In his recently released book, Get Up! Stand Up! Personal Journeys towards Social Justice, HIV activist Mark Heywood highlights the lack of diversity and representation in the media’s reporting in the late 1990s and early 2000s on South Africa’s fight for access to free HIV treatment in the public health sector.

Poor black women continue to be disproportionately infected with HIV, the latest Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) national HIV household survey found in 2012. They played a leading role in the Aids struggle but are rarely given a voice.

Instead, Heywood, who headed up the Aids Law Project at the time and was also a founding member of the Treatment Action Campaign lobby group, and fellow HIV activist Zackie Achmat, spoke for them.

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