Visiting the Past to Understand the Stigma of AIDS
BY BENEDICT CARTON
Why are South Africa historians studying an unfolding pandemic? Many historians of Africa might consider it unorthodox to study the present, but the devastating reach of AIDS, particularly in South Africa, is altering the compass of their disciplinary approach. With one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world, South Africa confronts a difficult future. It has become a sad truism that black youths comprise the most vulnerable group in the country. Chronic unemployment has prompted growing numbers of people to exchange sex for gifts and money. The implications of this pattern of intimacy are bluntly evident in nearly full township cemeteries. Rumors also swirl at funerals that wayward girls carry a fatal bodily pollution that supposedly spreads HIV. This accusation reflects a prominent belief of indigenous cosmologies—dread of misfortune that can be transferred through intimacy. Such accusations of promiscuity, in turn, evoke a venomous colonial stereotype that African sexuality is menacing. Working in tandem, these charges have spawned conspiracy theories that whites introduced AIDS to black women. Indeed, mistruths about the cause and course of HIV continue to challenge current efforts to slow the galloping pandemic.
HIV education programs boldly linking sex, illness, and death in the same axis of danger have intensified the climate of blame and shame. Well-meaning public health warnings—such as highway signs declaring “AIDS KILLS,” “AIDS: Don’t be a fool,” and “Choose life: practice abstinence”—have alienated South Africans. In the late 1990s, campaigns promoting behavior change seemed to accomplish the opposite, worsening the plight of some black teenagers who sought new lovers so as not to go down alone. Finally, safe-sex messengers have stirred community outrage. In 1998, an advocate of AIDS awareness named Gugu Dlamini who announced her HIV-positive status was beaten by a crowd and died of her injuries.
These high-profile cases of fatalism and denial have propelled more historians to explore the roots of popular hostility toward AIDS-prevention. Their understanding of settler rule has made them acutely aware that black South Africans had not forgotten the insidious allegations of white supremacists—from 19th century missionaries condemning the “libidinous heathen” to 20th century segregationists requiring the “promiscuous Bantus” to apply for passes to leave their homelands. Today, some health workers who harshly admonish every person to avoid unsafe intercourse unwittingly echo prior government warnings during syphilis panics in the 1930s. In the early 20th century district surgeons blamed sexual diseases on “reckless native disregard” for individual restraint, thus drawing attention away from the repercussions of compulsory migrant labor regimes, which drove rural African men into city employment and the world of prostitutes. Revisiting colonial-era understandings of safe sex campaigns can help today’s public health officials frame more sensitive safe sex messages that help curb HIV/AIDS.
During landmark AIDS conferences in South Africa in 2000 and 2001, historians joined medical professionals to clarify the complex legacies underlying the pandemic. Their intellectual collaboration raised a number of difficult questions, among them: How could historians tactfully investigate a scourge that stigmatizes gravely ill patients? If they could interview people with AIDS, could they broach the subject of risky sex? One event offered a model of empathetic inquiry, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which commenced its work shortly after the 1994 elections ushered the African National Congress into power. Despite controversial amnesties, the TRC managed a postmortem examination of human rights abuses committed between 1960 and the advent of democracy. While the TRC fostered restorative justice, revelations of twisted biology came to light. White scientists from Roodeplaat Laboratory testified that they experimented with drugs designed to limit black fertility. Government-sponsored contraception campaigns in the 1970s had already reduced African birth rates; such scientific experiments merely amplified rumors that apartheid henchmen aimed to extinguish the majority population. In a 2003 interview, a Zulu-speaking grandfather elaborated on these views. “Death was always the result of … ‘ripeness’ [advanced age],” he said. So why, he asked, “had death become a matter of ‘extinction?’” He answered by recounting memories of radio programs on the TRC, which described a sordid confessor, a white doctor (Wouter Basson) who wanted to poison black people. “Did Basson create AIDS?” The grandfather dismissed “this kind of gossip,” but his neighbors found it uncanny that the pandemic emerged after Mandela’s victory, only to strike “abantu, the [black] people, moving freely for the first time.”
Such confounding features of the AIDS pandemic have led some observers to remark that African resistance to behavior change reveals wanton ignorance of the ways in which HIV is contracted. Most historians do not accept this assertion. Rather, they record how people like the Zulu grandfather portray the advent and trajectory of AIDS; and then critically analyze this testimony using interpretive frameworks that gauge how local power dynamics as well as African suspicions of biomedical interventions profoundly shape a post-apartheid society facing the new millennium’s deadliest scourge. What some historians hope to discover is a way to understand the tragic consequences of AIDS by listening to a multiplicity of voices—in the past and present.
Benedict Carton (bcarton1@gmu.edu) is associate professor of history (http://history.gmu.edu/). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
