Shula Marks

An Epidemic Waiting to Happen? The Spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa in Social and Historical Perspective

There can be few more vital issues confronting Southern Africa than the pandemic of HIV and AIDS currently ravaging the sub-continent. The paper is an attempt to place the spread of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa in general and South Africa in particular in both its historical and social context. Yet what can an historian say about the AIDS pandemic? Our normal recourse is to look to the historians for the lessons of history both in order to see the epidemic in some kind of perspective and to learn from past policy prescriptions. But the lessons of history are not always so easily read. Humanity has rarely learnt from them and when it has it has frequently learnt the wrong lessons. And while there have been many epidemics in history none has had quite the same configuration as the last. Nevertheless I think history gives us a way of looking at the present. There are no simple answers but the value of historical analogy in challenging dominant preconceptions locating contemporary reactions in context and enabling a sense of perspective remains important. (excerpt)

Apartheid and health in the 1980s

The last 5 years have seen dramatic developments in South Africa, with wide-based internal political struggles and international pressure forcing the government into a well publicized if temporary series of reforms. Yet this has not been paralleled by any substantial improvement in the health conditions of the majority of the population. Apart from improvements in black infant mortality in some urban areas, the health gap remains, a material expression of the social inequality that is part of the definition of apartheid. Black children continue to die from preventible afflictions at about 10 times the rate of their white counterparts. Maternal deaths among women classified as black, coloured or Asian continue to occur, mostly due to septic abortions. At national level, blacks are nearly 30 times more at risk of being diagnosed to have tuberculosis than whites, with some age groups being at still worse risk. Black children under the age of 4 years in Cape Town in 1984 were 205 times more likely to have tuberculosis than their white counterparts. The last 5 years has also seen a revival of rhetoric echoing the international support for primary health care in the 1970s, but health care processes have not been modified to cope with the continuing racial stratification of disease and access to health care. A move towards privatization of the health services has only benefited a few.

New Paradigms in History and Archaeology in South Africa

Just over 40 years ago, a volume titled 500 Years: A History of South Africa appeared. Its main object was to recount ‘the activities and experiences of the white man [sic] over a period of nearly five hundred years in South Africa’ (Muller 1969:xi). In keeping with this object, the history of the African majority of South Africa was relegated to a 20-page appendix. The two volumes reviewed here between them extend South Africa’s history to encompass developments over the past 2,000 years and place black men (and to some extent women) centre stage. Whites – a thin line in this perspective of the past – do not even merit mention in the indices of either volume.