ABSTRACT
The apartheid policy maker's initial response to the emerging epidemic is perhaps the most consistent with literal official denial. This chapter describes that Stanley Cohen's typology of official denial is applied to the history of South African AIDS governance in order to investigate the theory of official denial. Classic official denial thus presents a more traditional kind of government denial that deals with the three basic types of denial: literal denial, interpretive denial and implicatory denial. The arguments contained in Castro Hlongwane that allowed officials to argue that the South African government is actually the victim in the AIDS epidemic, exhibit distinct elements of implicatory denial. Whilst whites were assured of a black decimation, the black communities, thanks to the initial selling of the epidemic as limited to white homosexuals, largely discounted warnings of a heterosexual plague. In this climate of oppression and political manipulation, conspiracy theories flourished.
