CHAPTER 1

As the 19th century came to a close, in 1900, the great pan-Africanist, W.E.B. du Bois, said that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the colour line.

During the last year of this 20th century, 2000, our President, Thabo Mbeki, was asked to open the Durban 13th International AIDS Conference, which he did.

On reporting this event, the media said that hundreds of delegates walked out of this opening session both because of what the President said and what he did not say. Let us quote what he said.

" Let me tell you a story that the World Health Organisation told the world in 1995. I will tell this story in the words used by the World Health Organisation.

" This is the story: The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code Z59.5 - extreme poverty.

" Poverty is the main reason why babies are not vaccinated, why clean water and sanitation are not provided, why curative drugs and other treatments are unavailable and why mothers die in childbirth. It is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicap, disability and starvation. Poverty is a major contributor to mental illness, stress, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse. Every year in the developing world 12.2 million children under 5 years die, most of them from causes which could be prevented for just a few US cents per child. They die largely because of world indifference, but most of all they die because they are poor.

" Beneath the heartening facts about decreased mortality and increasing life expectancy, and many other undoubted health advances, lie unacceptable disparities in wealth. The gaps between rich and poor, between one population group and another, between ages and between sexes, are widening. For most people in the world today every step of life, from infancy to old age, is taken under the twin shadows of poverty and inequity, and under the double burden of suffering and disease.

" For many, the prospect of longer life may seem more like a punishment than a gift. Yet by the end of the century we could be living in a world without poliomyelitis, a world without new cases of leprosy, a world without deaths from neonatal tetanus and measles. But today the money that some developing countries have to spend per person on health care over an entire year is just US $4, less than the amount of small change carried in the pockets and purses of many people in the developed countries.

" A person in one of the least developed countries in the world has a life expectancy of 43 years according to 1993 calculations. A person in one of the most developed countries has a life expectancy of 78, a difference of more than a third of a century. This means a rich, healthy man can live twice as long as a poor, sick man.

"HIV and AIDS are having a devastating effect on young people.

" In many countries in the developing world, up to two-thirds of all new infections are among people aged 15-24. Overall it is estimated that half the global HIV infections have been in people under 25 years with 60% of infections of females occurring by the age of 20. Thus the hopes and lives of a generation, the breadwinners, providers and parents of the future, are in jeopardy."

Because he said all these things, it was said that hundreds of delegates walked out on President Mbeki!

They also walked out because there were two things he did not say. One of these was that he did not say that HIV causes AIDS! The other was that he did not say that HIV/AIDS is the single greatest threat to the survival of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa!

Instead, he concluded his address with the words:

" The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill health and suffering across the globe, including South Africa, is extreme poverty.

" Is there more that all of us should do together, assuming that in a world driven by a value system based on financial profit and individual material reward, the notion of human solidarity remains a valid precept governing human behaviour! On behalf of our government and people, I wish the 13th International AIDS Conference success, confident that you have come to these African shores as messengers of hope and hopeful that when you conclude your important work, we, as Africans, will be able to say that you who came to this city, which occupies a fond place in our hearts, came here because you care. Thank you for your attention."

Offended both by what he said and what he did not say, reportedly hundreds of delegates who undoubtedly consider themselves to be friends of the Africans, walked out on the President.

The great puzzle is why these friends of the Africans found the truth, as told by the WHO, so unpalatable. Medical science everywhere in the world recognises the central importance of diseases of poverty.

As we will demonstrate later, even the most highly developed countries in the world are themselves involved in a struggle against diseases of poverty within their own borders.

For some strange reason, Africa, among the poorest continents of the world, is not supposed to talk about these diseases of poverty and to focus on their eradication. We are urged from all sides to break the silence about HIV/AIDS and maintain perfect silence about the diseases of poverty.

To what do we owe these strange goings-on!
The war to defeat AIDS is also a war to defeat the humiliation and dehumanisation of the African people.

This humiliation and dehumanisation 'is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.'

When the humiliated and dehumanised speak of it too much, some friends of the African judge such conversation as not being a pretty thing. Discussion then becomes impossible.

The war to defeat AIDS is a difficult struggle because it is not only a struggle against the conditions that produce ill health and unnecessary death among millions of Africans, challenging as this struggle is.

It is a difficult struggle also because it has to be waged against some friends of the African, who find that the truth is not a pretty thing.

Asserting that they stand on irrefutable scientific knowledge, these particular friends of the Africans, and the Africans themselves, are horrified beyond measure that the Africans will perish, consumed by an HIV/AIDS pandemic which is sweeping across the face of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Statistics are produced regularly to show rapidly growing HIV infections and rapidly growing deaths from HIV/AIDS on our continent.

Our friends claim that millions of Africans, in increasing numbers, are infected with a highly mutant and indestructible Human Immunodeficiency Virus. They say that this HI Virus is communicated from person to person through heterosexual intercourse and from mother to child.

To stop the spread of the Virus, they say that the Africans should abstain from sexual intercourse or use condoms.

They also say that HIV-positive mothers should be given drugs to stop the transmission of the Virus. Their babies, too, should be given the same drugs, presumably to kill the Virus if the mother has nevertheless transmitted it.

They urge that in the event of rape, the victims should also be given drugs, in case the rapist/s is or are carriers of the HI Virus.

They argue that all the above conforms, unequivocally, to the best available scientific knowledge. It is therefore unquestionable. Diagnosis, prevention and treatment are all based on immutable scientific truths that were agreed by the global scientific community 20 years ago.

It is then said that to question any of the above, or to ask any questions whatsoever, is to commit the sacrilege of questioning science itself and take on the guilt of the perpetration of the high crime of genocide.

The message is simple to understand and communicate. If it moves - clothe it in a condom! If it was naked - destroy its diseased emission with drugs!

The message is also simple in another way. The assertion is made that scientific discoveries about HIV and AIDS were proclaimed two decades ago. At the moment of the proclamation, the science of AIDS came to a standstill. It was frozen at this particular moment into an unquestionable and unchangeable monument to scientific thought.

Accordingly, further scientific inquiry into this matter is impermissible.

Such scientific knowledge as was possible two decades ago must be supported by all and sundry, including scientists, as part of a religious dogma. Accordingly, to establish his or her credentials, everybody must answer the ballad question - do you believe that HIV causes AIDS! Belief about a scientific matter, and not empirical evidence, thus becomes the criterion of truth.

In his book, "Eros & Civilisation", (Sphere Books, London: 1970), Herbert Marcuse wrote of our epoch as " a period when the omnipotent apparatus punishes real non-conformity with ridicule and defeat."

And so it has come to pass that anybody who has dared to question any of the above allegedly established scientific truths, has been confronted by this omnipotent apparatus. Accordingly, it has punished non-conformity with ridicule, defeat and worse.

Elsewhere in the same book, Marcuse writes:

" The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilisation. But ever since the first, prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression from without has been supported by repression from within, the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions." (Our emphases).

In our case, it would seem that this is precisely what the "omnipotent apparatus" has achieved. The defeat and repression of the non-conformists is sustained by repression from within. The unfree individuals, the Africans, have introjected their masters and the commands of the masters into their own mental apparatus. Thus do they sustain their masters, their ideas and their institutions.

In his 'Political Preface 1966' to this book, Herbert Marcuse says:

" The people, efficiently manipulated and organised, are free; ignorance and impotence, introjected heteronomy (the internalisation by the 'unfree' as the true exercise of individual autonomy of the practice of seeming to make an independent determination of choices, which are, in reality, pre-determined by another - Our annotation) is the price of their freedom."

He goes on to say:

" What started as subjection by force soon became 'voluntary servitude', collaboration in reproducing a society which made servitude increasingly rewarding and palatable.Today, this union of freedom and servitude has become 'natural' and a vehicle of progress."

Mark Twain put this differently when he said the 'all the human race loves a lord.In the Jardin des Plantes I have seen a cat that was so vain of being the personal friend of an elephant that I was ashamed of her.'