'Witness to Aids' (Edwin Cameron)

No-one seemed to want to read it. It’d been on the ‘Book Review’ shelf for ages, I was told. I grabbed it.

Edwin Cameron’s Witness to Aids is beautifully written, truthfully related and extremely (heartbreakingly) frank. No heaviness. No self-pity. Witness is also a gripping piece of history since Cameron, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Appeal, is South Africa’s only public office bearer to have publicised his HIV status.

“…[T]he act of speaking addressed – for me at least – that unspoken shame at the core of so much Aids discrimination…”

As a memoir, Witness is a moving account of Cameron's introduction to anti-retroviral drugs, which took a man battling to breathe and made him a climber of Table Mountain. As an analysis, it brilliantly explores crucial issues: stigma, Aids denialism, the role played by international pharmaceutical companies, the efforts of the Treatment Action Campaign and the monstrous mix of "race, sex, death and Africa".

Cameron's career – not his HIV status – makes him uniquely qualified to examine South Africa's response to Aids, increasingly depicted as a human rights issue for the estimated five million infected South Africans. This is why Witness should top every South African’s ‘required reading’ list: it is perhaps the most palatable, most sincere, most thought-provoking printed exploration of the Aids virus out there.

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