HIV/AIDS and discourses of denial in sub-Saharan Africa: An Afro-optimist response?

Abstract

This article re-examines HIV/AIDs discourses within the global imagining of Africa. It focuses on official responses which, between 1999 and 2007, were characterized by denialism, when South African President Thabo Mbeki, questioned the origin of the disease. The historical factors that shaped arguments locating African AIDS discourses as a counter-ideological response to Afro-pessimism are examined. It is argued that the controversy generated by debates on the origin and spread of HIV/AIDS, the denial of the link between HIV and AIDS, and the resistance against the roll-out of antiretroviral therapy, was a contestation especially of the Euro-American image of Africa, rather than of the epidemic itself.