The African Aids Epidemic: A History

In Kinshasa during the mid-1970s, the Congolese physician Kapita Bila noticed a troubling increase in patients consumed by bouts of diarrhoea and persistent tumours. By 1983, Bila's records, alongside those of his colleagues and the blood samples of their patients, linked these signs of an emerging epidemic in equatorial Africa with the newly defined human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the disease it caused: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). John Iliffe's lucid and important book tells the story that followed as the world witnessed what he argues was the first, and therefore worst, AIDS epidemic. Iliffe documents the pioneering research of physicians like Bila, picking up from where he left off in the tantalising final chapters of his earlier book on African medical history, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession (Cambridge, 1998). But while this previous book focused on people, here it is a biological entity, the HIV virus itself, that emerges as the central theme. Iliffe deftly follows the biological strand that was to bind an entire continent.