Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 15, 2001
Gillian Anstey

This is the first time in South Africa that a married woman has claimed damages after her husband wilfully infected her with the disease.

Last week, Johannesburg High Court Acting-Judge Naren Pandya awarded the Durban housewife R958 689 for "pain and suffering, and the mental anguish and the progressive loss of amenities of life" as well as medical expenses.

In his judgment, Pandya accepted her testimony that "she did not have sex with another man", during the time she contracted the disease.

The judge said "the dentist refused to attend to her. She does not feel like socialising for fear of being shunned. Now she only goes to the church where people greet her but do not want to sit next to her."

The woman, who has not been named because she has a 13-year old child, told the Sunday Times her story this week.

She met her second husband, a businessman, while on holiday in Mozambique in December 1995. He was "good-hearted", she said, and two months later she and her child moved to Mozambique to live with him. In March 1998 they married.

He was sick from the start but she didn't suspect anything. "I knew about Aids but I didn't know what it looked like," she said. "And I never asked him. I trusted him."

She didn't know then that he had had "numerous and multiple sexual partners" or that one of his former girlfriends had died of an Aids-related illness.

When he went for an emergency operation in August 1998 and was told he had full-blown Aids, he still didn't breathe a word about it.

Two weeks later, the two of them were called to the specialist. "My husband and I were sitting together and the doctor asked : 'Didn't your husband tell you what he's got?' "

It was left to their family doctor to break the news. It was only then - five months after their wedding - that she discovered he had known when they first met that he was HIV-positive.

"I was very shocked. I was paralysed and just looked at my husband and started crying. He looked at me and said: 'Sorry - sorry, sorry.' "

She said she had heard those words many times over the last two years.

"Please help me," he said - and she did, even after she found that he'd infected her.

"Everyone who is sick deserves to be taken care of. I was taking care of him, in faith, in hope. He was suffering," she said.

"Okay, I look healthy because I don't have Aids. I'm in the early stages. But when I am in that situation, who's going to help me? It's not my kid, it's not my [estranged] family, it's not my husband."

It never entered her mind to leave him, she said. But this April he upped and walk ed out on her with his clothes and business papers bundled in black plastic bags.

"We were happy together," she said. "He stole my life. He imposed a death sentence on me and he doesn't want to be responsible for it. Husbands who are HIV-positive or have Aids must tell their wives.

"I feel sorry for him, to tell you the truth," she said.

Sobbing, she said she often thought of killing herself but knew she had to keep living for the sake of her healthy, teenage child.

She shook an empty medicine bottle. She has kept it since April, the last time she took the triple therapy treatment, a cocktail of retroviral drugs.

"This bottle costs me R2 500. Sixty pills, it lasts a month. It's empty. He's got the money to pay for the medicines. What about me? Now I'm going mad. I want to kill myself," she said.

On Friday night, her husband's attorney, Jos Ferreira, said his client would ask the court to set aside the judgment and have the matter go to trial. "He claims he never received the summons and wants to defend himself," said Ferreira.
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