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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2020
Promise me to live … Live to a ripe old age … Don't die a stupid death … Live till every hair on your head turns grey. Earn your wrinkles and … enjoy them! Enjoy every wrinkle and every grey on your head. Tell yourself you have survived! Survived! … Live! … Don't die (Beauty's Gift: 74).
Sindiwe Magona's Beauty's Gift is a gripping story that juxtaposes the essence and preservation of life and the vicissitudes of life in the modern South African culture. Published in 2008, this novel expounds the tragic experiences of the people in a typical South African community that is ravaged by the dreaded Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the actual Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It highlights the seeming insensitivity of the government, the hopeless drifting of the youth, the steady elimination of people by, and the gloomy impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on families, the educational system, the church, marriages, the future of the community, etc. Through this novel, Magona responds to the very pressing problem of HIV in South Africa.
For the sake of clarification, Rebecca Hodes highlights that AIDS is the term for the condition caused by the advancement of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which weakens the human immune system and harms the body's ability to recover from illnesses. In the four decades since its emergence, science has made rapid advancement in understanding and treating HIV. By 1983, the virus had been isolated, and its modes of transmission were clearly established: principally through unprotected sex, from mother to the child in her uterus or through breastfeeding, and from needle sharing in intravenous drug use (‘HIV/AIDS in South Africa’). Kylie Thomas in ‘Photographic Images, HIV/AIDS and Shifting Subjectivities in South Africa’ explains that South Africa's first cases of HIV were reported in 1982, at a time of increased militarization and repression by the apartheid state. It was only in 1985 that the Department of Health launched its first HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. The campaign's use of coffins and skeletons conveyed nebulous, doom-laden messages about HIV, rather than conveying clear messages about the modes of HIV transmission, prompted panic and paranoia (356).
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