The colour of AIDS

Abstract

The African debate on HIV/AIDS has been approached in terms that either
foreground its biomedical implications, on the one hand, or its economic
challenges, on the other. From the biomedical perspective, HIV/AIDS is a
health problem, calling for appropriate behaviour modification strategies;
from the economic perspective, however, HIV/AIDS in Africa is viewed as a
structural effect of capitalist-induced poverty. This article aims at providing a
philosophical basis for understanding the African debate on HIV/AIDS. Its
primary contention is that, in order to understand the African experience of
HIV/AIDS, we need to overcome the crippling legacy of the modernist-colonialist
discourse on Africa, in which “reason” is invariably regarded as the
exclusive privilege of the (“white”) Western philosophical “mind”.

South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (4) 2007: pp. 388-402