While the plight of Nkosi Johnson, the 11-yearold boy who is terminally ill with AIDS, has touched the hearts of South Africans, it has also highlighted some of the changes which have taken place in that country in the post-apartheid years. Nkosi Johnson, who now lives in the Johannesburg suburb of Melville with his adoptive mother Ms Gail Johnson, came to prominence nationally and internationally last year when he made an appeal at an major conference in Durban for greater sympathy for people suffering from AIDS.
Ms Zanele Mbeki, wife of South Africa's president; the director general of the presidential office, Mr Frank Chikane; and Mr Edwin Cameron, a high court judge who has spoken publicly of his HIV-positive status and his homosexuality, have visited him in hospital. Not long ago Ms Johnson could have faced a prison sentence for harbouring a black person in a white suburb such as Melville, while Mr Cameron might have been removed from the bench through the influence of the more fundamentalist members of the Dutch Reformed Church.
The sympathy expressed towards Nkosi Johnson and his adoptive mother has ranged from the mansions of rich north-Johannesburg suburbs such as Sandton, through the urban sprawl of Soweto to the traditional kraals of the rural African heartland. A greater awareness has been created that AIDS can strike the very young as well as the sexually active in a country which is being ravaged by the disease. Figures released on World Aids Day last year indicated that as many as 20 per cent of South Africa's population may be HIV positive and attempts to check the spread of the virus have met with little success.
Perhaps the most remarkable factor in the South African debate on AIDS has been the persistence of President Mbeki in the belief that AIDS does not stem from HIV, a position which has not encouraged greater action in the fight against the disease. In this respect Mr Mbeki's views differ sharply from those of his predecessor Mr Nelson Mandela. Despite having the largest and most powerful economy on the continent, South Africa is a poor country by international standards. Some of the blame for its current plight must be shared by the richer countries of the northern hemisphere which have been reluctant to allow African countries to manufacture cheap generic versions of the expensive drugs used to stem the tide of a disease which kills an estimated 12 million Africans each year.
In the case of children such as Nkosi Johnson there is greater medical hope than there is for adult AIDS sufferers. The inexpensive drug Nevirapine which has been sanctioned on a trial basis at selected South African hospitals may at least lead to a lessening of the incidence of the disease amongst the young by blocking the transmission of the virus from pregnant mothers to their babies.