foundation's announcement of a new project to extend HIV treatment to children and to rural areas of Africa, Lewis presses the point - not enough is being done to confront what he calls "the hallucinatory carnage of the pandemic on the continent of Africa."
That message isn't universally welcomed. Political leaders with purse-string power have been known to bristle at the implication that they are insufficiently involved in the fight against Aids. Development agencies question the "absorptive capacity" of African communities to manage more aid effectively.
That resistance seems to propel him to ever-greater efforts. Friends and associates observe that he never stops, sleeping only a few hours a day - if that, living on airplanes, reading voraciously, telephoning and emailing contacts from wherever he is.
But if he often despairs that the response to HIV has been inadequate, Lewis's commitment and charisma have inspired a community of admirers that extends from positions of power to isolated African villages. Quadruple Grammy winner Alicia Keys, who also made the Time list, last year headlined a concert to raise money for the Keep a Child Alive program, providing resources for families and children with HIV, and for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Lewis's effort to channel funds directly to what he calls the heroic grassroots in Africa. When Oprah Winfrey wanted to visit southern Africa to see the effects of Aids on children, she asked Lewis for advice and help.
"Stephen Lewis is the most effective advocate for a stronger response to HIV in the world," says Drew Altman, who heads the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading health research and policy organization. "He has a unique ability to move beyond the mind-numbing numbers and talk about the realities of HIV in ways people can understand."
One of the people who understands Lewis's campaign, because she lives in the center of the HIV storm, is Siphewe Hlope, co-director of the Aids support group Swazi's for Positive Living (Swapol). Working mostly in rural areas of Swaziland, which suffers the world's highest prevalence of HIV infection, Swapol maintains community gardens to feed people too ill to farm, sponsors school fees and homes for Aids orphans and trains homecare volunteers, infusing all its work with education and prevention messages.
Proudly flourishing the key to a new van that delivers Swapol's help and hope to the most remote homesteads and that was bought with support from the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Hlope told a visiting reporter last year that Lewis relates with a unique intensity to the people he meets."He takes time to really listen," she said, alluding to the paradox that a man who never has time to stop seems always to have time to talk to anyone who asks his assistance.
Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin, in the profile of Lewis he wrote for Time, said Canadians are proud of their former UN Ambassador, who has also been Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), a legislator and leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, a media personality with his own popular talk show, and a member of the Organization of African Unity's International Panel of Eminent Personalities investigating the Rwandan genocide. In 2003, Canada awarded Lewis its highest honor, a Companion of the Order of Canada. "He was a politician by birth, upbringing and profession," Martin wrote, "and a relentless campaigner for social justice, equality and human dignity by conviction...Until there is a future in which the vulnerable are protected and new life and new hope can blossom again, Stephen Lewis will never consider his work to be done."
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South Africa's current and former presidents, Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela, also made the Time magazine top 100 list, as did Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai.
