Foreword by Nelson Mandela“I love being a judge. The challenges are exhilarating … But I am not only a judge. I am also living with Aids. I am still the only public office bearer in South Africa to have chosen to make public my HIV status. I felt I was called to witness. I felt called to account for my survival in a country in which hundreds of thousands were dying. I did not feel I should remain silent.”When Edwin Cameron announced to a stunned local and international media that he – one of South Africa's most prominent citizens - was himself living with the virus cutting swathes through the population of the continent, the impact was immediate.In Witness to AIDS, Edwin Cameron's compelling memoir, he grapples with the meaning of HIV/AIDS: for himself as he confronts the possibility of his own lingering death, and for all of us in facing up to one of the most desperate challenges of our time. In his intensely personal account of survival, Cameron blends elements of his destitute childhood with his daily duties as a senior judge and international human rights lawyer, while focusing always on the epidemic's central issues: stigma, unjust discrimination, and, most vitally, the life-and-death question of access to treatment. Cameron's remarkable story of his own survival in an epidemic that has cost millions of lives is at once moving and uplifting, sobering and ultimately hopeful.
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