S.Africa still harbours Eurocentric mindset

By M. S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, OCT. 7. The indignant reaction of Mr Essop Pahad, the Minister in the Office of the President, to some reports in the British media attacking the President, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, for his views on the link between HIV and AIDS is just another indication of how South Africa's foreign policy perspectives, indeed even domestic policy perspectives, remain heavily Eurocentric.

Shorn of all the intended and unintended obfuscation on all sides, Mr Mbeki's views amount to this: that while the Government's strategy to combat the disease is premised on the ground that HIV causes AIDS - and so, even without saying in so may words, admits a ``causal link'' between HIV and AIDS - `other factors' too, like poverty and unhygienic environment and malnutrition, contribute to and aggravate the spreading of AIDS. This stand, however, has enraged most AIDS activists and the media on the ground that it falls far short of an explicit and unambiguous acknowledgement of the ``causal links'' between HIV and AIDS. Underlying this seemingly semantic hair- splitting are more complex scientific, medical, pharmaceutical and commercial issues, though the overwhelming majority of medical and scientific opinion, the so-called ``orthodox'' view, is unequivocal about the ``causal links'' between HIV and AIDS.

In a sense, there is really no ``debate'' in South Africa since scientific and medical opinion as well as the media reflect overwhelmingly the ``orthodox'' view; and indeed, even Mr Mbeki has admitted that his Government's policy proceeds from the assumption that HIV causes AIDS - though rather infuriatingly for his critics, he invariably goes after such an admission with a `but...'

Going beyond the ``robust debate'' that has characterised the HIV/AIDS polemics, a recent article in The Spectator of London suggested that Mr Mbeki's views on HIV/AIDS, along with his stand on the situation in Zimbabwe (that is, his refusal to demonise President Robert Mugabe) and his views on the persistence of racism in South Africa suggested that Mr Mbeki was ``off his rocker''. ``Crudely put, many now believe that Mbeki is no longer playing with a full pack - that he's off his rocket''. Helpfully, the article suggested that faced with the ``hostile reality'' of being unable to cope with the problems facing the country, ``it may be that he is really suffering the nervous breakdown that some suspect.''

Apparently to correct such misrepresentation and to persuade the British media that Mr Mbeki was in full possession of his faculties, Mr Pahad made a trip to London. It is not clear what success the trip achieved, though the paper did publish a dismissive response from the Minister.

However, what is really surprising about the Government's reaction is that it should at all be surprised at this kind of writing. Indeed, in the whole HIV/AIDS controversy, one looks in vain for any reference to the literature outside what continues to be South Africa's spiritual homeland - England and the United States and the broad Anglo-American alliance. Indeed, even the relatively practical and successful tackling of the problem on the continent, as in Uganda, is seldom focused in the media.

A telling example of this mindset is this sentence from a recent analysis in The Sunday Independent (Sept. 24) by a highly regarded black South African intellectual. ``As far as I can tell, the HIV/AIDS debacle has all the makings of our own Vietnam, and worse.''

This tendency to see ``Vietnam'' not as a metaphor for the vindication of the human spirit, in the face of the immense cruelty inflicted on its people by the U.S. war machine with the full bipartisan support of its political establishment and the liberal intelligentsia, but in terms of what it did to the ``American psyche'' and so a metaphor for disaster, is the norm in this country.

Indeed, with no trace of contradiction, the proposal for a memorial to the victims of apartheid crimes is routinely equated with the memorial wall in Washington that carries the names of all the American soldiers who died in Vietnam, irrespective of the fact that the former were overwhelmingly victims while the later were, even if some were unwilling, perpetrators of genocide.

Perhaps, the phrase that seems to be so much in vogue is more appropriate here than in the HIV/AIDS debate: the ``causal links'' between the those who controlled the reins from plush offices in Western capitals and those who actually did the killings in the muddy fields, all in the name of fighting ``godless communism'' in Vietnam and South Africa, in every colonised country in Asia, Africa and Latin America struggling to be free.

If these causal links, instinctively recognised by the majority of the people of South Africa, are now given an entirely American spin by ``anguished intellectuals'' claiming to speak in the voice of this majority, such spin only reflects the more fundamental Eurocentricism mindset that continues to set the agenda in South Africa - notwithstanding all the hype about an African renaissance.

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Section  : International
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