/ 31 March 2000

What the judge said

Judge Edwin Cameron

Tonight I am talking not as a lawyer or as a judge. I am talking as a person living with this virus in my body, who knows what it is like to feel deathly sick and to fear death. I also know what it is like to recover and to start feeling strong and hopeful and optimistic again, to begin to love and enjoy friendship again.

The government’s response on mother-to- child transmission of HIV raises too many problems for it to give any of us reason to feel hope.

I am not a medical expert. I am not a scientist or a doctor. But if we are to give people with HIV/Aids greater involvement in this epidemic, then we must all have a voice.

In considering our government’s response to the epidemic, I can do no better than quote someone who, unlike like me, is not a white man, but a black woman. She is also a doctor and a medical expert, and one of the leading intellectuals on our continent. She is Professor Mamphela Ramphele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.

On December 1 1999, speaking at a graduation ceremony at the University of the Witwatersrand, she said that public policy in South Africa showed a “lack of respect for a scientific base for health care planning”. She stated that there was a “subtle but visible anti- intellectualism seeping into the body politic which discounts the value that experts can, and do, add to human development”.

What she called “the bitter fruits of this anti-intellectualism” were “most tragically evident in HIV/Aids”. She said that “no coherent management strategy [has] yet [been] developed by the government”. This failure, she stated, “results not from lack of expertise in South Africa, but in its disregard by those in the government, with tragic consequences”.

Ramphele concluded that the present government position on Aids was “nothing short of irresponsibility, for which history will judge it severely”.

These are profound and scorching words. But as a person living with Aids, I cannot but endorse them. We have a crisis in our country. It is all around us. When I got out of the plane this evening at Durban airport, of the first 10 people I saw, two already have HIV or Aids. It is in our bodies. There is too much at stake for intellectual dilly-dallying. There are too many lives, too much happiness, too much human prosperity at stake for flirtation with dangerous and wayward theories.

We have a wonderful country. Ten years after the release of Nelson Mandela, we have a government, an economy, a political system and a Constitution which could be the pride of the world. We need to set ourselves right on Aids.

We can start with pregnant mothers. We can intervene to save their lives and the lives of the children of our country. A constructive, effective intervention here will give us all respect and hope and confidence. It will give us the belief that we are beginning to tackle this epidemic in a sensible and respectful and progressive manner.

It will give our country the moral authority to tackle the drug companies. It will give us the international stature to say to them: “Aids is a particular crisis in Africa. It necessitates crisis measures. It demands special accommodations in drug pricing and patent applications.”

Ramphele’s criticism should not be taken amiss. It was intended as a plea to the government. It provides us all with a challenge. Aids threatens our lives. Our country’s handling of this crisis threatens its moral authority in the world. So devastating can this epidemic be that the deaths and illness and economic ravages it brings can threaten our national peace and the Constitution itself.

These matters lie close to our hearts as people who live with the virus in our blood and in our bodies. We are at the epicentre of this crisis because, though it affects everyone, it affects us most. We have most to lose if Aids is not handled properly. We have most to gain if it is.

Edwin Cameron is an acting Constitutional Court judge, and is HIV-positive. This is an edited extract from his speech to the Second Annual Conference of People Living with Aids in Durban on March 10