World Aids Day: Talk and Free Movie Screening
Fri Dec 1, 18:00 - Fri Dec 1, 21:00
SASNEV
ABOUT
Celebrating the living and remembering our dead: The struggle for HIV treatment.
At least 600 people a day were dying of HIV-related illnesses in South Africa around 2003 because they had no access to antiretroviral treatment.
On 10 December 1998, a small band of LGBTQI+ activists and their anti-Apartheid sisters and brothers formed the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) on the steps of St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
Treatment known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment (HAART) started saving hundreds of thousands and later millions of lives in Europe, North America and Brazil from 1996. In the rest of the world millions continued to die.
At that time, ARVs cost between R4 500 and R10 500 per month as drug companies profiteered.
As if that was not enough, between 1999 and 2008, President Thabo Mbeki consciously committed a crime against humanity when he denied that HIV caused AIDS and refused medicines to women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus, or, to treat dying people living with HIV/AIDS.
Today, people live because the resistance of working-class women living with HIV in informal settlements supported by men, and, a very small band of queer people. They defeated the drug companies, Mbeki and his criminal cohort.
TAC resisted the crimes of the drug companies and the crimes of President Mbeki.
Today government pays less than R100 per person per month for ARVs. Our country has the largest HIV programme in the world and more than five million people on treatment.
Come and watch TAC Taking HAART, story of their struggle directed by queer filmmaker and anti-Apartheid activist, Jack Lewis.
You will also hear Zackie Achmat and Lindiwe Mvandaba speak of their struggle to live.