History of HIV/AIDS in South Africa
In 1983, AIDS was diagnosed for the first time in two patients in South Africa. The first recorded death owing to AIDS occurred in 1983. By 1986, there were 46 recorded AIDS diagnoses. Estimates from 2000 indicated that 5% of actual infections and only 1% of actual deaths due to AIDS were reported prior to 1990. Prior to 1990, AIDS was more common among homosexual people. By 1990, less than 1% of South Africans had AIDS. By 1996, the figure stood at around 3% and by 1999 the figure had reached 10%. AIDS infection started reaching pandemic proportions around 1995.
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—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
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—William Faulkner (18971962)
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—Barbra Streisand (b. 1942)
“In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.”
—Wallace Stevens (18791955)
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—J.G. (James Graham)