In this dissertation, I interrogated the claims to origin and cure of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the economics of Antiretroviral Drugs (ARVs) in the rhetoric of the Gambian President, Yahya Jammeh. This study was motivated by two research questions: (1) How does Jammeh’s claims fit into or depart from the known HIV/AIDS and ARVs discourses; and (2) to what extent can Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens, in conjunction with the dramatistic pentad, be applied to Jammeh’s claims to distill the values embedded in them for Jammeh’s motives and their articulation?
Regarding the origin of the HIV virus, I unearthed three competing theories—the natural transfer, the conspiratorial, and the Congo-jungle accident. Concerning the therapeutic landscape of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, I unraveled four predominant treatment models—the biomedical, Christian, Islamic, and traditional. For the economic views on ARVs, I synthesized four paradigms—the postcolonial, the avant-garde, the humanitarian, and the activist—for the explication of ARVs.
I distilled five pentadic acts from Jammeh’s claims. The first pentadic act is dominated by agency with pragmatism as its philosophical mooring. This is followed by two pentadic acts dominated by purpose with mystical philosophical inclinations, while another two of the pentadic acts are dominated by agent with idealistic philosophical outlook.
The pentadic mapping of Jammeh’s claims revealed that, with regard to the origin of the HIV virus, Jammeh—Allah’s agency—speaks from a conspiratorial terministic screen. For the therapeutic map, it revealed Jammeh speaks from the Islamic-prophetic terministic screen; while for the economic map, it points to Jammeh’s claims as postcolonial terministic constructions, whereby a purposeful neocolonial West employs ARVs to exploit and dominate Black African bodies.
For the most part, Jammeh’s claims lack evidence in the known scientific ways. Jammeh employs fear appeals, equivocation, and identification and disassociation to attract PLWHAs to his treatment sessions. With health-dictatorship in the Gambia, there is the need to reset the pentad in ways that encourage civil participation in the HIV/AIDS and ARVs discourse in the Gambia.
KEY WORDS: Rhetorical values; Yahya Jammeh; the Gambia; Conspiracy theory, Islamic-prophetic; Postcolonial.