Thembi

"They locked me in this room and everyone was shouting at me". This is the reaction Thembi had to face when she discovered she was HIV positive. Yet she made a decision not to suffer her fate in silence, as so many other South Africans do. "I thought, if this is the way a HIV person has to live, I'm going to fight for my life", Thembi says with defiance in her eyes: "I'm not ashamed". Thembi's charisma and infectious smile were underlaid by a steely determination to confront her fate head-on. Her vocal battle against the disease catapulted her to international fame. Yet for Thembi international acclaim wasn't enough. She wanted to confront the attitude towards AIDS in South Africa. She took the stigma attached to HIV head on and became one of the most important AIDS spokespersons in the country. "I thought, if I can do this for America why can't I do it for my own country?" She forced many in the land of her birth to face up to the problem they were hiding from, even taking president Zuma to task over his ignorance about the disease. "He is very stupid and he is talking bullshit!" However, despite her strength, Thembi could not escape the sadness AIDS had brought into her life. Her boyfriend Melikhaya, the love of her life, caught HIV from Thembi after they decided to have a child together. As Thembi entered the last year of her life, at the tender age of 24, her struggle with the disease started to take its toll. The gap between what Thembi was saying and what she was able to deal with was beginning to grow. She found it more and more difficult to live with her fate, increasingly suffering from depression. Thembi wanted to be different: "I didn't want to just give up and die". AIDS denied her a long life, but she wouldn't let it stop her living. Her refusal to bow down to the disease and her mission to liberate her fellow South Africans from their frightened silence is one of the most poignant and powerful stories of our time.