FOTAC - Trustees and Officers
FOTAC was formed by the following:
Andrew Feinstein (Chair)
City Financier
Andrew was an ANC Member of Parliament in South Africa for 8 years. He resigned from Parliament in late 2001 in protest at the ANC’s refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into a multi-billion rand arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption. Andrew remains a member of the ANC. Currently working in Financial Services in London, Andrew writes and lectures on South African politics and economics. Andrew is the Chair of FOTAC.
Oliver Phillips (Deputy Chair)
Doctor of Law
Dr Oliver Phillips is a Reader in Law at the University of Westminster. He has a PhD from Cambridge University and has written widely on sexuality and rights in Southern Africa. He has a long history of advocacy in the region including participation in NUSAS in the 1980s, and was a founding member of GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe); the 8th of May Group; and FOTAC. Oliver is currently vice-Chair of the Britain Zimbabwe Society and international liaison officer for the Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality.
Oliver is FOTAC's Treasurer.
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Rachel Holmes (Secretary)
Writer
Rachel is an HIV treatment activist, writer and journalist. She is Project Manager of the FOTAC/TAC Comic Relief Treatment Literacy Project in Mpumalanga province, South Africa, and works on a number of other TAC projects. Her most recent book, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Times of Saartjie Baartman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. She is currently writing a life of Eleanor Marx. Formerly an academic holding lectureships at the Universities of London and Sussex, Rachel left academia to work for Amazon.co.uk for five years. Rachel is now Head of Literature and the Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre, London, and is a founder member and Trustee of WRITERS BLOC, an organisation of senior writers and journalists who write articles on education as an advocacy tool to raise public awareness and influence state policies on global education issues. She is a keen surfer Rachel is FOTAC‘s Secretary.
Alastair Constance (Treasurer)
Foreign Exchange Trader
Alastair is a South African living and working in London at the present. Having studied at Goldsmiths College he now works in financial services. Alastair is a FoTAC trustee and was recently appointed treasurer. He is also a director of the South African Business Club in the UK. Committed to the fight against HIV/AIDS, Alastair hopes to affect meaningful change in South Africa.
Tessa Lewin
Visual Artist
Tessa is a Southern African digital artist/media practitioner who has been involved HIV/AIDS-focused organisations since joining a University-based education project in Cape Town in 1994. She is currently living and working in the UK. In 2003 she made ‘The Harsh Divide’, a series of short filmic portraits of TAC members living with HIV/AIDS, with Gideon Mendel and Guilhem Alandry.
Professor Shula Marks
Academic
Shula Marks is an Emeritus Professor and Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and Distinguished Research Fellow of the School of Advanced Study in the University of London. A former Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, she is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Natal. She has lectured and written widely on South African history, and has a particular interest in the history of health and medicine in South Africa. In 1983 she co-authored a WHO monograph on Health and Apartheid, and in 1994 she wrote a major study on the history of nursing in South Africa, entitled Divided Sisterhood. Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession. Given these interests, she has a passionate concern to help in the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS in contemporary South Africa.
Chris Woods
Journalist
British-born Chris Woods is a senior freelance journalist and documentary producer, who spent a decade working for flagship BBC programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. He has a longstanding interest in the HIV/ AIDS crisis, and has been engaged with AIDS and HIV in South Africa since 1994. He filmed early efforts by South African activists to secure patent-free combination drugs. And he also directed a major Panorama investigation into untruthful claims about condoms by the Vatican, claims which have had a significant detrimental impact in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
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Imagine a book written by some of the best fiction writers in the world: Margaret Atwood, Woody Allen, Gunter Grass, Arthur Miller, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, Susan Sontag, John Updike... What if that book were edited by Nobel Prize winner, Nadine Gordimer?
