It is the 30th anniversary of Aids; a time to reflect on one of the worst human crises in South Africa's history.
Looking back, our inhumane response to the pandemic was due partly to SA being the only country in the world to face soaring HIV rates in the midst of a full-scale political transition. The ANC government-to-be was so busy negotiating to avert civil war, formulating a new constitution and transferring power that it took little notice of the catastrophic disease during the immediate post-apartheid era.
But the Aids epidemic was complicated by other issues. Having struck at the end of the world's most intense struggle against racism, a sense of disbelief prevailed towards the disease in the post-liberation years. As funeral hearses carried young and old to their graves in never-ending processions of grief, half a century of apartheid seemed to some to have given way to an equally intractable scourge at precisely the time when South Africans were expecting "a better life for all".
Sadly, the political elite's response to mounting pressure from Aids activists turned from polite distraction to a profound cultural hostility to acknowledging the sexually transmitted illness. Even then-president Nelson Mandela was famously persuaded to remove a beaded Aids pin from his lapel when one of his old prison friends asked him why he wanted to display the symbol of death.
Not surprisingly, given the attitude of the country's leadership, the stigma of the disease among ordinary people resulted in denial of such intensity that many of the dying were cruelly cast out of their homes and villages.
For journalists, the experience of terminal illness on an unprecedented scale defied articulation in any comprehensible form, other than anecdotal reporting. But the sex and death associated with Aids were such taboo subjects that most ordinary victims avoided talking to anyone, much less to the media, about the disease.
Prominence was given to the heroic story, often involving an articulate white person, that captured the experience of those living with the pain of dying. Journalist Sue Armstrong remembers Pietro, one of the earliest white men to admit he had Aids. "He ran a hospice in a staid, conservative suburban street, with a Sister Cecilia, which was a haven of tranquility and kindness for mainly destitute black people who'd been thrown out of their homes countrywide. I remember interviewing a skeleton of a man sitting in a plastic garden chair, who told me that the 'crazy' white hospice people thought he had some sort of bug, whereas he knew he'd been bewitched by his mother-in-law. The expression on his face indicated that he was just humouring people like Pietro and Sister Cecilia because they were the only ones who would look after him."
Although the country's public health system established policy and infrastructure, anomalies associated with official denial were apparent everywhere. Instead of treating Aids as a "normal" illness, separate hospital entrances were set up for victims of the virus, thus exacerbating its stigma. Fear that predominantly white employers would discriminate against infected workers discouraged vital initiatives to test and identify sufferers with a view to encouraging their use of condoms.
The focus on Aids through a lens not only of denial but racism formed part of the shift from the Mandela era of reconciliation to the Mbeki period, when widening social inequalities, including ill-health, began to be explained and confronted politically.
In a climate of growing hostility towards Western pharmaceutical companies and official defiance of the idea of African promiscuity, the media sought and found an evocatively "innocent" story. By describing the short lifespan of a black HIV-positive child, Nkosi Johnson, journalists were able to steer around the issue of sexual transmission by drawing attention to the universal pathos of childhood suffering. It was a narrative about the courage of a black child adopted by a white mother, which, in highlighting some of the cultural differences between Nkosi's biological and adoptive families, straddled South Africa's racial divide, its complex political transition, and the plight of Aids victims in an unsympathetic state.
Nkosi's smallness emphasized the unequal power relationship between the South African government and the sick individual. The child's foster mother made headlines when she fought for his right as an HIV-positive child to attend a regular school in a white neighbourhood - a timely human rights test of the new constitution.
The frail, shrunken boy's speech at the International Aids Conference in Durban in 2000 focused the world's attention on South Africa's controversial health policies. At one point in the globally-televised event, the boy who personified Aids victimhood and became a symbol of resistance, whispered: "I just wish that the government can start giving AZT to pregnant HIV mothers to help stop the virus being passed on to their babies."
Meanwhile, another story of an unlikely Aids hero, Judge Edwin Cameron, was becoming the epidemic's symbol of injustice. In the process of "outing" himself as an HIV-positive homosexual in homophobic South Africa, the well-respected jurist helped to relate the Aids story above and beyond the state's roars of denial. Although seemingly a million miles away from Nkosi's traditional background, Cameron linked his traumatic early life in an orphanage feeling "ashamed, soiled, disadvantaged" to the injustice of discrimination in general and the outrageous status of South African Aids victims in particular.
It was Judge Edwin Cameron who gave the keynote address at the same International Aids Conference at which the frail voice of a dying child shamed South Africa. Speaking loudly of "the iniquity of drug availability and access in Africa", the tall lawyer decried a world that enabled him to purchase health and vigour for US$400 a month when millions of others were dying of identical symptoms.
The momentous conference was addressed by an unrepentant Thabo Mbeki - who pointedly avoided meeting Nkosi, while his health minister stunned the gathering by suggesting that garlic and beetroot were better than ARVs. To the delegates'relief, the event was concluded unexpectedly by revered former president Nelson Mandela with words of support to Aids victims and activists.
In subsequent years, Mandela campaigned tirelessly for Aids treatment. His revelation in the garden of his Johannesburg home early in 2005 that his only son had died of the disease was another of the powerful personal stories told as an expression of voices lost in the time of South Africa's tragic denial.
While the media confronted the truth about Aids relentlessly, as did medics and activists, our former government's careless response will beckon us from the pages of history forever; a testament to human suffering inflicted by blind leadership.