Chronology and Causality in Africa’s HIV Pandemic: The Production of History between the Laboratory and the Archive

By 2018 approximately 32 million deaths worldwide had been attributed to HIV/AIDS. Yet the impact of the AIDS pandemic has been profoundly uneven. In the Global North, HIV has been constructed as marginal; in much of Africa, it is pervasive and transformative, fundamentally reshaping local economies, civil society, state structures and the continent’s relations with the outside world. HIV is in reality a series of distinct epidemics, each with their own histories. In recent years, scientists have challenged historians’ understanding of HIV’s chronology and patterns of transmission, providing alternative histories of the virus’s origins, expansion and resilience within mature epidemic settings. Epidemiologists and geneticists have realigned the temporal focus of archival and oral research while conceptualizing change over time around moments of divergence and focusing on historical episodes rather than process, and on diffusion over intensification. This article analyses scientists’ historical understanding of sexually transmitted infections, migration and same-sex relationships, challenging narrow understandings of causality and the assumption that the contexts of the recent past can be applied backwards to more distant periods. Reconstructing HIV’s long history requires recognition of the evolving complexity of sex and marriage, morality and discretion, migrancy and displacement, ethnic and racial preconceptions, and locality and connection.