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Reviews and Profiles

Professor Malegapuru William Makgoba – Johannesburg launch Thursday - 7 April 2005

Willemien Brummer - Die Burger - 8 April 2005

Johannes de Villiers - Die Burger - 9 April 2005

M.E. Coetzee - Volksblad - 20 April 2005

Michele Magwood - Sunday Times - 24 April 2005

Josef Talotta - Business Day - 29 April 2005

Loren Anthony - Sunday Times Lifestyle - 1 May 2005

Sharon Dell - Natal Witness - 10 May 2005

Justice Carole Lewis – Bloemfontein launch – 10 May 2005

Tim Trengove Jones - Business Day - 11 May 2005

Charles Leonard - Popmatters - 20 May 2005

William Saunderson-Meyer - Natal Witness - 21 May 2005

Werani Chirambo - Bonela Guardian, vol 2, issue 2 - June 2005

Luiz DeBarros - Mambo Online - 7 June 2005

Johnny Steinberg - Business Day - July 11 2005

The Economist, Thursday 13 July 2005 - (c) The Economist Newspaper Ltd, London, 2005

Tina van Rensburg - Die Beeld - 29 August 2005

Justice Kirby - (2005) 79 Australian Law Journal 795 - September 2005

Positive Nation, London, Issue 115 - September 2005

TNT Magazine, September 2005

Alina Oswald - Arts & Understanding - December 2005

Gwen Podbrey Spotlight: Books, True Love - January 2006

Angela Muvumba - University of Cape Town’s Centre for Conflict Resolution (Seminar on Witness to AIDS) - 7 February 2006

Oxford Today review by Martin Meredith, Hilary Term - 2006

iThemba Newsletter - October 2006

Liz Gitonga - Sunday Nation, KENYA – 19 November 2006

To all appearances, Edwin Cameron is a conventionally successful lawyer.  He grew up one of the privileged ‘whites’ in apartheid South Africa .  He attended a top high school in Pretoria .  From university he was elected a Rhodes Scholar and spent three years at Oxford .  He returned to a successful commercial practice at the South African Bar.  He was offended by things he saw and left the Bar to teach law at the famous Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg .  He also practised public law.  Like other leaders of the movement for freedom and equality in his country, he appeared in important court challenges against the regime.  He was criticised by the Minister of Justice in 1987 for unprofessional conduct in questioning some judicial decisions.  But in those days, that was a badge of honour.

When Nelson Mandela assumed office as President in April 1994, and a new Constitution was introduced, Cameron was quickly recognised.  He was nominated to the High Court in December 1994.  Later, he came under close consideration for a vacancy in the Constitutional Court .  He was passed over on grounds (with which agreed) of assuring a better racial mix in the South African judiciary.  Soon he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeals (formerly the Appellate Division), the judicial post he still holds.  This is the final court for all non-constitutional appeals in South Africa .  In the English speaking world it is a famous court.  Justice Cameron is a leading member of it.  His opinions are widely admired for their technical skill, mixed with a compassion learned from the apartheid experience.

Yet despite these externalities, Edwin Cameron is no conventional judge.  This book, a mixture of memoir and action statement, is proof of his sharp intellect, searing honesty, sensitivity and passion for justice.  That passion still burns more than a decade since apartheid was interred.  Now Cameron has a new concern.  It is AIDS.  And for him, it is not just a matter of theory.  It is a personal reality.  Edwin Cameron is a judge living with HIV. 

Justice Cameron would not be living today but for his access to the antiretroviral treatment that changed his life and gave him a “second chance”.  His knowledge that this is so fires him up to be a witness to AIDS for the whole of Africa and, indeed, the world.  In this role he is particularly important.  As he points out, he is still the only senior public officer holder in his country to be open about his HIV status.  Come to think of it, there are few others in Africa or elsewhere who have taken the same step:  opening up about themselves.  Being an example.  This book takes us on his journey to that step.  For anyone who wants to know what HIV/AIDS is really like, on a personal level, this book is compulsory reading.

Witness to AIDS does not follow the conventional form of an autobiography.  It is like an Ingmar Bergmann film.  It has a structure; but it is full of flashbacks and vivid stories as this distinguished judge explains how he learned of his condition and what it meant for him, his life and work. 

The first chapter begins with the day in October 1997 when he found that he could no longer climb the stairs from the judges’ common room in the High Court in Johannesburg to his chambers two floors above.  He knew that this was a bad sign.  In fact, it was a sign that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that he had acquired at Easter in 1985 had progressed to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).  He also knew that, in Africa, the mean survival of people manifesting AIDS was between 30 and 36 months.  It was a cause for panic. 

Fortunately, Cameron had access to the best medical care.  He scanned the literature and knew that in the United States , in July 1996, Dr David Ho had reported the remarkable capacity of a combination of three drugs to stop the virus in its tracks, at least in many patients.  So the race began for him to get access to the new treatment.  It cost him $US600 a month.  This was a third of his after tax earnings as a judge.  Most people in South Africa could only dream of such treatment.  It was out of their reach - and the government did nothing to make it available.

Edwin Cameron tells the story of the routine cases he was hearing in court at the very time when he was struggling to survive.  Poets might write movingly about impending death.  But for him, “reality is less poetic.  … It was fetid, frightening, intrusive, oppressive.  Too often I had seen friends and comrades die of AIDS.  Had seen how day by day, week by week, they would redefine wellness, adjusting it downwards each time but never losing its goal, no matter how wasted, disabled or physically dysfunctional they became.  Getting better always seems to remain attainable, even when, from the outside, it was plain that it no longer was”.  Unless he could get the new therapies, this was the journey ahead of Edwin Cameron.

But he did secure the new drugs.  And when they came “there was only one word for it.  It was glorious.  The drugs were working.  I could feel that I was getting healthy again.  I knew that I would be well again.  That, in turn, spurred my inner confidence.  Psychological well being had a pronounced psychic effect.  If the drugs were working, the virus was no longer multiplying within me”.

There are few better descriptions of what it is like to be living with AIDS and to gain access to the new drugs and to new hope.  Andrew Sullivan’s essay “When Plagues End” in his book Love Undetectable (Vintage, 1999) is a rival.  But Cameron tells it as it is.  His story helps to explain the feelings evident in the chapters that follow.

The second chapter describes the way the author learned of his original diagnosis in 1986 and how HIV gradually took its toll on him:

“AIDS is smell and feel - of sweat and grime, disintegration, excrement, waste.  Human waste.  AIDS is feeling - painful sharp tingling burning heavy dull weakening wasting enervating … bereaving.  AIDS is fear.  It is breathless and nameless”.

Cameron describes the way he went about his daily work whilst the horrifying reality was always close.  He does not spare himself:

“I was tainted, soiled, polluted.  My blood and body were fouled with the most conspicuously vile infection known to recent human history”.

He tells of the funerals he attended and the violence reported in the African media against hapless victims in the townships.  Fear was visited on the heads of victims as if removing them from sight would make AIDS go away.  The stigma that stubbornly clings to HIV throughout Africa, and the world, are described through the author’s personal experience and the sad cases that he recounts from the lives of people who had no access to the therapies that, at that moment, were keeping him from death.

This leads Cameron to the third chapter addressed to “Race, sex and death in Africa”.  He gives the statistics of sero-conversions throughout the continent, ironically peaking in the newly blessed South Africa with its fine infrastructure and independent courts.  Between 4 and 5 million of his fellow citizens were in the same boat as he. 

But what was different about South Africa was the grip that “dissident” scientists secured upon the mind of Thabo Mbeke - the brilliant young economist and freedom fighter who succeeded Nelson Mandela to the presidency.  For many dissidents, the cause of AIDS was poverty and the environment.  Talk of a virus was just an international conspiracy of bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and those who would denigrate Africans as “sex mad fiends”. 

This introduction is a prelude to the fourth chapter on the “Tragedy of AIDS Denialism”.  Here, Cameron tries to explain the apparent conversion of Mbeke to the views of a small coterie of “denialists” whose message the president was all too glad to hear.  At about this time, Cameron was asked to give a lecture at the International Conference on AIDS held in Durban in 2000.  The lecture honoured Jonathan Mann, the brilliant first Director of the United Nations response to AIDS.  Cameron took the opportunity to express his grief and sense of bitter frustration that, in the new country for which he had fought, the leaders were not facing the reality of AIDS.  He felt that he was living proof of the power of the new therapies.  But because they depended on the hypothesis of HIV and were expensive, the denial meant that millions were bereft of drugs that could save lives and infuse the living with new quality of life.

So Edwin Cameron reaches his fifth chapter “A Judge is Called to Witness”.  He begins this with a description of his attempts to see Mandela and de Klerk in the early days of the new government.  Soon the denials took hold of the administration, particularly after President Mbeke was sworn into office. 

At about this time, Edwin Cameron gave a lecture to the General Council of the Bar in London .  His visit to England coincided with the trial of David Irving’s defamation action based on his holocaust denial.  Cameron saw a parallel in the stubborn refusal of intelligent people to face evidence, reality and truth.  He said so both in London and in South Africa .  It was then that he suffered the second attack by a Minister of Justice in ten years.  This time it was the Minister in the new South Africa . He was castigated for speaking out as a judge.  Yet he felt a need to do so, drawing on his personal knowledge and experience.  It was a very uncomfortable time for him.  He outlines the reasons why judges should generally not become involved, beyond court necessities, in matters that put them at public odds with politicians.  He holds the view that it should not be done except for “compelling justification”.  Yet Cameron knew enough of the silence of the German judges during the Nazi Reich and the French judges during Vichy .  People, including no doubt some lawyers, may be critical of his stand.  But this book leaves one in no doubt that he agonised about his duty and felt obliged to speak in defence of the voiceless.

Meantime, in South Africa , important decisions had been delivered by the Constitutional Court .  One concerned discrimination by the national air carrier on grounds of HIV status immaterial to work capacity.  Another, of profound importance, concerned the right of new born babies and their mothers to access nevirapine, one of the antiretrovirals that, for less than a dollar, can radically reduce mother to child transmission of HIV if administered immediately before and following birth. 

Eventually, even Mbeke seemed to buckle under the weight of world-wide scientific opinion.  Five thousands of the world’s leading scientists criticised the dissidents and told the President that the established link between HIV and AIDS was “clear cut and unambiguous”.  In 2004, Mbeke promised “treatment” for South Africans living with HIV/AIDS by 2005.  As Cameron points out, the promise was not accompanied by recantation.  Nor were “antiretrovirals” mentioned.  Full delivery on the promise has still to be attained.  For Cameron, this has been a most painful experience amidst the new found freedoms of the country he loves and serves as a judge.

There follow two excellent chapters, written by the author with Nathan Geffen on the technical, but important, questions of access to therapy in a world of patents that prop up the prices of essential drugs.  Edwin Cameron asks how can the poor of Africa gain access to the drugs that offered him a glorious and virtually immediate relief from the downward spiral into the vortex of AIDS.  Court decisions, international agreements and political action at home are offered as the solution.  But for 20 million people living with HIV/AIDS in developing countries, especially Africa, change is happening too slowly and reluctantly to save many lives.

Cameron faces candidly the most acute policy problem now arising in HIV policy.  It has a legal element.  This is whether, in the context of available therapies, routine testing should be introduced to channel patients with HIV quickly to access to the new drugs.  Many are critical of this strategy, fearful that the promise of drugs will be unfulfilled and the stigma of positive status all too real.  On the other hand, proponents suggest that once HIV becomes a treatable condition, much of the stigma will disappear.  Practical questions such as the assured provision of therapies and monitoring their effectiveness in countries of abject poverty fuel the fears of the cautious. 

Edwin Cameron, knowing how the antiretrovirals can restore life, concludes, as I would, that a new strategy is needed.  So long as this strategy delivers the lifesaving drugs to millions, a strategy of routine testing with counselling and the right to opt out, seem to be the way to go.  Certainly, our world cannot continue to tolerate 3 million AIDS deaths a year.  Contrast that figure with the deaths from global terrorism of which so much is written and said.  Compare the energy and capital poured into that fight.  Then it is realised that it is not just President Mbeke who has failed to give proper leadership to the world in the face of the most grievous human pandemic since the European plague of the fourteenth century.

The last chapter in the book begins with the shocking story of the death of the author’s sister Laura, killed in a cycling accident when she was eleven and he was seven.  He recounts the funeral where his father was brought from prison to sit in the back row, a desolate man.  This is typical of Edwin Cameron.  Truly his is a book of warts and all.  Everything is revealed.  His parents’ separation.  The sadness and isolation of his childhood in an institution for disadvantaged children.  The “single and incautious episode” that led to his infection with HIV.  The failure of a love affair.  The imprisonment of his father.  It is as if Edwin Cameron is crying out to Africa: ‘In the name of God, and in the face of AIDS, be honest.  It is, after all, just a virus.  It is an enemy of the whole human family.  We will never overcome it if we are torn by shame, fear and stigma.  Science will triumph.  But we need to be honest to ourselves and to each other’.

Edwin Cameron’s honesty shines through every page of this book.  When he was considered for the Constitutional Court of South Africa, he underwent an interview in a town hall, as is now the procedure for judicial appointment in that country.  He disclosed not only his homosexuality (a matter of little import, expressly protected in the Constitution of South Africa).  But he also told the selectors of his HIV status.  It was a public declaration the like of which had not occurred before or since.  He felt that total honesty was required for the judiciary - and for South Africa . 

So far, Edwin Cameron’s example has not been copied elsewhere.  But it sets the goal standard.  It gives his words in this book a special integrity.  Perhaps it is the reason why, even after Cameron criticised him at the Durban AIDS conference, Mbeke proceeded to confirm him as a judge of the Court of Appeal.  Perhaps it is why Nelson Mandela, new convert to the struggle against HIV/AIDS in Africa, has called Edwin Cameron “one of South Africa ’s new heroes”.

This is an unusual book.  It will be a long time before another judge writes a personal book on the HIV/AIDS experience.  I doubt that I will live to read another such a book.  Yet we must hope that, by Edwin Cameron’s experience, candidly told, the next such book will reveal how new drugs and therapies were developed which helped to conquer this latest epidemic.  And how truth and political courage eventually secured action for the poorest of the poor, who are in the front line of death and suffering from AIDS, especially in the developing world, particularly in Africa.

IN HIS book, Wit­ness to AIDS, Edwin Cameron tells a ghastly story about Botswana . Knowing that up to a third of its population had HIV or AIDS, and that about 100 000 people were in ur­gent need of drugs, in 2001 Botswana's government began to offer free anti-retroviral treatment to every citizen with AIDS. Yet, by late 2003, only 15 000 people had appeared at public health facilities for free medication. Why?

"Stigma," is Cameron's answer. "People are too scared — too ashamed — to come forward and claim what their government is now affording them: the right to stay alive."

Indeed, he says, "in some horrifically constrained sense, they are 'choosing' to die, rather than face the stigma of AIDS and find treatment".

Later in the book, Cameron tells of his gardener, to whom he gives the pseudonym Gladwell. Gladwell is chronically ill. He says he has tubercu­losis, and is on pre­scribed medication, but his condition deteriorates.

Cameron   asks him if he has had an HIV test. "I have," Gladwell replies. "It was clear." His health keeps declining, and Cameron keeps urging him to have a test: he still says he is "clear".

Gladwell knows that Cameron himself is HIV-positive, knows that antiretrovirals have saved Cameron's life. He returns to his family in Zim­babwe . Five weeks later he is dead.

In retrospect, Cameron chastises himself: "Although I thought that I

was offering him help, and thereby the choice of living, in Gladwell's mind he had no choice. The stigma associated with AIDS left him no choice...

"I should have made him an ap­pointment with  Dr  Johnson," Cameron writes. "I should have told him I was leaving for Dr Johnson in 10 minutes. I should have told him he was free not to come. But I was going and I wanted him to come — I wanted him in the passenger seat of my car.

"I should have told him that my doctor would diagnose, and if neces­sary treat him, if it was AIDS. And that I would help him deal with his fears and loneliness if it was."

Cameron's identification with Gladwell, and the debt he feels he owes him, is striking. For Cameron tells us that he too might have died of stigma and fear; he too lived for a long time with secret shame.

There but for the grace of God, Cameron was Gladwell; his identifica­tion with his former employee is thick, complicated, and deeply personal.

Why do people die, not from a so­matic disease, but from their relation to it? Why do people die of stigma and fear? It is a huge, perhaps impossible, question, and Cameron can be forgiv­en for taking only a gentle stab at it.

But Witness to AIDS is a book of advocacy, and Cameron does have a good deal to say about what this spec­tacle means for human agency and solidarity.

People dying of stigma, he sug­gests, are no longer autonomous agents invested with the freedom to choose (except "in some horrifically constrained sense"), for they have lost their connection to their most vital self-interest, that of staying alive.

But that self-interest still exists, even if its bearer has lost sight of it, and it is thus incumbent upon us to substitute for it, to steer the sufferer to the choices he would have made had he been free to choose.

Cameron is not suggesting that we force-feed drugs to the ill. He is sug­gesting that at the global level of pub­lic health policy, we do what Cameron, at the micro level, imagined he ought to have done for Gladwell; to lead him, quite assertively, to the conditions of his own survival.

Cameron's imagined relationship with Gladwell also seems to serve as a model for the sort of human solidarity he is talking about. He is suggesting that we lend our own capacity to live to those dying of stigma, that the ca­pacity to live is, in a sense, a resource to be shared.

It is a strongly communitarian and, indeed, a moderately illiberal, posi­tion. And it is striking for being made in SA, in which the bonds of social sol­idarity, measured by such indicators as our rates of murder and incarcer­ation, are alarmingly thin. Indeed, our national response to AIDS — ambiva­lent, anxious, wounded and aggres­sive — is another symptom of the frailty of the bonds that bind us.

Dealing as it does with life and death, Cameron's book is among the most substantial contributions to the concepts of national identity, com­munity and solidarity we have had in 11 years.

Force of the True
In his published memoir, Judge Edwin Cameron’s clear authoritative voice cuts a path between the silence and panic of the Aids pandemic, writes Loren Anthony

"‘I emphasised that I had been able to choose to make my statement because ‘I am not dying of Aids. I am living with Aids.’ The phrase caught on’"

THERE are ways of talking about this disease, Aids. Pieter-Dirk Uys, for instance, uses a humour that abrades, and there’s a truth in that. Local poets do it differently, wrenching out words about deadly love. Politicians in South Africa barely mention the Aids pandemic. Their silence speaks volumes, meaning nothing or anything at all. But Edwin Cameron, Justice of the Supreme Court of Appeal, has found his voice, and it is clear and principled, certain and reliable.

‘I very carefully calculated my own voice,’ says Cameron. ‘In this epidemic of so many millions, there are so few voices. In affluent North America and Western Europe, you have these loud, expressive voices. In Africa it’s different. Poverty, stigma and the inhibition of discrimination, have muted the response. But I deliberately set out to speak at a very personal level, to find the hearts of a wide range of people.’

There’s a relief in this. Cameron’s voice quickly negotiates the unturned terrain between the silence and the panic. It’s a compassionate voice that brings some balance to the shrill advocacy and insensate denial still raging around Aids.

And it’s a voice that is authenticated by one simple fact: Cameron has the virus in his body. It’s this one somatic fact that immediately links Cameron, the judge, to Gladwell, the gardener; that connects him to countless others ‘ unspeakably poor and socially marginalised ‘ who are living with HIV/Aids in South Africa , and dying unnecessarily from it.

You might, at this point, question that connection as tenuous and presumptuous. You might ask how a well-groomed, highly educated, gay, affluent white man can arrogate to himself the right of speaking for the destitute and the dying. But there’s a curious twist to Cameron’s story: he comes from a background of poverty and destitution. He grew up in a children’s home in the Eastern Cape .

Cameron was poor, yes, but he was also white. His white skin, so brutishly reified by the apartheid government, delivered him into the rarefied world of a top boys? school in Pretoria. This fact has never left him. ?It is the central part of my social and political consciousness. I certainly had talents, but I was able to express and build on those talents because I was white. A poor white kid could capitalise on his gifts in the 1960s and 1970s because of the privileges extended to whites.?

The word ?privilege? has lodged itself in Cameron?s psyche. It is a double-edged, sharp-bladed thing, cutting through the axis of having and not having, scoring both the included and the excluded.

In 1979, back from a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Cameron delivered a valedictory address to his former school. (At 26, he was the youngest ever speaker at a Pretoria Boys High School valedictory service.) Privilege, he said, meant ?learning something about compassion and tolerance and humility.?

Cameron spoke about the difficulty of learning these things on an empty stomach, with inadequate facilities or under-qualified teachers, or without a school to study in at all. Cameron spoke from both sides of the line, from the margins and the centre, and it is in this liminal position that his sense of social justice is rooted.

In 1970, while in matric, Cameron wrote a letter to anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain, inviting him to pen a story on the sports boycott for the school magazine Cameron edited. ?We published the story on the front page,? he recalls, ?but I must also say, after matric, when I went to Stellenbosch University, I dropped a lot of that angry commitment to justice, and became much more compliant.?

His compliance was short-lived. After graduation, Cameron quickly eschewed a private legal practice, and in 1988 he helped argue an appeal against the death sentences imposed on the Sharpeville Six. Although the legal challenge failed, the international outcry, partly fuelled by Cameron?s out-of-court advocacy, saved the six.

Cameron was poor, yes, but he was also white. His white skin, so brutishly reified by the apartheid government, delivered him into the rarefied world of a top boys’ school in Pretoria . This fact has never left him. ‘It is the central part of my social and political consciousness. I certainly had talents, but I was able to express and build on those talents because I was white. A poor white kid could capitalise on his gifts in the 1960s and 1970s because of the privileges extended to whites.’

The word ‘privilege’ has lodged itself in Cameron’s psyche. It is a double-edged, sharp-bladed thing, cutting through the axis of having and not having, scoring both the included and the excluded.

In 1979, back from a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford , Cameron delivered a valedictory address to his former school. (At 26, he was the youngest ever speaker at a Pretoria Boys High School valedictory service.) Privilege, he said, meant ‘learning something about compassion and tolerance and humility.’

Cameron spoke about the difficulty of learning these things on an empty stomach, with inadequate facilities or under-qualified teachers, or without a school to study in at all. Cameron spoke from both sides of the line, from the margins and the centre, and it is in this liminal position that his sense of social justice is rooted.

In 1970, while in matric, Cameron wrote a letter to anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain, inviting him to pen a story on the sports boycott for the school magazine Cameron edited. ‘We published the story on the front page,’ he recalls, ‘but I must also say, after matric, when I went to Stellenbosch University , I dropped a lot of that angry commitment to justice, and became much more compliant.’

His compliance was short-lived. After graduation, Cameron quickly eschewed a private legal practice, and in 1988 he helped argue an appeal against the death sentences imposed on the Sharpeville Six. Although the legal challenge failed, the international outcry, partly fuelled by Cameron’s out-of-court advocacy, saved the six.

Cameron is inordinately modest about his role as a human-rights lawyer, as a judge, as a patron of children?s homes and Aids shelters, and as an activist. (Nelson Mandela forewords the book and calls Cameron a hero.) ?I don?t deserve any glory. There is no straight line, no long-standing, honourable tradition of activism. Anyone who tries to look back and see a morally unblotted life, a morally unambiguous life, is attempting the impossible.?

And yet it?s hard not to create such a smooth linear narrative for Cameron. From his early Oxford days, Cameron?s political awareness was acute. ?Living in England in the mid-1970s under a Labour government, I realised how governmental power worked and that the way in which it was wielded made a huge difference in ordinary lives. That?s where my commitment began.?

From there, Cameron?s CV reads like a spin-doctor?s dream. But subtending the dream, subtending the politically cogent, ethically engaged activities of his professional life were the more tortuous peripeteia of his private life. In 1985, after a single unguarded sexual encounter, Cameron contracted the virus. As Cameron?s expertise and advocacy on Aids policy grew, his own inner silence thickened.

By 1997 Cameron realised he was dying of Aids and needed treatment. His salary enabled him to purchase life-saving anti-retrovirals for a staggering R4000 a month, almost half his salary at the time. Cameron knew that while he popped his pills twice daily, thousands of others couldn?t afford them. Here was the double-edge of privilege again, this time cutting along the differential of death and life. Cameron knew then that access to treatment lay at the dark heart of the Aids debate.

In the South African landscape, there were two rigid barriers to treatment: official government denialism around Aids, and the patent (intellectual property) laws and over-pricing of the pharmaceutical industry. Faced with this intransigence, Cameron decided that, as an individual and as a judge, it was no longer morally tenable to keep quiet. ?Surely,? he writes, ?if I started speaking as someone living with Aids, I would do so with greater moral force, more unchecked energy, better clarity about what had to be done.?

Cameron is inordinately modest about his role as a human-rights lawyer, as a judge, as a patron of children’s homes and Aids shelters, and as an activist. (Nelson Mandela forewords the book and calls Cameron a hero.) ‘I don’t deserve any glory. There is no straight line, no long-standing, honourable tradition of activism. Anyone who tries to look back and see a morally unblotted life, a morally unambiguous life, is attempting the impossible.’

And yet it’s hard not to create such a smooth linear narrative for Cameron. From his early Oxford days, Cameron’s political awareness was acute. ‘Living in England in the mid-1970s under a Labour government, I realised how governmental power worked and that the way in which it was wielded made a huge difference in ordinary lives. That’s where my commitment began.’

From there, Cameron’s CV reads like a spin-doctor’s dream. But subtending the dream, subtending the politically cogent, ethically engaged activities of his professional life were the more tortuous peripeteia of his private life. In 1985, after a single unguarded sexual encounter, Cameron contracted the virus. As Cameron’s expertise and advocacy on Aids policy grew, his own inner silence thickened.

By 1997 Cameron realised he was dying of Aids and needed treatment. His salary enabled him to purchase life-saving anti-retrovirals for a staggering R4000 a month, almost half his salary at the time. Cameron knew that while he popped his pills twice daily, thousands of others couldn’t afford them. Here was the double-edge of privilege again, this time cutting along the differential of death and life. Cameron knew then that access to treatment lay at the dark heart of the Aids debate.

In the South African landscape, there were two rigid barriers to treatment: official government denialism around Aids, and the patent (intellectual property) laws and over-pricing of the pharmaceutical industry. Faced with this intransigence, Cameron decided that, as an individual and as a judge, it was no longer morally tenable to keep quiet. ‘Surely,’ he writes, ‘if I started speaking as someone living with Aids, I would do so with greater moral force, more unchecked energy, better clarity about what had to be done.’

In 1999, at his public statement to the Judicial Service Commission of the Constitutional Court, Cameron announced his HIV status. He was unprepared for the response: ?They seemed to embrace me, respectfully, supportively, even ardently. I emphasised that I had been able to choose to make my statement because ?I am not dying of Aids. I am living with Aids?. The phrase caught on.?

What did not catch on, sadly, tragically, was disclosure from other African leaders. To date, Cameron is the only person in public office in Africa who has disclosed his HIV status. The silence, Cameron knows, is due to the suasive seal of stigma.

To de-mythologise and normalise the illness, to unfreeze the static thrall of stigma, Cameron began to write. And he writes in two ways: firstly, he makes the story personal, very personal ? so personal that there are painfully candid pictures of himself and his loved ones at the centre of the book.

It is a small and precious album, but it is entrusted to the reader because Cameron wants to offer proof of a life lived and a disease survived. That is what witnesses do ? they offer up themselves as evidence.

Cameron makes it personal by not only telling his own story, but by respectfully telling the stories of others. He rightly intuits the importance of individual narratives. It is through personal testimony that the debate takes on its flesh, its soul. Hazel Tau, Christopher and Nontsikelelo Moraka, Gugu Dlamini and Gladwell, through lack of access to treatment, have died or almost died of this disease. By telling their stories, Cameron connects the voices, hooking the reader into the real, culling empathy and helping to challenge indifference. What Cameron does is evoke compassion where none had existed before.

Secondly, in writing, Cameron makes it simple. He takes incredibly complex issues like epidemio-logy, patent laws and Aids denialism, and makes them accessible. ?I didn?t want to write for the Aids cognoscenti, for academics and highbrow preoccupations,? says Cameron. ?Since the launch of the book, I?m amazed at how many responses have been about how readable and understandable the book is, how complex issues have been explicated.? With immense clarity and honesty, he has written the book that needed to be written, that did not yet exist in the sluggish canon of healing, helpful, empowering Aids literature.

In 1999, at his public statement to the Judicial Service Commission of the Constitutional Court , Cameron announced his HIV status. He was unprepared for the response: ‘They seemed to embrace me, respectfully, supportively, even ardently. I emphasised that I had been able to choose to make my statement because ‘I am not dying of Aids. I am living with Aids’. The phrase caught on.’

What did not catch on, sadly, tragically, was disclosure from other African leaders. To date, Cameron is the only person in public office in Africa who has disclosed his HIV status. The silence, Cameron knows, is due to the suasive seal of stigma.

To de-mythologise and normalise the illness, to unfreeze the static thrall of stigma, Cameron began to write. And he writes in two ways: firstly, he makes the story personal, very personal ‘ so personal that there are painfully candid pictures of himself and his loved ones at the centre of the book.

It is a small and precious album, but it is entrusted to the reader because Cameron wants to offer proof of a life lived and a disease survived. That is what witnesses do ‘ they offer up themselves as evidence.

Cameron makes it personal by not only telling his own story, but by respectfully telling the stories of others. He rightly intuits the importance of individual narratives. It is through personal testimony that the debate takes on its flesh, its soul. Hazel Tau, Christopher and Nontsikelelo Moraka, Gugu Dlamini and Gladwell, through lack of access to treatment, have died or almost died of this disease. By telling their stories, Cameron connects the voices, hooking the reader into the real, culling empathy and helping to challenge indifference. What Cameron does is evoke compassion where none had existed before.

Secondly, in writing, Cameron makes it simple. He takes incredibly complex issues like epidemio-logy, patent laws and Aids denialism, and makes them accessible. ‘I didn’t want to write for the Aids cognoscenti, for academics and highbrow preoccupations,’ says Cameron. ‘Since the launch of the book, I’m amazed at how many responses have been about how readable and understandable the book is, how complex issues have been explicated.’ With immense clarity and honesty, he has written the book that needed to be written, that did not yet exist in the sluggish canon of healing, helpful, empowering Aids literature.

In the face of denialism and silence and absence, Cameron?s openness and transparency, his modulated, truthful evocations are joyous. In another context, Umberto Eco has spoken of the Force of the False ? those clear moments in history when groups of people tend to believe in false knowledge.

Sometimes this may be serendipitous, leading to good fortune but, most often, this is dangerous and self-limiting. In many ways, the government?s obdurate denialism is an example of this. In contrast, I like to think Cameron represents the Force of the True ? and this force is shiny and tolerant, bright and compassionate, and hopeful.

?Edwin Cameron: Witness to AIDS is published by Tafelberg, R125


Laurice Taitz
Editor
Sunday Times Lifestyle




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In the face of denialism and silence and absence, Cameron’s openness and transparency, his modulated, truthful evocations are joyous. In another context, Umberto Eco has spoken of the Force of the False ‘ those clear moments in history when groups of people tend to believe in false knowledge.

Sometimes this may be serendipitous, leading to good fortune but, most often, this is dangerous and self-limiting. In many ways, the government’s obdurate denialism is an example of this. In contrast, I like to think Cameron represents the Force of the True ‘ and this force is shiny and tolerant, bright and compassionate, and hopeful.

I came upon Edwin Cameron’s remarkable book, Witness to AIDS just as our project on HIV/AIDS and security was beginning. Witness offers a coherent and enlightened view of the many debates about HIV and AIDS, but it also reminded me of something Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Literature Prize laureate, said in her Nobel lecture in 1993: 

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers… Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge…

Witness to AIDS, which is part memoir and partly an instruction in the recent history of HIV/AIDS in South Africa , indeed, surges toward knowledge. The book illuminates the many contradictions, tragedies and life-affirming experiences of living with and being affected by HIV/AIDS.  Witness also raises troubling yet necessary questions about two interior cores of our fragile human consciousness: sex and death. Because it’s a disease, which is contracted through sexual intercourse, it is still a great and unfortunate source of shame. Our fears about sex, and our as yet underdeveloped capacity to live without shame influence the way we respond to HIV/AIDS.  The desperate need to apportion blame is the very backbone of stigma.

I want to focus my comments on four issues presented in the book as critical for living with, and responding to HIV/AIDS.  As Edwin Cameron put it in his public disclosure: the choice to speak out indeed the ‘freedom’ to live openly as an HIV positive person with its attendant liberation from secrecy was available to him for very particular reasons:  1) because he had a secure job; 2) support from loved ones, friends and colleagues; and 3) access to medical care and treatment.  

Let me begin with the ‘supportive family and community’.  In a ‘jovial, nearly festive atmosphere’, Edwin Cameron took his first ARV pills sitting with a group of close friends on a warm summer evening. This image is astonishing. It conjures up home, stability, certainty and companionship. It reminded me of Walt Whitman’s lines:

            There is something in staying close to men and women and

Looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that

pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

However, for many people, taking ARVs remains enshrouded in secrecy and shame.  How many people today are quietly taking their medicines in hiding from their husbands, wives, mothers, children, pastors, friends, co-workers, lest the knowledge of their HIV status leads to divorce, dismissal from work, moral condemnation, and a bleak exile from the circle of people that are home.

And yet, I don’t know of a single person on ARVs who has done it without the safety net provided by people who love them. How could they? Indeed, family and support is so important to survival that the vast majority of treatment programmes insist that patients have a ‘treatment’ buddy to walk the path with you.

And what of ‘work and income’?  The author, like so many people, has had to worry about the cost of the drugs that will sustain him. Concerned about the exorbitant cost of AIDS treatment, and the fact that the medical scheme for judges and members of parliament limited AIDS benefits to R800 a year, especially since other chronic ailments such as high blood pressure had a cap of R10000, the author had approached a judicial colleague in Cape Town and expressed his concerns about the discriminatory policy.  However, despite promises to review the AIDS cap, the limit stayed at R800.  Eventually, when he was ill, but with the new ARVs coursing through him, Justice Cameron wrote an assertive letter noting the inherent discrimination in the AIDS cap, copied to the then judge-president and eventually, the AIDS cap was removed. 

Later, when Edwin Cameron disclosed his HIV status, it was before a Constitutional Court commission, effectively in a job interview, it was with some trepidation – but resulted in liberation.  The response has been largely positive, empowering, and supportive. Work has continued. Income has not been curtailed.  The impression one has at first is that the right thing happened – a happy conclusion is possible.

However, upon further reflection, what stands out most profoundly is a simple fact: the author knew his rights. Well, one hope’s he would – he is a Judge after all. But the argument is there nonetheless. One of the 1998 International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights is that States should implement and support legal support services that will educate people affected by HIV/AIDS about their rights.  Witness affirms this guideline; one comes away with the breathless and desperate need to see to it that more people know their rights, and are empowered to fight for those rights. 

This brings me to ‘decent healthcare’.  Governments have been slow to strengthen their own national health structures. The African Union Commission reported to the Heads of State in 2005 that only 3 in 10 Africans have regular access to essential medicines; and only 1.3 percent of the world’s health workforce while it suffers 25 percent of the world’s disease burden[1] – with underdeveloped African countries subsidizing the West by an estimated $500 million a year through the migration of health workers.[2]   Condom supply is around 3 condoms per year per potential user.  In its 2003 report on health services, the World Health Organization stated that:

“The ministry of health of Botswana estimated that achieving universal coverage of antiretroviral treatment alone would require doubling the current nurse workforce, tripling the number of physicians, and quintupling the number of pharmacists…Lesotho reported the public sector nurse vacancy rate at 48% in 1998, and Malawi at 50% in 2001.” [3]

It is no wonder that so few South Africans have access to ARVs through government health clinics and hospitals.[4] And this is not a tangential issue – weak or non-existent health infrastructure and social services, over nearly half a century, have fuelled the pandemic – and Africa’s overall poor health.   As Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside have noted, Africa has experienced a state of ‘abnormal normality’ that has fed the growth of HIV/AIDS. [5] A recent report from Christian Aid estimates that Africa has ‘lost $ 272 billion in the past 20 years from being forced to promote trade liberalisation as the price for receiving World Bank loans and debt relief’. [6] In terms of the apartheid regime, it undoubtedly had very little interest in the well-being of all South Africans.  But it is still shocking that even today in most of the world’s developing countries, foreign aid covers over half of the costs of healthcare. [7]   I wonder how we are able to live as ‘empowered citizens’ under these circumstances. Theories of behaviour change show that if people feel trapped in their socio-economic circumstances, they are less likely to feel a personal motivation or sense of efficacy for change. [8] This lack of social infrastructure is a unique vehicle for disease and ignorance.        

But as with all things, HIV/AIDS, the explanations for its causes, the prescriptions for its cure, there are further contradictions.  Witness presents a clear and precise final word which is part of the great contradiction: if everyone had food, housing, water, if gender relations were equal, if all the environmental and social forces were controlled to ‘prevent’ HIV transmission and keep people healthy after they contracted the virus, a medical approach would still be necessary and essential. Let us just imagine utopia – perfect peace and prosperity. But millions of people would still have sex – and without a protective barrier such as a condom they would contract HIV. Millions more would still get sick (the author did) and die without antiretroviral treatment.  AIDS denialists refuse to recognise this. Without the help of medical microbiology, without evidence-based science, the pandemic cannot be contained.

However, socio-economic or cultural position does not predict adherence to an AIDS drug treatment regimen. Despite the difficulties inherent in resource-poor settings, where access to clean drinking water, food, transportation to health clinics (or the availability of health professionals and facilities) is poor, despite these constraints, people can and do take their medicines. Witness bears testimony to this. The racist and demeaning comment that Africans are too illiterate or primitive to adhere to treatment regimens is more denial.   The evidence is around us in the work of Paul Farmer and Partners for Health in Haiti ; it is at the ‘Doctors without Borders/Medecin Sans Frontier’ ARV programme in Khayelitsha, and in the very lives of people throughout the continent who adhere to treatment regimens and like the Biblical Lazarus, rise from the bed of death. So, indeed at the centre of the book is this simple fact: that some people live because they have access to life-saving AIDS treatment, and others do not.

Before I finish, one last observation as a gesture of gratitude to the author, borrowed from Professor Morrison again, but relevant to the importance of writing about HIV/AIDS, and more importantly the importance of bringing forth more books like Edwin Cameron’s Witness to AIDS

[6] Mark, C, “Commentary: How the G8 Lied to the World on Aid:  The Truth about Gleneagles Puts a Cloud  Over the New York  Summit,”The Guardian, London, 24 August 2005. 

Supreme being

Supreme Court of Appeals judge, and author, Edwin Cameron may be ‘atypical’ but he is no contradiction.

The gravelly newscaster-ish voice confirms on the phone: “11am at Café, in Melville.I’ll cycle down from Brixton. See you then.”

I’m perched outside on the terrace, sneaking a cigarette when he arrives.

He’s punctual to the minute. But it turns out his bicycle has four tyres and says “Volvo” on it.“So, is that what you call a bike?” I exhale. He looks at me, with steel-blue eyes, getting a feel for the situation. He’s lightening quick. Maybe quicker. “It’s raining, in case you haven’t noticed,” he lets fly, pseudo-sarcastic — eyebrows arched and eyes twinkling. Point. And not only that, it’s also cold and grey.

“Edwin Cameron,” he says, extending a large, warm hand with a matching smile. We exchange pleasantries, and I suggest we move inside. “Oh no,” he says, “Go ahead, finish your cigarette. I also enjoy a Camel Light once in a while.”

It takes mere minutes to pass judgment. Guilty, as charged — the man’s got a wicked sense of humour, lobbing back Karoo-dry retort quick and hard whenever a facetious comment is thrown his way.

Time for silly stuff: “How do you unwind, Edwin?” I ask, “Do you enjoy the odd drink with your odd Camel Light?”

“Well, nothing odd about it, really,” he answers. “Yes, I’ll enjoy a glass of whisky once in a while. And maybe a half bottle of wine when I’m having dinner with friends. Nothing wild. And I might enjoy a glass of wine at night to relax.”

“You have a glass of wine every night?” I press, pen poised on the Moleskin notebook, “You’re saying you have a glass of wine … alone … every single night? So, what you’re really saying is that you’re an alcoholic?”

He immediately gets me. And laughs, “Listen, don’t put words in my mouth!” and calls me a few choice, unprintable names. “Mr Talotta, I can assure you I’m hardly the type to get drunk! An alcoholic, indeed!”

Cameron is fit and dressed in a blue Blake-cotton shirt, with a cardigan over it, giving the impression of a sporty, over-grown schoolboy. His consent to adulthood? An old “AIDSWalk New York 2001”baseball cap. “Yeah, I did the walk (an annual fund-raising walk) a few years back,” he says, removing the cap to double-check the date.

We settle in. “Hmmm, so where should we start?” I ask. He leans forward, repeating me, “‘Where do we start?’ What kind of question is that? You really want to make this difficult for me, don’t you?” He almost caught me — giving me a taste of my own medicine — before breaking into laughter.

Time for serious stuff: We discuss his new book, Witness to AIDS, which is enjoying rave reviews and brisk sales throughout the country. More importantly, we discuss its motivation, expectation and results. The sadness, of course, is that the book had to be written at all. With the dubious distinction of having the world’s largest population of people living with HIV/AIDS,SA has only one figure holding public office who’s “come out”as an HIV-positive person: Edwin Cameron. And it’s something aboutwhich Cameron is well aware. “I’m pretty atypical of the epidemic in Africa, being a gay white male who’s relatively affluent,” he says.

“But what I have in common with poorer people, and rural people, is fear. Of course, I’ve let it all out before, through speaking. But writing about it was probably the most difficult thing I have done, especially chapter two, which explores the stigma of HIV and AIDS.”

In it, he writes about his battle to “come out” with his HIV status to friends, family and colleagues: “One emotional evening in early 1987, shortly after returning from Harvard,” he writes, “I managed to confide in my friend and Wits law associate Carole Lewis, now a colleague in the Supreme Court of Appeals. I confided, after a time, in the person with whom I fell in love the next year. To a wise and patient private counsellor, and to a Wits doctor doing bravework in the field, Prof Ruben Sher, I spoke. But not to my family or troops of friends. I feared their reaction with a ghastly, sickening, isolating loneliness. For more than three years I lived with it solitarily.”

Ultimately, he told his mother. “I brought the conversation around and spoke gently to her. When I had finished there was a quiet pause. She continued looking calmly, almost abstractedly, at the flower beds. After a moment she glanced at me, and quietly murmured: ‘I thought as much, my boy.’ Later that week, when (sister) Jeanie discussed the implications with her, she became distressed. But she started wearing the red, furled ribbon of AIDS solidarity. And her friends splendidly followed suit. She died two years later, ten months after we had celebrated her 80th birthday.”

While gut-wrenchingly emotional at times, Witness to AIDS is hardly a boo-hoo-hoo diary. Rather, it’s what Cameron’s friend (Treatment Action Campaign activist) Zackie Achmat calls “an abiding commitment to social justice”.

Cameron provides a human face — even if it’s that of a “pale male” — to a disease which is arguably the most horrific catastrophe to challenge our country, continent and, indeed, the modern world. In that sense, his voice speaks for millions of infected South Africans. And it’s a responsibility Cameron doesn’t take lightly.

Witness to AIDS’s media coverage has been impressive, which is particularly important in a country where the disease remains an abstract concept for far too many. “It’s not only gratifying,” says Cameron of the book’s success, “it’s also affirming.” While grateful for coverage in the country’s “intellectual” publications, he’s particularly excited about his upcoming interviews with more “accessible” ones like Drum.

“It breaks stereotypes,” says Cameron, “and people need to be informed.”

While he might have expected the book to sell in academic, medical and AIDS-activist circles, Cameron was warned by his publisher not to expect too much from the greater market, “She said the serious book market moves 3000 to 4000 copies,” says Cameron, “so if we sold that number, it’s great. I’ve just heard there are only 580 copies left in the country and it’s going into a second, emergency printing two weeks after its launch.”

SAis known for being the world’s first country to protect the rights of its gay, lesbian and trans-gendered communities through its constitution (other progressive countries have protected these communities through supplementary laws and addendums), something for which Cameron occasionally takes flack.

“When people say the constitution is a document thatbenefits mostly white-and-wealthy gays and lesbians, they’re wrong. It’s also important to young people in the townships. They know they’re protected by the constitution and they’re proud of it.”

“Most importantly,” he stresses, “the constitution is a document that’s a contract between South Africans. We’re still a desperately unequal society and we need to fulfil its promises of equality to secure stability.”

A great source of Cameron’s stability is his friends and family. While Cameron misses his mother, he’s still very close to his remaining family, and to his legion of friends, who he sees as extended family.

“My friendships are very intense,” he says. “As a gay male without a partner, friends often become your family.”

In a country where people still keep multiple cellphones for multiple lives, Cameron has a thoroughly integrated life — mixing colleagues, family and friends. “Good observation,” he muses, “When I became an advocate in 1983, I came out and told my colleagues and clients I was gay. So, sure, I mix and match my friends who range from gays and lesbians, former Wits academic colleagues and young black queens to transvestites, the judiciary and my family.”

“But,” he notes, putting things into context, “we’re a country of 44-million people of diverse and divided backgrounds. It’s important to try to integrate one’s capacities in a society like ours.”

As a Supreme Court of Appeals judge, Cameron spends half the year in Bloemfontein. “It’s sometimes hard,” he says, “because it’s a commuter lifestyle.”

Not that he’s complaining: “Bloem has lots of good restaurants but I lead a fairly monastic life there. We work extremely hard. We (Supreme Court of Appeals judges) tend to work most evenings, and most Saturdays and Sundays. But Bloem has been good for me. It’s calmed down the pace of my life. In Jo’burg I can receive invitations to dinners five or six nights a week but, with my being in Bloem, it’s tapered off a bit because people don’t know where I am.”

That said, he knows exactly where he is, as he recently pointed out in the Sunday Times: “I feel a sense of purchased time. And it’s precisely that sense that gives me my passion about giving other people the same break.”

Ultimately, Cameron’s cool intellect and breezy humour are far out-weighed by his unwavering sense of arden