Shocking allegations have surfaced that apartheid-era operatives orchestrated a campaign to spread HIV/Aids among black South Africans to reduce the
population ahead of the country’s first non-racial elections.
The claims, detailed in a new book, Who Really Killed Chris Hani?, point to a deliberate effort to use biological warfare as a tool of oppression.
In a devastating exploration of apartheid’s final, desperate years, retired judge Chris Nicholson’s new book alleges that the racist regime and its allies actively pursued a campaign of biological warfare, seeking to use the emerging HIV/Aids pandemic as a weapon to alter the demographic balance of power.
The book presents a tapestry of evidence, drawing from apartheid-era documents, testimonies from former security operatives, and historical connections to global eugenics movements, to support the harrowing claim that the spread of the virus was not merely neglected but, in some instances, deliberately facilitated.
Nicholson posits that for the apartheid state and its business beneficiaries, faced with the inevitability of non-racial elections, two nightmares loomed: 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. He cites former security branch policeman JG Scholte, writing under a pseudonym, who
recalled a conversation with a soldier in 1983.
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.”
The book directly implicates the apartheid state’s clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast, 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”.
Another scholar, Jeremy Youde, is cited confirming that “RRL [Roodeplaat research laboratories] spent a great deal of time and money on utilising HIV as this agent”.
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