A desperately ill black boy and his distressed white foster-mother have caught the imagination of South Africa and brought the nation to a sharpened awareness of the terrible threat posed by AIDS. Nkosi Johnson (11), who has AIDS, has been sent home to die in the home of his foster-mother in Melville, Johannesburg, after suffering a series of convulsions and slipping into a coma at the nearby Coronationville Hospital.
Since returning home last Friday, a stream of high-ranking people have visited the still unconscious Nkosi and offered words of solidarity to his foster-mother, Ms Gail Johnson.
Scores more people have conveyed their good wishes through written messages, some printed in block letters on cardboard and some sent electronically to a special e-mail address.
Nkosi sometimes squeezes his fostermother's hand as she talks to him, raising hopes that he may yet open his eyes and smile at her. Sometimes, however, there is no sign he knows she is there. He is fed through a nasal tube.
Ms Johnson, whose face has become as familiar to television viewers as Nkosi's, says simply: "He is hanging in there." Nkosi will turn 12 next month if he can ward off the ravages of the illness transferred to him by his biological mother, Nonthlanthla Nkosi, who died of an AIDS-related illness when he was two.
The stream of notables who have arrived to pay homage to Nkosi's struggle against the modern plague - and to Ms Johnson's love for the little boy with the beaming smile and high-pitched voice - include Ms Zanele Mbeki, wife of President Thabo Mbeki, the Rev Frank Chikane, director-general in the President's Office, and Judge Edwin Cameron, a High Court judge who has publicly acknowledged his HIV-positive status and his homosexuality.
In his short life, Nkosi has attracted public attention on three occasions:
In 1997, when Ms Johnson successfully fought for his right to attend the local government school in the face of opposition from some parents;
Last year when he pleaded for greater public sympathy for those with AIDS at the World AIDS conference in Durban and for a more vigorous campaign against the disease by the government (then still reluctant to acknowledge HIV - human immuno deficiency virus - as the cause of AIDS and to prescribe anti-retroviral drugs in state hospitals);
In the past week, when his fight against the terminal stages of his illness attracted attention throughout South Africa, from the presidential household to the remote kraals where the transistor radio is the main link with life in the big cities.
Nkosi's illness has made South Africans aware that AIDS is not confined to sexually active adults (particularly those who are sexually promiscuous or "deviant").
Dr Glenda Gray, a doctor at Baragwanath Hospital on the edge of Soweto, the sprawling black township which is part of the Johannesburg-centred megalopolis, calculates that at least 200 HIV-positive babies are born every day in South Africa.