Mbeki still unconvinced of HIV/AIDS link, says biographer

A new biography of the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, has uncovered ongoing ‘dissident’ beliefs about HIV and AIDS, an article in The Guardian newspaper has revealed.

Mbeki courted much controversy in 1999 by questioning the safety and efficacy of AZT, one of the first antiretroviral drugs. He then caused a similar storm in 2000 by repeatedly casting doubt on the widely held belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Mbeki officially withdrew from the debate on the cause of AIDS in 2000, though arguments continued within the government. In 2002, Pregs Govender, the chair of a parliamentary committee on the status of women resigned over the issue, and several fellow members of the government strongly criticised Mbeki's views. The President has stayed away from the debate in recent years, though the new biography by the respected author Mark Gevisser reveals that he remains unconvinced of the HIV/AIDS connection to this day, and is aggrieved that he was silenced by colleagues who believed his opinions to be damaging for the country. Though Mbeki has never expressly said that HIV does not cause AIDS, his obvious scepticism has had a deep impact on the government’s reaction to the AIDS crisis. His views are also now shared by the country’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

In the book, Gevisser describes how Mbeki contacted him personally to tell him of a paper he had secretly authored six years previously and distributed anonymously among senior members of the Africa National Congress. The paper, which Mbeki took care to have personally delivered to Gevisser, compared AIDS scientists to Nazi concentration camp doctors and depicted black people who accepted the standard rhetoric on AIDS as victims of a slave mentality. The paper also describes the "HIV/Aids thesis" as entrenched in "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans".

Much of Mbeki’s career was spent fighting against Apartheid during the many years that South Africa was a nation divided by race. As a consequence, says Gevisser, Mbeki holds a deep suspicion of white ‘colonial’ orthodoxies, and believes AIDS to be a prime example of racist attempts to demean and repress black Africans. He also believes that much of the Western world is in league with pharmaceutical companies in their attempts to make money out of AIDS by selling potentially dangerous treatments.

Over two million people have died of AIDS in South Africa since the first cases were reported, and about nineteen percent of adults are thought to be infected with HIV. The government has in recent years made greater efforts to address the epidemic, and began to distribute antiretroviral drugs in 2003, "but that did not mean, in any way, that [Mbeki] had changed his mind," writes Mr Gevisser. "When I asked him in 2007 how he felt about having to withdraw from the Aids debate, he told me it was 'very unfortunate' that his initiative had been 'drowned'."

Mark Gevisser's biography of Thabo Mbeki goes on sale in South Africa from 7th November.