INTRODUCTION

In a dramatic display of political astuteness, six hundred volunteers under the banner of the Treatment Action Campaign, a non-government organization dedicated to ensuring access to treatment for the millions of South Africans infected with HIV/AIDS, commemorated human rights day in South Africa in 2003 by marching on the same police station at Sharpeville where anti-apartheid protestors had been gunned down on March 21, 1960. Symbolizing the number of South Africans dying each day from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses, the demonstrators demanded that the government immediately agree to establish an antiretroviral treatment program in the public health sector. At the same time, fellow TAC protestors in Durban and Cape Town highlighted the urgency of their demands by laying formal charges of culpable homicide against the Minister of Health as well as the Minister of Trade and Industry whom they accused of negligently failing to act and thus of causing the deaths of thousands of AIDS sufferers.

This campaign reflects a situation in marked contrast to the day nearly a decade before in May 1994, when Nelson Mandela, in his first official exercise of power as President of South Africa, announced that free health services must be provided to all children under the age of six and to pregnant women. Yet, unlike the over forty-year struggle against apartheid, within a year the government had conceded that the public sector must provide treatment and was instead embroiled in a debate over the pace of implementation of the promised program.