Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

South Africa is considered to be ‘home’ to the deadliest disease ever known in our contemporary age hitherto: HIV/AIDS. According to UNAIDS data (2018), East and Southern Africa alone concentrate nearly 50% of the people living with the disease in the world. Within the larger framework of this mind-numbing statistics, Jonny Steinberg’s The Three Letter Plague (2008) makes the disease engaging to individuals and communities who have barely thought of the far-reaching consequences of the disease, very especially on a social level. In so doing, the author walks the reader through the untimely HIV/AIDS epidemics in one of the most affected areas by the virus in rural South Africa, Lusikisiki (KwaZulu-Natal), through the lens of a young man nicknamed Sizwe, a rural entrepreneur tested HIV-positive who aims high in life and who is likewise willing to share the place that AIDS has in his life with the readers community. The story of Sizwe helps explore the ravages of AIDS epidemic in a stifling rural atmosphere dominated by superstitious beliefs and tight social structures, where the silence of a terrified community about the impact of the disease on villagers impinges on the natural flow of social relations. In this bleak state of affairs, the power of life writing emerges to challenge both the silence and fear associated with the stigma of coping with HIV/AIDS, thus enabling readers to have first-hand knowledge on the dynamics of rural South Africa when it comes to health.