You're listening to the BBC World Service, I'm Audrey Brown and this is the story of AIDS.

When the first cases of AIDS emerged 40 years ago, no one could predict the devastating effect it would have on the world.

At the heart of the crisis is one country, mine, South Africa.

Today it is home to more than 7 and a half million people living with HIV, more than any other country in the world.

AIDS first arrived in South Africa at the time of severe political turbulence, the consequence of centuries of European colonial rule, an institutionalized white supremacy.

And it's vital to understand this political story, in order to understand South Africa's AIDS story,

and how it came to envelop a nation.

Our policy is one which is called by North Africa's word apartheid.

It could just as easily and perhaps much better be described as a policy of good-nableness, accepting that there are differences between people.

But in reality apartheid was a brutal system, with South Africa dominated politically, socially and economically by a white minority.

And in the social hierarchy black people were placed at the bottom in all aspects of life.

In South Africa they were philosophy, a long term objective, the separation of black and white.

The present effect of apartheid is the best for the white man, the second best for the black.

A liberation movement formed to fight a system which denied black people the same jobs, health care and education as white South Africans, and denied black people the right to vote as well.

Through decades of tension brought on by violent segregation, South Africa became an increasingly violent country.

Brutal undercurrents flowed through the cultures of both races, it wasn't just a party that brought them to the surface.

In Soweto, 25 domestic murders a weekend were routine.

Most whites seemed to have guns and few inhibitions about using them.

And so, when AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, South Africans were already consumed by another war,

and the government showed little motivation to face up to this new threat.

The history of HIV in South Africa has been a very tortured and complicated one that has always unfortunately been tied up with politics.

Mark Hayward is a human rights activist who back in the 1980s was a member of the African National Congress, or ANC, one of the parties leading the fight to end apartheid.

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