An online article published in the past year suggested that
with a healthful lifestyle and current anti-retroviral treatment (ARV), a
person with HIV can come close to living a full life span. This average person – where average means
possessing access to ARVs and the means for healthful food and lifestyle
choices - would only lose about thirteen years from his or her life
expectancy. This news seems to do more
work to diminish the specter of AIDS and bring its consideration to the level
of other serious, but manageable, health problems. Somehow, though, practical medical
assurances, countless NGOs devoted to HIV/AIDs issues, and constant reference
to it in the South African media has done little to diminish the stigma of
HIV/AIDS.
As many scholars have recognized (Susan Sontag and Paula
Triechler in particular), the symbolic capital of AIDS and its “epidemic of
significations” has bestowed the disease with metaphorical powers strong enough
to overpower any one article that may suggest its manageability. AIDS in South
Africa has always been considered a
heterosexual disease here – this was one of the key differences from a Western
conception of AIDS then-President Thabo Mbeki emphasized in several speeches he
gave over the course of 2000. However,
instead of highlighting its transmission through heterosexual sex, Mbeki
insisted it was a cluster of illnesses caused primarily by poverty. This obfuscation turned out to be
statistically incorrect, but rhetorically in line with his position on economic
and political development for the nation.
As Deborah Posel argues, “In [Mbeki’s] discourse on the epidemic, the
meaning of AIDS was inseparable from the meaning and fate of the country’s newfound
freedom. AIDS threatened to extinguish
the hope that had inspired the liberation struggle and that had animated the
birth of the fledgling democracy.”
But if that is a snapshot of the broad political sense of
the epidemic, then what do glimmers on the ground look like? Yesterday I accompanied R to Umlazi High School (a public school in the
township of Umlazi outside of Durban), one of many
schools in the area who she is approaching about participating in the YAP (Young and Positive) Program. Organized
by Create Africa South (the NGO I have been researching for my
dissertation), this program asks students to “yap” about HIV/AIDs so that
“learners themselves come up with a language that speaks to them when it comes
to pertinent issues.” In the future, YAP
groups at school may organize and produce grassroots media about other issues,
such as climate change, literacy, unemployment, etc. I’m interested in the idea of encouraging
students to create their own language, but I still wonder how much it can do to
remove the stigma that continues to attach itself to the disease.
Transmitting HIV remains a recurring theme on the “soapies”
produced here, with the most common story being that of a trusting (generally
female) partner who comes to discover her lover or husband has broken the commitment
of monogamy in their relationship when she tests positive. The devastation is a double one, then, and the management
of HIV (through ARVs and lifestyle changes) remains a constant reminder of a
reality that has failed to live up to the expectation and promise originally agreed to. It is perhaps these associations –
with their pain and heartbreak - that continue to feed the specter of AIDS
here.
This post has been a clumsy and ridiculously academic way of
honoring someone who dared to have faith in someone else, only to be let
down. With love and respect for you…
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