Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - March 24, 2006
Tom Eaton: VIVA GAZANIA!

The report of that guest appearance, dutifully stored away in the African National Congress's website archives, doesn't go into details. For instance, we aren't told whether she was lowered into the venue in a huge fibreglass replica of the Venus de Milo's clam shell, or simply jumped out of a large condom-shaped cake. But it does record the sobering statistics she quoted in defence of Ngema's play. "By the year 2005," the report quoted her as saying, "more than 300 people will die annually from the [HI] virus."

No doubt those 300 deaths were a typo, three zeroes being nationalised and redistributed into ether by some bored party clerk. Indeed, Sarafina 2 has killed well over 500 people a year alone, mostly through suicide induced by the jiggling of buttocks and the curiously moronic finger spasms used by cheerleaders to denote joy. But it does beg the question as to why, in 10 years, that document has never been corrected. And two weeks into the trial of Jacob Zuma, one has to wonder whether 300 seemed a more believable figure to the typist than 300 000.

In these times it is best to stick to facts: one doesn't want to be accused of being a part of a media conspiracy against Umsholozi, or, indeed, have one's boyish good looks Xeroxed and set alight to whoops of "Burn the bastard!" The facts will suffice, and in this case, they are clear. Firstly, Zuma has a great many fans. They have plenty of rhythm, and very understanding employers. Secondly, Advocate Kemp Kemp Kemp "Kempie" Kemp (the Kemp) uses a gorse bush to brush his hair. But thirdly, and most pertinently, Jacob Zuma had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman.

At first glance this would seem madness, until one realises that Zuma is simply practising what his government has implicitly preached for the past 12 years: what you don't believe exists can't hurt you.

The precise number of people killed by the apartheid regime is vague, presumably kept so in the interests of reconciliation. Max Coleman, a former member of the Human Rights Commission, is widely quoted on the Internet as counting 21 000 deaths directly attributable to political violence between 1948 and 1994. But surely this is too small.

Perhaps one should quadruple it to include the migrant labourers killed in alcohol-fuelled fights, the women beaten to death by dehumanised men, the children lost to disease and malnutrition, or simply lost. That's 84 000. And finally, to allow for those who were buried too deep or tossed overboard too far out to register in the figures, let's round it up to 100 000 for the sake of argument. For that argument involves the Aids non-debate, still maintaining its decade-old pin-drop silence.

The journal Science (whose name alone makes it anathema to the state's response to the pandemic) reckons that Uganda cut infections by 60% in the 1990s. It did this by -- shock and hissing -- telling people that Aids can kill you, and that you get it not via duplicitous witches disguised as frogs, nor from spiteful chameleons giving you the beady, but by having unprotected sex.

South Africa's gross domestic product is 12 times the size of Uganda's. Our literacy rate is 16% higher than theirs. We have more than 350 radio stations to their 40. It is, therefore, not wildly romantic to imagine that things could have been managed better.

So let's pretend for a moment that the past two administrations hadn't sat on their liberated arses for 12 years and denied, obscured, obstructed and dallied. Let's pretend they'd called Grand Vizier Rath's hateful bluff, injected him full of HIV and told him, "Heal thyself". Let's be really out there and imagine that they'd managed a faint facsimile of Uganda's effort. Let's be generous, and concede that if they'd managed a sleepwalking banana republic response that would have been dismissed with contempt in any other functioning society, they might have lowered the death toll by 10% in those 12 years.

But they didn't, and those 200 000 people are now dead because of a failure to act.

This is not the same as blaming all Aids deaths on the government. A general condemnation is unfair and dangerous, since it removes responsibility from the men who continue to spread the disease by invoking culture as a pretext for rape. But those 200 000 corpses are different. Uganda proves that the only reason they are dead and not alive is because of negligence. In law that's called culpable homicide.

In a single decade our government has killed twice as many people as their former enemies managed in five. Apartheid was officially declared a crime against humanity. When will the new indictments begin?

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