His desire to go to art school wasn’t so much a passion to study painting, sculpture or textiles but a determination to follow a path that many English pop stars had previously trod. While in Zanzibar he had read in the few Western magazines to reach the island that it was almost de rigueur for wannabe pop stars to attend art school first, and he had his heart set on Ealing Technical College & School of Art, as its famous alumni included Ronnie Wood, Roger Ruskin Spear and Pete Townshend. ‘He used to talk about that,’ his mother, Jer, remembers, ‘that so many people from art college had done music, pop music, and I didn’t take much notice of that at that time thinking, well, it’s one of those things, let us see.’4
But Freddie’s lack of educational success in India and Zanzibar meant he didn’t have the required qualifications to be accepted at Ealing. The only option available to him was to attend a foundation course at another educational establishment. Thirty-five minutes away by bus from Freddie’s Feltham home was Isleworth Polytechnic, where in September 1964, he began an arts foundation course. Here, he hoped to get the A-levels he needed to get into Ealing.
Although he was not yet where he wanted to be, Freddie Bulsara had arrived in London. And at just the right time. It was the era of The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, of Mods and Rockers clashing at seaside resorts, of Radio Caroline broadcasting from UK territorial waters, and Top of the Pops had just begun on BBC TV. For the first time, Freddie felt he belonged, and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity fate had dealt him.
Little did he know that also living in Feltham, just a few streets away from the Bulsara family, was a 17-year-old physics student. This teenager was a keen guitarist but unable to afford the much-coveted Fender Stratocaster that he so desired. The only solution was to build one himself. So, over the next 18 months with the help of his father, he built an electric guitar to precise specifications.
A few years later, Freddie would be introduced to this teenage guitar wizard during a random meeting in London. It would prove a pivotal moment in music. The life of Freddie Bulsara and the course of pop history would never be the same again, as the foundations of Queen were laid during that very first encounter.
5
At around the time that the Bulsara family was fleeing Zanzibar for their new lives in London, HIV was beginning its own migration across the world.
For decades, ever since the initial jump of the virus from a chimpanzee to a human sometime around 1908, it had remained, by and large, contained within the Republic of Congo. The country had been granted independence from Belgium in June 1960 and then dispensed with the name of the Belgian Congo. In fact, the year in which Belgium ceded interest and governorship in the region has been identified as a crucial and pivotal mid-century moment of divergence in the spread of HIV globally.
It was the very ambition to develop the west of Africa by the great Western powers that, ultimately, created this situation and provided the routes for HIV to spread beyond the ‘Dark Continent’. The desire to plunder the Congo region for its ivory, rubber and diamonds, and the subsequent railway network created to service such intensive industrialisation, produced the perfect environment for the virus to spread. Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville) rapidly became the best connected of all African cities and, as such, was the perfect conduit from which HIV could spread rapidly. By 1948 over a million people were passing through Kinshasa on the railways every year and this unwittingly enabled HIV-1 to be transmitted throughout the country. At some point between the end of the 1930s and the early 1950s, the virus had spread from its epicentre.
Signs of the virus reaching out were there for all to see, but no one would know what they were looking at, or what they were looking for. As early as the 1930s, Dr Leon Pales, a French military doctor, spent some time observing the soaring death rates among men constructing the Congo-Ocean railway. After conducting autopsies he found in 26 of the deceased workers a wasting condition he named Mayombe cachexia. This condition, named after the stretch of the jungle where the men had died, resulted in atrophied brains, swollen bowel lymph nodes and a number of other symptoms that would later become synonymous with HIV. But, during the 1930s, it was simply another unidentified tropical malais.
Therefore, HIV was able to spread extremely quickly across the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, as a result of the railway network and, to a lesser extent, the waterways. The changing sexual habits of the country’s population, in particular the rise in the sex trade, also contributed greatly in enabling the virus to become a pandemic. The social changes surrounding independence in 1960 also contributed; a study by Dr Nuno Faria of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology states that this year ‘saw the virus “break out” from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world’.1
As well as medicine and the creation of infrastructure, there remained the most effective method of the virus being transmitted: sex. The sex trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo flourished as a consequence of the building of roads and railways and the increase in industry within the region. The construction workers, miners and administrators who flooded into the region to seek employment were predominantly male (they outnumbered women in the city of Kinshasa by two to one) and they sought out the prostitutes who, taking on a large number of clients and practising unsafe sex, were all unknowingly complicit in helping the virus take hold in the city. From here the virus would spread to neighbouring regions via the very roads and railways these construction workers were building. A study in the journal Science suggests that, because of the medical programmes and this increased sex trade, HIV spread from Kinshasa rapidly as infected individuals travelled along their newly constructed railways and roads and even the old waterways. By 1937, HIV had spread four miles from Kinshasa to the nearby city of Brazzaville; by 1946 it had reached Bwamanda, 583 miles away; and by 1953 it had reached Kisangani, over 720 miles from Kinshasa. The authors of the study claim that, by 1960, the spread of the virus had become exponential in West Africa, although no one realised it.2 How many Africans died of the disease can only be speculated – perhaps, over 80 years, as many as 200m?
Then, sometime in the mid-1960s, HIV crossed the Atlantic and landed in Haiti. The catalyst for this transmission of HIV was yet another goodwill gesture, one that backfired spectacularly. Once independence was granted to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1960, most – if not all – of the Belgian officials made a hasty retreat from the region, leaving a critical vacuum at the heart of the newborn Republic.
To fill this void UNESCO shipped thousands of Haitian teachers and technocrats to Africa, specifically the Democratic Republic of Congo. A large proportion of these were based in Kinshasa. Ideal recruits to step into the shoes vacated by the Belgians, they were French-speaking, well-educated, black, and more than happy to desert Haiti and the brutal dictatorship of ‘Papa Doc’ François Duvalier. They spent weeks, months or years working in West Africa, in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Cameroon before returning to their homeland. It was when these professionals arrived back home, sometime around 1964, that the HIV-1 subtype reached Haiti.
This timescale corresponds precisely with the thousands of Haitians who went to Africa in 1960 to work and who returned during the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s once Zaire (the Democratic Republic of Congo had renamed itself Zaire in 1971) had completed the training of local national managers. En masse, Haitians began to leave central Africa after 1968, although many had already returned home. In 1998, J.F. Molez wrote a paper for the American Journal of Tropical medicine which states: ‘Medical investigations made in Haiti from 1985 to 1988 and clinical observations reported the deaths of retired Haitian managers who had lived and worked in Zaire and then returned to Haiti (and had lived there for a period of 10–15 years) that were suspected to be due to AIDS’. Given the length of time from infection of HIV to death from AIDS in the 1980s was seven to ten years, these dates align perfectly with the theory that Haiti was suffering an AIDS epidemic of its own around 1970 following the return of its workers from Zaire during the late-1960s.
But it wasn’t just sexual intercourse in Haiti – be it heterosexual or homosexual – that led to