The AIDS denialism of South African President Thabo Mbeki's government is analysed through close examination of a representative monograph circulated throughout the ANC in 2002, referred to here as `The humanisation of the African'. Particular attention is drawn to the document's anti-colonial rhetoric and its indictment of AIDS activism as an instance of western neocolonial intervention. Although the anti-colonial stance of this document is problematic, the expressed resistance to pharmaceutical industries and racism needs to be regarded seriously. Fanon's essay `Medicine and colonialism' establishes useful parameters for historicising the impasse between scientists and Mbeki's government. Understanding Mbeki's AIDS denialism within the context of apartheid and colonialism is crucial in enabling us to read the tragic mismanagement of the epidemic beyond the most frequently employed explanations of South African racial paranoia, pathological despotism and/or scientific illiteracy. A closer examination of AIDS denialism has broader ramifications for a critical understanding of the relationship between medical intervention, postcolonial studies and human rights.
Anonymousmonograph circulated by the ANC government (March 2002).
2.
Frantz Fanon, `Medicine and colonialism', 1959.
3.
Although some would argue that AIDS denialism persists even now, the year 2003 is used as a tentative cut-off point as it was then that an affordable roll-out plan for anti-retrovirals (ARVs) was first devised by the ANC. Comprehensive plans were drafted and reworked in 2006 and 2007 that aim to halve the rate of infection and make ARV treatment available for 80 per cent of those infected with HIV. Although bureaucratic hurdles remain, this 160-page document has been commended by UNAIDS and the WHO as a progressive, sound treatment plan. Importantly, these treatment plans coincided with a dramatic decline in the costs of ARV treatment.
4.
In a letter to heads of state in 2000, reprinted in the Washington Post (19 April), Mbeki wrote that `a simple superimposition of Western experience on African reality would be absurd and illogical. Such proceeding would constitute a criminal betrayal of our responsibility to our own people .'
5.
For a very useful summary of specific AIDS policy debates, see A. Butler, `South Africa HIV/AIDS policy: 1994-2004: how can it be explained? ', African Affairs (Vol. 104, 2005), pp. 591-614.
6.
The leading AIDS dissidents involved in the Mbeki debate were at the University of California Berkeley and California State University: David Rasnick, Charles Geschekter and Peter Duesberg.
7.
Edwin Cameron , `AIDS denial and Holocaust denial - AIDS, justice and the courts in South Africa', South African Law Journal (Vol. 120, 2003), p. 537.
8.
Although Mbeki himself never officially endorsed this document, its rhetoric was so familiar that some speculated it was either written by himself or by an assigned ghost-writer. See H. Barrell, `Would the real AIDS dissident please declare himself', Mail and Guardian (19 April 2002).
9.
N. Scheper-Hughes , `Letter to the editor: reply to Helen Epstein ', New York Review of Books (20 November 2003 ).
10.
S. Powers, `The AIDS rebel', New Yorker (19 May 2003), p. 59.
11.
This document has been reproduced online at: <http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/ancdoc.htm>and<http://www.altheal.org/africa/hlongwane.htm> .
12.
Charlene Smithis a white South African woman who was raped by a young black man in her home, and subsequently wrote an article entitled `A society of rapists', published in the Weekly Mail and Guardian (7 April 2000) in which she concluded that ` AIDS is storming across the continent because of despicable attitudes and practices toward women and children - and rape leads the field.' This article was reprinted in the Washington Post and was heavily debated by Tony Leon and Thabo Mbeki in their series of open letters, reprinted in the Weekly Mail and Guardian in 2000.
13.
A more recent example of the tenor of attacks, reprinted in T. Leonard, is `Scientists rip South African AIDS policies', Washington Post (6 September 2006).
14.
`Address at the inaugural Z. K. Matthews lecture', 12 October 2001, University of Fort Hare, reprinted at <http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2001/tm1012.html>.
15.
S. Sontag, Illness and Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors ( New York , Picador, 1998). Sontag argues that AIDS has always been portrayed as a particularly dehumanising illness because it renders its victims `bestial' (p. 124), and she critiques the `classic script for plague' inscribed within AIDS discourse as yet another narrative of `infestationfromtheso-calledThirdWorld' (p. 137).
16.
P. Farmer, Aids and Accusation: Haiti and the geography of blame (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).
17.
M. Heywood, `The Achilles heel? The impact of HIV/AIDS on democracy in South Africa ', in S. S. Abdool Karim and Q. Abdool Karim (eds), HIV/AIDS in South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 381.
18.
S. Robins, `Long live Zachie, long live', Journal of South African Studies (Vol. 30, no. 3, 2004), p. 660.
19.
Cameron, op. cit. p. 532.
20.
V. Van der Vliet, `South Africa divided against AIDS', from Kyle D. Kaufman and David L. Lindauer (eds), AIDS and South Africa: the social expression of a pandemic (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 86.
21.
Van der Vliet, op. cit, p. 81.
22.
Mail and Guardian (28 July 2000), <http://ww2.aegis.com/news/dmg/2000/MG001001.html>.
23.
Mail and Guardian (25 August 2000), <http://ww2.aegis.com/news/dmg/2000/MG001001.html>.
24.
The Durban declaration was printed in the journal Nature (6 July 2000) and was entitled `African scientists join colleagues in affirming HIV's role in AIDS'. Mbeki's comments on it (17 July 2000) reprinted at: <http://ww2.aegis.com/news/dmg/2000/MG001001.html>.
25.
NevilleHoad analyses Mbeki's AIDS stance through a close reading of Mbeki's anti-racist critique in his speech on Sarah Baartman in `Thabo Mbkei's AIDS blues', Public Culture (Vol. 17, no.1), 2005.
D. Fassin, When Bodies Remember: experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press , 2007), p. 99.
28.
In 1999, plans were exposed by leading members of the apartheid security forces to spread AIDS among the black population. See `Apartheid forces spread AIDS', Weekly Mail and Guardian (12 November 1999).
29.
J. Oppong and E. Kalipeni, `Perceptions and misperceptions of AIDS in Africa', fromSusan Craddock, Jayati Ghosh, Joseph Oppong and Ezekiel Kalipeni (eds), HIV & AIDS: beyond epidemology (Oxford , Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 47, 49.
30.
W. Marshall , `AIDS and black bodies: towards critical humanist interpretations of the epidemic', from Emevwo Biakolo, Joyce Mathangwane, Dan Odallo (eds), The Discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa (Gaborone, University of Botswana, 2003), p. 305.
31.
S. Craddock , `AIDS and ethics: clinical trials, pharmaceuticals, global scientific practice ', from Craddock, et al, op. cit, pp. 4-5.
32.
S. Lewis and P. Donovan, `Time for a change?' Nature (Vol. 447, 2007), pp. 531-32, <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7144/full/447531a.html> .
33.
D. Fassin, op. cit, p. 10.
34.
See S.Y. Gool , `Mbeki in Mugabe's footsteps!', <http://www.zmag.org/content/ForeignPolicy/GoolSAfrica.cfm> .
35.
Qtd. by P. Treichler , How to have Theory in an Epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999), p. 120.
36.
See `The global HIV/AIDS market outlook to 2012', Business Insights (1 July 2007), <http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1536660&g=1> .
37.
`Buying anti-AIDS drugs benefits the rich', Business Day (20 March 2000).
38.
S. Powers, op. cit, p. 62.
39.
W. Marshall, op. cit, p. 309.
40.
Between 1932 and 1972, hundreds of poor African Americans in the South were deliberately allowed to degenerate from syphilis in order to make their bodies more readily available for scientific autopsies. In 1997, President Clinton apologised for the Tuskegee experiments, describing them as `deeply, profoundly, morally wrong' and `clearly racist'.
41.
S. Craddock, `AIDS and ethics', op. cit, p. 204.
42.
F. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1959), p. 101.
43.
M. Lyons, The Colonial Disease (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 5.
44.
`US: gag rule threatens global fight against HIV/AIDS', Human Rights Watch News (22 December 2006), <http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/11/16/usdom14627.htm> .
45.
Qtd. by H. Epstein , `God and the fight against AIDS', New York Review of Books (20 July 2000).
46.
Qtd. by J. Beard, `HIV/AIDS in Africa and the study of literature in American universities ', from Biakolo et al, op. cit, p. 213.
47.
Qtd. by `The humanisation of the African', from Fanon, `On national culture'.
48.
Fanon, `Medicine and colonialism', op. cit, p. 107.
49.
Ibid., p. 104.
50.
Ibid., p. 106.
51.
V. Chibber, `The good empire', Boston Review (February/March 2005).
52.
A. Sitze, `Denialism', South Atlantic Quarterly (Vol. 103, no. 4, 2004). Sitze argues that in 1994, the same year that apartheid was officially abolished in Pretoria, the US initiated a new `global apartheid' by imposing a `distinctly imperial economic policy' through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The final act of the GATT established the World Trade Organisation as well as a series of intellectual property patents for multinational pharmaceutical companies that would later become the basis for multiple lawsuits against South Africa in 1998 (p. 773). The term `global apartheid' has been used elsewhere by Patrick Bond, Titus Alexander and Mark Gevisser.
53.
T. Barnett, and A. Whiteside, AIDS in the 21st Century (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan , 2006), p. 7.
54.
See `Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot', Guardian (15 February 2007 ) and `Nigerian Muslims oppose polio vaccination', BBC News (27 June 2002).
55.
H. Schneider , `On the fault line: the politics of AIDS in contemporary South Africa', African Studies (Vol. 61, no. 1, 2002), p. 153.
56.
B. Okere, `The protection of human rights in Africa and the African charter on human and people's rights', Human Rights Quarterly (Vol. 6, no. 2, 1984), p. 143.
57.
E. Osaghae , `The state of Africa's second liberation', Interventions (Vol. 7, no. 1, 2005), p. 16.
58.
R. Jackson, Quasi-States (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 198.
59.
J. Comaroff , `Beyond bare life: AIDS, (bio)politics, and the neoliberal order', Public Culture (Vol. 19, no. 1, 2007), pp. 198-99.
