Edwin Cameron

I was diagnosed with HIV in December 1986. A well-meaning family doctor ordered the test without consulting or informing me and told me of the adverse result by telephone. The shock was savage and I experienced what had happened as a damaging violation additional to my diagnosis. Those were dark days in the epidemic and there seemed little hope of survival. My situation then was the same as that of millions of Africans now - the bleak prospect of apparently certain disfiguring illness and lingering death.

At the time I was a human rights lawyer practising from the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Though my colleagues and I worked in close and often intense comradeship I no more thought that I could invoke their empathetic support for my condition than if I had molested one of their children or pets. So deep was the disfiguring effect of stigma and fear. Again, for millions of Africans today it is no different. The fear of rejection and discrimination, often well-founded, binds millions of Africans to damaging silence.

In my own case, the privileges of position and income - ensuring access to medical care and treatment - together with loving support from family and friends have helped obtain a different outcome. Twelve years after being infected, in October 1997, I fell severely ill with four AIDS-defining conditions - PCP, systemic thrush, severe weight loss, a crippled immune system and raging viral activity. But with the coming of democracy and constitutionalism in South Africa in 1994, President Mandela had appointed me a judge. And on a judges' income I could afford - though barely just - the then-exorbitant expense of the new combination therapies. Within weeks I knew that a miracle was taking place inside my body. I was feeling better, stronger, more energetic. And with energy and health came hope. In the place of near-certain death, my life and vigour had been given back to me. The contrast with the lot of fellow Africans was intolerably stark.

The judges' and parliamentarians' medical insurance excluded AIDS. I tried to invoke the assistance of a colleague who sat on the board, but was met with prevarication and insult. Stung to challenge, I wrote to my colleague's Judge-President, who swiftly intervened. The insurance scheme now covers the full cost of anti-retroviral treatment.

But my biggest battle lay ahead - the decision to choose openness about my life with HIV and AIDS. Falling ill, the desire to integrate my public and private capacities (for since the 1980s I had been deeply involved, as a lawyer though not openly as someone living with HIV, in litigation and policy formulation on AIDS), together with the tragic death in December 1998 of Gugu Dlamini - a young woman who told her fellow township-dwellers that she had HIV and was killed as a result - impelled me to a public statement. At a hearing of the Judicial Services Commission in April 1999 I stated that I was living with HIV. I also pointed out that it was my privileged access to treatment that ensured life for me on a continent in which millions were unnecessarily dying.

The response was overwhelmingly positive and remains so. Now, in my work in the Supreme Court of Appeal and elsewhere, I have the support and companionship of many colleagues and friends. But the struggle to try to gain for millions of others the benefits that I enjoy - security of position, freedom from discrimination and stigma, and, most vitally of all, access to life-saving care and treatment - continues. That struggle involves questions about medical science and infrastructure, and about how the law permits access to knowledge and its productive exploitation. But in South Africa it also involves a contest of truth about the aetiology of AIDS in which the law has not been and cannot be silent. As someone who has felt the full effects of the epidemic in my own body and life and also in my country and continent, my continued involvement does not seem to be a matter of choice.