Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In Africa, AIDS was initially described in both men and women in 1984." [Public Health & Preventive Medicine, p. 189] "AIDS more heavily affects sub-Saharan Africa than any other region of the world. In 2011, 23.5 million people in the region were estimated to be infected with HIV." [Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, p. 1471] "By the end of the 1980s, it was clear that AIDS had become a global pandemic." The graph shows the number of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa to be close to zero before 1980, about 1 million in 1988, about 2 million in 1990, and rising to nearly 4 million new infections per year by 1999. [Infectious Diseases, p. 970-971]