The health minister in the province of Mpumalanga said she knew exactly what President Thabo Mbeki would make of the little pills given to rape survivors in the hope of staving off Aids. They were really a plot to poison black people, she claimed.
The minister, Sibongile Manana, went further and ordered volunteer rape counsellors out of the province's public hospitals because she said they were "trying to overthrow the government".
Their crime was to ensure raped women were quickly given access to antiretroviral drugs which can prevent HIV infection from taking hold if taken within hours of the assault. The need for the pills has taken on added urgency in Mpumalanga province where many rapes are committed against girls under 15 years old because of a widely held belief that sex with a virgin is a cure for HIV.
But Ms Manana saw it differently. She said the South African president had warned that antiretroviral drugs were poisons, that HIV had nothing to do with Aids, and no amount of protest from the hospitals and doctors would convince her otherwise.
Mr Mbeki begins a state visit to Britain today during which he will face questioning about his presidency, South Africa's rampant crime, and his handling of the political crisis next door in Zimbabwe. But nothing has overshadowed the first two years of his rule as much as the Aids epidemic and his reaction to it.
Confusion
The South African leader has tried to play down the impact of his contentious views on the disease by saying he did no more than raise questions for debate by challenging the link between HIV and Aids, and contending that antiretroviral drugs may be poisons that kill more quickly than the disease they are supposed to keep at bay. He now says he has withdrawn from the controversy after admitting he may have caused "confusion".
But the country's top medical researchers, high ranking civil servants, Aids campaigners, and doctors and nurses forced to turn patients away from underfunded clinics say that Mr Mbeki has done irreparable damage that will cost many lives in a country with the highest number of HIV positive people in the world: 4.7m, one in nine people. Most will be dead within a decade.
Among the president's strongest critics is a leading scientist and political ally who warns that history will conclude that the South African government is guilty of a moral if not legal genocide for allowing politics to override science.
Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, the head of South Africa's medical research council, ushered the president on to the stage for the launch of his much vaunted African Renaissance two years ago. Mr Mbeki wrote the foreword to a book by the professor about the racial barriers thrown up against him at Witwatersrand University. But the two men have parted ways over Aids.
Genocide charge
"We are acting in a way that could be judged as genocide at a philosophical level," Prof Makgoba said. "The president says he may have created confusion. I think that's an understatement. I think that has infected the whole chain from youngsters, who are supposed to be taught about prevention, to the policies that are very difficult to interpret at ground level because of the mixed messages."
The fault for the rapid spread of the disease by no means lies entirely with Mr Mbeki's government. When Aids first reared its head, the old white regime was in power. It viewed HIV as a problem for blacks and homosexuals, not reason enough to offend the white population at large with public discussion of sex. As late as 1992, the then all-white management of Helen Joseph hospital banned the public display of condoms on World Aids Day.
Nelson Mandela's government came to power two years later promising action, but had other priorities. By the time Mr Mbeki took office in 1999 there was no doubt about the scale of the calamity facing South Africa.
Mr Mbeki correctly says he has never denied the link between HIV and Aids. "If I'd known what the response was going to be to questions - because that's all I did, ask some questions, and say the minister of health must have a look at [them] - then I'd have dealt with the matter differently," he told the Guardian last month.
But those on the front line against Aids say that Mr Mbeki did more than raise questions. He presented alternative theories, such as saying poverty also caused Aids whether or not HIV was present, that have had profound consequences. And far from retreating from the issue he continues, critics say, to oversee policies which fail to recognise that this is a crisis.
The president's views have severely undermined the laborious work of persuading South Africans to use condoms in the face of considerable cultural resistance, and made it more difficult to persuade people to test for the virus.
Above all, some of the country's top medical researchers say Mr Mbeki's decision to "withdraw" from the debate has harmed efforts to control the HIV epidemic in South Africa.
"It's dealt a mortal blow to our efforts," says Professor Salim Karim, an internationally recognised Aids researcher who has been accused of "disloyalty" by the country's health minister. "We are not dealing with just another disease. Aids is destroying the very fabric of our society. It's consuming everything that is good that we have worked for.
The sharpest protest has been over the government's failure to supply drugs to HIV positive pregnant women which could save the lives of tens of thousands of babies each year. The risk of HIV positive mothers passing on the virus to their babies is as much as halved with a single dose of nevirapine shortly before birth and another for the child afterwards.
The government had promised a series of studies to develop the infrastructure for mother-to-child prevention programmes across the country, but in April, the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, suddenly announced that the scheme had been referred back to the cabinet for approval - an unheard of involvement of ministers in what should be routine drug trials.
Then the government - at Mr Mbeki's behest - moved the goalposts again, saying the focus of the tests would be extended to see whether the drugs were too toxic or would create a resistance that could make it harder to combat the disease. Those studies could take up to two years. Scientists question the motive for the "research" given that similar data is readily available from Uganda and America.
"I have often asked myself why did the government even get itself involved in trying to understand antiretrovirals when it doesn't get involved in, say, the treatment of leukaemia which uses toxic treatment all the time," Prof Makgoba said.
Johannesburg General is one of the largest hospitals in a city where Aids is rampant and the morgues are staying open longer to cope with the consequences. Yet the hospital's HIV clinic opens for just four hours a week and is so overwhelmed that it is sending new patients to nearby hospitals such as Helen Joseph, where there is a three-month waiting list to join the HIV clinic.
"The situation in the hospitals is very difficult," said one senior nurse who did not want to be identified because she is employed by the state. "They are simply not training enough doctors to deal with HIV, and those they do train, it is not well enough. If the government is not taking HIV seriously, why should the hospitals? It allows hospitals with hard-pressed budgets to shun their responsibilities for people with HIV and Aids."
Men like Ernest Ncube try to pick up the pieces. He is black, HIV positive and an Aids counsellor at Helen Joseph hospital. Not many people come to him for advice before they contract the virus. Usually it is an act of desperation in search of a promise of survival once they have tested positive.
"People feel abandoned. They come thinking you can tell them where they can get medicines, where they can get help but all you can do is tell them there is hope and how to look after themselves and eat properly and what diseases to watch out for," Mr Ncube said. "They soon lose hope and then they start denying. They say the president says HIV doesn't cause Aids so I'm not going to die. They say they won't use a condom. They say they will go to the sangoma (traditional healer) who is promising to cure them. Usually they don't come back to the hospital."
The HIV positive patients at Helen Joseph are lucky to see anyone at all. Doctors say that in some rural areas primary health clinics do not tell people they have HIV because there is nothing they can do for them and it is tantamount to a death sentence hanging over their heads.
South Africa's health ministry is divided. Influential senior civil servants privately say that the president's position is unscientific and irresponsible. One top official recently wept in public when a prominent Aids activist said her policies were killing people.
"There are very committed people working in the government," said Prof Karim. "They don't want people to die of Aids, but there is an inability to act because they don't want to be seen to be contradicting the president."
Critical scientists and researchers have also been publicly vilified for "getting rich" through a "corrupt Aids industry", and of being in the pay of the multinational pharmaceutical companies.
Mr Mbeki says he wants all the evidence to hand before deciding how to combat Aids. And he continues to defend his view that there is much more to the disease than HIV. "There is no doubt that there are many factors that result in the breakdown of the body's immune system. Repeated infections, malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, impact negatively on the immune system. There may well be a virus that also results in a breakdown of the immune system," he said in one speech.
"We need to look at the question that is posed, understandably I suppose: does HIV cause Aids?" he asked in parliament. "Aids, the acronym, stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Now I do not believe that it is a sensible thing to ask: does one virus cause a syndrome? A virus cannot cause a syndrome. A virus will cause a disease."
But Prof Makgoba accuses the president of playing with words and asks what would have happened if America or Uganda had waited until everything was known about Aids to respond.