‘Without the luxury of time’: AIDS, Representation and the Birth of Rights-based AIDS Activism in the 1980s
On the August 4th 2003 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists marched on the
first South African AIDS Conference. The singing and toyi-toying demonstrators
reached the court-yard next to the entrance to the conference’s venue, Durban’s
International Convention Centre, which is usually blocked off to protestors. After a few
minutes, Zackie Achmat, the well-known gay rights and AIDS activist and national
chairperson of the TAC took the microphone to much applause, then he outlined the
rights-based case for HIV treatment access in the public health sector in South Africa.3
At the end of his impassioned speech he called upon the conference organisers,
Professors Jerry Coovadia and Slim Abdool Karim, prominent AIDS-researchers and
former anti-apartheid doctors to take the podium and declare whether or not they would
use the conference to support TAC’s campaign for wider HIV treatment access: both
duly did as Zackie asked. This powerful strategic alliance between former anti-apartheid
doctors and former anti-apartheid gay rights activists for the realisation of rights-based
AIDS policy has not, however, always existed and should not necessarily be viewed as a
‘natural’ alliance. Indeed, for much of the early to mid 1980s the gay rights movement
(in the guise of the Gay Association of South Africa) was splintering between
conservative, ‘apolitical’, accommodationist and racist tendencies and ‘militant’ antiapartheid,
anti-racist tendencies. This was a split which would make a future alliance
possible between anti-apartheid gay rights and health activists Also, anti-apartheid
doctors who belonged to the National Medical and Dental Association (NAMDA) were
preoccupied by the civil unrest caused by apartheid repression manifest in the States of
Emergency throughout the decade. Furthermore, the anti-apartheid movement in general
was riddled with homophobia and heterosexism which had to be at least partially
overcome for anti-apartheid doctors to form activist alliances with gay rights doctors over
AIDS.