[DEBATE] : Two books on AIDS (one on SA, the other mainly on SA) reviewed in LRB

[Mandi Smallhorne]

A couple of comments: the header on this one is misleading, Epstein's book
is not 'mainly on SA' at all, although SA features quite strongly.
Second: "Circumcision – a practice to which Fassin makes one slighting
reference – seems to cut a man’s risk of contracting the virus by at least
50 per cent. It is also protective of his sexual partners. It is probably
the reason HIV rates in West Africa, where circumcision is widely practised,
are so much lower than in southern Africa. One can readily imagine the
difficulties of introducing the practice where it is not culturally
accepted. And yet the Zulu and the Tswana – two of the peoples hardest hit
by Aids – practised circumcision in pre-colonial times." Hmmm, Mante
obviously didn't do her research. So how do we explain the very high
prevalence in KZN, where circumcision has definitely survived into the
present? And isn't it so that circumcision only protects when performed on
adult men (I seem to recall reading this recently) and not when it was done
ages ago on boys: if so, how is West Africa protected by it?
Finally, I have contact with people working at grassroots level on the
Highveld, and the issue of a white-on-black genocide doesn't seem to have
(or have had) much currency. Anyone have any evidence that it is widely
believed?
Mandi
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Jacobs" <tintinyana at gmail.com>
To: <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 4:37 PM
Subject: [DEBATE] : Two books on AIDS (one on SA,the other mainly on SA)
reviewed in LRB


     * LRB
     * 20 September 2007
     * Hilary Mantel more detail icon

Saartjie Baartman’s Ghost
Hilary Mantel

     * When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South
Africa by Didier Fassin, translated by Amy Jacobs and Gabrielle Varro
Buy this book
     * The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight against Aids
by Helen Epstein

Where to begin? When we tell stories about Africa we can’t speak
without an imported frame of reference, carving up the years into the
pre-colonial, the post-colonial era: once upon a time in the golden
age, once upon a time in the dark ages that followed. But in South
Africa over the last two decades, story itself has been shortened,
shrinking to the time-span of a truncated life – thirty years perhaps,
enough time to have children of your own and leave them a memory box
when you die. Puleng, from Alexandra township, aged 29, weight about 35
kilos, tells her story ‘in one breath’ and pro forma, as if she were
part of the government’s initiative to tackle the disease
biographically; storytelling has become an organised activity, intended
to stem denial and ease stigma, with an exhibition of storyboard
biographies travelling among the stricken. Puleng’s is a township story
from the apartheid years: family breakdown, alcoholic mother, vanished
father; her good looks and talent squandered; ambitions thwarted; a
house burned down, a brother killed by the police; then the arrival of
the virus, contracted from a man who tells lies. And now, the need to
plan one’s funeral.

Didier Fassin, who recorded Puleng’s words, is a Paris-based
sociologist, anthropologist and doctor of medicine, with extensive
fieldwork experience in South Africa. Many writers have referred to the
‘mystery’ of Aids in Africa; the chief puzzle is why rates of
heterosexual transmission are so high. Why, Fassin asks, should the
mystery yield readily to outside investigation? South Africa in
particular is not a transparent society. But, he says, ‘my purpose and
hope here is to affirm the principle of intelligibility.’ He reads the
epidemic not so much through medical facts, statistics and case
histories as through a history of how we think about Aids and why we
think as we do. He wants to understand the epidemic phenomenologically,
and not merely through the experience of individuals but of
communities, not just in the light of the present but of the past;
above all, to understand it as an experience of the body, the site
where the past has made its mark as surely as it has made its mark on
the landscape.

Helen Epstein is an American molecular biologist who became involved in
Aids studies when she went to Uganda in 1993 to work on a vaccine, her
role being to determine which sub-types of HIV were prevalent there.
Since then, she has visited, studied and written about the other
countries in sub-Saharan Africa affected by the crisis. None of these
countries can act as a case study. Each has a different experience of
colonialism, a different narrative of independence, a different
self-image; accordingly, the epidemic has been viewed differently,
tackled differently. Her well-organised book is practical, concrete and
full of hard information, but it lacks nothing in subtlety; she is
conscious of the ambivalence and complexity that hedge all discussion
of Aids. She extends many of Fassin’s observations and shows that they
are not unique to the society that suffered under apartheid; her wider
focus helps us to see the influence, economic and social, that South
Africa has exerted over the whole region. Epstein’s book began life as
series of articles published in the American press. Occasionally, the
text shows this by some overlap, though with such complex material a
reprise is often welcome. Fassin, who has read some of Epstein’s
earlier work, casts doubt on her credentials, but her scientific
background, lucidity of expression and habit of wide-ranging inquiry
lend her book authority and accessibility.

Taken together, the books present a desolating account of pain and
loss, hypocrisy and cant, corruption and incompetence, suffering which
is almost – but not quite – unspeakable. Epstein’s book is the kind in
which acronyms proliferate; it has charts showing the transmission
networks of HIV, ‘arranged so that readers may thumb through them, as
with a “flip-book”’. Fassin’s is a self-doubting text, fascinating and
difficult, in which a shack is an ‘ephemeral construction’. In the end,
their conclusions draw closer than the reader could have foreseen.
Neither allows one to dwell for long on the problem in the abstract.
The body is always present, in its unfathomable singularity, and
repulsion as well as compassion finds its place in the story. Epstein
says: ‘Aids can be a lonely disease. You die slowly, in great pain, and
many people are frightened of you.’ Fassin relates the words of a young
woman volunteer in Alexandra township; asked what was most distressing
about her work with Aids patients, she replied with a directness he
found devastating: ‘The hardest in this work is when you find maggots
in the bedsores.’

Fassin credits Desmond Tutu with the phrase: ‘Aids is our new
apartheid.’ The West pities South Africa as a stricken country, and
sees a kind of cosmic unfairness at work: sees a country hit by the
terrible tragedy of Aids at a time of national regeneration. But there
are problems with this view. For one thing, it splits off South African
experience from that of the countries around. And also, it assumes that
apartheid had some kind of final curtain. If we look at it as a system
for running a country, we can say, ‘it is over’; but we can’t delimit
its effects. What many in the West see as distinct stories – the
beginning of reconstruction, the devastation of Aids – are intimately
linked in the bodies of those who have lived through an era of South
African history. Fassin hopes to show how the past interpenetrates the
present, how deeply it is knitted into the experience of disease, death
and survival. Should South Africa dwell on its past, or not? Perhaps it
seems extraordinary that any society would entertain a project of
national forgetting. But it has recognised that certain erasures may be
politic, if a whole society is not to collapse into eternal
recrimination and demands for reparation. At the end of apartheid, the
national mood was to look forward. For the activist, the future was
what counted. Now the happy horizon has shifted, the virus has
collapsed the nation into a dense, curtailed present.

Thabo Mbeki has asked, what is a just society? His answer: a society
that remembers. Yet South Africa might be said to have no collective
past, no shared history. Fassin says that the republic’s history is not
to be found at the Voortrekker Monument or even at the Apartheid
Museum, but in ‘words and gestures, silences and attitudes that expose
the grim realities experienced by those who have been on the wrong side
of history’. You could not grow up under apartheid and be blind to the
experience of the body; rights depended on the colour of the skin, on
measurable biological attributes inseparable from identity. Long before
the virus came, biology was destiny. Life was so fractured, so
dehumanising and precarious, that the state’s ideology impacted on the
most personal and intimate negotiations; the catastrophe of Aids has
imported the old inequities into a new situation. Now as then, the body
has no frontiers where politics stops.

One of Fassin’s chief intentions is to shed light on the scientific
dissidence of Mbeki, which to Western observers has seemed so peculiar
and destructive. Epstein explains succinctly:

     He publicly questioned the relationship between HIV and Aids,
claiming the disease was not caused by a virus, but by a mysterious
syndrome resulting from poverty and malnutrition; it was more common in
Africa because African people had been physically weakened by centuries
of humiliation and oppression. It was no wonder they were more
susceptible to tuberculosis, wasting and other symptoms that looked
like Aids. To Mbeki, HIV tests were meaningless and Aids drugs were
toxic poison, foisted on Africa by a venal pharmaceutical industry bent
on exploiting the poor.

Epstein describes his dissent as ‘a public health disaster’. It
alienated the South African government from the international
scientific and medical establishment, and antagonised Aids campaigners
within his own country. The government failed to roll out an antenatal
programme to stem mother-baby transmission, which would have been well
within the budget of the health ministry. It also refused to back an
antiretroviral programme, Mbeki angrily questioning the use of giving
sophisticated drugs to people who didn’t have enough to eat. Such a
programme certainly has drawbacks. The drugs have side-effects,
sometimes severe. The task of administering them and following up
patients diverts health workers from the treatment of diseases that are
cheaper and simpler to treat, but which are potentially fatal.
Furthermore, antiretrovirals serve only to hold the disease at bay; the
virus mutates, so that in time more sophisticated drug cocktails are
required, and these are expensive, largely unavailable in Africa, and
test health workers’ expertise and patient compliance. And yet it seems
clear that if they had been used early in South Africa, antiretrovirals
might have preserved thousands of lives.

The decision was reversed in 2004, but the government’s attitude is
still equivocal. Last month, Mbeki sacked his popular deputy health
minister, who has been active in treatment promotion and has built
bridges to the orthodox medical community; the five-year plan she
formulated, which had won widespread backing, is now left in the hands
of the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, known as ‘Dr
Beetroot’ for her promotion of vegetables as a cure. If this is an
African disease, the dissidents say, there must be an African
treatment. There have been several would-be miracle cures, Fassin says,
developed by local researchers and announced without proper testing:
‘Each announced discovery appears to serve as revenge for the colonial
and post-colonial past; and, at the same time, any reservations
expressed by representatives of official science are attributed to
ulterior motives with racist overtones.’

In the years since Mbeki declared himself a dissident, the debate has
been conducted in the most bitter and personal terms, each side
flinging accusations of racism and bad faith and murderous intent. In
2001, a newspaper headline asked: ‘Has Mbeki heard of Nuremberg?’
Orthodox believers have denounced his position as irrational, marginal
and paranoid. The West sees it as a product of local incompetence and
error, an opportunistic alliance between a coterie of corrupt
politicians and quack scientists. Mbeki has been urged to ‘leave
science to the scientists,’ as if scientists possess a purer form of
knowledge, which is value-free and can be abstracted from the body
politic. Such was the derision to which Mbeki’s view was exposed that
it became very difficult to question statistics, interrogate doctors’
assumptions, or question the ethics and protocol of drug testing
without being accused of ‘denialism’. Fassin’s own position on the
science is orthodox, but he doesn’t think it is enough to denounce
Mbeki’s view as irrational. ‘Saying that poverty causes Aids is
inexact, especially if such a statement serves to exclude its viral
aetiology.’ Yet he believes that ‘there is a profound truth behind the
factual error.’ Much of his book is an attempt to illuminate that
truth, and to link the ideological structure of the controversies –
controversies that have made politics into necropolitics – to the
ideological structure of South African society.

To make that link we need to explore the frontiers of history and
memory. Fassin speaks of the past as existing in two dimensions. On the
one hand, there is the past of the historians: objectified, distanced,
depending on documents, archives, artefacts. On the other hand,
memories of individuals, which are subjective, and in which what is
repressed and unsaid is also significant. These two overlapping
representations can sometimes compete, for they are founded on
different schemes of truth-telling. Like a psychoanalyst, the
ethnographer is in dialogue with the living, yet he has no access to
their interiority: his job is to objectify, like a historian. He is
shot through with the terror of interpretation, and he is alive to all
the unconscious prejudices that shape what can be heard; yet if he does
not interpret, his material becomes simply exotica, to be placed in a
cabinet of curiosities.

These scruples may seem academic, this unease indulgent, when faced
with the facts of the epidemic. But consider what the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission has been trying to do: to legitimate the
memory of individuals, and at the same time to produce an official
version of the past, one that everybody can sign up to. In its
hearings, different realities collide. ‘Reconciliation’ is a project
poised between remembering and forgetting, and the problem (or so it
seems to me) is that in the case of South Africa memory, personal or
collective, is often accompanied by crippling shame; whether you have
been victim or victimiser – or cannot agree which role you occupy – you
are ashamed to have lived under apartheid, to be the relict of such a
system. Shame is what makes forgetting most urgent, and also what makes
it impossible. And the virus has arrived to intensify stigma; South
Africa, for so long a political untouchable, so far off the moral map,
is ravaged by a disease which from its inception has been identified
with sexual shame. Fassin says: ‘The South African government and maybe
society as a whole push away the intolerable,’ and try to select an
alternative truth; and what is intolerable is not only the disease
itself, but its stigmatising representations. Mbeki has accused the
West in these terms: ‘Convinced that we are but natural-born,
promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that
our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our
unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.’

The first Dutch colonisers who arrived in the Cape read the new land
through Christian myth, taking African women as a reminder of Man’s
fall, as examples of unselfconscious, unmediated animal sensuality. If
from among the legions of the dead there is one single ghost that
haunts the Aids narratives, it is the ghost of Saartjie Baartman, taken
to Europe in 1810 and exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’. After her
death, her dissected remains were presented to a Paris museum, pitiful
remnants used to furnish a pseudo-scientific discourse on racial
difference and inferiority. In South Africa’s history it has been
meaningless to say that one human life has the same value as another.
Mbeki’s dissent on Aids becomes comprehensible if you understand how
public health projects have always – not just in South Africa – been
closely linked to political projects: projects designed to put the poor
at a safe distance from their masters, and to guarantee a pool of
physically strong workers. This is not to deny the existence of
humanitarian concern, but to point out how often it goes hand in hand
with a stigmatising process: the poor are unclean, they are not like
us, they are more like animals. In South African history, health and
hygiene considerations offered a rationale for physical segregation,
which then became ideological; you put the others beyond the city wall,
and then make up a theory about why they ought to be there. The
‘mystery’ of the incidence of tuberculosis in the African population
was solved by deciding that the native was weakened by his contact with
civilisation. City habits exposed him to infection; in crowded
conditions his precarious morals would break down, and syphilis would
spread. His body – closer to nature, for better or worse, than the
bodies of whites – was actively harmed by inclusion in the polis. It
became a thing to be defined, counted, regulated and excluded, or
admitted under strict conditions when it was necessary to have it work
in the factories and mines. It became a thing to be cast aside in
sickness: sent home, exiled from the city, placed out of sight.

It also became a thing to be feared. A Johannesburg newspaper of 1893
reports the attempted rape of a white woman by a black servant: ‘Beware
of your houseboy, for under his innocent front may be lurking and lying
latent the passions of a panther, or worse.’ That word ‘latent’ is
interesting, suggesting as it does what is hidden perhaps even from the
possessor of the power; suggesting arrested development which
ultimately you cannot arrest, for though you may call your servant a
‘boy’, you will learn in the worst possible way that he is a man.

The most odious document Fassin finds to quote is an 1894 article
published, presumably in all seriousness, in the South African Medical
Journal. ‘Why has the white master got syphilis?’ is the problem posed.
We must look for the focus of infection. ‘This in nine cases out of ten
is the servant,’ who is ‘generally a church-native’, and ‘wears
stockings’. She has kissed the baby; the baby gets syphilis; papa
treats his offspring to ‘a chaste and paternal kiss’ and next thing
‘gets a hard sore on his glands and prepuce’.

There is no need to multiply examples. Both Fassin and Epstein are
alive to the sorry history of cholera, TB and sexually transmitted
diseases in the mines and wherever population is concentrated without
adequate public health facilities. Once you understand this history you
begin to see why a common reading of the epidemic among black South
Africans is that it is a genocide project, planned by the whites to
kill off the blacks and have the land to themselves. When you look at
how medical resources were distributed under apartheid, this reading
becomes intelligible. Fassin says that in the 1980s, after the creation
of the ‘homelands’, half the country’s population shared 3 per cent of
the doctors.

Wherever the virus spreads, rapidly mutating misinformation spreads in
its wake, and multiple fables tyrannise the imagination. Aids is caused
by antiretrovirals, by witchcraft, by the CIA. It’s the freemasons,
it’s extraterrestrials. If you hang up a certain brand of condom in the
sun you can see the HIV virus squirming around inside it. Rumours may
be culturally intelligible, or they may take novel forms. A male
patient told Fassin that the virus had been spread through injections
of Depo-Provera, a long-acting contraceptive; an interesting rumour,
this one, since it places the blame on both the whites and the women,
and exonerates the African male. Like many of the rumours, it is not
incomprehensible; Depo-Provera has long been a controversial drug
because of the extent of the testing that was carried out in the
developing world and on poor women, and there is one clinical study
that suggests an increased HIV risk in users, though the relationship
is unlikely to be causal. Sometimes you can guess how the more baffling
rumours start. In Alexandra township, Fassin was told that the virus
had been injected into oranges; it was citrus fruit that was spreading
the plague. Medical staff learning to give injections often practise on
oranges before they are let loose on people; one understands that it’s
not the job of an anthropologist to judge between stories, but perhaps
in not telling the reader this, Fassin is guilty of what he calls
‘opacity’. Rumours need not be natural growths; they can be planted.
Epstein details a story spread as far back as 1986, that HIV was
developed by the Americans in a military laboratory and introduced into
Africa by British and American doctors; the authors of the rumour,
‘assumed to be Soviet propagandists’, were careful to tailor it to
every district, putting in the names of local white doctors.

Yet there may be a grain of truth in the notion that Aids was spread by
doctors: reused needles, blood transfusion, old techniques of smallpox
vaccination – all these may have been implicated in the untraceable
beginnings of the epidemic. We know from court cases brought since the
end of apartheid and from the proceedings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission that the government up to the 1990s supported
research into germ-warfare agents which could be used, selectively, on
opponents or on sections of the civil population. Very recently, the
law and order minister under the old regime was given a ten-year
suspended sentence for trying to kill the then secretary-general of the
South African Council of Churches; the method chosen by the policemen
helping him was to put a nerve agent in the priest’s underwear.

Now that a black government is running South Africa, rumours of
high-level malfeasance have not ceased. A township dweller tells
Fassin: ‘The ANC wants us to die. Most people with HIV are unskilled,
uneducated, unemployed . . . How will the government benefit from us?’
It is natural that apartheid – indeed, colonialism itself – should
leave a legacy of resentment and mistrust of authority. Perhaps
paranoia is simply a concomitant of civilisation. Whenever there is
government there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and whenever that division
arises the next question is ‘what are they up to? What are they keeping
from us?’ (One day, when the story of the triple-vaccine/autism panic
is written, it will not be a story just about medicine, but about
society.) In more comfortable times and places, you can hope that
rumour and fear will give way to rational persuasion, that consensus
will soothe the unease of minorities. But in South Africa, it is the
majority who have been ill-used, who are traumatised and embittered.
They cannot be expected to read a situation objectively; to do so they
would need to obliterate both their own history and their bodies’
experience. And if it is difficult for everyone, in the South African
context, to disentangle truth from falsehood, it may be that South
Africa’s style, cut off as the country was from the rest of the world,
has long been a paranoid style; those who favoured the cultural boycott
forget that, though it may have acted as an expression of disgust, it
also meant a lamentable absence of reality checks. Towards the end of
the 1980s, the far right came up with a theory that Aids had been
imported by the ANC, who were planting HIV-positive terrorists in the
townships to have sex with prostitutes and so spread the epidemic.
Whether they originate with sick, scared and disempowered black people,
or with Afrikaners on the run from the future, the rumours mirror each
other, and all the reflections are ugly, the distortions of an ugly
history.

The epidemic progressed, as both authors show, from a minority concern
in the mid-1980s to mass panic by the late 1990s. In South Africa,
inequalities in diagnosis and treatment echoed the old inequalities. In
1987, the then health minister put sexual behaviour at the heart of the
matter. ‘Promiscuity is the greatest danger, whether one likes it or
not. We have to say that. It is a fact.’ So what to do? Preach at
people? Give out condoms? With an admirably straight face, Epstein
reports on National Condom Week, ‘during which free condoms that had
unfortunately been stapled to cards were distributed’. And what she has
to tell us about transmission of the virus goes some way to vindicate
Mbeki’s angry assertion that it makes no sense to superimpose Western
explanations on African reality. Epstein says that it is not
promiscuity but concurrency that poses the greatest risk of
transmission. Concurrent relationships may be long-term. A man may have
a wife and a steady girlfriend, a woman may have two boyfriends who,
between them, give her enough money to feed herself and her children.
The men in these relationships are not necessarily promiscuous. The
women are not prostitutes. Such arrangements are accepted as normal in
many present-day African countries, and they derive from a notion of
social responsibility as well as from economic need; if you have a
child by a woman, although you are married, it is better to maintain a
relationship with her, even a part-time one, than to treat her and your
child as a mistake. Men and women in Africa, it seems, have no more
sexual partners in the course of a lifetime than people in the West.
But the effect of concurrency is to create sexual networks which are
ideal for spreading the virus. If any one person has a casual
relationship, and imports the virus into the network, it spreads fast,
being most easily transmitted in the early weeks of infection.

If this is true – and it is very persuasive – then Mbeki was right to
say that the problem of Aids has a specifically African dimension; his
social assumptions were right, even if his science was wrong. And
Fassin is right to protest against the historic assumptions about
African sexuality which have driven the notion that promiscuity is the
key to transmission.

Yet changing the individual’s behaviour may still be the key to
containing infection. ‘Zero Grazing’ was the slogan of the successful
Ugandan campaign to combat the virus. It asked people to do something
realistic: not to eschew pleasure and overturn their way of life, but
to cut down on concurrent partners and limit sexual contacts – if you
can’t be good, be careful. Epstein explains that Uganda was the only
nation which saw a decline in the prevalence of HIV by 2003. She looks
at how this country, devastated by civil war, its health infrastructure
collapsed, tackled the crisis not only with drugs but by plain
speaking, community cohesion and a vigorous women’s movement. Botswana,
peaceful, democratic and with a universal healthcare system, was less
successful. Denial does not exist only at government level, Epstein
shows. Both these African governments acknowledged the problem and
tackled it energetically. But the outcome was different. In Uganda, the
virus was seen as everybody’s problem, but in Botswana, entangled in
stigma and shame, Aids was something that happened to other people, to
bad people, to people in ‘risk groups’. Epstein suggests that Uganda’s
grassroots activism and home-based care was more effective than
Botswana’s hospital-based services and mass media campaigns.

Unfortunately, in Uganda the gains are becoming losses. HIV rates are
now rising again. The ‘Zero Grazing’ campaign has been phased out in
favour of the abstinence and virginity campaigns influenced by the
American right. Some funding agencies do not like the idea of asking
people to limit their sexuality. Others, it seems, do not like the idea
of sex at all. It is African self-determination they are quarrelling
over, African bodies, which are again being counted and controlled by
someone else’s agenda. As research progresses, ironies multiply.
Circumcision – a practice to which Fassin makes one slighting reference
– seems to cut a man’s risk of contracting the virus by at least 50 per
cent. It is also protective of his sexual partners. It is probably the
reason HIV rates in West Africa, where circumcision is widely
practised, are so much lower than in southern Africa. One can readily
imagine the difficulties of introducing the practice where it is not
culturally accepted. And yet the Zulu and the Tswana – two of the
peoples hardest hit by Aids – practised circumcision in pre-colonial
times.

Because of Fassin’s sensitivity to the injustice of white construction
of black African sexuality, it is hard for him to speak on a topic
where silence is not an option: the topic of sexual violence in South
Africa. ‘When history has not been on one’s side, at least its telling
should be,’ he writes. Gender politics are not central to his book, but
that is not to say he ignores them; he produces some startlingly nasty
examples of what happens when sex is not about love or lust but about
survival. Astrid, a young woman he meets in Alexandra, tells how she
contracted the virus after having been raped by her father. She told
her mother, who appealed to the economic facts of life: ‘Because he’s
the only one who is working, let’s not put him to jail.’ When it became
evident that she was HIV positive, both parents told her she was going
to die and washed their hands of her. She ran away from home after
reporting her father to the police; he was sentenced to eight years.

Fassin is keen to emphasise that sexual violence in South Africa is not
something new – though you would have to be very ill-informed to think
that it was. It is its acknowledgment that is new. The West, still
fearful, is ready to believe that new and unique forms of wickedness
come out of Africa. Instances of the rape of babies and young children
– crimes which are hardly specific to that society – have been linked
by the Western media to reports of a folk-belief that sex with virgins
can cure Aids. But does anyone really believe this? Has anyone believed
it, at any time? It’s rather that everybody has heard, or read, that
there are stupid people somewhere else who believe it. It is Epstein
who nails the ‘myth about a myth’, and finds its antecedents: in
America in the 19th century, the same allegations were made about newly
arrived immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were said to
be raping virgins to cure themselves of syphilis.

Epstein is unequivocal about the extent of sexual violence. South
Africa, she says, has the highest rate of reported rape in the world;
and we must assume that many more are not reported. She explores the
‘scripts of male domination’ that have created this situation. Rape has
become an instrument by which men control women – they may target the
woman herself, or her children. Concurrent relationships are also, very
often, transactional, arising from an unemployed woman’s need to keep a
household together. A man who has nothing material to offer a woman is
useless, socially adrift and liable to be coercive. Economic
empowerment – not just of women – seems vital to the social
transformation that must occur if sexual violence is to be stemmed; and
these writers agree that, whatever its origins, whatever its route of
transmission, Aids is a disease born in poverty and inequality, which
brings in its train of disasters further poverty, the breakdown of
family and social structures. Wherever she went, Epstein said, ‘when I
came to talk to them about HIV, they told me about money instead.’ Her
belief is that the crisis is best tackled by modest community-based
initiatives run by knowledgable local people who have influence with
their neighbours, rather than by multi-million pound projects devised
in Geneva or Washington. On her first visit to Africa she was told that
there are two kinds of Aids: slim, which afflicts infected people, and
fat, which causes bloated bureaucracy, and makes doctors, managers and
consultants grow sleek. The inflow of funds has become what Epstein
calls an ‘all-you-can-eat buffet’ for corrupt politicians. She is
asking one of the big questions of our time: does aid to Africa do
anything, except make the donors feel good?

Both authors quote from Mbeki’s overblown ‘African Renaissance’
rhetoric: ‘I owe my being to the Khoi and the San, whose desolate souls
haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape . . . I am formed of the
migrants who left Europe . . . In my veins courses the blood of the
Malay slaves.’ It sounds less like renaissance than the last gasp of
pan-African romanticism, and is about as convincing as Margaret
Thatcher sounded when she took to public prayer. Fassin would not
agree. He sees it as a ‘refutation of the morbid ideology that is
crushing Africa’.

He requires us to suspend judgment, think more deeply, learn more,
reflect critically, be sparing with denunciation. Anthropology is
long-term work, which goes against ‘the imperious necessity to act in
the world’. He worries that his discipline, attacked from without and
vulnerable to its own self-questioning, has missed its way as a ‘form
of moral commitment to the world’, losing touch with the Enlightenment
project of working out what human beings have in common, and devoting
itself to the discernment of difference. He recommends that we set
ourselves in an attitude of inquiétude, which he distinguishes from
anxiety: the latter paralysing us, the former provoking us to
constructive action.

At best – if indeed any good is to be found in Africa’s catastrophe –
he believes that the virus offers ‘a resource for the reconstruction of
the self’. He sees those who are carrying it campaigning with
born-again vigour, and caring for those who are sick; making themselves
into cautionary tales, making themselves examples, drawing some meaning
from their approaching death. They are turning the brute fact of
biological survival into something active, something ethical, moving
from an individual experience of pain into a collective experience. He
quotes Wittgenstein: ‘I am the only one to know if I really suffer;
another person will merely suspect it.’ Philosophically speaking, we
may be doomed to that solipsism, but to try to break out of it is a
political act. Fassin convicts the West not so much of hardness of
heart towards Africa, as of a sort of acedia, an indolence: ‘There is
no inequality more disturbing than that by which we decide what is
interesting and what is not.’ Epstein says: ‘Everyone seems to know
what Africa needs, but sometimes I think our minds are not really on
it. Most of us see only Africa’s contours, and we use them to map out
problems of our own. Africa is a career move, an adventure, an
experiment. It fades into an idea.’ Fassin hears overhead the creaking
wings of Benjamin’s Angel of History, surely no longer surprised at the
corpses piling up at his feet as he flies backwards towards the future.
Epstein hears the beating of the ‘Drums of Affliction’, an alarm signal
which says that life and culture are threatened, but also a signal of
cohesion, of union in the face of disaster: perhaps, one day, a signal
of regeneration, of a healing process beginning its work.

Hilary Mantel is working on a novel called Wolf Hall, about Thomas
Cromwell.

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Sean Jacobs
http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com