Posted on August 30, 2009

Beat It
Jack Lewis, Community Health Media Trust

The idea of an AIDS Archive has been around for some time. But thus far nothing has materialised. Hopefully this is about to change.

UCT has signed an MOU with Community Media Trust to archive a collection of over 3000 hours of video footage generated between 1998 and the present. The footage, a vast anthropological trawl through the vectors of transmission, prevention, treatment, care and support of HIV, was produced for the Siyayinqoba Beat It! Television programme. You can watch all the inserts produced for the show online. We hope to use this holding to develop an online database which provides the foundations of a larger AIDS Archive.

Siyayinqoba Beat It! has been on air since 1999. The first three series appeared on eTV. After a hiatus in 2003, the series reappeared on SABC 1 in 2004 and this year the 8th Series launches on Thursday 3rd of September at 1.30pm on SABC 1 and will run for 26 episodes.

An AIDS Archive is about trying to intellectually characterise the historical meaning of the epidemic. This is something which we are still too close to the events to be able to do definitely. The impact of AIDS will continue to be felt for decades and we are indeed not through the worst of it yet. At one level we can fairly accurately describe the main contours of the epidemic: The annual death rate from AIDS increased from 132 990 a year in 2000 to 360 689 in 2006 (over 900 a day) and may only now be stabilising. still increasing. New infections are running at probably around 500 a day. The proportion of children in South Africa who have lost one or both of their parents has increased from 17% in 2002 to 21% in 2006. An estimated 1.8 million children were orphaned and at risk in 2008. HIV prevalence has increased from less than 1% among antenatal clinic attendees in 1990 to over 28% today (over 40% in some districts). On the upside, we have one of the largest antiretroviral treatment programmes in the world, with about 600 000 people on treatment.

But what does all this mean socially, politically, economically - in short historically? We should be very dissatisfied with the state of our intellectual grasp of the epidemic. If we ask the question 'what does the AIDS epidemic meanâ€Â then I think we can begin to see the need for an AIDS archive. AIDS and the struggle for access to treatment has defined the notion of a progressive politics based on the constitutional promise to 'progressively realiseâ€Â a whole range of social and economic rights - not least being the right to health, which is fundamental to the rights to life and dignity. The decade of Mbeki inspired denialism has centred on a discourse of (false) Africanism and the misappropriation of the idea of a 'renaissance', which simultaneously denied not only a relevant African response to the epidemic but the possibility of renewal itself.

These false discourses and their consequences will be with us for decades. But, there is a possibility that in the social response to AIDS, in the work of hundreds of thousands of activists, community health workers, people living with AIDS and those drawn into support networks, lays the seed of a really innovative African response to the epidemic, one which carries with it the seeds of a real renaissance - understood as the moment in which large parts of Africa develops a new relationship to science and begins to own global culture as part of its own experience - not as consumers of goods, but as people who understand the relationship between science and culture in their own particular context. If a change of this magnitude is in the works it is hardly surprising that is often difficult to discern it.

But in the AIDS archive, and particularly in the initial holding of over 3000 hours of tape donated by Community Media Trust, I believe this and future generations of researchers and video makers will find an invaluable resource which indexes the real meaning of the changes induced by the epidemic and its response. A bit grandiose perhaps, but let me give you some examples.

In a 2008 episode on disclosure (episode 22 - you are invited to watch it on line) we meet Bongi and Thandi, two women from Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape who not only were open about their HIV status but are also living together and identify as Lesbian. These women live in the same general area in which another women, Nokuzola Mfiki, had recently committed suicide and taken the lives of her children as well because of the stigma she suffered because people thought she was HIV positive. The contrasting experience of these women is certainly striking and noteworthy and a warning against careless generalisation. This is the same area where Johnny Steinberg drew the inspiration for his book 'Three Letter Plague'. How do we understand the difference?

For me it is clear, from having been immersed in the creation of this archive over the past 12 years, that the difference is a function of the revolution in thought brought about by exposure to what the Treatment Action Campaign calls 'treatment literacy' - the scientific knowledge of what is true and not true about HIV and AIDS. An AIDS archive is necessary for us to begin to provide the missing context and derive the meaning that is hidden by the numbers which are usually invoked to tell the story of this epidemic.

Picture courtesy Beat it!