Apartheid's Darkest Secret: Claims of HIV/AIDS as a Biological Weapon
Johannesburg – A new book has made disturbing allegations that the apartheid regime orchestrated a campaign to spread HIV/AIDS amongst black South Africans in a bid to reduce the population ahead of the country's first democratic elections.
Retired judge Chris Nicholson's book, Who Really Killed Chris Hani?, details these claims, suggesting a deliberate effort to use biological warfare as a tool of oppression during apartheid's final years. The book alleges that the racist regime and its allies actively pursued this campaign, seeking to exploit the emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic to alter the demographic balance of power.
Nicholson suggests that the apartheid state and its business beneficiaries were haunted by two nightmares as non-racial elections became inevitable: Nuremberg-style trials for crimes against humanity and the economic redistribution promised by the ANC's Freedom Charter.
"So desperate were the right-wing whites to retain power and wealth that they would consider any solution to avoid these two consequences," he writes. The emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s presented a macabre opportunity: "Some extremists went as far as looking for ways that the black majority could be reduced, short of a Nazi-style mass extermination strategy. The arrival of the deadly Aids virus… gave hope to these white supremacists that nature might achieve their goal for them." This notion, Nicholson suggests, was discussed at high levels within the apartheid government.
The book presents a tapestry of evidence to support this harrowing claim. It draws from apartheid-era documents, testimonies from former security operatives, and historical connections to global eugenics movements, alleging that the spread of the virus was not merely neglected but, in some instances, deliberately facilitated.
The book directly implicates Project Coast, the apartheid state’s clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme, and its head, Dr Wouter Basson. Nicholson quotes academic Robin Jakob’s dissertation, which found that "evidence emerged that the state had tried to develop HIV as a biological weapon".
Jakob noted that one Project Coast project at the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL) "sought to turn HIV into a sterility agent that could be administered to black women, reducing birth rates and opposition to apartheid". Jeremy Youde, another scholar, confirmed that "RRL spent a great deal of time and money on utilising HIV as this agent". Youde also noted rumours in Zulu communities of a white "doctor of death" unleashing AIDS, a figure "widely assumed" to be Basson.
The allegations extend beyond research to operational deployment. Nicholson details claims from apartheid-era insiders about deliberate infection campaigns.
Former "dirty tricks" operative Paul Erasmus, in his book Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman, states that he "was approached with a request to obtain a 'usable' quantity of HIV-infected blood". His understanding was that HIV-positive "askaris" (turned freedom fighters) from Vlakplaas "were being dispatched to have unprotected sex with women identified as lefties".
Similarly, JG Scholte, a former security branch policeman writing under a pseudonym, claimed that "when the ANC exiles returned, the CCB [Civil Cooperation Bureau] ran a major operation in the 'transit camps' by making available HIV-positive women to the men".
This is corroborated by Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies cited by Nicholson. He references Youde’s work, which records that "two former security officers claimed… they took HIV-positive men to two hotels in Hillbrow, instructing them to infect the hotels’ sex workers with HIV to spread the disease more widely". CCB operative Willie Nortje supported this, stating that they acted on Eugene de Kock’s instructions.
Nicholson cites the 1996 book Sellout! by PJ Pretorius, another intelligence officer, which claimed: "Aids was seen as the dominant factor to curb black domination." Pretorius also referenced a "German scientific study" procured by the national intelligence service that suggested "South Africa will once again be characterised by white domination by the year 2010" due to Aids. The Broederbond, the secret Afrikaner brotherhood, allegedly conducted population projections in the mid-1980s that "suggested whites would be in the majority in the future due to the devastating effects that Aids was projected to have on the black population."
ANC intellectual Jabulani "Mzala" Nxumalo wrote before his death in 1991 that HIV might have been invented in "laboratories of the military-industrial complex". Nicholson connects this to former president Thabo Mbeki’s own 2000 parliamentary address, where he quoted a racist email hoping "Aids isn’t working fast enough" to kill black South Africans, warning that racism was not dead.
At the heart of this dark narrative is Chris Hani himself. Nicholson reveals that as early as 1990, Hani gave a prescient and urgent warning to ANC members in Maputo: "We cannot afford to allow the Aids epidemic to ruin the realisation of our dreams. Existing statistics indicate that we are still at the beginning of the Aids epidemic in our country. Unattended, however, this will result in untold damage and suffering by the end of the century."
Scholte also recalled a conversation with a soldier in 1983, where the soldier allegedly revealed: “South Africa is busy doing research, developing a method of curbing blacks from multiplying. The plan is to make it look natural so the world wouldn’t suspect anything. One of the aspects was to make it a sexually transmittable disease because of the blacks’ hyperactive sexual tendency and having multiple sexual partners.”
Follow Us on Twitter
