African AIDS, in the West, is often associated with media images of skeletal, forlorn-looking and dying Africans inviting the sympathy of the viewer or reader. Associated with these images are often motleys of subtly hidden narratives - poverty, promiscuity, failed leadership, impending Armageddon, and lately the greed and heartlessness of Western drugs companies who are harangued for prioritising profits over African lives.

But how do Africans themselves see AIDS? What do they believe causes the disease? How do those affected by the undeniable epidemic really live with it? And how has the disease affected the Africans’ sense of who they are?

With the possible exception of the perspectives espoused by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa – much of which is distorted – the  African AIDS discourse, has, as with most things African, been severely marginalized, if not completely kept away from the Western media.

Dr Raymond Downing, an American medical doctor, who with his wife (also a medical doctor) have been living and practising medicine in different African countries for over fifteen years, seeks to plug this lacuna with this book. Based on personal observations, interviews, the reading of African press, books and AIDS narrative in African fiction, as well as in academic papers, Dr Downing charts the development of the African AIDS discourse. He invites the reader to look beyond the AIDS epidemic to see how Africans view health and diseases in general.

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Raymond Downing was born in Massachusetts, USA, and studied medicine in New York between 1971 and 1975. He and his wife, Janice Armstrong, have practised medicine in Sudan, Tanzania and Kenya for more than fifteen years.  His other books include The Wedding Goes On without Us, which was published in Kenya in 2002.