Canadian who flagged Africa's AIDS catastrophe dies

Stephen Lewis, who died on Tuesday at the age of 88, was a Canadian politician, diplomat and broadcaster who became one of Africa’s most eloquent foreign champions. When Kofi Annan appointed him UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Lewis had no formal mandate, no precedent to follow, and clue of what he would find. Canada’s then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had appointed Lewis ambassador to the UN, where he campaigned against apartheid SA, helping to position Canada as what Prime Minister Mark Carney later called ‘a principled leader’ in the international campaign to isolate the regime. The Daily Maverick reports that the posting gave Lewis an education in the moral geography of a world divided between those who acted, and those did nothing. The epicentre, when Lewis arrived as Special Envoy, was SA. More than 6m people were living with HIV, the highest number of any country, and President Thabo Mbeki had descended into a denialism so lethal that Lewis would eventually wonder, aloud and in public, why it did not meet the threshold for crimes against humanity.

Full Daily Maverick report