Tony Barnett

Aids denial costs lives

Three experts in Aids research, Tony Barnett, Gwyn Prins and Alan Whiteside, say that Rian Malan has placed lives in danger with his sceptical approach to the epidemic

issue 25 September 2004

The figures are unremittingly stark. Last year alone 2.2 million people died from Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-five million people are infected with Aids in Africa. It is not like the Black Death. It is worse.

Yet for whatever reason not everyone accepts the seriousness of the Aids epidemic. The South African writer Rian Malan is one of those sceptics. Scion of a famous Afrikaner family, Malan is the author of My Traitor’s Heart, the tortured and much admired 1990 homily on the white man’s relationship with Africa. In The Spectator last Christmas he argued that the Aids epidemic was far less serious than the experts suggest. The story carried the headline ‘Africa isn’t dying of Aids’.

Malan likes to shock. He said so in an interview in the Afrikaans magazine, Insig: ‘I get a kick out of it when the Treatment Action Campaign attacks me; it’s like sport.’ In The Spectator Malan advanced two linked arguments, one purportedly substantive, the other overdeterminedly interpretative.

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