Mantshi, 32, pays a steep price for campaigning to smash complacency about AIDS in black townships. Fearful neighbors won’t enter her three-room shack in the Macassar neighborhood of Khayelitsha. Local children shun her daughter, who attends a Roman Catholic-run preschool for boys and girls who carry HIV. But she is dauntless in hectoring Khayelitsha residents to be tested at the local government hospital. She has known of her HIV status since 1995. Though she is jobless, her family helps scrape together funds to buy anti-retrovirals privately, and 112 weeks of treatment have restored her strength. She rose at 6 a.m. on the day of the march, and took her morning meds with a bowl of porridge. When only a handful of others showed up for the chartered bus to the city, she commandeered a cell phone and quickly filled it up.
Her affidavit last year helped the Treatment Action Campaign win a first round in a lawsuit charging that the government’s refusal to roll out a program to protect newborns from AIDS violates the civil rights of South Africans. She and her comrades are building a mass movement like the United Democratic Front, the coalition of church, labor and civic groups that struggled against apartheid.
The president’s reticence on AIDS mystifies Mantshi. “He is very stubborn, but I don’t know why,” she said. “People are dying but there is no solution.” The government is slowly giving ground; on budget day, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel announced that the AIDS budget will treble, enough to pay for only a modest treatment program, say activists. Late in the week government newspaper ads highlighted a comment by Mbeki implying he wouldn’t oppose plans by Gauteng, the industrial area surrounding Johannesburg to quickly roll out a program for women in childbirth. But foot soldiers like Thandeka Mantshi won’t rest until AIDS is destigmatized, and all have a chance of living in spite of it.
