SOUTH AFRICA: Activists are urging the people to fight HIV as they once rose up against the white racist regime, writes Joe Humphreys in Pretoria
Benedict Sombane didn't know he was HIV-positive until he started feeling faint at work.
"My employer sent me to the hospital for tests, and that's when I found out," the 35-year-old married man recalls.
His wife, with whom he lives in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Pretoria, also tested positive for the virus. So too did their only son - who died from an Aids-related illness two years ago at the age of five.
Together they form part of a grim set of statistics in South Africa. More than six million out of the country's population of 45 million are now HIV-positive. An estimated 1,500 South Africans are newly infected with the virus each day.
It is not just the figures that are mind-boggling, however. The government's response to the epidemic has confounded and enraged anti-Aids activists.
They accuse the cabinet - and in particular health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang - of playing down talk of a crisis, fighting against the roll-out of anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment, and opening up a debate on whether HIV causes Aids.
Dr Tshabalala-Msimang, a qualified doctor who advocates a cocktail of beetroot, garlic and olive oil for the treatment of Aids, rejects the criticism, citing a 100-fold increase in spending on HIV/Aids over the past 12 years as proof of the government's "commitment".
In addition, she says overseas donors have "confidence" in South Africa's strategy - a claim borne out to an extent at the weekend when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria praised the government at a biennial meeting with its partners in Durban.
Jon Lidén, spokesman for the UN-sponsored fund to which Ireland contributes €20 million a year, said it was increasing its grant allocation to South Africa to €80 million because of the country's success in meeting performance targets.
"South Africa is doing fairly well," he says, adding that initial resistance on the part of the government to spending money on treatment was now history.
Few people working at grassroots level agree with this analysis, however.
The Treatment Action Campaign - the country's leading advocacy organisation on HIV/Aids - continues to describe government policy as one of "denial".
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are increasingly concerned, moreover, that the international community is being "duped" by the government's reports of progress - and mistakenly adjusting spending priorities in the process.
"The donors all want to fund the government now, and NGOs are suffering as a result," says Fr Kieran Creagh, a Belfast-born priest working with terminally ill patients in the township of Atteridgeville West.
"Donors are hoping the government will fund the NGOs but that does not happen."
Conscious that he is "a guest in the country", he says he does not wish to be overly critical of the ANC government.
In any event, he says, politicians are not alone to blame.
"There is a need for all of society here - government, civil society, the Church, whoever - to get together and call a halt to this."
Nonetheless, he believes a special responsibility rests with the government, and he echoes a call by the Treatment Action Campaign for a local campaign against HIV/Aids, similar to the struggle against white only rule.
"Apartheid is still alive in this country, but the division is between rich and poor," the Passionist priest says. "The situation is going to get a lot worse.
"In a few years, it's going to be like a war zone situation, with the amount of death and sickness ahead."
In his own parish, some progress on treatment has been made. New testing clinics have opened, along with an ARV centre. However, they are already overstretched, and the local hospital has begun turning away gravely ill patients because of a lack of nurses.
Fr Creagh worries that the focus in future may simply be on the quantity of care, not the quality. It was partly out of this fear that he helped to establish a hospice for terminally ill patients - a hospice which he hopes will be a model for the country.
Called Leratong, or "place of love", it marked its second anniversary at the weekend with a function to which former inpatients - among them Mr Sombane - were invited.
When Benedict Sombane was admitted to the hospice in December 2004 he weighed under six stone and was given just a few weeks to live.
Now he believes he has "at least 10 years" left in him - time which he wants to spend supporting his 16-year-old daughter, who has tested HIV negative, and his wife.
"In the dictionary, it says a hospice is where you go to die but here I am still living," he remarks. "Because of Leratong I am."
Fr Creagh takes strength from survivors such as "Benny" but he knows a bigger battle lies ahead - and it is a battle, he believes, in which everyone can play a part.
"Irish people were very good at challenging the apartheid government," he says, "but I would love to see another anti-apartheid movement challenging the current government on its [ health] policies, because the people who are oppressed today are those living with HIV/Aids."