LAST APRIL, the South African judge and human rights advocate Edwin Cameron confirmed publicly that he is living with Aids. Cameron has been an out gay lawyer for more than twenty years could have used his privileged position to hide his status but chose instead to try to create a broader public debate on the questions involved.
Cameron, has a long association with ANC organisations and the trade union federation COSATU, and was part of the movement to ensure that the new South African constitution included non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. He was in London in July for an international gathering of lawyers to discuss partnership rights for lesbians and gay men. He also spoke at a fringe meeting organised by UNISON during TUC Lesbian and Gay conference. Terry Conway reports. EDWIN Cameron's story is a moying one. He is certainly an impressive person, someone I felt l wanted to get to know after hearing him speak for twenty minutes or so. But more because behind the individual there are more sto'riac As Cameron explains there is the issue of the government's attitude to HIV and Aids.
"One of the puzzles of our transition to democracy has been the ineffectual government response to the Aids epidemic. The one twentieth-century figure who really could use personal persuasion to mange young people's behaviour", former President Nelson Mandela, has largely stayed silent. "It had to have been a choice or, a semi-conscious act of denial on his part, because we did everything we possibly could".
This has been a profoundly frustrating experience for someone who has a lot of confidence in Mandela and the ANC. Cameron feels that South Africa has a good deal to learn from the experience of Uganda, the most positive model for fighting Aids on the continent where the government has taken a very interventionist role.
He reckons that he was infected with Aids some time in the 80s but was catapulted into making a public statement about his status after he was nominated as a High Court judge. By this time he had started combination therapy following a bout of illness in late 1997, and felt it was vital to make a public declaration that he had Aids but was healthy and strong enough to do his job.
His guess that finally talking about his illness was the right thing to do has been confirmed:
"I have had the most deeply moving and astonishing response to my public statement from every corner of South Africa, from all sectors and segments of society... I have had many hundreds of letters and cards and faxes from people all over Africa, Nigeria and Zambia and Tanzania and Uganda who say "you're the first prominent African to come out.' They don't say "even though you are a white gay man, we're very glad you have come out'... they're saying you're an African and that's why your coming out matters'... They have claimed me as an African, they have claimed my act as an African act in this particular epidemic. He tells the story of Gugu Dlamini, a woman from a township near Durban who spoke publicly on World Aids Day last year and was stoned to death less than three weeks later. He believes that if more people were able to come out that the negative attitudes that led to her murder will change. "Its only by Edwin Cameron four million of us creating the conditions for making that statement that we can create safety for each other. Its one of those paradoxes."
For him, the key issue facing all Aids activists is the fact that treatment is so expensive as to be completely inaccessible to the majority of Africans. This is despite the fact that the production costs of these drugs are a tiny fraction of what the multinationals charge. In this context he praises the work of South Africa's Treatment Action While the focus of both Cameron's appeal and that of the Treatment Action campaign is on Africans, certainly he is ready to acknowledge that the same issues are facing millions in Asia where Aids is spreading rapidly. For example it is predicted that 20% of GDP may be lost in Thailand by 2000 because of Aids.
Of course fighting expensive medication is only one part of the battle against Aids in an situation where structural adjustment programmes and neo-liberal policies are undermining spending on health care and education so necessary to combat the pandemic.
But a campaign that highlights the gruesome profit levels the pharmaceutical industry makes from death and disease as well as the inequality between north and south deserves maximum publicity and involvement.
For all Aids activists, for all socialists this is an issue that we must take up vigorously.