Sacrifices of a Street Fighter.(Thandeka Mantshi)(Brief Article)

She was lost in the crowd of protesters outside Parliament last week. As township activists shouted under the noonday sun, not afraid to stand up to demand that President Thabo Mbeki launch an all-out war against AIDS, Thandeka Mantshi stood quietly in the throng with her daughter Okuhle, 4. Mother and daughter both are HIV positive. And just by being there, they showed they were not afraid to stand up to demands that their president end his dithering over the causes of the pandemic.

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 ...