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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Zeblon Gwala is a husky forty-nine-year-old man with an unusually vivid dream life. For many years, he worked as a long-haul truck driver, crisscrossing South Africa from his base, in Durban. But he is in a different business now. A few years ago, Gwala began to dream about herbs. Some nights he would see just one, on others two or three. Gwala's grandfather, who died when he was a boy, was a traditional village healer, and in the dreams he would tell Gwala which herbs to collect and where to get them. Gwala kept a list next to his bed, and eventually, when it had grown to eighty-nine, his grandfather instructed him to divide the herbs into two groups and boil each batch. The resulting concoctions, the apparition assured him, would cure AIDS, the disease that was destroying his country. Gwala followed instructions. He quit his job, turned his garage into a factory, and opened a storefront dispensary in downtown Durban, wedged between a dry cleaner and a furniture store. He hung two signs next to the door: one has "Doctor Gwala" written on it, and the other says "H.I.V. and AIDS Clinic." There are no doctors, nurses, or medical technicians at this particular clinic, and just one product: ubhejane, which is the Zulu word for black rhinoceros. Every day, from eight in the morning until four--unless he runs out first--Gwala sells ubhejane in litre-sized milk containers. There are two kinds. The bottle with a white lid holds an herbal mixture intended to rebuild an immune system ravaged by the AIDS virus. The second, with a blue lid, is a potion to reduce the amount of the virus that has already accumulated in the bloodstream.
On a typical day, as many as a hundred people come to Gwala's clinic, each paying the equivalent of about a hundred dollars--nearly two weeks' pay--for a thirty-day supply. Gwala says that the medicine never fails. He also says that he has no idea how it works. "Ubhejane protects the cells from any virus,'' he told me when I met with him at his clinic, last fall. "I don't know how that happens. I am not a scientist. But what I do know is that people who were on the edge of death go back to work. It makes them feel better, and it gives them life."
The use of ubhejane has been encouraged by President Thabo Mbeki's Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and by the Director-General of Health, Thami Mseleku. The health minister in the province of KwaZulu-Natal has also spoken in favor of the remedy, and the mayor of Durban has supplied funds to buy it for patients at a hospice not far from the city. Ubhejane's most vigorous promoter, a retired professor of sociology named Herbert Vilakazi, says that antiretroviral drugs, or A.R.V.s--which have proved to be the only successful treatment for the millions of people infected with H.I.V.--are so toxic that they can cause more harm than good. Like Mbeki himself, he seems to be convinced that a genuine cure for AIDS is more likely to be found in the arsenal of traditional African medicine than in any chemical compound sold by a Western pharmaceutical company. For years, Vilakazi, Mbeki, and Tshabalala-Msimang have used words like "damaging," "toxic," and "poison" to describe A.R.V.s.
Ubhejane is far from the first untested remedy that South African leaders have recommended to AIDS patients. Virodene, a powerful industrial solvent with no medicinal value, was embraced by Mbeki and his comrades as soon as it was introduced by South African researchers, in 1997. More recently, Secomet V, an extract from red clover, made a splash in the market. It is sold as Ithemba Lesizwe--Hope of the Nation. Minister Tshabalala-Msimang, whose antipathy toward pharmaceutical AIDS treatments has long been an international scandal, has never wavered in her support for such remedies. Last summer, she astonished participants at an international AIDS conference in Toronto by presenting a government public-health display that focussed on beetroot, olive oil, garlic, lemons, and African potatoes. Antiretroviral drugs were included only after furious protests.
Denying the scientific consensus about what causes AIDS and how to treat it is not limited to South Africa, of course. H.I.V. itself is now on trial before the Supreme Court of South Australia. Last year, a thirty-five-year-old man who had unprotected sex with three women--and infected one--despite knowing that he was H.I.V.-positive, was found guilty of endangering their lives. He has appealed, saying that H.I.V. does not cause illness. His main witness is Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a medical physicist at Royal Perth Hospital, who claims that H.I.V. has nothing to do with AIDS. The Perth Group, as she and several other Australian H.I.V. denialists are known, has argued for more than twenty years that the virus has never been isolated or identified properly. Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues insist that AIDS in gay men results from drug abuse and repeated exposure to semen. Last month, the President of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, disclosed that he had found a secret remedy for AIDS and asthma, and announced that he would begin to cure AIDS on Thursdays and asthma on Saturdays.
AIDS denial plays a corrosive role in the health policies of many countries, but nowhere has the damage been as extreme or as enduring as in South Africa. Five and a half million of the country's forty-eight million people are infected with H.I.V., which makes South Africa by any epidemiological standard the country with the world's deadliest AIDS epidemic. Nearly a thousand people there die of AIDS every day, and at least twice that many are newly infected. Between 1997 and 2004,...
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