Zackie Achmat (born Abdurazzack Achmat in 1962) is a South African activist, most widely known as founder and chairman of Treatment Action Campaign.
Treatment Action Campaign, or the TAC, has become the most well-known and successful AIDS activist group in South Africa, and makes its mission to ensure that HIV/AIDS is not a death sentence. It focused initially on access to medicine for those who could not afford private health care by taking on government policies and brand-name pharmaceutical companies. After scoring major victories against both, it has broadened its outlook to improving all aspects of health care provision and particularly with the implementation of an anti-retroviral program in the public health sector.
The TAC's notoriety and success is in no small part due to the dynamism of Achmat. Achmat publicly refused to take Aids medications until all who needed them had access to them, which drew former President Nelson Mandela to plead with Achmat at his home to begin drug therapy. Achmat respectfully refused Mr Mandela, and held firm in his pledge until August 2003 when a national congress of TAC activists voted to urge him to begin taking his medicines; he announced that he would start shortly before the government announced that it would make antiretrovirals available in the public sector.
A former anti-apartheid and gay rights activist, Achmat was skillful in marshalling the support of existing activist networks and mobilizing a grassroots membership to work in the community level, as well as tapping classic anti-apartheid tactics such as civil disobedience. TAC is unique among AIDS activist groups for combining some of the tactics and political networks of the sort of AIDS activism that started in US and European gay communities in the 1980s (e.g., ACT-UP) with the tactics and political networks of South African trade union and anti-apartheid movements. And no one embodies that unique blend of influences better than Achmat himself.
Achmat grew up in the so-called "Coloured" community in Cape Town during apartheid, in a Cape Malay Muslim family. At the age of 14, he set fire to his school during the period of the Soweto Uprising to force his fellow students to boycott classes. He was arrested and tried in each of the years between 1976 and 1980. He founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and as its director in the early 1990s he ensured protections for gays and lesbians in the new South African Constitution, and prosecuted cases that led to the decrimilization of sodomy and granting of equal status to same sex partners in the immigration process. Before starting TAC, he was a director of the AIDS Law Project based out of the University of The Witswatersrand, which is now headed by Zackie's longtime collaborator Mark Heywood. The AIDS Law Project and TAC work closely together in all the legal matters that arise in the course of advocating for the right to health, including prosecuting cases and defending TAC volunteers. He was an active member of the ANC in his youth and early adulthood, and continues to hold membership despite dissenting from its policies towards HIV treatment.
In 2004 he was voted 61st in the Top 100 Great South Africans. Also in 2004, Achmat was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a U.S. Quaker humanitarian group, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Achmat was one of TIMEeurope's "Heroes of 2003", winner of the inaugural Desmond Tutu Leadership Award in 2001, the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights in 2003, and the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in 2003.
A TAC Newsletter dated 28 March 2005 reported that Achmat suffered a heart attack four days earlier, but that he was recovering well and will take time off before resuming work.
