Winstone Zulu, one of Africa's most dynamic Aids activists, is currently trying to set up ACT-UP Zambia. Yet a year ago, as a member of Thabo Mbeki's Aids Panel, he was questioning the very existence of HIV. He talks to Gus Cairns
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Even now," says Winstone Zulu at the start of our conversation,
"I hate this idea of being HIV positive." Yet by the end, he
is advocating radical street demos in Zambia to get Aids treatment.
On an echoey phone line from London to Lusaka, a complex character comes
through.
Zulu, now 38, was diagnosed in 1990. A lifelong communist, he was given
a scholarship to what was still (just) the USSR, to study politics - on
one condition. He had to take an HIV test. "I had no counselling.
I think from
the time I found out I was HIV positive I really believed I was going
to die."
And yet, almost from the start, he became one of the few Africans then
in the 'Aids establishment'. At the Paris World Aids Conference in 1994
he was instrumental in seeing through the Paris Declaration which said
that people with HIV must be consulted on their care. He was present at
the meeting in Como, Italy, that set up UNAIDS. He was on the scientific
committee of the Vancouver World Aids
Conference in 1996, and was all set to perform a similar role at Geneva two years later.
