A New Struggle: Active Citizenship in Thembi Ngubane and the Bambanani Women’s Group’s HIV/AIDS Narratives

Abstract

This article discusses South African women’s narrative and artistic responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to include Thembi Ngubane’s radio broadcast “Out of hiding, into the world: Thembi’s AIDS Diary” and the Bambanani Women’s Group’s collection Long Life … Positive HIV Stories. Produced in South Africa for a global audience, these texts use narrative as a strategy for intervention through their multi-media representations of HIV/AIDS that challenge sensationalist, and often Western, accounts of the epidemic in Africa. This article claims that both Thembi Ngubane’s radio diary and Long Life represent the struggle against HIV/AIDS as a human rights issue, and that they both assert the significance of narrative as a form of activism that facilitates solidarity among women affected by HIV/AIDS. More specifically, this article argues that, collectively, the women’s communal and individual stories advance a form of active citizenship that incorporates narrative as a political strategy, challenges popular epistemic understandings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and demands a new version of health rights. Finally, this article considers issues of mediation and consumption in terms of the global audience that these narrative texts imagine for themselves in their effort to span national and continental borders and to develop new global communities.

Keywords:

• life narrative
• health rights
• Nkosi Johnson
• Mbembe’s necropolitics
• Foucault’s biopolitics