Hosted annually by 91黑料网 Global Health Programs (GHP), Global Health Night brings together over 300 members of our university community to celebrate student accomplishments in global health. The evening features a student poster fair showcasing more than 75 projects, followed by a formal program that highlights the university鈥檚 leadership and impact in global health. The annual program also includes a keynote address delivered by a distinguished global health leader.
For the 17th annual Global Health Night, we were honoured to welcome Zackie Achmat as our keynote speaker. As the first recipient of the Paul Farmer Award, Mr. Achmat delivered the inaugural Paul Farmer Lecture for Global Health Equity.
Read the interview conducted by the student-run 91黑料网 Perspectives on Global Health blog with Mr. Achmat in the lead-up to Global Health Night: .
Recording
About our Keynote Speaker
Zackie Achmat is a socialist who joined the struggle as a high school student during the 1976 student revolt against white minority rule. During the 1980 high school and university student rebellion, he was detained without trial. Zackie was recruited to the banned African National Congress (ANC) in prison to work both openly organizing building youth, student, worker, civic and health organizations.
Zackie was diagnosed with HIV in 1990. In 1994, he joined the AIDS Law Project founded by Justice Edwin Cameron. He co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality in the same year. Zackie became one of the founders and leaders of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) on 10 December 1998. He has collaborated with HIV activists and humanitarian agencies worldwide, including M茅decins Sans Fronti猫res, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization. Since then, he co-founded and led movements Equal Education, the Social Justice Coalition, Ndifuna Ukwazi, Reclaim the City, and #UniteBehind. These movements focused on political education, research, mobilization, and litigation. Zackie also continues to fight against state capture, corruption, mismanagement, fraud, incompetence, and criminality through the work of #UniteBehind. Recently, he co-founded the Global Coalition for HIV Treatment to help address the criminal cuts to PEPFAR by the Trump regime.
Justice, equality, dignity and freedom is at the core of all the organisations with which Zackie has worked.
Photo credit Gary Van Wyk.
Keynote Lecture Abstract
"Defying the Law to Realize the Right to Live"
In the years 1999 and 2000, a struggle took place between the poorest working-class people in South Africa and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, Pfizer. At stake was the right to life and equal access to life-saving medicine against super profits. The struggle was led by people living with HIV/AIDS organized in the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) at that time a movement with fewer than 2000 volunteers. Yet, our resistance to Pfizer鈥檚 profiteering became a global struggle with allies and support from across Africa, Asia, Central and Latin America, Europe and the US.
An unemployed man and his partner who lived in a shack was a local leader in our struggle after giving evidence at Parliament on 10 May 2000, the minutes of that watershed moment where people living with HIV confronted drug companies simply recorded 鈥淥ne man talked.鈥� Parliament denied him a name. His name was Christoper Moraka. And for a short time activists, academics, drug companies, government and the media across the world would learn his name.
In this lecture, my memory, faulty as it might be, combined with an archive (documents, minutes, official correspondence, newspapers, scholarly work, audio visuals and my notebooks) reconstruct this campaign for access to fluconazole for systemic and other forms of thrush including cryptococcal meningitis. The excessive profiteering by Pfizer caused millions to suffer illness, placing an inordinate strain on South Africa鈥檚 public health system and the deaths of perhaps hundred of thousands of people living with HIV. The Christopher Moraka Defiance Campaign against Patent Abuse and Profiteering became the roadmap for the Treatment Action Campaign and the global HIV treatment movement. Our resistance against Pfizer was based on understanding political power, fundamental rights, scientific and medical evidence, pedagogy, law, the public and private health system, the political economy and power of the global pharmaceutical industry. We educated ourselves through studying and action as individuals, collectively as leaders, TAC鈥檚 activist cadre and most critically the extraordinary branch leaders who conducted public education. Our local and global allies shared strategy, knowledge and resources. For the first time in South Africa and globally, the media were faced with a mass movement of people living with HIV / AIDS whose mobilisation was local and global, built on experience and knowledge. Our roadmap of a small campaign holds lessons for resistance, rebellions and revolutions in the struggle for justice, life, equality, dignity and freedom.
This lecture is a tribute to the extraordinary known and unknown global citizens with whom Dr Paul Farmer identified through solidarity, action and love.
About the Paul Farmer Award and Lectureship in Global Health Equity
Launched in 2024, the Paul Farmer Award and Lectureship in Global Health Equity recognizes individuals whose work embodies Dr. Farmer鈥檚 lifelong commitment to health as a human right. Each year, the award honours a visionary leader advancing health equity in underserved communities and invites them to deliver the annual Paul Farmer Lecture at 91黑料网 Global Health Night. The award was established through a crowdsourcing campaign that raised over $180,000 from more than 650 individuals. Dr. Farmer received an honorary doctorate from 91黑料网 in 2019 and was a longtime friend of the university. He also delivered the inaugural Dr. Victor Dzau and Ruth Cooper-Dzau Distinguished Lecture in 2018.
