African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on April 24, 2009
African Affairs 2009 108(432):353-370; doi:10.1093/afraf/adp020
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‘Condoms Cause Aids’: Poison, Prevention and Denial in Venda, South Africa
Fraser G. McNeill (F.G.Mcneill{at}lse.ac.uk) holds a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and was the joint recipient of the 2008 ASAUK Audrey Richards dissertation prize, which is partly sponsored by Oxford University Press Journals and African Affairs. He would like to acknowledge financial assistance from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the reviewers of African Affairs for their insightful suggestions. Thanks also to Elizabeth Hull, Maxim Bolt, Jason Sumich and Mushaisano Tshivhase for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.
This article presents a critique of the position that South Africans are engaged in a process of collective HIV/AIDS denial. Ex-President Mbeki's well-documented belief that HIV does not lead to AIDS, and that South Africans are not dying of AIDS-related disease, has been used by academics and journalists to explain the widespread public silence around the pandemic. The article argues that the complex social processes employed to create and maintain the avoidance of open conversation around HIV/AIDS are rooted, not in Mbeki's denialism, but rather in conventions through which causes of death can, and cannot, be spoken about. Through case studies of poisonings and public performances by HIV/AIDS educators, the article demonstrates that by invoking public silence and coded language, ‘degrees of separation’ are constructed that create social distance between individuals and the unnatural cause of another's death. Far from a collective denial, acts of public silence and obfuscation should be read as protestations of innocence: attempts to drive a wedge between open, public knowledge of death and potential implication in the increasing number of AIDS-related fatalities. HIV/AIDS prevention policies based on inadequate understandings of this wider context have given rise to the social construction of peer educators – and condoms as their central symbol of prevention – as vectors of the virus.