People have been surprised to learn that the new leader of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Sipho Mthathi, is a woman and HIV-negative.
Mthathi has been in her job for almost seven months but she has only been propelled into the limelight now because of a fight with the government, which wants to exclude the TAC from a key United Nations meeting next month. The state offered to take Mthathi along in her private capacity, but she refused.
Mthathi, the first general secretary of the vocal, 16 000-strong TAC, is used to struggling against the odds. Like the organisation she represents, the 31-year-old farm girl from the Eastern Cape has challenged the established order all her life.
A poet and the mother of an 11-year-old boy, she was appointed late last year to head the Nobel-nominated NGO, which remains sidelined by the national Department of Health.
”I learnt the things I needed to know to survive in today’s world. One of the things I learnt was social responsibility,” she said.
Born in the Ciskei in 1974, Mthathi was raised by her grandmother after her mother left home to find work. They settled in Umgababa, a Ciskei village, and the young girl moved to Grahamstown to attend high school.
She emerged with a matric certificate but penniless. So she hopped on a bus to the University of the Western Cape and talked her way in to a free education. Twelve years later her voice still reflects the joy of winning a place at university. She often had to work at night to pay her way and studied by day.
An anti-apartheid foot soldier, Mthathi was a member of the Young Women’s League and the African National Congress, and she worked with township community groups during her stint at university.
She returned to Grahamstown after getting an honours degree in English literature and completed a diploma in education at Rhodes University. That helped her get a job teaching English at the exclusive Herschel girls’ school in Cape Town. But this only lasted a year before she moved on to something closer to her heart: running a schools project in Cape Town for the South African Institute of Race Relations aimed at integrating learners and cultures.
Spurred on by the growing toll of HIV/Aids on friends and relatives, including the death of a cousin, she went to the first TAC meeting in Guguletu in 1999.
”My exposure to Aids was either rumours that so-and-so was sick or died, or the horrible pictures when we went to the family planning clinics. The nurses would point to the posters, but wouldn’t give you condoms. The pictures were just emaciated figures, with no sense of dignity, because illness had taken it away.
”At the TAC meeting, people were giving information and talking about the science and politics of the epidemic. It was very empowering.”
Mthathi said the TAC provided a welcome refuge. ”Fear drives you crazy, you need a place that can give you basic help. Also to get the sense of determination.”
She developed a programme to provide poor and semi-literate people with access to information about HIV/Aids, and set out their rights under the Constitution.
”If the TAC was going to be an effective social movement, it needed to be where the epidemic had the greatest impact — in the townships. Where I come from people did not have a sense that there were things they could do to help themselves.”
In 2001 she was elected to the TAC’s national executive committee as deputy chairperson, and the next year she became a salaried TAC staff member. She was chosen as the organisation’s first general secretary last September.
She is candid about the opposition she faces in the top post, not least from within the ranks, because of her gender. ”There was definitely unhappiness about electing a general secretary who is a woman. The organisation is a microcosm of society.”
”We have to fight to ensure there is zero tolerance of sexism. Sexism is not something that can change overnight. It is one of South Africa’s biggest problems, one of the reasons we have this epidemic.”
Another challenge is to overcome a perception that she is a ”token” and that chairperson Zackie Achmat and treasurer Mark Heywood will remain the most visible faces of the organisation. There are also suspicions within the TAC that the government and other critics are trying to undermine the organisation by claiming that she is nothing more than a token black front for the real power structure.
Mthathi said charges of tokenism were painful and disrespectful to TAC members. ”It is an insult to them to say you’ve elected someone who is not good enough. It is saying they are stupid.”