Overcome by apprehension, I stopped my car next to the roadside. For a while I leaned my head on the steering wheel and let grief overcome me. Afterwards I felt better. However awesome public disclosure seemed, Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson was right. What I proposed to disclose stood the test of truthfulness. It stood the test of usefulness. And looked at objectively there was no shame in it. Shame, in fact, my shame — other people’s shame, our shame as people with HIV, the fear and inhibition that shame produced — was at the root of the problem.
My brother-in-law Wim and his family stoutly supported the move. So I set about telling close friends and colleagues who did not know. And on the Sunday before the commission convened I joined my mother for lunch at her retirement centre in the quiet Pretoria suburb of Arcadia.
The autumn day was blissfully warm and sunny. In the early afternoon she and I took a slow walk through the lovely terraced gardens of the Union Buildings — the splendid sandstone crescent Herbert Baker had conceived in 1910 as the hill-top administrative hub of a white South Africa. Now the magnificent edifice proudly housed the offices of the president and deputy president. Amid the richly coloured cannas and late roses we sat down on a bench overlooking Pretoria’s city bowl. I had to tell her that not only was I living with HIV — but that very shortly I planned to go very public.
My mother had long followed my career. Always, she expressed support and admiration for my work on Aids. In my worst moments I had thought I would not survive her. Now I could truthfully emphasise how well I was feeling on the drugs. Our deaths, parent and child, would be in due order.
I brought the conversation around and spoke gently to her. When I had finished there was a quiet pause. She continued looking calmly, almost abstractedly, at the flowerbeds. After a moment she glanced at me, and quietly murmured: “I thought as much, my boy.” Later that week, when the implications were discussed with her, she became distressed. But she started wearing the red, furled ribbon of Aids solidarity. And her friends splendidly followed suit. She died two years later, 10 months after we had celebrated her 80th birthday. At her memorial service, I read out friend and Aids activist Zackie Achmat’s evocation of her: “Always in your garden, always wearing her Aids ribbon.”
The commission convened in Cape Town. I was the morning’s first candidate. Achmat made sure that he was there, sitting just behind me. If he leaned forward he could touch me. That taught me something I had not experienced about the tangibility, the felt proximity, the physiological closeness, that friendship and support can bring.
Justice Chaskalson introduced and welcomed me. He referred to my previous appearances before the commission — when I had been appointed to the high court, to the Labour Appeal Court and a previous unsuccessful pitch for the Constitutional Court. The moment came. He invited me to read my statement “about a personal issue you wish to entrust to the commission”.
I began to read. My friends and I had carefully crafted it to deflect as much attention as possible away from the sensational angle some inevitably might take (“Judge has Aids”) to the material circumstances that made it possible for me to speak at all.
I emphasised that I had chosen to speak out even though legally and ethically I was entitled to remain silent. This choice was available to me “for very particular reasons — because I have a job position that is secure, because I am surrounded by loved ones, friends and colleagues who support me, and because I have access to medical care and treatment that ensures that I remain strong, healthy and productive”.
Those three privileged conditions —a secure job in a nondiscriminatory environment, support of those closest around me, and life and health — were exactly what Gugu Dlamini [the 36-year-old KwaZulu-Natal woman who was beaten to death after disclosing her HIV-positive status] deserved no more and no less than me, but was not privileged to have. We were particularly anxious that my statement should not expose others to unfair and premature pressure to be tested, or to reveal their HIV status.
“For millions of South Africans living with HIV or Aids,” I went on, “these conditions do not exist. They have no jobs, or their jobs would be at risk if they spoke about their HIV. They not only lack community support, but face grave personal danger if they do so. And, most importantly, they do not have access to proper medical care and treatment. For them, in a still hostile climate, the choices are strictly limited. Their right to invoke confidentiality remains of critical importance to them.
“It is only by creating conditions in which people can speak out without fear that we can begin to end the silence surrounding South Africans living with Aids and HIV.”
I concluded by stressing “my hope that my decision to speak may contribute to a greater climate of openness and caring, and to the prospect of proper medical treatment, for all South Africans living with HIV or Aids”.
For a few palpable moments the commission’s judges, lawyers and politicians sat in stunned silence. I sensed that some of them had family — or feared they had family — who were closely affected. Perhaps their fears were closer still. Then the silence was broken by one, more, many questions. They seemed to embrace me, respectfully, supportively, even ardently. I emphasised that I had been able to choose to make my statement because “I am not dying of Aids. I am living with Aids.” The phrase caught on.
Before, it had felt like the hardest, most self-exposing thing I had ever done. Afterwards, I knew that I had freed myself of a vast burden — that of unnecessary secrecy. I was able to unite myself with the truth, finally to disburden myself of responsibility for a secret that I had not wanted to keep.
More deeply, I was relieving myself of responsibility for others’ reactions to my illness. My silence was designed to forestall them from condemning, despising me. Now if they wished to condemn me, it was their decision. I no longer sought to control. After more than 12 years, it was an inexpressible relief.
And finally, the act of speaking addressed — for me at least — that unspoken shame at the core of so much Aids discrimination. My silence entailed collusion between my inner sense of shame — however unjustified — and others’ anticipated reactions of condemnation.
My act of speaking realised the simple truth in Justice Chaskalson’s advice. There is nothing shameful about having HIV or Aids. If we can talk about it, we normalise it. And the sooner Aids becomes a normal disease, the sooner we will be able to deal with it unemotionally and effectively. Normally.
The commission lauded my statement. It recommended me for consideration by the president. In the end I was not appointed.
Then minister of justice, Dullah Omar, a friend and colleague from cases and campaigns in the 1980s, telephoned me immediately after the Cabinet meeting where the decision was made. He had been mandated, he told me, to emphasise to me how the Cabinet had agonised over the choice.
The post went to a highly respected high court and Labour Appeal Court colleague, Judge Sandile Ngcobo. A tough-minded lawyer with wide experience and strong constitutional commitments, Justice Ngcobo had academic credentials in addition to practical experience. He had also trained in a Washington DC law firm and in the chambers of United States circuit appeals Judge Leon Higginbotham before returning to South Africa to work in public-interest law.
He quickly established himself as a powerful force within the court. In a deserving twist of fate, he wrote the Constitutional Court’s commanding opinion in the first Aids case that came before it, Hoffmann v South African Airways. For me this suggested, as so often in my life, that events have their own timeliness, their own rightness, their own roundness.
This is an edited extract from the new book Edwin Cameron: Witness to Aids (Tafelberg Publishers)