Thabo Mbeki's AIDS blues: The intellectual, the archive, and the pandemic

Public Culture

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 101-127

  Hoad, Neville ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 14844333825     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-17-1-101     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. I follow Mbeki in referring to her as Sarah Bartmann rather than Saartjie Bartmann, the more common version of her name. Saartjie is a Dutch diminutive of Sarah.
2. For a collection of quotes from Mbeki's public comments on the connection between the HIV virus and AIDS, the related efficacy of antiretroviral drugs in treatment of the disease, and his defense of the public health policy of his regime, go to www.tac.org.za. For a broader view of South African AIDS policy, see Samantha Power, "The AIDS Rebel: An Activist Fights Drug Companies, the Government, and His Own Illness," New Yorker, May 19, 2003, 54-67. For an ongoing sense of this policy drama as it unfolds, readers should subscribe to the Treatment Action Campaign's (TAC) newsletter by e-mailing the campaign at news.subcribe@tac.org.za.
3. This figure is hotly contested. The Department of Health, the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA), and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) have all separately used the results from surveys of pregnant women at public antenatal clinics, of patients in public hospitals, migrant workers, bank workers, and truckers to estimate the size of the epidemic. This is not a simple task, particularly given the difficulties of extrapolating infection rates to the general population from these specific social groupings. These three institutions, each with a different agenda, calculate epidemic sizes ranging from 4.8 million to 6.6 million for 2002. The difference of nearly 2 million is not insignificant, but an HIV epidemic in 2002 of even 4.8 million people is massive. For a critique of earlier and slightly higher WHO numbers, see Rian Malan, "AIDS in Africa: In Search of the Truth," www.whatisaids.com/ rollingstone.htm; for a disputing of the current South African numbers, also see Rian Malan, "Apocalypse When?" Noseweek, no. 52 (December 2003), www.noseweek.co.za/look/ns_article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication= 5&NrIssue=52&NrSection=1&NrArticle=629. Nathan Geffen's rebuttal of Malan's arguments is available at www.tac.org.za/newsletter/2004/ns20_01_2004. htm.
4. This figure is hotly contested. The Department of Health, the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA), and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) have all separately used the results from surveys of pregnant women at public antenatal clinics, of patients in public hospitals, migrant workers, bank workers, and truckers to estimate the size of the epidemic. This is not a simple task, particularly given the difficulties of extrapolating infection rates to the general population from these specific social groupings. These three institutions, each with a different agenda, calculate epidemic sizes ranging from 4.8 million to 6.6 million for 2002. The difference of nearly 2 million is not insignificant, but an HIV epidemic in 2002 of even 4.8 million people is massive. For a critique of earlier and slightly higher WHO numbers, see Rian Malan, "AIDS in Africa: In Search of the Truth," www.whatisaids.com/ rollingstone.htm; for a disputing of the current South African numbers, also see Rian Malan, "Apocalypse When?" Noseweek, no. 52 (December 2003), www.noseweek.co.za/look/ns_article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication= 5&NrIssue=52&NrSection=1&NrArticle=629. Nathan Geffen's rebuttal of Malan's arguments is available at www.tac.org.za/newsletter/2004/ns20_01_2004. htm.
5. On the Virodene scandal, see Thabo Mbeki, "ANC Has No Financial Stake in Virodene," www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/1998/virodene. html.
6. See Sarah Boseley, "At the Mercy of the Giants," Mail and Guardian, February 16, 2001, for an account for the buildup to the case, and Power, "AIDS Rebel," 61, for how the Clinton regime backed down from its campaign on behalf of the pharmaceuticals against the Medicines Act.
7. Wherever possible, I have tried to provide a source for these factual claims from the government's perspective by citing a relevant document from the ANC's Web site as well as a second, usually more critical source from the South African press. See "Hasty Action no Solution to Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission," ANC Today 1, no. 45 (2001), www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/ 2001/at45.htm. For the court case forcing the government's hand to provide the drug, see Paul Graham, "A Street-Wise Judgement," Mail and Guardian, October 11, 2002.
8. Wherever possible, I have tried to provide a source for these factual claims from the government's perspective by citing a relevant document from the ANC's Web site as well as a second, usually more critical source from the South African press. See "Hasty Action no Solution to Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission," ANC Today 1, no. 45 (2001), www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/ 2001/at45.htm. For the court case forcing the government's hand to provide the drug, see Paul Graham, "A Street-Wise Judgement," Mail and Guardian, October 11, 2002.
9. Since the ruling, the price of generics has risen, and once again cost is being used as a reason for not implementing distribution of antiretroviral treatments. See "Don't Pop the Champagne Yet," Mail and Guardian, January 26, 2004.
10. For a defense of the governments initiatives on HIV/AIDS, see James Ngculu's May 13, 2003, health appropriation bill speech, available on the ANC Web site, www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/speeches/2003/sp0513.html; and Power, "AIDS Rebel," 65.
11. For a defense of the governments initiatives on HIV/AIDS, see James Ngculu's May 13, 2003, health appropriation bill speech, available on the ANC Web site, www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/speeches/2003/sp0513.html; and Power, "AIDS Rebel," 65.
12. See "Government Rejects 'Populist' Use of Aids Drugs," Mail and Guardian, April 30, 2003.
13. For an early government acknowledgment of the seriousness of the epidemic with the typical reservations about funding drug treatments, see Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, "The Issue of HIV/AIDS, AZT and Rape," www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pr/1999/pr0527.html. See n. 3 for citations concerning the controversy over the breadth of the epidemic.
14. See Power, "AIDS Rebel," 65.
15. For careful consideration of the difficulties in assessing the relation between medical history and medical policy, albeit in a very different context - the nineteenth-century United States - see John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
16. For careful consideration of the difficulties in assessing the relation between medical history and medical policy, albeit in a very different context - the nineteenth-century United States - see John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
17. For a defense of Mbeki's involvement with David Rasnick, a U.S. scientist who disputes the connection between HIV and AIDS, see the April 28, 2000, article on the HIV/AIDS debate by Zweli Mkhize, minister of health for KwaZulu-Natal, www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/misc/zweli0428.html.
18. For a summary of the extensive and occasionally contradictory documentation on Mbeki's AIDS dissidence, see Drew Forrest, "Behind the Smokescreen: The Record Reveals President Thabo Mbeki's True Stance on Aids," Mail and Guardian, October 26, 2001.
19. Bartmann, better known as the Hottentot Venus, was a young Khoi-San woman who was taken to Europe as an ethnographic exhibit in 1810. At her death, her body was dissected by Baron Cuvier, and her remains, including her genitals, were preserved in formaldehyde until returned for burial to South Africa in 2001.
20. The ANC objected to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter's criticism of the South African government's response to the pandemic in the following terms: "We find it alarming that President Carter is willing to treat our people as guinea pigs, in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies, which he would not do in his own country." Mike Cohen, "S. Africa's A.N.C. Criticizes Carter," Associated Press, March 10, 2002. See also Power, "AIDS Rebel," 60, for a brief account of the problems with Western pharmaceuticals and new-drug testing in South Africa.
21. The ANC objected to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter's criticism of the South African government's response to the pandemic in the following terms: "We find it alarming that President Carter is willing to treat our people as guinea pigs, in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies, which he would not do in his own country." Mike Cohen, "S. Africa's A.N.C. Criticizes Carter," Associated Press, March 10, 2002. See also Power, "AIDS Rebel," 60, for a brief account of the problems with Western pharmaceuticals and new-drug testing in South Africa.
22. For a fairly representative and accurate accusation of racism as the underlying cause of criticism of the ANC government, see Mbulelo Goniwe, "DP [Democratic Party - the predominantly white parliamentary opposition party] Becoming Choice of 'Rightwing Dinosaurs,' " www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/ pubs/mayibuye/mayi9801.html#DP.
23. Z. K. Matthews, one of the most important black South African intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, was best known for mobilizing Christians against the inequities of the emergent apartheid state, for advocating on behalf of better education for black South Africans, and for critiquing pedagogies of servitude. He was the first African headmaster of a high school and an important figure in the growth of Fort Hare, South Africa's premier black university. See his Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews, Southern Africa 1901 to 1968, comp. and ed. Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983).
24. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
25. Thabo Mbeki cultivates a reputation as his own speechwriter. See, for example, Thabo Mbeki, Africa: The Time Has Come: Selected Speeches (Cape Town: Tafelberg and Mafube, 1998), a collection of his speeches up to 1998.
26. For Mbeki's elaboration of the idea of an African Renaissance, see his address to the African Renaissance Conference on September 28, 1998, at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/1998/tm0928.htm.
27. On the U.S. response to AIDS in the 1980s, see Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); and David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991); and on the United Kingdom's response, see Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
28. On the U.S. response to AIDS in the 1980s, see Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); and David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991); and on the United Kingdom's response, see Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
29. On the U.S. response to AIDS in the 1980s, see Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); and David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991); and on the United Kingdom's response, see Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
30. On the presence of Bartmann's remains in Paris, see Carmel Schrire, Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 174-78.
31. The literature on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is vast and growing. For an early and moving account, see Antjíe Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times, 1999). Mark Sanders, "Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission," in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), offers a careful account of women's testimony in the TRC that could speak to the difficulties Mbeki's speech has in mourning Sarah Bartmann.
32. The literature on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is vast and growing. For an early and moving account, see Antjíe Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times, 1999). Mark Sanders, "Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission," in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), offers a careful account of women's testimony in the TRC that could speak to the difficulties Mbeki's speech has in mourning Sarah Bartmann.
33. Thabo Mbeki, "Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann" (lecture, Hankey, South Africa, August 9, 2002), www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/ mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
34. I thank Catherine Burns for bringing the video of this event to my attention.
35. See Bernth Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus," in The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1987), in which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus: A Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Angela Carter's novel Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth, 1985) offers another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
36. See Bernth Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus," in The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1987), in which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus: A Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Angela Carter's novel Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth, 1985) offers another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
37. See Bernth Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus," in The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1987), in which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus: A Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Angela Carter's novel Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth, 1985) offers another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
38. See Bernth Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus," in The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1987), in which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus: A Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Angela Carter's novel Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth, 1985) offers another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
39. See Bernth Lindfors, "Courting the Hottentot Venus," in The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism (Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, 1987), in which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus: A Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997). Angela Carter's novel Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth, 1985) offers another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
40. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) was a Prussian antiquarian most famous for his insistence on the centrality of Greek culture to Enlightenment Europe's self-understanding and on the centrality of ideals of masculine beauty to Greek culture. Imputations of European homoeroticism lurk behind this invocation of Winckelmann.
41. Mbeki, "Funeral of Sarah Bartmann."
42. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "Gridlock: Intimacy, Genealogy, Carnality" (paper presented at the IASSCS Conference on Sex and Secrecy, WISER Center of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, June 22, 2003).
43. See La Reine Helen Baker, Race Improvement or Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1912); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1976).
44. See La Reine Helen Baker, Race Improvement or Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1912); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1976).
45. See La Reine Helen Baker, Race Improvement or Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1912); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1976).
46. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), for the definitive account of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in Western culture.
47. Mbeki, "Funeral of Sarah Bartmann."
48. Mbeki, "Funeral of Sarah Bartmann."
49. For the most theoretically elaborated account of how racism works through the framing of the African as an animal, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 193-96, 236-40.
50. See Candace Vogler, "Much of Madness and More of Sin: Compassion, for Ligeia," in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004). On the usefulness of haunting as a concept-metaphor in cultural studies more generally, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); on the power of haunting as a mode of negotiating colonial problematics of embodiment and social space
51. See Candace Vogler, "Much of Madness and More of Sin: Compassion, for Ligeia," in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004). On the usefulness of haunting as a concept-metaphor in cultural studies more generally, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); on the power of haunting as a mode of negotiating colonial problematics of embodiment and social space
52. see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
53. Mbeki, "Funeral of Sarah Bartmann."
54. It is unlikely that Sarah Bartmann ever saw the Gamtoos; she most likely came from the Western Cape. The choice of her burial site was determined by the politics of the present - attracting tourism to the economically depressed Eastern Cape, the regional heartland of the ruling ANC.
55. Zolani Ngwane, "The Politics of Campus and Community in South Africa: An Historical Historiography of the University of Fort Hare" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001).
56. Mbeki, Thabo, "Z. K. Matthews Memorial Lecture" (lecture University of Fort Hare, South Africa, October 12, 2001), www.anc.org.za/ ancdocs/history/mbeki/2001/tm1012.html.
57. Mbeki, "Z. K. Matthews Memorial Lecture."
58. Mbeki, "Z. K. Matthews Memorial Lecture."
59. Deborah Posel makes a similar point - "Mbeki's position on AIDS amounted to a denial of the salience of sex in its transmission" - in "The Scandal of Manhood: 'Unmaking' Secrets of Sexual Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa and Beyond" (paper presented at the IASSCS Conference on Sex and Secrecy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, June 2003), 27.
60. See n. 16 for citations relating to problematic drug testing in southern Africa. The problem of Third World drug dumping also speaks to ongoing imperialist racism in relation to global "medical" practices. See John Dunne's attack on the WHO for failing to prevent the export of substandard and expired drugs to the Third World, Drug Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1997): 39-41. Questions of expiration dates and reliability for specific drugs complicate the issue. While the pharmaceutical undoubtedly benefit from the practice, there is the possibility of some local benefit as well, alongside the obvious and considerable risks.
61. David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billig Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, Pa.: Running Press, 2000).
62. Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 6-7.
63. For a genealogy of the emergence and deployment of the race card as a trope in U.S. culture, see Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
64. Mandisa Mbali, "Mbeki's Strange Aids Discourse," Mail and Guardian, March 22, 2002.
65. Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2001), 110.
66. Mpe, quoted in Laurice Taitz, "Welcome to Our Literature," Sunday Times (Johannesburg), September 16, 2001.
67. For a lucid explanation of the proliferation of witchcraft practices in the new South Africa, see John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism," Codesria Bulletin 1999, nos, 3/4: 17-28, and "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist 26 (1999): 279-303.
68. For a lucid explanation of the proliferation of witchcraft practices in the new South Africa, see John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism," Codesria Bulletin 1999, nos, 3/4: 17-28, and "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist 26 (1999): 279-303.
69. Neville Hoad, "Between the White Man's Burden and the White Man's Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern Africa," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 559-84.
70. Simon Watney, "Missionary Positions: AIDS, Africa, and Race," in Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Maria Gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990).
71. Jean Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis define a part-object as a "type of object towards which the component instincts are directed without this implying that a person as a whole is taken as love-object. In the main part-objects are parts of the body, real or phantasied (breast, faeces, penis) and their symbolic equivalents. Even a person can identify himself or be identified with a part-object." Jean Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 301.
72. Edwin Cameron speech to the Second Annual Conference of People Living with AIDS, Durban, South Africa, March 10, 2000, www.tac.org.za/about.htm.
73. The formation of the organization was announced at the memorial service of the Delmas treason trialist and important political antiapartheid and self-identified gay activist Simon Nkoli by its president Zackie Achmat. Achmat, himself a veteran of the antiapartheid struggle, has expressed the enormous emotional difficulty he has in fighting the ANC: "The emotionally torturous thing for me to do was to recognize we had to take on the A.N.C. Our A.N.C." Quoted in Power, "AIDS Rebel," 65.
74. After negotiations with Deputy President Jacob Zuma, the TAC and several key allies agreed to suspend the campaign of civil disobedience in the hope of ironing out key questions around reductions of prices of medicines, treatment programs for the public sector, and a national plan for the prevention of HIV infection and the treatment of people with AIDS (TAC NEC [national executive committee] Resolution, April 29, 2003). For an excellent, brief history of the Treatment Action Campaign, its iconic leader, Zackie Achmat, and the postapartheid South African state's failure to respond effectively to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa, see Power, "AIDS Rebel," 54-67.
75. See the list of actions at www.tac.org.za/.