Growing Up in a Time of AIDS: The Shining Recorders of Zisize

Abstract

As the HIV epidemic increasingly took hold across South Africa during the 1990s and early 2000s, images of destitute young orphans left to fend for themselves by overburdened kin support systems proliferated. Depictions of helpless children prone to hunger, school dropout, exploitation and sexual debut at a very young age, and predisposed to future criminality were repeated, over and over, in local and international media (Meintjes and Bray, 2005) as well as in international aid agency, government, donor and non-government organization (NGO) publications (Meintjes and Giese, 2006). Rapidly growing in number, orphans were stereotyped as both the quintessential victims of the epidemic and a significant social threat in South Africa (Meintjes and Bray, 2005; Meintjes and Giese, 2006).