Honouring a tireless campaigner for social justice

ZACKIE Achmat, poster boy for the fight against the stigmatisation of people living with HIV/Aids, says provincial authorities are failing people despite the government’s efforts to curb the epidemic. He largely blames this on corruption, which, he says, will cripple the health system.

Although Achmat, 51, is no longer the frontman for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an organisation he co-founded eight years after being diagnosed with HIV in 1990, he is as active against social injustice as he was during Thabo Mbeki’s tenure as president of South Africa. He now works with Equal Education, a movement working for quality and equality in education.

Achmat has been an activist from the age of 15 and was one of the students who stood up against Bantu education in the 1976 uprising.

His convictions led to him to being in and out of apartheid jails from an early age. Later, he risked his life by boycotting antiretroviral drugs in protest against the high prices imposed by drug companies, which made the medicine unattainable to most of the population.

Mbeki’s administration refused to do anything about it. According to Achmat, at least 600 South Africans were dying every day because of HIV and the government’s Aids denialism.

Former president Nelson Mandela visited Achmat at home in 2002 in an effort to persuade him to take his medicine, but the Madiba magic did not work this time.

“I think Madiba understood when I spoke to him that it was an issue of principle,” Achmat says.

Achmat continued to refuse treatment until 2003, when a national congress of TAC activists voted to urge him to start taking the antiretrovirals. But it was a visit by Mandela to an HIV clinic on the Cape Flats that finally changed his mind.

“He put on this HIV T-shirt when he visited Khayelitsha Site C clinic. It was a few days before the ANC national conference in 2003 in Stellenbosch. At that moment I realised I could take my pills because what he had done then was to take a stand against a party he had given his life to,” says Achmat.

Achmat is still angry at Mbeki and would not want to meet him. He says he will invite him for tea “only if it leads to his arrest”.

For his portrait, photographer and founder of the 21 Icons project Adrian Steirn framed Achmat with the words “Alive with HIV” — a reference not only to his having lived with the disease since 1990, but also to the positive achievements of this tireless campaigner for social justice.

The poster is distributed in the R17 edition of the Sunday Times this week.

Tonight at 6.57pm SABC3 will show a three-minute film of the shooting of the portrait.