Out of Egypt – our fellow African country up north – comes the disturbing news report that four HIV positive men and one of their friends had been convicted and sentenced to three years in jail for being HIV positive and thus assumed to be homosexual. The defense lawyer for the five, Adel Ramadan, said [...]
Posts under ‘HIV/AIDS’
A must read book about HIV and stigma
Having just finished reading Jonny Steinberg’s latest book on HIV/AIDS, called The Three Letter Plague, many feelings and thoughts swirl through my head. It is a shocking, sad, depressing, yet uplifting and insightful book – all at the same time – and should be required reading for opinion formers in South Africa.
Steinberg spent much time [...]
Denialism = dissidence = Mbeki = death
On Thought Leader Ronald Suresh Roberts again tries to argue that President Thabo Mbeki is neither an Aids denialist, nor an Aids dissident, but merely a poor misunderstood and maligned man with a deep passion for the lives of the vulnerable and the poor living with HIV. This, after Mark Gevisser said Mbeki was [...]
Gevisser: Mbeki admits he is still an AIDS dissident
Ever wondered why President Thabo Mbeki has failed to fire Health Minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang despite her disastrous tenure? Apparently the new biography of President Thabo Mbeki by Mark Gevisser provides some answers. The London Guirdian reports this morning that the President had admitted to Gevisser that he was still an AIDS dissident. The paper [...]
After the party…. (I)
I am busy reading Andrew Feinstein’s book After the Party and it seems so far to be quite an honest book and quite scathing of President Thabo Mbeki and the ANC that he now leads. Of course, I immediately turned to the chapter on HIV/AIDS to see if there was anything new there.
Feinstein includes the [...]
Mbeki’s AIDS denialism explained
The latest London Review of Books contains a fascinating article in which Hillary Mantell reviews two important books dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. Discussing especially the work of Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South Africa, Mantell tries to make sense of the HIV denialism [...]
Finally he fires someone….
I have missed the drama of the firing of the Deputy Health Minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, because of a trip to Senegal, where (I imagine) the services provided at Frere Hospital (even before they shipped in more equipment to please the Minister) would have been regarded as quite good or even excellent.
It is therefore tempting to [...]
On "facts", bikini’s and postmodernism
For a person with such a strong affinity for “objective reality”, President Thabo Mbeki seems to have a rather tenuous grip on reality (”objective” or otherwise) himself. It also does not always appear that he is in touch with his own humanity – although he always (rightly) talks about the inherent dignity of all humans [...]
Thabo Mbeki = George W. Bush?
In idle moments I have often wondered whether – despite the obvious ideological differences – there are not perhaps remarkable similarities between President’s George W. Bush and Thabo Mbeki. Both have a messianic streak and both seem to have a tendency to ignore difficulties that do not fit into their ideologically tinted world view. Both [...]
Aids denialism (II)
A reader points out that my post two days ago suggests that Mbeki did not deny that HIV causes AIDS, but only that there are other issues that affect immune deficiency. I would contend that this is mere semantics.
Most South Africans would not make this distinction and would believe Mbeki to have denied the link [...]
