MEDIA- SOUTH AFRICA: Activist Journalism in the Service of Aids Awareness

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 24 2001 (IPS) - Thanks to the fact that 32-year-old Lucky Mazibuko works in former President Nelson Mandela’s backyard, the elder statesman is becoming an ambassador in the battle against HIV-Aids.

Mazibuko works at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, where he heads its HIV-Aids programme. The Foundation is based on the Mandela property, so Mazibuko has easy access to his hero.

He also acts as Mandela’s counsellor on Aids matters, helping the former president prepare speeches and ensuring that he becomes a national symbol of efforts to turnaround the spread of the pandemic.

But Mazibuko is an icon in his own right: before coming to work at the Foundation, he won national acclaim with a weekly column on HIV-Aids. He lives positively with HIV and has helped to destigmatise Aids with his column, which runs in the Sowetan newspaper – South Africa’s largest daily.

A contemporary black leader, he sits in his office under a series of portraits of older icons like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mandela and President Thabo Mbeki.

While they fought for civil rights, equal rights and independence, his demons are different. “I talk Aids, I sleep Aids, I drink Aids. I have a fighting relationship with the virus. “It’s in your system to kill you and you have to fight bitterly to stay alive. But its sole purpose is to kill you and when you die, it dies,” says Mazibuko.

When Mazibuko found out he was HIV-positive, he was already working as a journalist in Johannesburg. Writing became his form of counselling, of dealing with the myriad emotions that being positive stirs.

He became an activist, joining a support and counselling group to find out all he could about Aids and how to beat its “belittling” impact. It was, he says, a “turning point” when one of his group died – his first close encounter with an Aids death.

He counts his article then on the wasted friend’s wasted body as a symbol of his turning point. It was when he decided to do battle with his virus.

The experience had made him confront his mortality – “I realised that someday I could see myself in his shoes”. That fear has been turned to a stoicism – “someday we all die”.

On his desk is the bestseller “Conversations with God” – perhaps an indication of the soul-searching he has undergone to reach a peace with the world.

Mazibuko was recruited by UNAIDS to join its Greater Involvement of People Living with Aids (GIPA) programme. The programme places HIV- positive individuals in workplaces where they become ambassadors who destigmatise the disease and ensure that those who are infected and affected by Aids determine policies on prevention and treatment.

Several conventional industrial corporations were interested in recruiting the spunky, affable young man. But he wanted to write and while there were no media companies that were GIPA partners, Mazibuko found his own space.

He phoned the Sowetan’s editor-in-chief Aggrey Klaaste who agreed to see him and even cancelled an appointment to hear Mazibuko’s proposition.

Klaaste is re-known and widely respected for his writings on nation building and he decided to give Mazibuko a column, seeing it as part of the Sowetan’s project.

“The Sowetan gave me a voice, exposure and a platform that no other company could,” says Mazibuko. With the column, he punched above his weight, extending his influence way beyond GIPA’s expectations.

The column wasn’t all plain sailing. Conservative elements on the paper tried to scotch the column, but Klaaste batted for it, beating down any opposition.

As the column has become an institution, there has been a major shift in the correspondence the journalist gets from readers.

Three years ago, says Mazibuko, people always wrote anonymously, asking for help, always for “a friend”. That has changed.

Between October last year and March this year, he received 160 calls. “I get mountainous amounts of correspondence, including from high profile political and sports personalities.” He adds “There’s been a remarkable change in the correspondence.”

Mazibuko says people now identify themselves. People want to learn how to live “positively”, while others ask for information on caring for loved ones living with HIV. “Often”, he says, “I am an excuse for people to talk about Aids.”