As they see it the development of the African AIDS discourse

News items about AIDS in Africa repeatedly find their way to the from pages of newspapers in Europe and North America. In most of them, the same players and themes recur: the UN and its statistics of doom, the pharmaceutical companies and their profits, the activists, and their passion, and the hapless African governments lost in poverty and corruption. Little is reported about what African leaders and scholars think about their own, epidemic-except, of course, South African President Thabo Mbeki, and most reports have vilified him. Another story emerges, however, when we look more closely at what Mbeki has actually said about AIDS (rather than how he has been interpreted), and when we consider what other Africans have said about him. His approach to AIDS is far more helpful than the media have led us to believe. However, the standard by which we judge AIDS programs is the biomedical standard-as it is practiced in the West-rooted in Western ethical assumptions. It is according to this standard and the assumptions that we in the West have written of Mbeki's view of AIDS. More seriously, how the rest of Africa views this epidemic remains mostly hidden from view. The story of how Africa views AIDS needs to be told, including a reexamination of the Mbeki controversy. In telling this story, I have begun with some of the questions that are on the minds of many in Africa, followed by a review and an analysis of what Africa scholars working in Africa have said about AIDS. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, to cover every African conference and scholar and book on AIDS; I have rather tried to be representative, looking at conferences and books and scholars and trends that point to distinctively African approaches to the disease. Consequently, there is little here that draws from biomedical research done by Africans, as that research is, to some extent, "culture-blind". What we do with the results of that research, however, has everything to do with culture. It has bee said that African sometimes defines itself in response to events that happen to it and how they are viewed in the rest of the world.