AIDS in the Context of South Africa's Epidemic History: Preliminary Historical Thoughts

In the reams of writing on AIDS in South Africa, both scholarly and popular, there runs a strong sense that this is an unspeakable epidemic, without precedent in the country’s history. It ‘defies description’, remarked a leading AIDS scholar recently,’ while the South African chair of the AIDS 2000 Conference in Durban said he ‘could find no parallel in history for AIDS’ it was an epidemic ‘the likes of which we have never seen’.2 Not surprisingly, at a popular level this perception has been even more marked. In 2000, Time magazine referred to AIDS in South Africa as being ‘worse than a disaster’ and of rural Kwazulu-Natal as being ‘the cutting edge of a continental apocalpyse’, while very recently it followed up these dire descriptions of an entirely unparalleled disaster by labelling AIDS ‘humanity’s deadliest cataclysm’.’ The lack of a comparative perspective which such views suggest is a reflection not only of the authors’ short historical memory, but also of the relative failure of South African historiography to make past epidemic experiences part of the mainstream narrative ofthe country’s history. Recent general histories of South Africa make but passing reference to epidemics, and generally give greater prominence to epizootics like rinderpest and East Coast Fever than to smallpox, bubonic plague and influenza. In this regard, AIDS has shown up very sharply this failure of historians of South Africa to fulfil one of the basic tasks of history as a discipline, i.e. what the American historian Joseph Strayer called the ability to help in ‘meeting new situations, not because it provides a basis for prediction, but because a h l l understanding of human behaviour in the past makes it possible to