Leadership Quote by Stephen Lewis

Lewis is doing something politically risky and rhetorically shrewd: he takes AIDS out of the realm of “tragic inevitability” and puts it squarely in the realm of power. The line doesn’t comfort. It indicts. By insisting that you might still “have a disease…called AIDS” but not “a pandemic,” he draws a hard boundary between biology and catastrophe. The virus is natural; the scale is man-made.

The specific intent is to force listeners to stop treating the African AIDS crisis as a medical mystery or a cultural trope and start treating it as a gendered emergency. He builds his argument through a chain of conditionals - “if… if… if…” - that reads like a prosecution brief. Each clause tightens the case: consent denied, violence normalized, predation tolerated. The subtext is that public health campaigns, drug access, even funding targets will fail if they refuse to confront the everyday coercion that determines who can protect themselves and who can’t.

Context matters: Lewis became one of the most prominent international voices on HIV/AIDS in Africa in the 2000s, a period when “ABC” prevention slogans and donor-friendly narratives often sidestepped sexual violence, economic dependence, and legal impunity. His phrasing deliberately punctures the polite language of development. “Predatory” isn’t epidemiology; it’s moral vocabulary. He’s telling Western policymakers and African leaders alike: stop outsourcing blame to “tradition” or “behavior” and reckon with the structural fact that women’s autonomy is the frontline of prevention.