Mark Heywood deals with personal and public suffering in his memoir of a life of activismWhen Mark Heywood bounced in to a cafe in Cape Town on Tuesday he was tired. Two days earlier he had run his 18th Comrades marathon and a month before that cycled joBerg2c - 900km on a mountain bike.He had not trained enough for either race but had finished both, and that's Heywood: he never gives up.With the energy of a whippet and tenacity of a terrier, Heywood has been one of South Africa's foremost social justice advocates for nearly 30 years.Friendship and love drive this activism as the narrative of his new book, Get Up! Stand Up! Personal journeys towards social justice,reveals.Among the painful experiences he shares are the loss of two babies, and how this fuelled his fight to save babies from being born with HIV, which meant death before treatment was made available."Our first son went to full-term pregnancy but we were told to terminate because he had extreme hydrocephaly and had nil chance of survival," said Heywood, whose long-term partner is activist Sharon Ekambaram."The following year Sharon was pregnant again, with a girl, and this time we monitored the pregnancy very closely."But Sharon went into labour on the Easter weekend in 1996 and staffing shortages [in a public hospital ward] meant the midwives were overworked and tired."They left the baby in stress too long and by the time an anaesthetist arrived she was dead, and Sharon came fairly close to not making it."Part of what made me angry and impassioned over preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV was my own knowledge of what it is like for a woman to be pregnant, to go through losing a child, and we were allowing this to happen to tens of thousands of women and babies."An estimated 35,000 babies were born with HIV and 330,000 lives were lost because of the Aids denialism of then-president Thabo Mbeki and his health minister, the late Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.Heywood - co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign and Section27 - played a pivotal role in campaigns supported by the Aids Law Project, which forced the government to provide life-saving drugs for the prevention and treatment of HIV.Heywood, the only founding member who is still active in the TAC, said: "We have about four million people on treatment but another three million who need it."I can't leave the TAC midway through the Aids epidemic. I don't like to leave unfinished business."TAC general secretary Anele Yawa said: "Mark attends meetings and listens to everyone in the room, and only then raises his hand. He believes in engagement and treats people like equals."In the TAC he is regarded as one of our own, never as white. You never see Mark behaving like a boss."Yawa added: "He likes Bob Marley" - which explains the book's title.Heywood, whose love of music started with the Sex Pistols, said he had tried to weave love, loss, literature and music into his story as revolutions are made by these elements fused with friendship, passion and principles.Unlike the dry first draft, which he tossed out, Get Up! Stand Up! is not a didactic account of how to be a revolutionary, but a real record of what it means.Although: "It is difficult writing about people that you live with and love, and experiences that are ongoing," Heywood said.He described Ekambaram as the person "whose love most transcends and infuses" his life.The lives of their two surviving children are private, but Heywood said he hoped their unconventional upbringing had instilled a sense of justice in them.Heywood's memories give insight into the convictions and vulnerabilities that made him into a true leader who played a pivotal role in saving millions of lives.The book traces his journey as a privileged boy growing up in the UK and Africa, and his exposure to the apartheid state and its systematic brutality when his parents moved to Botswana in 1977.Heywood describes becoming active in the Marxist Workers' Tendency in the ANC in 1985, while attending Oxford University, and working in London with exiles before returning to South Africa in 1989.One of campaigns he became involved in some years after returning to South Africa was to help smuggle AK47s to self-defence units in Alexandra that were under attack.Throughout the book, Heywood, a published poet, celebrates unsung heroes who made a difference and who lost their lives to Aids before treatment was available.And he shared back rooms with public heroes such as Zackie Achmat and Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron.Achmat and Heywood had tea with Cameron in 1997, when the judge had started taking anti-retrovirals - and discovered a third of his salary was being spent on the medication. In 1999 Cameron went public with his Aids diagnosis.Heywood is honest about what it's like to agitate and strategise in the corridors of power, which he ran up and down as the deputy chairman of the South African National Aids Council from 2007 to 2012, before he decided to get back onto the streets with the TAC.Section27 was launched soon after that. More recently, Heywood has been a force in campaigns such as Save SA to protect people's constitutional rights.He said: "I want to pull politics back to values, to humanity. I want to try to re-establish empathy between the lives of people who are relatively secure and privileged and people who have none of that."I feel it is incumbent on all people to be activists now, to look at their behaviour and its consequences and how, even in small ways, we can all impact on inequality."keetonc@sundaytimes.co.za Get Up! Stand Up! by Mark Heywood..