The TAC’s struggle has been directed against the government’s inadequate HIV/AIDS policies, but it has also, to a great extent, been a struggle against the stigma of HIV/AIDS. This has often meant an individual struggle for activists facing stigma and discrimination from partners, family, friends and the community:
A challenge that millions of South Africans faced throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s was that testing and disclosing one’s HIV status was taboo. We encouraged openness and debate on HIV in communities through our HIV-positive T-shirts.
– Vuyiseka Dubula, 10.12.09, TAC activist email list
The TAC maintains that, on an individual level, HIV/AIDS policies and discrimination are connected:
A Treatment Plan will help remove the stigma of HIV/AIDS. Making treatment available will encourage people with HIV to be open about their status, because the fear of death associated with HIV/AIDS will be reduced. If more people become open about their status, it will be more difficult to discriminate against people with HIV. Ignoring treatment will exclude and marginalize people with HIV.
– Forward to a people’s HIV/AIDS treatment plan! A Treatment Action Campaign Briefing Pamphlet, http://www.tac.org.za/
Documents/TreatmentPlan/tpbriefingsheet.pdf
One TAC activist was distressed after having been in Berlin on International AIDS Day, 2002. According to him, the events were exclusively focussed on African AIDS victims, as if nobody in Europe had HIV or AIDS. In South Africa today many TAC activists are open about being HIV-positive and many testify that this has helped them to come to terms with their disease (Fighting for our lives, 2010). Moreover, it is easier for those who have declared their status publicly to gain support when receiving treatment:
I know how hard it is to reveal your status, but I also know how important it was for me. If I had not disclosed, I don’t think I would have lived this long. I would have carried the burden alone. Disclosure is important so that people around you can offer treatment support.
They can remind you to take your tablets and to go for regular check-ups at your nearest health facility.
– Nokhwezi Hoboyi, Equal Treatment - Magazine of the Treatment Action Campaign, http://www.tac.org.za/community/
The ‘HIV-POSITIVE’ T-shirts that are worn by infected and non-infected AIDS activists alike, and by other TAC supporters around the world, challenge the clear boundaries drawn between those who are infected and those who are not. This implies challenging commonly held stereotypes about who is likely to be infected, both within South Africa and in the global AIDS community, such as those that the TAC activist in Berlin encountered on AIDS day. TAC uses the T-shirt in order to politically demonstrate that anyone could be infected, or become infected, hence blurring the boundaries between the supposedly non-infected and the infected.
The TAC not only challenges the divide between the assumed non-infected and infected, but also the divide between the infected and the (medical) experts. This argument is developed further in Chapter five. HIV-positive activists who take part in the TAC’s treatment literacy workshops learn about the HIV virus and CD4 counts, as well as the global structures which impact on health. In the following quotation, the knowledge of TAC activists is compared to that of some sociologists:
I went to a conference in Bloemfontein a few days ago. The discussion amongst sociologists was so terrible. They didn’t even
understand HIV and they didn’t understand medicines. Even in the poorest areas of TAC there are comrades in our branches who speak of HIV better than the professors can.
– Zackie Achmat, speech at opening of People’s Health Summit, 02.07.04
For the TAC an understanding of HIV/AIDS not only involves knowledge of the relevant political and social context (Robins, 2004;
Jungar & Oinas, 2007), but also questions around discrimination like xenophobia, homophobia, violence against women, homo- and transsexuals, sexism, and racism. The TAC was one of the first organisations to mobilise in 2008 when African foreigners in South Africa were being harassed and attacked. In one march organised by the TAC fairly soon after the first xenophobic attacks, TAC activists were wearing T-shirts with the slogan ‘FOREIGNER’. Here the TAC used the same tactic as they did with the ‘HIV- POSITIVE’
T-shirts in which activists assumed an identity in order to unsettle the boundaries between perceived ‘categories’ of people. In this case, the boundaries between those presumed to be South Africans and those presumed foreign were questioned.
In the article ‘Shop and Do Good’ the TAC is compared to the commercial campaign ‘Product Red’. The brand’s founding premise is that ‘Good business is more sustainable than philanthropy’ (Vanity Fair, 2007:222). According to Sarna-Wojcicki (2008), Product Red allows the consumer to connect their purchase to saving the lives of others. Salo and I argue furthermore that the consumers are told that they can change lives, as well as history:
First world consumers are told that what we choose to buy can change ‘life and history on this planet.’
– Jungar & Salo, 2008:96
One Red campaign T-shirt, sold by the clothing company Gap, bears the slogan ‘2 weeks’ in brackets, indicating that, if purchased, it will provide someone with a two-week supply of antiretroviral medication. By indicating that the consumer has bought two weeks of life, the campaign constructs a very clear line between the infected sufferer and the consumer who ‘saves’. As we argue, “Western consumers are given an almost god-like power over the lives of
HIV-infected Africans” (Jungar & Salo, 2008:98). The Red campaign markets social difference. The Red T-shirt conjures up an image of Africa as a place of death and victimhood, and a corollary vision of the West as a vibrant, animated world which has the power to save. By contrast, the ‘HIV-POSITIVE’ TAC T-shirt makes it impossible to distinguish between ‘them’, the infected, and ‘us’, the presumed uninfected, and therefore also to distinguish between victims and saviors.