Zackie Achmat

Abdurrazack "Zackie" Achmat (born 21 March 1962) is a South African activist and film director. He is a co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign and known worldwide for his activism on behalf of people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa. He served as board member and co-director of Ndifuna Ukwazi (Dare to Know), an organisation which aims to build and support social justice organisations and leaders, and was the chairperson of Equal Education.In 2024, he stood as independent candidate in the South African National Elections.However, he did not garner enough support to secure a seat in parliament. Quotes Hope is passive; resolve is active. That’s why I believe in resolve, not hope. Zackie Achmat says this with the calm certainty of someone who has lived it—not as a slogan, but as a hard-earned philosophy. He speaks as someone who has watched history repeat its cruelties and yet refuses to stop believing in humanity’s capacity to act. For him, hope without movement is sentiment; resolve, by contrast, is the discipline of those who keep going even when optimism feels like betrayal. I think perhaps the most important part of my identity, and I don’t believe in intersectionality, I believe in indivisibility, would be the fact that I’m a socialist, and everything I do and understand of the world is influenced by that. Everything I know about justice,” comes from the people who raised me. In an interview I’ve lived with depression for more than fifty years. My mother was institutionalized several times, so there’s a genetic disposition.” Reading, he says, became both refuge and resistance. “I still read the Financial Times every day. My reading is extensive, from boring policy documents to great novels. I think the fact that people don't know about my politics, my love, my understanding of culture, and everything other than HIV and sometimes queerness, is for me like, oh, come off it. I'm much more than an HIV-positive t-shirt. In an interview Anger is personal. Rage can be used collectively,” Achmat replies. “Don’t waste your hate—it only makes you feel bad. Rage, on the other hand, can be organized into action. Action doesn’t only mean marching; it means studying, connecting with communities, and finding solidarity. In that time millions have died because of lack of access to drugs, and millions more will die if we do not achieve universal access by 2010. In South Africa and in countless other countries, we have been working for more than a decade to ensure HIV treatment access. We don't want our men to go to the chop shop, but have medical circumcision.» Author: Zackie Achmat If candidates do not support testing for HIV or Aids, don't vote for them. If candidates don't support the use of condoms, don't vote for them. We are saying he should be arrested under the Medicines Act. There is a crisis of prevention in this country. There is a crisis of prevention in this country. There are 1,400 new infections every day. That must stop. My system of belief, ethics, and conscience requires one to love one’s neighbour as oneself, to protect oneself and others from harm, and to promote justice, equality, and freedom. I have no religion, apart from my system of ethics and I struggle to uphold it. I have read the letter of a certain Mrs Estelle Thyssen to the Imam of the Salt River Muslim Congregation at the Muhammadiyah Masjid in Tennyson Street, a letter that reads like a charge sheet for a crime. The Tennyson Street Masjid was the second home to my family, we prayed there, the funeral ceremonies of my grandparents were conducted there, my aunts were married from there—and there I learnt that all people should be treated equally. My grandfather Ebrahim Adams often prayed by himself in the mosque especially when wars raged across the world whether they were wars instigated by Pakistan against Bangladesh or Israel against the Palestinian people. He would tell me: “We are all the children of Nabi Ebrahim (Abraham) and we should love one another”. In 1969, standing on the balcony of our one-bedroomed flat at 17 Chatham Road with my late grandmother, Asa Adams, and my aunts, I heard the call to prayer, watched people fill the street from that mosque and march towards the cemetery to join the burial of the late Imam Abdullah Haroon, murdered by Spyker van Wyk and other security policemen. Many mosques in our city performed the same ritual in the martyred Imam’s memory. Every Friday, all the school boys would walk hand-in-hand from Kipling St Primary School dressed in white through Pope Street down Chatham Road and turn left, where we would find the Tennyson Street Masjid, a place of sanctuary to pray. Once, I performed the athaan (call to prayer). The congregation treated my call to prayer as a noise nuisance because I was completely off-key. Apart from that, to this day, even though I am not a believer, the call to prayer is an integral part of my identity, the call I first heard at the Tennyson Street Masjid. The only verse of the morning prayer that I found difficult to observe at that time was “Asalatu Khair Minal Naum”, it is better to pray than to sleep. None of our Christian neighbours ever regarded the athaan as a noise nuisance. As a socialist, it is my duty to defend every democratic right, including the right to worship a god or ancestor of one’s choice. I believe the letter describing the athaan as a “noise nuisance” is not only discriminatory but also deeply offensive to the Muslim community. I have no doubt that all reasonable people of faith, whether Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or ancestral worship and atheists regard the City of Cape Town’s letter as an unconscionable infringement of religious freedom. AN OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR OF CAPE TOWN GEORDIN HILL-LEWIS Without a very rapid set of interventions, we’ll be lucky to save a couple of million people on HIV treatment. The disruption in southern Africa and beyond is formidable… where people are literally going to die within a few years if they don’t manage to get back on treatment fairly quickly. Nelson Mandela has called him a role model, visited him at his house and asked him to take his pills. "I'm an atheist, but he's my saint," Achmat said in a telephone interview from his Cape Town home. "You don't want to refuse him anything." But he did refuse, unwilling to save his life while the drugs remained too expensive for others. Achmat's decision, which was not known to the public until last year, when journalists began to ask why he was so sick, has gripped a country disillusioned with its all-too-human leadership. Radio listeners call in to discuss whether he should take medicine. "My grandmother is asking me, 'When is Zackie going to take his pills?'" says Jonathan Berger, a researcher at Johannesburg's AIDS Law Project. Surprising to me during the campaign politically is two things stand out: one is the number of youth that have joined the movement, it’s exceptional and they really are exceptional young people. The second is the grannies…the gogos was who I expected would have a much greater loyalty to the ANC and the pain that people have gone through. Well, I think the world has come very far in the last three, four years. We have managed to change the WHO's intervention. It has put antiretrovirals on its essential drug list. It has prequalified antiretroviral drugs. It has called for a target of treating 3 million people by the year 2005. It has the full support of UNAIDS in doing that. The prices of antiretrovirals have come down significantly. Many, many governments have approached WHO for technical assistance, more than 50 governments have approached WHO for technical assistance in developing their program. This is a unique opportunity to turn around the epidemic. Both to reach people for new prevention with new prevention strategies and also to treat people, but it is not going to be realized if we don't understand what the barriers are. In an interview However, our government, our President yet has to visit an antiretroviral program. Our President yet has to visit a clinic where people with HIV attend. Our President yet has to openly speak to people living with HIV publicly. More importantly, our Minister of Health is doing everything she can to speak to confuse science, to confuse issues of nutrition and treatment and so on. She's using nutrition as opposed to ARV treatment as an example to often cause confusion. So that level, very importantly in our country, we don't have a Director General of Health as we speak. We do not have a National Director of our AIDS program. She, Dr. Sime Lela resigned. We do not have a Deputy Director. We don't have a Director of TB at our national level. And that shows of a serious lack of leadership in Provinces. And that's not bad for Provinces with capacity like the Western Cape, Hauting [misspelled?] and so on, the richer provinces. In an interview External links Category:Activists from South Africa Category:Film directors from South Africa Category:Politicians from South Africa Category:HIV/AIDS activists Category:1962 births Category:Living people