As they see it the development of the African AIDS discourse

Abstract

News items about AIDS in Africa repeatedly find their way to the from pages of newspapers in Europe and North America. In most of them, the same players and themes recur: the UN and its statistics of doom, the pharmaceutical companies and their profits, the activists, and their passion, and the hapless African governments lost in poverty and corruption. Little is reported about what African leaders and scholars think about their own, epidemic-except, of course, South African President Thabo Mbeki, and most reports have vilified him. Another story emerges, however, when we look more closely at what Mbeki has actually said about AIDS (rather than how he has been interpreted), and when we consider what other Africans have said about him. His approach to AIDS is far more helpful than the media have led us to believe. However, the standard by which we judge AIDS programs is the biomedical standard-as it is practiced in the West-rooted in Western ethical assumptions. It is according to...