Viral Reality
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 15, 2000
South Africa's battle against AIDS has increasingly been taken up by those on the fringe as the President continues to turn a blind eye to the catastrophe, writes Ed O'Loughlin in Durban.
SOME people say that the importance of a conference or festival can be exactly measured by the strength of its fringe.
This week's XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban was pretty important, so there was plenty going on away from the simultaneously translated debates in the big halls and the impenetrable medical symposiums.
In fact, it was with two fringe events that the conference kicked off last Sunday. The first was last Sunday's march and rally by groups responding to the call of the Treatment Action Campaign, a South African non-governmental organisation which demands that expensive Western drug treatments be made available to all sufferers from HIV/AIDS.
So it was that an uneasy mix of communists, Christians, gay activists, anti-globalists, human rights non-government organisations and Winnie Mandela found themselves sharing a platform with the Virginity Movement, a band of adolescent girls who undergo monthly ``virginity tests" as part of a growing, HIV-inspired chastity movement among the traditionalist Zulu people of Durban's hinterland.
But the regiment of the bare-breasted, ululating certified virgins themselves recoiled in shock when the chance movements of the crowd steered into their midst three statuesque transvestites two black and one white who marched boldly up to the front of the crowd amid catcalls.
Durban may look like any Western beach city, but when it comes to open displays of homosexuality it is still a long way from Kings Cross especially among the mainly Christian and conservative non-white population.
After a moment of suspicious mutual appraisal, the transvestites bravely held their ground in front of the speakers' podium and the virgins marched off in traditional Zulu ``impi" formation.
They reappeared minutes later demurely dressed in some of the free ``HIV Positive" T-shirts that a gang of street youths had been fighting over minutes before.
The second fringe event was supposed to be official but ended up on the periphery as far as many delegates were concerned. President Thabo Mbeki's opening speech on Sunday night and the accompanying Olympic-style razzamatazz ceremony so exactly failed to meet the mood of many of the 12,000 delegates that it might as well have been staged for a different event.
As dancers gyrated and choirs wailed, the prerecorded voice of South Africa's poetry-loving president boomed out generic praise of knowledge, childhood and other good things, while pictures of AIDS sufferers flickered across the giant video screen of the Kingsmead cricket stadium.
Mr Mbeki, who has of late being courting the opinion of ``dissident" scientists who claim that AIDS does not exist, then stepped forward in person to read out a long speech.
It boiled down to a statement that in Mbeki's view, HIV is not the only cause of the AIDS phenomenon in Africa, and that diseases of poverty must also be taken into account.
Those who had hoped for the announcement of a major new HIV/AIDS initiative by the man who presides over the world's highest infection rate (up to 1,700 new cases a day) were bitterly disappointed.
When he was finished, only about half the people in the crowd contributed to a few seconds of polite clapping, and fewer still stood up. As one locally based journalist remarked, Hansie Cronje could get more applause at Kingsmead if he turned up there tomorrow.
The biennial International AIDS Conferences are not intended to be merely medical gatherings, and a broad range of activists, non-governmental organisations and commercial companies attended as exhibitors, delegates or speakers.
Prominent in the last days of the conference was the American Foundation for AIDS Alternatives, part of the mainly US-based ``dissident movement" which has been revitalised in recent months by President Mbeki's apparent patronage.
Tuesday brought a press conference by Professor Charles Geshekter, a Californian historian who was invited by President Mbeki to sit on his ``panel of experts", recently assembled in Pretoria to spend two days inconclusively debating whether HIV causes AIDS.
A leading member of the dissident movement, the unfailing-ly courteous Professor Geshekter outlined for the handful of journalists present his own belief, based on several long periods in Africa, that lack of hygiene and traditional diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and dysentery are the real cause of the ``apparent" AIDS epidemic.
Recalling one primitive household he had visited, Professor Geshekter said: ``... the place where the little boy was defecating was really close to the place where they prepared their food. As one African woman said to me, it's not sex that causes AIDS, it's the flies!"
As he spoke his words were almost drowned out by the chanting of about 30 supporters of the treatment pressure group Act Up. They were not in fact targeting Professor Geshekter's press conference at all, but had merely chanced to settle down outside his seminar room after disrupting a nearby conference address by the head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Dr Brundtland had been half-way through her speech to a packed plenary session when the protesters burst onto the podium and proceeded to pretend to be corpses, albeit corpses that chanted ``medication for every nation" and clenched their fists in the air.
A female activist read out a lengthy denunciation of the WHO's emphasis on prevention rather than treatment in Africa, but she sounded rather like Arnold Schwarzenegger and it was difficult to make out what she said. There was a burst of applause when the protesters finally got fed up and left, and Dr Brundtland resumed where she had left off.
Across from the massive conference complex, in the Durban Exhibition Centre, the huge, swanky exhibits for the big pharmaceutical companies gradually gave way to a jumble of smaller stalls from dozens of local and foreign NGOs, publications and small companies active in the area of HIV/AIDS.
Here sat Ken John, from Sydney, holding the fort on behalf of Australia's National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAPWA). Himself diagnosed with HIV 13 years ago, Ken was greatly enjoying his first overseas conference.
``I am learning that we are just a drop in the ocean," he said. ``In Australia we have a population of around 15,000 HIV positive people, out of 16 million or so. In comparison to the South African epidemic that's not much. People just laugh at you when you tell it to them. We have 500 transmissions a year. Some countries here have that in a day."
What struck him most, compared with relatively proactive Australia, was the fatalistic attitude shared by both government and people in the teeth of the world's worst epidemic of HIV/AIDS.
``I can't imagine thousands of people catching it every day and doing nothing about it," he said. ``I keep asking myself why can't they do something about education, about at least knowing what is going on. We have all this stuff" he indicates the NAPWA stall, piled deep with educational material and information on contacts and resources ``and a government which is willing to put money in".
Two smartly dressed young Zulu women came up to inspect the wares on the NAPWA stall.
``Those are postcards," explained Mr John, as they picked up a pile of images depicting gay male sexual activity. ``As you can see they are pretty explicit."
``Yes, yes we can see that," mused one, examining a card in which a latex glove featured prominently.
Beyond the fringe is the realm of legend. Nobody in the media room, crowded with journalists from all over the planet, ever managed to track down the Chinese delegation which, it was rumoured, was at the conference distributing AIDS information leaflets of its own. These centred mainly on the advisability of paper seat covers when using public toilets. If these were not available, the story went, people were being advised to squat with their feet on the rim.
There is nothing legendary about the fact that, six hours' drive to the north, publicity from the conference is driving legislators in independent Swaziland to debate the sterilisation of anybody found to be carrying HIV/AIDS. Even if they do vote in favour the new policy is unlikely to be put into effect. Swaziland is one of the world's last real monarchies and the young but wise King Mswati usually ignores most of what his legislators say.
Despite warnings about South Africa's dire crime wave, most delegates managed to keep themselves out of harm's reach. By Wednesday only three muggings had been reported, all of Westerners who had unwisely wandered off the beaten way on foot. Nobody was hurt. Police attributed two of the muggings to central Durban's gangs of young street kids themselves often orphans and victims of the disease the foreigners had come to fight.
Other delegates strayed in another sense. On Wednesday the owner of a large Durban escort agency was contacted by an enterprising morning radio show. What with the conference and the thousands of delegates, he said, business at the heart of the world's AIDS epidemic had never been so good.
ADULTS AND CHILDREN LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS* Western Europe 520,000 Eastern and Central Europe 420,000 North Aftica and Middle East 220,000 Sub-Saharan Africa 24,500,000 Australia and New Zealand 15,000 South East Asia 5,600,000 East Asia and Pacific 530,000 Caribbean 380,000 North America 900,000
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald