About - banana history

My name is Kevin, well it’s Kevin to most people anyway - but in Zululand, South Africa I am known as 'Banana Man' by thousands of children.

Here’s why……………….

In February 2005 I saw the terrible plight of AIDS orphans in South Africa on a TV documentary.

I watched in horror as a young boy witness his father die of AIDS in front his of eyes. He had to walk miles back to his home, a filthy mud hut with no running water, gas or electricity. Distraught and starving, he soon broke down in tears - so did I. His mother had already died of AIDS a year early and his brave young sister tried to comfort him in vain.

The documentary continued, and so did the scenes of despair and inhumanity, which we were told were being played out a thousand times a day across Africa.

The AIDS pandemic had orphaned over 2.5 million children in South Africa alone – and I simply could not accept that no one was helping these children.

I'm not religious - and I don't go to church - yet I found myself angrily arguing with God asking why he allowed this horror to happen - a voice in my head said - Why do you?

I knew from that instant I would not.

Six days later I was standing in rural Nkandla, Zululand, feeding the children I had watched suffering on TV just days earlier.

The hardest part of the journey was getting over the inhibition to just get up and go. I lived in a small terraced house in a poor area of Merseyside at the time, and my life saving totalled little more than £1500. Worst still, I had to leave my wife, my children, my family, my friends and my work – and I could not explain to anyone why.

As I packed my case full of children’s clothes, toys and medicine, my only thoughts were to find the young Zulu boy called Sne and help him. But as I left home I didn’t have a clue where I was going – and I had had no time to get inoculated or to take malaria tablets.

It took three planes, two days travel, and a grueling six hour drive across rough terrain before I arrived in Zululand. The TV documentary had named a Catholic nun, Sister Hedwig, who lived in a small town called Nkandla, helping the sick and caring for the thousands of children left behind, and I had decided my best chance of finding Sne was to make contact with the nuns.

The journey into Zululand was a dangerous quest in itself. Trying to get a taxi from Durban to Zululand is a bit like landing at Edinburgh airport and asking a taxi driver can he help you find a convent in London without having anything more than a nuns name to go on.

What I can say of this incredible taxi journey was that the taxi driver, David, who agreed to take me on a one way journey into Nkandla (although he didn’t know the way!), would stay with me over the next two days, at no cost, acting as driver, interpreter, security guard, historian and “father and friend” to the hundreds of children we met.

After driving for many hours along the beautiful South African coast, the roads slowly turned to tracks, and as the tarmac ended, so did the running water, the electricity, proper housing, access to food and basic healthcare.

As we drove, David kept stopping at road side stalls so that I could buy fruit from the improvised trades, as he knew they desperately needed the money. The fruit only cost pennies – but because I could see the people needed the money so badly, I bought bag after bag. In the end the taxi was full of hundreds of bananas, so we started to give them out to hungry children as we past them on the roadside.

We finally arrived in Nkandla and somehow found the convent in the middle of the night – no small feat given its remoteness. It’s fair to say the sisters were a little surprised to see us when we arrived at this time of night, but I gave them my suitcase of clothes and the little money I had brought and they kindly took us in for the night.

I explained that I had seen the children’s plight on TV a few days earlier and had felt compelled to help in any way I could. We talked for a while and it wasn’t long before I realised that this small convent of ten incredible nuns, was the first, last, and only hope for the 140,000 forgotten Zulu’s who lived there.

The nuns estimated that 100,000 Zulu’s in the area were dying of AIDS, and said many were dying of TB too. Almost all the people lived in abject poverty, in mud huts without water or electricity, and over 95% of the population was unemployed.

Of the 100,000 Zulu’s with aids in Nkandla – the government was only providing anti-aids drugs for just TEN people. And these were only on a trial basis!

The nuns did all they could to help people, comforting the dying and supporting the living - giving small food parcels to hungry young orphans whenever they could. But they knew they were losing the battle to save this doomed Zulu community.

The next day the nuns said they would help me try and trace some of the orphans I had seen on television only a few days earlier, including Sne.

We traveled into the valleys and before long we found the Lindiwe family, who I had seen on TV. Lindiwe was a poor mother dying of AIDS, desperately trying feed thirteen children, many of which she had taken in after their parents had died of AIDS.

As we traveled, I bought hundreds more bananas and gave them to hungry children we past. The local Zulu’s, and the nuns, started calling me Banana Man, a name which would later stick.

I found Sne, a boy who’s plight had broken my heart only days earlier, and the nuns look after him and him sister to this day.

I had only come to help this one child, but found thousands more children who needed help.

All too soon I had to return home, vowing I would do all I could to help these forgotten people on my return.

I arrived home with the maddening knowledge that thousands of children were orphaned, starving, frighten and alone – yet it would only cost 4p a day to feed them with fruit.

My small terraced house with big mortgage was already up for sale when I had left home for Africa; and on my return it quickly sold and my family rented a house with a garden, instead of buying again.

With some of the sale proceeds I was able to return to Zululand in June 2005 and set up Food to School programmes with the nuns – which provided nearly quarter of a million school meals of fresh fruit to hungry children in its first year.

To sustain the project I took on an additional part-time job for over 16 months to pay for the fruit between 2005 to 2007.