"Condomising" in the Global Village, International AIDS Conference, Durban: Photo: Alice Welbourn
On the final day of this year’s International AIDS Conference in Durban I got mad in public. It was in yet another panel about women with no woman actually living openly with this HIV virus on the platform. I normally take pride in having a small reputation for keeping my relative calm when all around me are losing theirs. But my outburst from the audience last Friday, especially when the panelists talked about women’s leadership, the need to link with the women’s movement and the idea of addressing huge rates of HIV among young women in sub-Saharan Africa with PrEP, was about the absence of a woman living openly with HIV on the panel, the mad lack of funds for women’s rights activists to take part at all and the huge need to hold on to bodily integrity when it comes to treatment, This outburst offered me a large and overdue dent in this particular aspect of my ego. It is really hard, I find, being an activist and not getting angry. Anger seems to be part of an activist’s job description. Anger comes from the reptile part of our brains, the most ancient, instinctive part in the lower back of our skulls, which we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. It is borne out of deep fear, frustration and despair. Yet it does not represent us humans at our best and erupts most often at the wrong time with the wrong person. So I have had to keep learning, the hard way, that anger doesn’t get you very far, Most of the time, I manage to keep it quietly under wraps, ticking away dormant, well covered up by the more humane folds of my upper brain. But every now and then it lashes out in a charged moment of fierce compassion. Last Friday was one of those moments. This article is both an apology to those who, through no ill-intent of their own, got caught in the firing line of my lashing reptile tongue, and a rage against the machine that charges up these furies inside us.
The carpark meeting room under the main conference building. Photo Alice Welbourn.
