In November 2001, Rolling Stone magazine published "AIDS in Africa: In search of the truth" by controversial South African journalist Rian Malan that touched off a global debate about statistics, president Thabo Mbeki's denialist HIV views and the severity of AIDS on the continent.
The article is not available for free Rolling Stone's site, however, subscribers can login and access it. It is also available at AIDS denialist sites which I won't link to and you can use Google to locate them.
Malan's new book "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was reviewed in the March 21 edition of the New York Review of Books by Bill Keller, currently an opinion writer for the New York Times where he once served as executive editor and from 1992 through 1995 was the bureau chief in Johannesburg.
The Review makes the full article available only to subscribers, of which I am one, and I've excerpted from it because what is reported needs a wider audience beyond the Review's readership.
Keller writes:
Two long pieces in The Lion Sleeps Tonight are devoted to his brawl with anti-AIDS campaigners, a confrontation that did more than anything else to alienate Malan from the mainstream. Malan says that his reporting assignment began as an intended takedown of Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela’s successor as president of South Africa. Mbeki came under the influence of charlatans who convinced him that AIDS was a hoax perpetuated by whites, designed to promulgate a racist cartoon of African hypersexuality . . .
“I would have attacked Mbeki for nothing,” Malan writes in a preface to the chapter, "but this American magazine [Rolling Stone] was offering me a small fortune to exercise my disgruntlement on the presidential person, and I could scarcely believe my luck. I’d been struggling for years to get naive and idealistic Americans to publish anything even vaguely negative about the South African situation…. Unfortunately, the facts as I found them failed to justify Mbeki’s decapitation." . . .
Malan found a valid complaint: beginning in the late 1980s AIDS organizations, relying on computer models in the absence of reliable epidemiological data, overestimated the magnitude of the impending “apocalypse” in Africa. Some anti-AIDS campaigners perpetuated the alarmist numbers even after they had been discredited, using the inflated body count to rally resources for the campaign. And skeptics like Malan were demonized for pointing this out . . .
“I believe AIDS is a real problem in Africa,” he concedes. “But there are breeds of AIDS activists and AIDS journalists who sound hysterical to me.” These “professional pessimists,” he says, “come forth like loonies drawn by a full moon.” . . .
[The] actual numbers of people infected ultimately soared, and, while not as apocalyptic as the original models forecast, AIDS remains an epidemic in much of Africa. Even Malan finally concedes that “by 2007 the anecdotal evidence was overwhelming: the phantom catastrophe of 1999 had become real,” which comes pretty close to saying of his war on AIDS hyperbole: Sorry, never mind . . .
Unfortunately, Keller doesn't say if Malan disclosed what that small fortune from Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner amounted to, and I'm curious to know even a ballpark figure.
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