Shoddy reporting on Zuma test perpetuates stigma
Deputy President of the ANC Jacob Zuma certainly knows how to keep himself in the public eye. In a brilliant publicity move Zuma was tested for HIV in his home district of Nkandla.
According to an article in the Sunday Independent on March 4 2007, publicly undergoing an HIV test is an important gesture for a politician to perform. However, in the case of Zuma, public testing reads as an attempt to erase from public memory the embarrassing and dangerous statements he has made about HIV and AIDS in the past.
Chris Makhaye’s reporting on this event only serves to help Zuma clear the slate. As his brief article makes clear, there is much that remains problematic about public discourse on HIV and AIDS and the ways in which it is reported.
Makhaye’s story has several inaccuracies. Zuma was tested for HIV, not AIDS. This is an important distinction. One of the reasons is that for many people, diagnosis with HIV is understood as a death sentence. This is not the case, particularly since all South Africans have the right to access to anti-retroviral therapy. Conflating HIV and AIDS also points to the larger problem of how the science relating to the epidemic remains misunderstood and misreported by journalists.
Makhaye writes “On Human Rights Day (although it was in fact Heritage Day, September 24!) last year, Zuma raised the ire of gays and lesbians when he said that when he was young he would not stand next to a homosexual.” In fact Zuma said that when he was a young man he would have knocked down any homosexual person he met.
For Makhaye the statements Zuma made at his public test “steered clear of controversy”. And this is perhaps Makhaye’s biggest mistake. In his speech Zuma encouraged young people to practice abstinence and called on people to be tested for HIV.
“If they are found to be positive, they will know how to behave so they won’t spread the disease and if they are negative they will look after themselves and stay negative all their lives.” He went on to say, “This disease is transmitted in many ways, but mainly through sex. It is you who go out there to get it, it doesn’t come to you.”
From the mouth of Jacob Zuma, these are controversial words indeed. They are also harmful. Zuma’s conservative moralising disavows the relation between HIV infection, transactional sex, sexual violence, poverty and unequal relations of power between men and women, boys and girls. It also places the blame for HIV infection on those infected with HIV.
The media can play a decisive part in raising the level of debate around the epidemic. By drawing attention to the problems in public discourse on this issue it can also counter the pervasive stigma and discrimination people living with HIV and AIDS continue to face. But if we still can’t get the simple things right – such as differentiating between the virus and the syndrome – how are we to engage critically with the crisis we are facing?
Kylie Thomas, Research Co-ordinator, HIV/AIDS and the Media Project, WITS Journalism Programme and the Perinatal HIV Research Unit