I am humbled to have been afforded the opportunity to come and speak to you today about breaking the stigmatisation of Aids.  I come here today not as a politician or a leader, but as an ordinary man whose life and family have been profoundly affected by this disease. 

I would like to first take this opportunity to pay tribute to the marvellous work that Archbishop Ndungane and this Cathedral has undertaken, to dispel the stigma and silence surrounding HIV/Aids. The Cathedral of St George's, and many other churches in this diocese and throughout the country, have become beacons of light and hope to people living with HIV and Aids.

And I emphasise the word 'living'.  For the Judeo-Christian faith, is rooted in the belief that we should ascribe to others the same values with which we would like to be ascribed to ourselves.

This fundamental truth informs our commitment to equal human dignity, the touchstone of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Apartheid cruelly blunted the majority of our people's inalienable right to live in dignity.  We stopped looking at each other the way God looks at us. 

I fear the HIV/Aids epidemic runs the same risk.  As Archbishop Ndungane succinctly observed in the Interfaith Service at St George's Cathedral, on World Aids Day last year, people living with HIV/Aids are at risk of being swallowed up in the anonymity of numbers. 

One in ten is infected.  For most people, understandably, the scale of the pandemic is still almost impossible to humanly comprehend.  We will not reach the plateau of this pandemic and feel its full impact for another decade or so.  Yet for my wife, Irene, and I, there has not been the deceiving cloak of anonymity, as the disease has struck down two members, two of our children.

There are no words to convey the pain one feels, when the natural rhythm of life is violated and a parent outlives their children.

As a leader, I have observed how, almost unhindered, HIV and Aids is decimating our people, tearing apart our families, and uprooting our communities in my home province, KwaZulu-Natal, and throughout the nation. 

How tragic that at the very time our nation needs to pull together, as one, to repair its injured society, this pandemic should strike.  It has created brand new categories of orphans, child-headed households, and terminally ill patients, who cannot perform their daily tasks without cumbersome assistance.  One in ten people we work with in the office, or sit next to in a taxi, or in a Sunday church service, are infected.

Yet there is hope.  The message that shines out through the pages of the Gospels is that every person is made in the sovereign image of God, and is special to Him. Our Lord said that even the very hairs on our heads are all numbered.

What a dazzling ray of light in a world of despair and the broken hearted!

As a man, who has served as a political leader for over-half-a-century, I am deeply aware of the limits to what politicians can achieve.  A politician can only legislate for the rule-of-law, but only the Church can teach the life of faith.

Yet there are times when the Church must speak out, to sound the trumpet as it were, when political action falters. The campaign to abolish slavery in Britain in the eighteenth century and the fight against racial discrimination, in the United States and South Africa in the twentieth century, were such defining times.  The present war we are waging against HIV/Aids is also such a time.  

With the authority of the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos, and the agape compassion of the New Testament saints, Archbishop Ndungane has spoken out with righteous indignation when anti-retroviral drugs were withheld and Global Fund monies, allocated for KwaZulu-Natal, were placed at risk. He did so not to score political points, but to challenge all politicians, and people beyond the political divide, to ensure that the human rights of people living with Aids are observed.  

I believe God has called us all alike, be we students, taxi drivers, parents, shop assistants or public representatives, to use our positions to tear down the walls of stigma and silence surrounding the HIV/Aids pandemic.

When, over twenty years ago, the Aids pandemic first surfaced, gay people were stigmatised and the disease was referred to as the 'gay plague'.   At the beginning, quite frankly, our response to the disease, here and overseas, in both politics and church, was tardy. I pray God will forgive us for our inertia and judgemental attitude to all those people we stigmatised.

Times have moved on in more prosperous nations in the West. Access to triple therapy has become more widespread since 1997, and the death rate has plunged by more than two thirds.

Yet we can see clearly the danger of allowing notions of 'them' and 'us' to flourish here. Many millions of people have died unnecessarily. More will be claimed by the disease in the coming years, but many more can and must be saved.

Let us go out into the world and use every opportunity to tear down the walls of ignorance and perceptions of 'them' and 'us' between infected and non-infected people. 

In so doing, we heal and find in ourselves an inner strength we may have not realised that we have been endowed with.

Despite the tragedy that has befallen my family I have come so far in my personal pilgrimage. My belief in the glory of the human spirit to rise again, and again and again, is stronger than ever.

When I remember my children Nelisa and Mandisi, I recall that they never succumbed to a 'victim' mentality, but fought the disease with the courage and spirit of those who never gave up hope.

I have found in my own journey of coming to terms with the impact of Aids upon the people I most love, a deeper insight into the meaning of life, love and death.