In the inaugural Z. K. Matthews Memorial Lecture at Fort Hare (October 12, 2001) and his speech at the funeral of Sarah Bartmann1 (August 9, 2002), Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, analyzed sexually charged representations of African bodies as central epistemological features of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European racism. Given President Mbeki's increasing reluctance to give interviews on the subject of HIV/AIDS, I turn to these two speeches to explore how their implied critique of the sexual ideology of racism begins to account for the South African regime's difficulty in systematically or coherently responding to the AIDS pandemic facing its citizens. Both speeches insist on situating public health initiatives to fight the pandemic within a broader history of colonial and apartheid-era racism. Rather than dismiss Mbeki's invocation of the history of colonial racism in relation to present-day HIV/AIDS, this essay argues that Mbeki's trenchant analysis of racism needs to be deepened and expanded to include colonial racism's representation of the sexual norms and forms of whiteness.

The history of the mistakes, backflips, controversies, denials, and inconsistencies of the first democratically elected South African government's response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is well known, and I cannot rehearse it here in its entirety.2 It is marked by a series of scandals and a few fragile victories for the estimated 4 million-plus HIV-positive people in South Africa.3 The history of the pandemic under the apartheid regime and during the Nelson Mandela presidency is mostly one of silence. While the pandemic has undoubtedly grown massively since 1996, a history of HIV/AIDS in South Africa would need to address public health questions in these diverging yet continuous eras. In 1998, the government promoted (and perhaps even funded) Virodene, a drug it claimed might "cure" HIV/AIDS and whose active component, dimethyl formamide, is a highly toxic industrial solvent banned for use on humans by a wide variety of organizations from several European governments to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and China's National Poison Control Center. The regime then chose to take no action against the company who made the drug and illegally tested it on human subjects in Tanzania.4 In 2001, the High Court in Pretoria was poised to refuse multinational pharmaceutical companies exclusive patent rights, and (in holding up the 1997 Medicines Act) encouraged the production and distribution of much cheaper generic versions of antiretroviral drugs, and called on the government to distribute them.5 Later the same year, the South African government flew in the face of conventional medical and scientific wisdom by refusing to supply pregnant women with nevirapene, a drug endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) that limits mother to child transmission.6 The government has been very slow in providing drug treatment.7 International funds for drug treatment have been held up or blocked. In 2002, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang refused to disburse $72 million for antiretrovirals to KwaZulu/Natal Province from the Global Fund.8 In 2003, doctors in government and mine houses' health clinics were encouraged not to prescribe or distribute antiretroviral drugs and were even in some cases forbidden to do so, even when these drugs were available from the Ministry of Health.9 According to a range of studies, infection rates have increased fivefold since 1991, and the most recent figures extrapolate an infection rate of 25 percent of the total population and as high as 32 percent in KwaZulu/ Natal.10 South Africa, with its more developed medical infrastructure, has seen this increase in a time in which other sub-Saharan African countries, arguably Uganda and notably Botswana, have made successful inroads in both treatment and prevention.11