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One of the great, iconic struggles for social justice in the 21st
century has been the campaign of the TAC against state-supported
AIDS denialism in South Africa. This struggle between activists,
scientists and health workers, on the one hand, and a strange
alliance of dissidents, quacks and political leaders, on the other,
is here recounted in absorbing and dramatic detail for the first
time by an insider. In his book, Nathan Geffen, one of the TAC
leaders, describes how early on in its life the organisation
discovered that the greatest obstacle to AIDS treatment was in fact
the South African government's denialism. Not only did this extend
to a reluctance to provide antiretroviral treatment to AIDS
patients but also to the support of a host of quacks and denialists
who operated freely in the country to sow suspicion and confusion
about the efficacy of standard medical treatment of AIDS. The most
notorious of these were the German vitamin seller, Dr Matthias
Rath, who along the way sued The Guardian of London and lost his
case, and the Dutch nurse Tine van der Maas. It was the TAC that,
as a result of a court case it brought against Rath, managed to
stop his operations in South Africa; and it was the TAC, once again
through legal means, that put pressure on the South African
government to roll out an antiretroviral programme throughout the
country. Geffen describes not only the TAC's response to the
puzzling intransigence of government and the spellbinding nonsense
of dissidents, but the thought, strategy and discussion that lay
behind the organisation's major decisions. The story of the TAC's
campaign is one of the great triumphs of citizen activism for
social justice and human rights.
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