Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
By Tony Leon
Tony Leon, as head of the Democratic Alliance, leads the opposition in the South African Parliament.
Los Angeles Times
Former South African President Nelson Mandela has again found the courage his nation needs in a desperate time. Mandela announced Thursday that his only surviving son had died of AIDS. In doing so, he helped South Africans begin to break through the heavy stigma that surrounds the disease.
More than 5 million South Africans are infected or dying from a virus whose name we speak only in fearful whispers. We watch as friends and colleagues quietly disappear, only to reappear several months later in newspaper death notices. "Died after a long illness," the obituaries usually say. Or: "The cause of death was unknown." Of course, we know all too well. Yet the grim reality of HIV/AIDS is still too great for many of us face up to. Instead, it remains shrouded in mystery and shame.
If there is any country in Africa capable of winning the war against HIV, it is South Africa. We have the resources and the medical expertise. Yet we suffer from a lack of leadership — particularly political leadership.
The apartheid government did virtually nothing to stop the pandemic in its early stages. The new democratic government was preoccupied with the task of uniting a deeply divided nation. AIDS was an afterthought.
Indeed, after stepping down from the presidency, Mandela admitted that he had not done enough to fight HIV/AIDS while in office. He had been afraid of the political cost of admitting that the country was facing a massive humanitarian crisis. "AIDS," Mandela says now, "is no longer a disease. It is a human rights issue." Unfortunately, his successor, President Thabo Mbeki, believes otherwise.
For Mbeki, HIV/AIDS is a racial issue. He is deeply offended by the idea — accepted by all but a few die-hard conspiracy theorists — that HIV has spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa primarily through heterosexual intercourse. Such conclusions, the president argues, define Africans as "barbaric savages" and are therefore racist. Mbeki even claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS. For many years, Mbeki and his government refused to distribute life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs, believing that they were "poisons" cooked up by Western pharmaceutical companies.
In 2003, Mbeki said, "Personally, I don't know anyone who has died of AIDS." That is a startling claim since it is widely speculated that his former spokesman, Parks Mankahlana, died of AIDS in 2001, as did one of his political confidants, Peter Mokaba, in 2002.
As a result of this denial, South Africa lags far behind African nations such as Uganda, which has succeeded in dramatically reducing the HIV infection rate. There, political leaders broke religious and cultural taboos and spoke openly about the causes of and treatment for AIDS.
The terrible irony is that by treating HIV/AIDS as a racial issue, Mbeki helped sustain the cloud of confusion that hovers over the pandemic. It is well past time for South Africa to choose whether it is worth sacrificing our nation's future for the sake of the racial obsessions of decades past.
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