Born in Qqeberha in the 1990s, popular Aids activist Nozibele Mayaba’s upbringing was one of struggle and strife. She was raised by the tough hand of her mother in the confines of a strict Christian household. Nozibele strove to be the “good girl” that everyone adores to win her mother’s approval and the affection of her absent father.

She lived by the book and was steered by her faith. Hers becomes a life of firsts. She is the first person in her family to travel overseas. The first to graduate from university. It is also her first love, with his infectious smile that infected her with HIV.

This diagnosis throws her life into disarray. Fearing stigma and feeling the need to maintain her “good girl” image, she kept her status a secret. However, she soon succumbed to depression. It is in the aftermath, when she picks up the broken pieces of her life that she finds purpose in all the pain she has endured.

She went public with her story in a video that when viral and launched her onto a new path. Nozibele, who has since gotten married and recently became a mother, has made it her mission to hold open conversations about her journey living with HIV.

Told with gut wrenching honesty, Nozibele is at her most vulnerable in this brave account about what it means to live and love beyond HIV.

The Culture of AIDS in Africa enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across this vast continent by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. They investigate and engage the social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa to the wider world, they bring intimate, inspiring portraits of the performers, artists, communities, and organizations that have shared with them their insights and the sense they have made of their lives and actions from deep within this devastating epidemic.
Covering the wide expanse of the African continent, the 30 chapters include explorations of, for example, the use of music to cope with AIDS; the relationship between music, HIV/AIDS, and social change; visual approaches to HIV literacy; radio and television as tools for "edutainment;" several individual artists' confrontations with HIV/AIDS; various performance groups' response to the epidemic; combating HIV/AIDS with local cultural performance; and more. Source material, such as song lyrics and interviews, weaves throughout the collection, and contributions by editors Gregory Baz and Judah M. Cohen bookend the whole, to bring together a vast array of perspectives and sources into a nuanced and profoundly affective portrayal of the intricate relationship between HIV/AIDS and the arts in Africa.

The devastating AIDS pandemic in Africa poses daunting medical, social, and economic challenges, placing local, regional, national, and international communities at a moral crossroads. This title, the first to systematically examine the ethical implications of the AIDS pandemic for Africa, examines such pressing questions as: How do we deal with the uncertainties surrounding AIDS statistics? Is it really too costly to provide people highly active antiretroviral therapies in Africa? What is the relationship between AIDS and poverty? Is the political leadership in South Africa doing what is right and prudent to meet the challenge of AIDS? Is the developed world responding responsibly and justly to this crisis in the developing world? Is it moral for companies to make profits from AIDS drugs? Given the scope of the crisis, ought First World ethical standards for doing research on AIDS drugs and vaccines to apply unchanged to Africa? Ought we to include children in research for AIDS vaccines, and if so, how? Why do people persist in regarding AIDS as punishment for sin? Internationally acclaimed experts in their fields, most of them Africans themselves, come together in this title to address these challenging questions that have tested South Africa's and Africa's leadership, and that of the Western world. They challenge also us. For in Central and Southern Africa AIDS is not someone else's problem - it is our own. Our response to AIDS – in our own lives and households and workplaces and communities and organisations – will help determine the calibre of society in the future. A major topic in biomedical ethics, AIDS is discussed here in this context in a single volume that will serve as a resource for public health workers, doctors, care givers and managers in the workplace, all of whom confront ethical problems in their handling of the disease. It is intended also as a textbook for students of medical ethics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and addresses some of the fault lines that emerge in finding a global solution to the pandemic, as well as the radical changes AIDS is likely to leave in its wake.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City explores the survival strategies of poor, HIV-positive Puerto Rican women by asking four key questions: Given their limited resources, how did they manage an illness as serious as HIV/AIDS? Did they look for alternatives to conventional medical treatment? Did the challenges they faced deprive them of self-determination, or could they help themselves and each other? What can we learn from these resourceful women? Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our current health care system as a whole. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.

There is an inherently powerful and complex paradox underlying HIV/AIDS prevention - between the focus on collective advocacy mobilised to combat global HIV/AIDS and the staggeringly disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS in many places. In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practises of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in South Florida. Although there is worldwide emphasis on the universality of HIV/AIDS as a social, political, economic and biomedical problem, developments in HIV/AIDS prevention are rooted in and focused exclusively on disparities in HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality framed through the rubric of race, ethnicity and nationality. Everyone is at equal risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, Sangaramoorthy notes, but the ways in which people experience and manage that risk - and the disease itself - is highly dependent on race, ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, immigration status and other notions of "difference." Sangaramoorthy documents in detail the work of AIDS prevention programmes and their effect on the health and well-being of Haitians, a transnational community long plagued by the stigma of being stereotyped in public discourse as disease carriers. By tracing the ways in which public knowledge of AIDS prevention science circulates from sites of surveillance and regulation, to various clinics and hospitals, to the social worlds embraced by this immigrant community, she ultimately demonstrates the ways in which AIDS prevention programmes help to reinforce categories of individual and collective difference and how they continue to sustain the persistent and pernicious idea of race and ethnicity as risk factors for the disease.

A "CHOICE"Outstanding Academic Title of 2010

For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. "The Secret" situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex, is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them.

Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage."

A "CHOICE"Outstanding Academic Title of 2010

For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. "The Secret" situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex, is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them.

Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage."

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

Written by a team of nationally recognized African American social work professionals with extensive and distinguished backgrounds of HIV/AIDS service, the book examines the crisis facing African American communities. The editors strive to convey to academics, researchers, and students the magnitude of the crisis and that individuals and organizations serving African Americans need to be able to respond to the service delivery needs this crisis brings.

The crisis is evident in the fact that by year 2000 fully 50% of all AIDS cases will be among African Americans--who only constitute 12% of the nation's population. This book serves as a wake-up call and is designed to stimulate discussion and planning for new models of service to all African Americans and HIV prevention, education, and treatment.

"It has long been a belief of the feminist academic community that personal voices and experiences must be validated and heard. This volume succeeds admirably in being true to that tradition."--"Canadia HIV/AIDS Policy and Law Newsletter"

Women now account for the majority of all new HIV/AIDS cases diagnosed in the United States. Yet, the resources allotted to women for research, health services, education, and outreach remain woefully inadequate. The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women fills crucial gaps in understanding the specific effects of HIV and AIDS on and in women's lives. It takes as its starting point the premise that it is vitally important for researchers, teachers, health service providers, public policy makers, and community-based organizers to begin taking gender-- especially as it intersects with race, class, and sexuality-- into consideration as they work with HIV-infected women.

The first comprehensive, interdisciplinary volume on this topic, The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women goes beyond tokenism, with a contributor's list made up of approximately 45% people of color, including African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. The volume emphasizes marginalized populations such as the homeless, sexworkers, youth, the elderly, intravenous drug users, transgendered people, lesbians, bisexuals, incarcerated women, and victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence.

The contributors, including Evelyn Hammonds, Risa Denenberg, Michelle Murrain, and Paul Farmer, are recognized experts in their diverse fields. From their posts at the center of the pandemic--in the laboratory, the academy, clinics, and communitybased organizations--they criticize blind spots in the recognition and treatment of HIV in women and articulate accessible and practical solutions to specific areas of difficulty.

This collection is a serious attempt to explore the relationship between cultural content and the form AIDS takes in different cultural settings. Written mostly by anthropologists, these essays examine different cultural areas and AIDS: central Africa (Rwanda), New York City, Houston, and London. In addition, articles address topics such as stigmatization of AIDS victims by the press; language and AIDS; class variations in the delivery of social services as experienced by gay and bisexual men in New York City; and homophobia and AIDS. The volume is a valuable addition to the social-anthropological literature on AIDS and should be useful to professionals and for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses dealing with sociocultural aspects of AIDS. "Choice"

AIDS has become a pandemic with major implications for the future vitality of humankind, according to this powerful new book compiled by the editor of the widely acclaimed The Social Dimensions of AIDS. As a cultural phenomenon the social patterning of AIDS can be explained and its direction largely predicted. Culture and AIDS is written almost entirely by anthropologists and represents the interest of dozens of anthropologists and represents the anthropologists' interest in AIDS related research and activities. Thirteen essays explore the social and cultural context of AIDS related behavior and clarify key domains in AIDS and the social sciences. This volume seeks to broaden its readers' understanding of how AIDS is changing our lives as it redirects human experience.

"Culture and AIDS" is not intended as an introduction to AIDS. It looks at AIDS as a cultural phenomenon. It includes an introduction and postscript by its editor, Douglas A Feldman. Eleven essays explore: AIDS in Rwanda (Central Africa); A Haitian village handling AIDS; possible cofactors in HIV transmission; social service needs of gay men with AIDS in NYC; psychological factors influencing adjustment among HIV-infected gay men in Houston; social behavior of female prostitutes in London; social effects of AIDS on minority women; AIDS-related stigma in the press; language and AIDS; and other AIDS related areas.

The result of an intensive two-year research study, this volume examines the likely course of the AIDS epidemic over the next fifteen years. Extremely well-documented and based largely on sophisticated statistical analysis, the study makes detailed forecasts of who will become sick; explores the social, political, and economic consequences of the spread of the disease; and analyzes the controversial policy choices that must be made if the epidemic is to be contained. The authors argue that current policies have failed in their efforts to combat the spread of AIDS and suggest new public policy measures aimed at dramatically reducing the spread of the virus. AIDS researchers, health care practitioners, and policymakers will find The Catastrophe Ahead both an invaluable source of detailed statistical information about the AIDS epidemic and an urgent call to action.

Based on the study results, the authors conclude that by 2002, a million and a half people may die of AIDS and more than 4 million others may be infected with the disease. They explore various scenarios--worst, best, and middle cases--demonstrating that blacks face by far the greatest risks: under the most likely scenario some 15 percent of all blacks between the ages of 15 and 50 will carry the virus by 2002. The authors propose a universal routine voluntary testing program to avert this catastrophe, enabling people to sexually self-segregate themselves based on whether or not they carry the HIV virus. While the authors concede that this program cannot completely stem the tide of infection, they argue that it offers one of the best defenses available against the epidemic. Well written and illustrated with numerous tables and figures, this volume should be required reading for anyone involved in AIDS counseling and policymaking.

"For the LORD brought Judah low because of Ahaz, King of Israel, for he had encouraged moral decline in Judah and had been continually unfaithful to the LORD." 2 Chronicles 28:19 NKJV In this twenty-first century, the eruption of HIV/AIDS is a disturbing result of moral decline. This is a call to the people of all nations --and all in authority --to learn from history and uphold a moral culture. Wherever you live as an honorable father, mother, sister, and brother, please do not ignore this essential and timely call. This book offers you, your family, and your children a new dimension of exceptional living. Readers of all ages will find this book indispensable. It offers sensible and practical suggestions on how to manage the disease, relate with those already infected and, best of all, avoid becoming a victim of HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS is a global health problem. Only those who are equipped with knowledge and understanding will be able to escape. Whether you are so far free of HIV or have already been stricken, save yourself and your children, arm yourself with the facts, and do your part to stop this pandemic. Do not despair . . . In the words of Scripture, "Everything is possible." Yes, it is.

This book examines the gender context of HIV and critiques the global policy response. Anderson contributes to the feminist task of de-invisibilising gender as structural violence and identifies how gendered power structures are responded to at the local level in Malawi.

In this extraordinary history, James Driscoll reveals the untold story of how AIDS activists, by thwarting bureaucratic plans imposed by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), both saved HIV patients and rescued the FDA itself from a self-inflicted public health catastrophe. By 1996, accelerated approval of AIDS drug cocktails transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease. That approval, however, came only after years of struggle pitting AIDS activists against the hidebound culture of the Food and Drug Administration, which wanted to run lengthy efficacy trials required for full approval and possibly delay the drugs at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Driscoll's courageous efforts, which are an important personal part of the story, navigated conflicts among AIDS activist groups as they struggled with both major American political parties to be heard and respected. He examines the effect of AIDS activism on the LGBT community, its views of itself, and its place in modern American society. Additional materials analyze FDA mistakes, drug pricing, and other contemporary challenges for the LGBTs community.

This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.

In 2003-2006, Patricia Henderson lived in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal where she recorded the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. In this illuminating study, she recounts the concerns of rural people and explores local repertoires through which illness was folded into everyday life. The book spans a period when antiretroviral medication was not available, and moves on to a time when the treatment became accessible. Hope gradually became manifest in the recovery of a number of people through antiretroviral therapies and 'the return' of bodies they could recognise as their own. This research implies that protracted interaction with people over time, offers insights into the unfolding textures of everyday life, in particular in its focus on suffering, social and structural inequality, illness, violence, mourning, sensibility, care and intimacy.

The most authoritative account published to date on the history, spread, and chilling repercussions of one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen. Global AIDS Crisis scrutinizes the scourge of HIV and the AIDS virus throughout the world through the eyes of one of the top AIDS researchers in the world. From Botswana and sub-Saharan Africa to Thailand, Romania, and Brazil, an exploration of developing countries with limited access to healthcare and scarce resources reveals how such factors as tourism, international travel, war, and mobility have facilitated the insidious spread of HIV and AIDS. Candid discussions of sensitive issues such as stigma and its effects on morale and health complement scientific and medical inquiries into the origins of the disease and the development of antiretroviral therapies. An analysis of groundbreaking solutions such as "medication adherence partners," prevention strategies, and current vaccine models adds a glimmer of hope to a seemingly hopeless crisis. A comprehensive chronology examines scientific discovery, government and nongovernment responses to the epidemic, and access to care and antiretroviral drugs An entire chapter of illustrations and charts visually supports discussions of cutting-edge medicine, surveillance, impact, and prevention