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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Against negative interpretation HIV/AIDS narratives in post-apartheid South Africa Wu, Charlotte Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Sep. 2021 Against Negative Interpretation: HIV/AIDS Narratives in Post-Apartheid South Africa Charlotte Xiao Ou Wu Submitted for Degree of PhD in 2018 English and Global Health Humanities King’s College London 1 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 4 List of abbreviations and acronyms ....................................................................................... 5 List of Illustrations ................................................................................................................. 7 Note on terminology and language ........................................................................................ 8 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 9 CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 10 AIDS as Metaphor, Africa as Metaphor .............................................................................. 24 Decolonising African HIV/AIDS Discourses ...................................................................... 35 HIV/AIDS in the South African context: A chronology ..................................................... 42 Under Apartheid and the colonial encounter (-1994) ...................................................... 42 Under President Nelson Mandela (1994 – 1999) ............................................................. 47 Under President Thabo Mbeki (1999 – 2008) ................................................................. 54 Under President Jacob Zuma (2009 – 2018) and Cyril Ramaphosa (2018 – present) ..... 58 Conclusion and outline of chapters ...................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER TWO – READING THE MBEKI SCANDAL: NARRATIVE, CHARACTER AND MEMORY .......................................................................................... 68 Thabo Mbeki as Historical Protagonist................................................................................ 74 Searching for a Scapegoat .................................................................................................... 84 ‘The Chief’: Contemporary portrayals in fiction and non-fiction ....................................... 93 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 103 CHAPTER THREE – BREAKING THE SILENCE: PUBLIC AND HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS ................................................................................................................... 106 Public and hidden HIV/AIDS transcripts .......................................................................... 111 Silence is Death: global implications in the context of HIV/AIDS ................................... 118 ‘Blood on the Page’ or ‘An Eerie Silence’?....................................................................... 127 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 145 2 CHAPTER FOUR – HIV/AIDS AND THE POST-APARTHEID CONDITION IN TWO CONTEMPORARY NOVELS ................................................................................ 149 Personal to political denial: Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System ..................... 152 Treatment vs commodity: ART as sign of late capitalism ................................................. 160 ‘Last Life’: Phenomenology as style in Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive ..................... 170 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 179 CHAPTER FIVE – HIV/AIDS AND THE BODY SOCIAL IN SOUTH AFRICAN NON-FICTION .................................................................................................................... 182 Ethnographies of treatment as national story-telling ......................................................... 189 Rival healthcare knowledges ............................................................................................. 198 Epistemic Gender Trouble ................................................................................................. 205 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 213 CHAPTER SIX – EPILOGUE ........................................................................................... 216 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 227 3 Abstract This thesis explores various narratives that have emerged in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in post-Apartheid South Africa. Building on the heightened interest in narrative and discourse as relating to health, power and society that has developed in the academy during recent decades, I bring these ideas together with schools of postcolonial thought to examine how the epidemic manifested as a social phenomenon in the post-apartheid context. In particular, I argue that both the macro-narrative of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the intertwined narrative of the post-Apartheid nation remain incomplete unless certain pervasive discursive tropes are brought to the forefront of our reading. In the introductory chapter, I identify and engage the ‘prior discourse’ (Mbembe 2001) of Eurocentric readings and epistemic starting points which postcolonial theorists argue that writing from the postcolony is continually required to refute. South Africa presently has the highest burden of HIV/AIDS in the world, an extremity which can be partly attributed to the social engineering and neglect that was entrenched during colonial and Apartheid rule of the country. However, it began only to be identified as a political priority after the transition to democracy in 1994. My research suggests that the epidemic has consequently been, in a number of ways, narratively employed to interpret or signify truths about the state of the new nation. The remainder of the chapters examines the intersections between HIV/AIDS, its treatment and South African narratives. Exploring this terrain through various themes such as silence and stigma; Thabo Mbeki and ‘AIDS denialism’; the post-apartheid state; alternative health knowledges and gender relations, I show that under conditions of epistemic injustice, different strategies of reading and knowledge production may be required to illuminate aspects of social reality that are too often concealed by dominant narratives. 4 List of abbreviations and acronyms ANC African National Congress (of South Africa) AIDS Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome ARVs Antiretroviral drugs ART Antiretroviral therapy AU African Union CMC Computer Mediated Communication DA Democratic Alliance EFF Economic Freedom Fighters GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme HAART Highly active antiretroviral therapy HIV Human Immunodeficiency Virus HSRC Human Sciences Research Council IDU Injection Drug Use IEC Independent Electoral Commission MCC [South Africa’s] Medicines Control Council MSF Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) MSM Men seeking Sex with Men MTCT Mother-to-Child Transmission (of HIV) NACOSA Networking HIV/AIDS Community of South Africa NAP National AIDS Plan NEC National Executive Committee (of the ANC) NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development NGO Non-Governmental Organisation 5 NIH National Institutes of Health NP [Afrikaners] National Party PACHA Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS PEPFAR The President [of the United States]’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief PLWHA Persons living with HIV/AIDS PMTCT Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission PrEP Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis medication RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme SADC Southern African Development Community SAHO South African History Online SAMJ South African Medical Journal SANAC South African National