It is impossible to contemplate the shape of late modern history, in Africa or elsewhere, without the polymorphous presence of HIV/ AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny. The disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations. “AIDS,” wrote Susan Sontag (1989:122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,” a throwback to an era in which sickness was, by its nature, immutable, mysterious, and fatal. Such reactions make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scientific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future. As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering; nor even in the relationship with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and the capacity to control it. AIDS also cast a premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. Epidemics everywhere tend to be seen as coming from outside, especially when they well up within the antiseptic heartlands of reason. When Western order is polluted from within, the contagion is frequently identified

with Africa-as primal other, as object of dangerous desire, as projection of a self never fully tamed or tameable.