CAPE TIMES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2012

INSIGHT

Its good to see SA playing central role at international Aids conferences

Alex Welte
ONE might have feared that we South Africans would feature mainly as the objects of case studies and trials at the recent biannual International Aids Conference, hosted by the US in July . In fact, the reality was refreshing. A few years after the South African government was ridiculed for its anti-scientific posturing, our deputy president and health minister were well received at the conference, commenting astutely on key issues while on panels and offering sound bites to the press. The US National Institutes of Health umbrella continues to be the leading funder of basic medical research, generally, and in Aidsrelated areas; and US universities are leaders in many areas from the mathematical/statistical sciences, through basic biochemistry and immunology , to clinical and social science. Yet, the US only reversed a long-standing policy of refusing visas to HIV-positive applicants just in time to make the conference viable. For many delegates, this conference is mostly about the meeting of collaborators and the random connections, new and old. South African researchers and NGOs engaged in Aids-related work were ever visible, presenting new results, chairing key sessions or delivering talks. Even when not formally in the spotlight, the ripples of their work could be discerned widely and deeply . It seems that, however prone we South Africans may still be to name calling and stereotyping, in some debates, our discourse around medical science and health systems analysis is maturing impressively . Before the conference began, it was widely noted that an important shift in debate had occurred in recent years, concerning the coalescence of treatment and prevention. No one now seriously doubts that antiretroviral treatment is a superb form of HIV prevention, as treated individuals have too little circulating virus loads to be efficient transmitters, and the discussion is now mainly about how to access this benefit in light of practical and political obstacles. This debate, although heated at times, did not just go over the same old ground, and progress here has largely been based on the work of South Africans pushing these ideas, and amassing the evidence of early impact of our treatment programme, the largest in the world. South and Southern Africa is also at the heart of a disconcerting conundrum around the possibility that hormonal contraception in particular the injectable forms, variants of which are widely used in SA in particular may increase the risk of HIV acquisition in women who use it, and, perhaps even increase the risk of onward transmission to the partners of these women. This thorny problem presents

The ripples of their work could be discerned widely and deeply

researchers with problems of analysis at the limits of their methods, and study design challenges at the edges of the feasible, not to mention moral complexities in translating the technical meaning of research into advice for action. One cant summarise this important debate into a few sentences, but there is controversy over evidence of

a problematic and indefinite nature that there is risk associated with certain injectable contraceptives. This was well summed up by a South African session chair, closing a session by asking the audience, who in the room would feel comfortable if their teenage daughter were using such products. There were very few hands. Next question: who would actively try to prevent their use if it were the only option for birth control also very few hands. It cuts to the heart of the problem of limited choices for young women, not just about their contraceptive choices, but even about their basic sexual choices, heaping, on top of this, the problem of insufficient information to make clear decisions. SA has been, and will be, at the

centre of this debate. South Africans are doing some of the most important work in many aspects of HIV research, not just in applications to our specific problems, but also raising the bar internationally in the practice of good science. This includes difficult and complex trials of new interventions like antiretroviral products (pills and gels) for use by HIV negative individuals at high risk and field testing new point of care diagnostic devices. Dr Welte is director of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (Sacema) at Stellenbosch University. Sacema is a Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation Centre of Excellence.

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

New nature of indigenous knowledge

Lesley JF Green
INDIGENOUS knowledge is often counterposed with hard science. When indigenous knowledge is understood in this way as being different, separate and distinct from scientific knowledge it sets up debate in very unhelpful ways. One of the best examples was when former president Thabo Mbeki saw traditional medicine as the antithesis of an exploitative Western pharmaceutical industry . The conceptual opposition generated a deadly either-or either African medicine or Western science to justify the states failure to provide antiretrovirals. This failure contributed to an Aids mortality figure of more than 3 million, which translated in 2009 to a mortality rate of almost 850 people every day . The catastrophe of the Aids pandemic serves as a grim reminder of the huge responsibility that scholars who pursue the value of alternative intellectual heritages must shoulder. Since the formalisation of SAs indigenous knowledge policy in 2004, indigenous knowledge has become prominent in national discussions on education, medicine and law in a democracy . Yet the contest over traditional medicine and science in the struggle for antiretrovirals for HIV and Aids has generated an intellectual climate that has made it very difficult for SA scholars to think outside the framework of established positions, canons and criticisms. Fortunately, helpful debates about indigenous knowledge have occurred in India, Latin America and Australia. In Latin America, indigenous and traditional knowledge debates are dominated by differences on environmental knowledge that have two remarkably different strands. The first offers a vigorous defence of Amerindian environmental knowledge and lands. The second strand challenges conceptions of knowledge as universal. It questions whether the modern discipline of cartography and ideas of personhood can convey Amerindian knowledge. It proposes that Amerindian intellectual heritage does not have to be subsumed into modernist thought in order to make sense. Contemporary Brazilian anthropology has sought an approach that works with Amerindian theory . This approach contains new concepts including the rights of nature itself which have been accepted recently into the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. This new approach asks that we rethink the idea that there is only one way to think about nature. Behind much of the new approach to indigenous knowledge is the idea that knowledge is constructed and constantly shifting and cannot be fixed or found existing somewhere in a pristine form. Another feature is to question whether any one group has privileged access to the truth and, in fact, to doubt the existence of one truth. This development helps to expose the limitations of the SA debates. Mbekis Aids denialists cast virus science as a construction of something that did not exist. Their opponents in the humanities and sciences cast traditional medicine and indigenous knowledge as constructions of realities that did not exist. They were working within a framework that one was right and the other wrong. Contradictory alliances have come to define the terrain. Aids activists defence of a pure science has put its supporters in an uncomfortable alliance with Big Pharma. Indigenous knowledge proponents defence of a pure traditionalism sets up an uncomfortable alliance with elites who use the idea of tradition to insulate themselves from criticism from inside (cultural pollution!), and criticism from outside (you have no right to speak!). One of the central difficulties with these debates is the nature of culture. An example of the way in which culture is considered as separate and identifiable from other cultures is in a recent collection, Another Knowledge is Possible, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. One of the contributors, Thokozani Xaba, whose wider body of work makes an important contribution to knowledge debates in SA, argues: Africans [in SA] find themselves constantly destabilised while the what is science, how is nature known, whose sciences ought to prevail in a democracy , and so on. It is appropriate for parliaments to question in what sense the sciences can claim to define nature, reality and truth. But an identity politics of knowledge Western or African science must not be the basis of policies, policing and research. Activists, in such a context, have not found in scholarship the tools to mount an effective response, and have met the states efforts to assert an identity politics of nature by denouncing interests and associations and beliefs, rather than reframing its questions and grappling with the intellectual heritage of scholarship itself. If nothing else, the SA version of the war between science and indigenous knowledge teaches that scholarship by denunciation is a toxic game. The recognition that it was with much the same tools of argument that Mbeki asserted that Aids was a social and political construction has enormous consequences for social scientists who were schooled to detect and out interests and associations of powerful elites. But the struggle over knowledge that has come to be defined as indigenous knowledge cannot be adequately described as culturalist, or ethnonationalist, or fundamentalist, or a movement of political elites, or the marginalised. If SA scholarship is to move beyond the current impasse, there is a need for recognition that the idea of indigenous knowledge not only incorporates claims to identity or efforts to incorporate financial gain, but also challenges central ideas of modernity: including in relation to notions of personhood in medicine and jurisprudence, to notions of ecologies, to notions of well-being, and to what it means to know or believe or imagine. Green is a member of the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at UCT and a former associate of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity in the UCT Research Office. This feature is based on an article recently published in the South African Journal of Science.

CLEARING THE AIR: Behind much of the new approach to indigenous knowledge is the idea that knowledge is constructed and constantly shifting, and cannot be fixed or be found existing somewhere in a pristine form, says the writer.
benefits derived from the holistic approach and the egalitarian nature of indigenous medicines are not being realised. Instead, Africans are subjected to modern practices, among which are the invasive techniques of scientific medicine. Despite its publication amid the SA Aids crisis in 2008, the article makes no mention of the debate between traditional medicines and antiretrovirals. The argument relies on the identification of an authentic African tradition that is separate from Western science. Yet, is it not the case that where the state plays a role in proscribing and normalising traditional healing via bureaucratic regimes of registration, certification, examination, assessment, committees, outcomes and deliverables, that traditional practices are profoundly transformed? The writer also calls for greater investment by the state in research on traditional healing, in ways that rethink conventional practices in the sciences. While that research is important and appropriate, there are significant difficulties in setting up authentic culture as the touchstone of the argument. Firstly , it relies on a particular definition of culture to define the debate: a definition that is deeply rooted in the intellectual heritage of the European Enlightenment. In my view, a critique of that set of ideas is profoundly important in rethinking the ways in which African history is written. Secondly , there is little space, in an argument that takes authentic culture as a given, either for the criticism of tradition, or for traditions of criticism. Like his wider scholarship, Xabas article raises the important issue of medical pluralism. Yet, like Mbekis science war and his more recent challenge to scholars to rethink the relationship between knowledge and democracy, the approach underscores the need for a scholarship on knowledge that will rethink the terms of the knowledge debate, and explore whether science and indigenous knowledge systems are indeed the most useful concepts that can be deployed for the purposes of policy and university transformation. The unintended consequence of the SA debates is to foreclose the possibilities for fruitful dialogue on intellectual heritage. The breakdown in dialogue on African intellectual heritage has much to do with the inheritance of a style of criticism in the humanities that points out intellectual associations in order to condemn those who are seen to fall in the same camp. The insistence on the part of the critical left in denouncing ethnonationalism without engaging the politics of knowledge that regional thinkers on indigenous knowledge have highlighted, creates intolerable conditions for scholars like Xaba who swim against the tide of ideas that is the heritage of the postapartheid critical humanities in SA. The idea of indigenous knowledge is often ahistorical and has many problems. It draws on a colonial vision of culture as comprised of genealogies and blood ties. It asserts a historically problematic notion of ethnicity that can serve the interests of a class of elites. It insulates indigenous knowledge discussions from criticism. But these shortcomings should not prevent us from acknowledging that there are different knowledges and ways of knowing. The focus on identity politics is no longer helpful. It limits critique to the way in which the idea of culture is politically constructed and appropriated. Such an argument may have been of value in an era in which culture and identity were central elements of apartheid ideology . But SAs contemporary debates about science have shifted the fight out of the terrain of culture and social forms, to that of nature itself: what is real, what is rational,

An industry driven by widows

WE NOTE the rather one-sided reporting, in The Cape Times, of attacks on truck drivers and truck driver deaths during the current strike. We see no such similar exposure on the deaths caused by fatigue on the road (such as the two drivers from Imperial who died in accidents recently). These truckers have been literally driven to their deaths by the bosses whose sole interest is profit. By implication, you want us to accept these fatigue-deaths as normal. They are not. They are part of the structural violence committed by the transport bosses every day . How many drivers have died over the years due to fatigue-related accidents? Go and do your research on that, please. How many truckers have had their families torn apart by them spending so many nights on the road in the service of the bosses? The entire trucking industry is based on transport widows. Why do you not go and interview the wives and sons and daughters of the two Imperial truck drivers who recently died on the roads because of greedy bosses? Monopoly capital, Anglo Ameri-

National shame of the Simelane scandal

NO ONE NEEDS to whisper these truths any more: Menzi Simelane, head of SAs prosecution services, is a liar, and the president acted irrationally by giving him the job. The Constitutional Courts decision to this effect means we can say out loud what was obvious to everyone, except President Jacob Zuma, the minister of justice and Simelane. The judges, in coming to this conclusion last week, carefully examined what happened at the Ginwala Commission of Inquiry , among other evidence. But what exactly did Simelane say or do that the court found so unacceptable? Think back to September 2007, when head of prosecutions Vusi Pikoli is going after now-disgraced police chief Jackie Selebi. Suddenly he is stopped short by a letter from then justice minister Brigitte Mabandla. On September 23 he is suspended by then president Thabo Mbeki. A few days later, Mbeki sets up the Ginwala Commission to inquire into Pikolis fitness for the job. Simelane, as director-general of the justice department, has the responsibility of presenting the governments case to the commission, spelling out why Pikoli was not fit to hold the post. Through his display at the commission his lies and some of his

Soapbox
Shaheed Mahomed
can mainly, are responsible for the daily deaths of truckers. They know that if their goods do not get to market, they will not realise any profit. Yet, Anglo American and other mining corporations are on record for stealing wealth from the country for at least the past 50 years. Trillions of rand have been carried off with the consent of the current and previous governments. This is why the miners and truckers strike is legitimate. It is a revolt against the capitalist system which is based on large-scale theft from the masses, the deliberate impoverishment of the masses. When the bosses steal it is regarded as normal, a good business environment, but when workers challenge the theft, it is regarded as bad for business, a threat to the economy . Yet if the stolen wealth is brought back, everyone would have a decent home, all would have work, all would have free quality education, all would have free, liberatory education up to the highest level.

To end the large-scale system of transport-widows, we need to expropriate not only the transport companies by the mines, without compensation to the capitalists, and to place these under workers control. We cannot nationalise under the regime of the Marikana butchers. But to achieve expropriation of the commanding heights, we need to unite all the sectors of the working class and poor in a general strike. A great step towards this would be for workers to establish committees to control the strikes from the grassroots level, for the workers committees to take over the unions, for uniting the workers strikes with the service delivery struggles by extending the workers committees to include delegates from working-class communities. Of course, we need to break from the ANC and SACP and set up an independent revolutionary working class party . Such is the path to abolish poverty in the land of plenty . Such is the path to a general strike which will end this system of exploitation of man by man. Then we would have peace. Mahomed is from the Workers International Vanguard Party.

Legal & General

carmel rickard
inadvertent truths Simelanes integrity is shown to be wanting and his warped understanding of prosecutorial independence is revealed. Though it was clear he had no place in a democratic civil service, he was appointed to Pikolis job. This was after present Justice Minister Jeff Radebe who says he studied the commission findings advised Zuma to ignore both the Ginwala commission and the equally critical public service commission findings on Simelane. Since Radebe appears to approve of Simelanes answers, one must conclude that the minister is equally unsuitable for office in a constitutional democracy . Now for some specific examples of Simelanes behaviour at the commission. Just days before Pikolis suspension, Mbeki wrote to Mabandla asking her to get him some information from Pikoli about his decision to act against Selebi. In response, Mabandla had Simelane draft a letter to Pikoli. But this letter went further than merely asking for information it said

Pikoli could not arrest Selebi until the minister said so. Quite correctly , Pikoli reacted by saying the last part of the letter amounted to an unlawful instruction. Its a crucial point in this history . See what it says about Simelane: he drafts a letter for the minister, clearly imposing an unlawful intervention in prosecuting decisions. This is an inadvertent truth revealed by Simelane, showing what he thinks should be the proper relationship between a prosecutions head and the executive. In terms of his proposed relationship, the minister could interfere in and close down investigations. But, in truth, such interference is unlawful. The exchange shows Simelane also failed to disclose to the commission this Simelane/Mabandla letter and Pikolis response to it. Under cross-examination by Wim Trengove SC, he said he knew about both letters, but had not thought it necessary to include them in the government submissions to the commission. Remember that this commission was set up to establish Pikolis fitness to hold office yet Simelane claims the commission did not need to know about these crucial exchanges. Grilled by Trengove, he admitted they were important, but he became incoherent about

why they were not disclosed. Its not the only time Simelane withheld information. After the commission was established, Pikolis lawyers wrote to Simelane as part of their preparation, asking for all relevant letters between the president, minister and Simelanes department. In response, Simelane said there were no such letters. Crossexamined about this lie, he gave a variety of explanations, all of which the Concourt rubbished. These are just a couple of examples of his attempts to subvert the truth quoted by the court. These and other instances, highlighted by the commission, should have been brightly flashing red lights, warning anyone considering the reports, said the judges. No one reading the evidence or even simply the conclusions of the report could have failed to see that Simelane was a stranger to integrity . Since the law requires the head of prosecutions to be fit and proper with due regard to his or her integrity, this should have been the end of Simelane. That the minister and the president ignored the flashing red lights promoting and defending him rather than ensuring he never again held office in SA is a national scandal. carmelrickard@posterous.com