ABSTRACT
The apartheid government's strategy regarding Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) seemed to reflect an unwillingness or inability to deal with the socio-political structures underlying the unfolding epidemic, leaving it to other sections of South African society to muddle through on their own. Apartheid laws had criminalised certain forms of sexual relations that acted as a vector for the spread of HIV: homosexual relations, commercial sex work, as well as relations across racial divisions. The white National Party (NP) government defined the AIDS problem in moralistic and racist terms: the HIV-positive individual was due to their own immoral behaviour responsible for their own infection. HIV and AIDS were merely added to a list of communicable diseases provided for in the Public Health Act. The effect was to render AIDS notifiable to a limited extent and to bring into play the possibility of compulsory hospitalisation or isolation of persons suspected of having contracted the syndrome.
