African Responses to HIV/AIDS

This collection of essays provides a provocative critique of leadership on HIV/AIDS in Africa from the 1980s to the present. It examines the rhetoric on HIV/AIDS, which has influenced culture and behaviour, service delivery, policy, the design of national interventions and the varied success of different countries in containing the pandemic.

African scholars contextualise a host of public and scholarly disputes, ranging from AIDS exceptionalism, racialised data manipulation and ‘denialism’ to the racist debates on ‘African promiscuity’ and the recent revival of assertions that homosexuality is not ‘African’ behaviour. The book refers to the record of governments in a wide range of African countries with case studies drawing on the rhetoric of governments and the nature of leadership in Ethiopia, The Gambia, Morocco, South Africa and Zambia.

What emerges is that the rhetoric is diverse, occasionally logical and effective in terms of informing systemic HIV/AIDS interventions that improve the welfare of people, and sometimes it is contradictory to the point of absurdity.