Blog

The Two Faces of AIDS

By Melissa Meyer

Stories on HIV and AIDS in the newspapers this last month make it seem as though South Africa is facing two rather different epidemics.

The first makes ordinary people its victims: a teenager heading a household who is concerned about his younger brothers; an ailing boy who wants a bicycle with a bell; a young singer that supports 200 orphans with her income.

The second epidemic prefers the company of doctors, scientists and politicians. It is all very complicated. Discussions around the issue are laden with technical terms...

Death and a Funeral

By Melissa Meyer

The newly appointed Minister of Home Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s public grieving over the suicide of a young man who took his own life after the Department of Home Affairs refused to issue him with an ID, has made for truly moving copy this week.

But there is something disconcerting about this ministerial display of empathy. If only Dlamini-Zuma had been this moved by the deaths of the some 180 000 South Africans who perished from AIDS-related illnesses during her tenure as Health Minister, the South African epidemic may have taken a much less dramatic toll.

Circumcision Season

By Melissa Meyer

It is circumcision season again, and newspapers are telling stories of young Xhosa men who flock to the mountains where they subject themselves to mutilation and a certain risk of death.

The casualties have been dutifully tallied: towards the end of the June season, the Sunday Times reported 44 deaths, 270 maimed genitals and 13 penile amputations.

This has been a particularly gruesome initiation season and whilst there has been intelligent discussion in the media around issues of tradition and manhood, coupled with much-need exposure of illegally operating surgeons, the macabre stories of botched circumcisions seem to speak loudest.

All quiet on the Aids front…

By Matthew van Onselen

The combination of the quiet festive period and the focus on the ANC’s party conference at Polokwane has meant that there has been scant focus on the AIDS question and the issues that surround it. This is disappointing to report, since the drop in AIDS reports seems to have started directly after World AIDS Day, on December 1st, on which the AIDS benefit concert – the Nelson Mandela 46664 concert – was held.

An Old Truth

This week saw the reemergence of an old and frustrating truth: Mbeki ‘still AIDS dissident’. According to Mark Gevisser, the author of a new biography about Mbeki, the President still maintains that there is doubt over the link between HIV and AIDS, and sees the scientific conventions concerning AIDS couched in racist and colonial paradigms.