SOUTH AFRICAN Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron is a leading activist on gay rights and HIV/AIDS whom the late Nelson Mandela called a “new hero for South Africa.” Adopted in 1994, South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2005, before Cameron joined the court, it issued a landmark decision requiring Parliament to legalize same-sex marriage.
Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, Justice Cameron speaks candidly here about his ongoing struggles with internalized stigma, the state of the nation’s unhealed wounds, and lingering injustices and the need for what he calls “angry engagement” by all South Africans on critical questions of the day.
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein: As a justice, you’ve achieved a pinnacle of respect, but you’ve talked about your own internalized shame and stigma as something that’s deeply ingrained.
Edwin Cameron: As a gay man, I’ve experienced the internalized shame and stigma of growing up in a deeply oppressive, heterosexist society, where for centuries and millennia I’ve been treated as an outcast, as unwell, subordinate, stigmatized, sick, immoral, as unbiblical. So, despite being a 63-year-old proudly gay man who’s a justice of this court, I still sometimes experience that internal stigma. I’ve also experienced the internalized stigma of HIV, where I’ve known perfectly well, perfectly rationally, that HIV is simply a viral particle that can be fully medically contained. And I know the force of the internal shame of HIV. It’s very powerful.
The fact is, and I’m not saying this to claim any credit, I’m still the only person holding public office in Africa who has stated my own HIV status. It’s not that there aren’t people who speak about the HIV status throughout Africa. It’s that they are almost exclusively poor, unemployed and working-class people. What’s keeping singers, soccer stars, members of Parliament, provincial premiers, government executives, cabinet ministers from speaking about their own status? It’s internalized stigma. We know, as a simple matter of demography, that between ten and twelve percent of all of those sectors have HIV. Yet none within the elite has spoken out. So in this sense the internalized shame of HIV remains highly active—and presents as an elite, class-linked phenomenon.
I suspect—though as a bearer of white privilege I cannot reliably say—that my country is dealing also with internalized racial stigma. It’s impossible to grow up in a country where for centuries one race has been proclaimed superior in rights and culture without suffering internal injury. I grew up with an internalized racial consciousness of superiority. I was poor, but I “knew” that I was better. That’s my apartheid deficit, and it’s a deep and shameful injury. The converse injury may be an internalized sense of racial shame and stigma. Of course I’m guessing because as a white man I’ve only experienced the opposite injury. Steve Biko addressed the internal burden of shame of growing up in a deeply racist and oppressive society. James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates have written about it. Perhaps others with title to speak may take it up.
JKL: Does your own experience as a gay man help you have some sensitivity to racial issues?
EC: I would hope so, but of course one must approach this with caution, because of the risk of seeming patronizing or condescending or intrusive. I’m hyper-aware of that. Even when approached with great caution, these issues are still very delicate.
JKL: Do you find that being in some of those dialogues can have a healing effect for you?
EC: Undoubtedly. With AIDS, I can testify that, as a lawyer in the ’80s, as a judge in the ’90s, I felt deeply ashamed of having HIV. This was even though I knew that my job was secure. I knew that those around me would support me. Yet I feared coming out about my HIV status. Why? Internal shame—irrational and unnecessary, but immensely powerful. It was Gugu Dlamini’s death that triggered my public statement about my own HIV. She was a poor person from KwaMashu in Durban, a sex worker. She spoke out about living with HIV—and paid for it with her life. I could not keep silent after that.
I can only report my own experience. That is why I condemn no one for remaining silent, nor urge people to come out. I know the fear and the constraint too profoundly. Again, with LGBT activism in South Africa, there’s an interesting class dimension. Activism has been working-class-driven in South Africa. The white middle classes are hopelessly depoliticized. But it’s important to note that black middle-class lesbians and gays, certainly those I know, are pretty depoliticized. They’ve not come out, they’ve been politically very quiescent. So, as with AIDS, the impulse and energy to activism have been left to working-class and poor people.
JKL: What is your sense of healing and social justice for you on a personal level and for South Africa as a whole?
EC: We should start off by acknowledging that there is a sour taste among many. The sentimental fervor of rainbowism has passed. We are 22 years into a very gritty reality. We have a divided country with a deeply racialized past and with much unachieved. We also have a government that has shown itself subject to significant failures—not just of service delivery, but also in predatory looting and corruption by politicians and officials, which is widespread. So, it’s gritty reality of a functioning democracy in a developing country, or in any country. This means that it’s filled with disappointment and anger and claimant groups.
And ours has a particular history. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was indispensable for what it did. We’d have been in serious trouble if we had not had those hearings, countrywide, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu presiding. Many, many people got to speak of their grief and anger and loss. The signal thing omitted was reparations. We had amnesty. A lot of people benefited from amnesty, black and white, on both sides, but the
beneficiaries were mostly white perpetrators of apartheid crimes. And there was truth telling, but not enough—and no reparation. So that process was partial and part of the present anger is directed toward that.
In my talks, I urge people to take up issues through their own agency and activism and organizations. There’s no end to what each of us can do with our own determination and ingenuity and strategic organization. I urge them to use the Constitution more. It’s through angry passivity that we will go backwards. Angry engagement will take us forward.
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is an assistant professor of journalism at Grand Valley State Univ. in Michigan. In 1995–96 he taught in South Africa and has maintained a strong connection to the country since then.
