60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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244 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness Every day more than 600 people in South Africa die of HIV/ AIDS-related illnesses. Many lives could have been saved had our government shown urgency and commitment. We still have a chance to save millions of lives. Regrettably, the Minister of Health continues to equivocate. 3 In the second – in a lecture given by Zackie Achmat, a founding members of the TAC and its spokesperson at the time – a larger context is implicated, including discourses on sexuality and gender inequality: We die because of excessive drug company profi teering. We die because our governments are in denial of the seriousness of the HIV epidemic by governments and bureaucratic procrastination and equivocation. We also die because men have greater access to resources and power than women; because rich countries invest substantially more in war than in public goods, and because many global corporations live outside the law of global human rights. We die because religious dogma and reactionary traditionalism suppress sexual freedom and because some African leaders label homosexuality unAfrican. And we die because we cannot buy life-saving medicines. Unlike some of our neighbours in the north, we cannot aff ord to buy life.’ 4 The third quote exhibits a more clearly Foucauldian tone emphasising discursive power, asserting that embodiment is shaped by global biopolitics: the power/knowledge networks enable certain subjectivities, for example the resisting/victimised body of ‘us’, dying due to global injusticies: Our bodies are the evidence of global inequality and injustice. They are not mere metaphors for the relationship between inequality and disease. But our bodies are also the sites of resistance. We do not die quietly. We challenge global inequality. Our resistance gives us dignity. In the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the voices of our comrades, friends and children echo around the world to resist injustice. Our voices demand life even as our bodies resist death. 5 To some extent, the fi rst example, especially, presents a mainstream understanding of power, typical for example of Marxist perspectives, where power is conceptualised as binary oppositions, polarised pairs 3 ‘Volunteer for Civil Disobedience’, TAC E-Newsletter, 10 March, 2003, See www.tac.org.za 4 Achmat, John Foster Lecture, 10 November 2004, p. 12. See www.tac.org.za 5 Ibid, p. 13.
a luta continua! – south african hiv activism, embodiment and state politics 245 of oppressors and oppressed, powerful and powerless. The TAC language often brings up oppositions between the rich and poor, politicians and patients, pharmaceuticals and poor people, government ministers and citizens. One group has a monopoly on resources as well as defi nitions of the body proper, and the other suff ers, albeit not quietly. At the same time dichotomies are also disrupted. The TAC also continuously challenges the idea of diff erences in the face of the epidemic. Here, for example, it is the democratic nation in total that is addressed: ‘This failure to confront the epidemic as a nation united in action, may have permitted a continued advance of the HIV epidemic’ (Heywood 2005: 378). In the following e-mail to TAC activist e-mail list on 14 February 2008 Achmat thanks many diff erent actors for new PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child transmission) policy guidelines established by the government, thus indicating that policies are made collectively: A special thanks to all comrades, friends, clinicians, lawyers, nurses, unionists, religious leaders and scientists who made the change possible. It has taken four years but the progress is a victory for civil society. A special thanks to Gauteng TAC for mobilizing the march on SANAC [the South African National AIDS Council] on 10 September 2007 and then mobilized in Ekhuruleni to march for the policy change and its implementation – despite a diffi cult time with their own staff shortages. Now our job is to ensure that our country reduces MTCT [mother-to-child-transmission] of HIV to less than 5%. Western Cape has achieved an overall 5.3% and in Khayelitsha, a transmission rate lower than 4%. Our country is behind Botswana and many others. Thanks, Zackie. A polarisation between the power of the government versus lay civil society thus appears in some statements but is also challenged. Sometimes a juxtaposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is there, sometimes everyone is part of the ‘nation’, or ‘us’. Similar contradiction (or, rather, a double strategy) applies for who is ‘aff ected’ by AIDS: sometimes there is a clear ‘us’ who are dying, sometimes ‘everyone’ is included. For example, the famous T-shirts stating HIV POSITIVE that participants in TAC rallies wear, indicate an erasure of diff erence between HIV patients and others. The message is that everyone is aff ected by the epidemic. A T-shirt does not mark the identity of a HIV-positive person, but a commitment to resistance. ‘We all need treatment to be made available’ (Cameron 2005: 130). With the message that AIDS affects everyone, victims cease to be a clearly defi ned group of Others. Rather, the epidemic compels everyone to responsibility – including government ministers. The government is implicated in a diff erent way because of a diff erent access to resources and the possibility to
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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