Inter Press Service - September 5, 2001
Farah Khan

Two young women sit in the sun, braiding each other's hair. They are not much younger than Gugu Dlamini was when she was beaten unconsciousness by four people in a mob, angry at her decision to reveal her HIV status in a Durban township.

The park has been renamed the "Gugu Dlamini" park, after the young woman who died three days after her attack in Dec 1998. On World AIDS day that year, the young AIDS activist had decided to come out and reveal her status. She was dead less than a fortnight later.

The park is now a symbol of a city and a country, trying to come to terms with the deep stigmas still attached to being HIV- positive in South Africa today.

"There are lots of Gugu's beaten up everyday for saying who they are and what their health status is," said Mercy Makgalemele, also a woman living with HIV and a mentor to the young Dlamini.

This Sunday (Sep 9), Makgalemele celebrates her 31st birthday. She is a young woman grown tired with a 12-year-long battle not only to triumph over the virus doing battle in her body, but against a society that still discriminates, even though one in 10 South Africans is infected.

Makgalemele told her story of being beaten by her husband when she notified him, of being fired from her job and ostracised from her community.

"I'm tired of a world that is continuously debating," she told a panel on the intersection between AIDS, race, stigma and discrimination.

The solutions had been debated and discerned; it was time to educate communities. "At the community level, we face challenges that are not here," the feisty young women said, waving her hand around the cavernous hall filled with HIV/AIDS activists from around the world. The "Gugus" of the world still faced discrimination in the workplace and in accessing education, said Makgalemele.

"No woman will be empowered, unless she is economically empowered," she said calling on the private sector to employ people who were HIV-positive.

In a conference packed with rights issues and a raft of demands from people on the fringes of societies across the globe, UN AIDS executive director Peter Piot had been asked in Durban "What are you doing here, at a racism conference?"

Clearly aghast at the question, Piot said, "The question illustrates there is still not the understanding that the driving force behind this epidemic are discrimination, poverty, rejection and stigma. We need to do a better job in spreading the message."

"Nothing better illustrates the destructive force of intolerance and discrimination than HIV/AIDS," he said.

His colleague Peter Eggleton said the links were manifest since the first manifestations of HIV/AIDS had always been very closely linked to race. Its genesis, still mythical, is still held to be from "green monkeys" in Africa.

"HIV/AIDS put into circulation images and ideas that played into racist stereotypes which exploit the fault-lines of an already unequal world," said Eggleton. "The stigmas do not arise out of the blue," avers an HIV/AIDS paper that makes the links. "They usually build upon and reinforce pre-existing fears and prejudices; about poverty, about gender, about sex and sexuality, and about race."

In a world where 40 million people were infected throughout the Nineties and an astounding 15 million people died, linked discrimination and intolerance would grow, said Piot unless a set of strategies kicked.

The most vital, he said, was leadership by political and moral authorities in society. "It doesn't cost a penny but its worth all the money spent today on AIDS. Five years ago there was a deadly silence and that has changed, particularly on this continent," said Piot.

Other vital strategies, said Piot, was that leadership of the battle against AIDS had to be vested in people who lived with the HI-virus; protective legislation was necessary as was education and the documentation of all abuses.

In Brazil, he said, a successful movement led by people living with AIDS was behind government advances in the treatment of AIDS. "HIV stigma comes through powerful combination of shame and fear. Our aim should be to replace shame with solidarity and fear with hope," said Piot.

With a carefully considered strategy, it was possible to end the lingering perception of the pandemic as that which afflicted "another".

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson was hopeful the final conference declaration and platform for action would explicitly pronounce on the view that all human rights should be extended to people living with HIV/AIDS.
010905
IP010901

Copyright ©1990, 2000. ÆGIS. All materials appearing on ÆGIS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of ÆGIS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. Feedback/Contact Us.