Review: 'When bodies remember: Experiences and politics of Aids in South Africa'

Using a vivid mosaic of public controversies and ethnographic vignettes, Fassin works through the controversial denials of South African president Thabo Mbeki and the precautionary policies of his health ministers within histories of apartheid, epidemics which justified segregation, and secret biological warfare plans of Project Coast, as well as wider battles over the ethical protocols of Aids testing and widening inequalities."-Michael M.J.Fischer, author of _Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.

In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global Aids crisis-the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the Aids epidemic in South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period. One person in ten is infected with HIV in South Africa, and President Thabo Mbeki has initiated a global controversy by funding questionable medical research, casting doubt on the benefits of preventing mother-to-child transmission, and embracing dissidents who challenge the viral theory of Aids. Fassin contextualises Mbeki's position by sensitively exploring issues of race and genocide that surround this controversy. Basing his discussion on vivid ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he passionately demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa is a demographic catastrophe as well as a human tragedy, one that cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, in particular to institutionalised racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century.