UTC Library builds HIV/AIDS video archive

MORE than 5.5 million people in South Africa are afflicted with HIV or AIDS. The epidemic has prompted a media group and a university library to pool their resources to document and preserve the experiences of those who are suffering and those who have battled a government that has at times refused to acknowledge the epidemic.

Since 1998, the Community Media Trust has shot 3,000 hours of video footage chronicling the social and political aspects of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. With a $75,000 grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the University of Cape Town Libraries (UTC) has launched a unique archival project to safeguard and make accessible a decade of “primary source” material. The archive, housed in the library’s Manuscripts & Archives Department, ensures that the largest audio-visual collections on the AIDS experience in Africa will not become lost to South Africa — the country with the largest number of HIV-positive individuals — or to researchers and policymakers around the world.

The footage broadly represents the social character of the epidemic from transmission through prevention, treatment, care and support. It also contains extensive material on the Treatment Action Campaign’s (TAC) struggle for access to care from 1999 to the present and highlights the fight for the rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups susceptible to gender violence.

The AIDS Archive also provides an important historical record of TAC’s resistance to the government’s AIDS denialism.Air Jordan XI 11 Wool