From ‘Dark Country’ to ‘Dark Continent’: AIDS, ‘Race’, and Medical Research in the South African Medical Journal, 1980–1995

Abstract

Racist theories have been the preserve of neither one era, nor one community of people, and they have certainly crossed academic disciplines. In research examining the relations between medicine, science and racism, much has been written about the constructions of Africa as a ‘sick continent’ and of black bodies as not only ‘diseased’ but also ‘hypersexual’. In the 1980s a new syndrome – eventually called acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) – would draw on old images and stereotypes to apportion blame to ‘high-risk groups’, including ‘Haitians’ and ‘Africans’.Between 1980 and 1995, hegemonic AIDS narratives evident in the USA and UK influenced medico-scientific engagements with AIDS in South Africa. These early AIDS narratives constructed AIDS avatars in the form of ‘high-risk groups’ that included (white) homosexual men, (marginalised) intravenous drug users, (female) sex workers, (black) Haitian people and eventually (black) people from Africa.This article focuses on the interplay between AIDS narratives, ‘race’ and science by analysing articles from the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ). It examines how ‘race’ featured as a research category in the SAMJ, and tracks the similarities and differences in the use of racial markers in the AIDS narrative constructed in the journal compared with the international AIDS narrative. It shows too that the political context of 1980s South Africa is reflected not only in the focus on racial markers but also in concerns about ‘infected others’ from beyond the country's borders.