AIDS denailism at senior government level is estimated to have resulted in the untimely death of 340 000 South Africans during the period referred to as “the lost decade” by the current Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi. Memories of the lost decade are vivid in people who lived and worked in close proximity with the devastation caused by this pandemic and in those who fought to change this reality. This project aims to generate oral testimonies of the first decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The lessons learned from fighting this in epidemic deserves to be remembered and the key individuals who contributed to ensuring that South Africa now has the largest AIDS treatment programme in the world needs to be acknowledged. The Oral History Project acknowledges that that such lessons are best conveyed by human experience, in human voices by those who witnessed and experienced the events of this lost decade.

This project is documenting through the use of multimedia sources the stories and experiences of health professionals, advocates and people living with HIV and AIDS. The project is also building up a repository of these stories for the purposes of creating a historical archive of the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which will be accessible to the public and to future generations.

View the Talking Back Project interviews