In ten years? time the number of orphans from Aids will reach 42 million, the UN conference in Barcelona heard this week. A veteran commentator recently visited southern Africa, where he met families struck by the virus. He met, too, the remarkable women who care for them. These women, who are also infected, are transforming Africa in a very different way.

YOU can see why it is called God?s Window. The heart-stopping view from this high ridge of South African rock sweeps north and south, across ranges of mountains and down a deep valley to the endless plains beyond. ?More lovely than the singing of it?, is how the writer Alan Paton described the landscape. But take a few steps downhill from this divine spot to a huddle of thatched huts tucked under the ridge and you are in hell. The huts are the home of the Moseamedi family. Once they were seven; now only two survive: Manuel, aged 14, and his brother Malatji, 11. Everyone else has died or disappeared.

Manuel sits out of the sun on a low mud wall, kicking his bare heels in the dust and tugging at his dirty, torn shirt. His eyes are on the ground, his face contorted with pain, his speech barely audible. When Manuel was four his father went off to Johannesburg to look for work. ?No, he never sent us anything?, he says, ?not even money for school fees or clothes, but I would like to see him again?.

As soon as he begins to talk about his mother Manuel?s face crumples and he dissolves in tears. He tries to wipe them away with a grubby hand but he doesn?t want to talk any more. His aunt tells me that his mother fell sick in March. She had constant diarrhoea and lay in the hut until she died in May. Soon after, his grandmother also fell ill and has gone to a hospital some 40 miles away. In the hut where Manuel?s mother died there is a low wooden bed and blankets, a pile of worn-out clothes, a sack of corn meal and an oil lamp. There is nothing else. His aunt lives close by and comes to wash, cook and collect firewood for the boys, but she also has children of her own to look after.

The full horror of Aids is only now beginning to strike Africa. Infection rates may be levelling off but the dying has only just begun. In Africa the virus has already killed 13.7 million people ? twice the population of London. About 28 million ? half the population of Britain ? are infected and will die by 2020. In Botswana the infection rate is nearly 40 per cent, in Zimbabwe it is about 33 per cent and in the rest of southern Africa it is more than 20 per cent and rising.

The United Nations agency UNAIDS warns that countries such as China and Indonesia and states of the former Soviet Union could soon face a similar plague. Even when the level of infections start to fall the death rate from Aids will continue to rise for about 10 years as those infected die. UNAIDS estimates that while 20 million people have died from Aids in the past 20 years, more than three times that number will die in the next 20. This will leave millions of orphans like Manuel. Already there are 13 million Manuels in Africa. In some places one child in ten will be an orphan.

?Condomising? ? a new African word ? may help to prevent the spread of the HIV virus in richer urban areas but in the poorer countryside condoms have not even begun to be part of the culture. Aids workers in Africa have not yet found the trigger to persuade people to change their behaviour to curb the virus?s remorseless spread. Some people even believe that it is condoms that spread Aids. Most anti-Aids campaigns are based on the concept that talking openly about Aids and sex is the best way of getting the message across. Slogans urging people to abstain, delay the age of first sex, stick to one partner, are pumped out of television, radio, churches, schools, billboards and office posters. Children younger than ten sing anti-Aids songs. The level of awareness is high, but behaviour is not changing quickly or widely enough.

And the constant bombardment can be counter-productive. In Botswana Aids is called the ?radio disease?. Many people who have changed their behaviour admit that it was a death in the family or among friends that made them wake up to the danger. When most fall sick they still head off to the traditional healer for a cure or to a witch doctor to discover who has bewitched them and made them sick. President Thabo Mbeki?s public questioning of orthodox science on Aids has left a huge leadership gap in South Africa and the region, undermining the basic message that unprotected sex can spread the virus and that the virus leads to Aids.

This week the UNAIDS conference in Barcelona heard that a vaccine for HIV could be ready within five years. But will it be affordable and available for the millions of people who are most vulnerable? Even if it is, a vaccination will be no help to the generation that is already infected and cannot afford antiretroviral drugs. Populations are normally shaped like a stepped pyramid with the young at the broad bottom and the tapering top representing the old, but Africa?s pyramid is being dramatically hollowed out at the middle and bottom as the young and middle-aged die off and fewer children are born. The mature productive middle generation is getting thin; without them society is unable to support itself.

A pattern is setting in among poor fam-ilies. In the short term a family breadwinner or homemaker dies and the children become poorer, some starving to death. This year drought has struck southern Africa, making survival even more precarious. In the medium term the children, especially the girls, drop out of school. That means they will be poor, more vulnerable to relationships that expose them to Aids or marriages in which they are powerless. In the long term, such women may contract Aids themselves and die young or may give birth to HIV-positive children. Even if they and their children survive, they will not have the skills to make a living or provide money for the education of their own children. Research identifies the education levels of mothers as the crucial factor in infant mortality rates. The recent gains in helping the children of the poor survive their first five years may be lost.

It is hard to predict where this will lead, but one scenario is that millions of children will grow up unparented, never knowing a mother?s loving cuddle or a father?s guiding hand. Such a generation could become semi-feral, deprived of socialisation or education, lacking the fundamental human attachments of family, owning nothing but the rags they stand in and unable to keep themselves alive except by theft and violence. In Africa?s fragile states such a generation could easily become a pool of ruthless warriors for power-hungry politicians. Whole regions of Africa could be destabilised.

And the economic impact on the continent will be severe. The gap between Africa and the rest of the world is already widening alarmingly; as it strikes down skilled people, Aids will make it worse. Governments will be forced to spend more on health while education will come under severe pressure as teachers? numbers decline. Funerals are costly. In Africa the bereaved family traditionally kills a cow to feed all the relatives and neighbours at the wake and this can cost half a year?s income. Some Churches in Africa are trying to persuade families to cut down on funeral expenditure and make sure that powerful but distant relatives do not take the property of widows and orphans.

Orphans are the most vulnerable in this bleak new social landscape. In the villages and poor urban areas of Africa there are dozens of households like the Moseamedis, now headed by a 14-year-old or an even younger child. Africa?s traditional extended family support system is breaking down. In southern Africa the family was already under pressure from the apartheid system, which lured men to the big cities for work but did not allow them to take their families with them. Many set up second families in the cities and abandoned their rural families or returned once a year to bring money. In the late 1980s and 1990s they started to bring back the HIV virus too, spreading it deep into poor rural communities. They fell sick and died, but not before Aids became rampant.

Already over-stretched, families are beginning to turn away the children of their dead brothers, sisters and cousins. They are left to fend for themselves. Words that a few years ago were rarely heard in Africa ? ?abandoned children?, ?child abuse?, ?depression? and even ?child suicide? ? are now heard daily. Abandoned children are abused and exploited by relatives and guardians. Orphaned boys, adopted by uncles or guardians, are kept out of school and made to work for nothing on farms. Young girls are sexually abused and raped.

Afflicted by a catastrophe such as Aids, which threatens the very foundations of society, some will exploit the suffering and make it worse. But others find a deep resource of determination and energy to fight back. As I travelled around the region visiting child-headed households and orphans I noticed that the most dynamic and effective organisations at local and national level were those headed by women who were themselves HIV-positive. Some had been middle or low-ranking professionals and mothers who must have been infected by their husbands. The trauma somehow liberated and galvanised them. They have become the main activists in the battle against Aids.

Siphiwe Hlophe from Swaziland had just turned 40 in 1999 when she won a scholarship to study agricultural economics in Britain. She has four children: the eldest is 22, the youngest 11. One of the conditions of her scholarship was an Aids test; she took it as a matter of routine, not thinking there was a problem. When she turned out to be HIV-positive, her husband left her, she lost her scholarship and thought she was going to die. But she came through the shock and decided to do something for people living with Aids.

Siphiwe formed a group called SWAPOL: Swaziland for Positive Living. It now has 150 members, mostly HIV-positive women who organise meetings to discuss Aids and spread the message to children. They counsel others who discover that they are HIV-positive, visit terminally ill people in their homes, make sure they get medical care, educate people about better diets ? a crucial factor for people living with Aids ? and battle with headmasters who turn away Aids orphans. They also work to make sure grandmothers and orphans get government allowances. This astoundingly difficult but inspiring work is accompanied by a great deal of laughter and song. They seem to be saying: ?I am going to die of an incurable disease but before I do I am going to change the world.?

In fighting the battle against Aids and trying to prevent others becoming infected, these women are actually fighting a bigger war, a war against the codes of modern African societies that leave people, especially women, powerless and vulnerable. Whatever Aids does to African society, these women who have lost their fear will also change it for ever.

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