1996 Uganda was a boom. It was boom boom time everywhere, or so it seemed.
The economy was doing very well; international coffee prices were still favourable to Ugandans who grew some of the best coffee in the world at the time.
fish exports from Lake Victoria were also beginning to grow. Most importantly, the Indians, and their expulsion from Uganda earlier , remember them? The ones that brought you the Last King of Scotland!
By the mid 1990s they were returning back after being invited by the Ugandan reigning president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. The president also ordered for the Indians property and land that had been confiscated by Idd Amin Dada to be returned to the rightful owners. The returning Indians, and their cousins from Pakistan. It did not matter, they were the Indians.
The Indians had come to Uganda upon the invitation of the British to construct the famous Uganda Railway.
When the Indians initially known as the Coolies had finished building the railroad and the British Empire long gone after the collapse of colonialism, the Indians refused to go back to their country. They stayed forever.
The British left the economy of Uganda in Indians hands and the politics to the Ugandans, the relationship between the Indians and the Ugandans after the departure of the British was well captured in the movie; The Last King of Scotland
Museveni came as the ultimate good character against in the said movie. He stabilized Uganda.
By 1996 Uganda was indeed a pearl.
The Ugandan shilling was exchanging fairly well against the US dollar. As a result many Ugandans were able to go Dubai to trade, many even went to Japan and started motor vehicle import businesses across East Africa. Dubai was the first adventure for many hustling Africans to achieve success.
When Museveni invited back the Indians the economy went BOOM. Ugandan seriously challenged Kenya’s position as the economic powerhouse of the region, most of the Indians that fuelled this new birth of Uganda had settled in Kenya earlier when Amin expelled them.
They fired up Uganda.
Along With the economic success of Uganda came other less fortunate things. First among them was HIV/Aids. Long before the disease made serious headlines elsewhere in the world; Uganda was suffering the worst of the disease. Major commercial lines and corridors were at the centre of an epidemic, which nobody at the time was even able to comprehend.
In the simple analysis of many Ugandans it was a curse from the witchcrafts, wizards and magicians.
The witchdoctors, traditional healers smelled a rat. They increased their services. Sometimes advertising their services in their neighbourhoods. Listing the number of curses, diseases, demons and punishments the magicians were capable of commanding.
It became normal to see roadside adverts for traditional healers, yet in contrast, witchcrafts were a of particular interest amongst Ugandans. Many suspected people of witchcraft were burnt in public in some places.
Buyikwe and Bukunja in Mukono district were highly respected in matters witchcraft.
Aids was simply a matter of witchcraft.
One of the first public victims of HIV/Aids in Uganda was a superstar musician known as Philly Bongole Lutaya. Lutaya had done a first for his generation on the continent. He had successfully created himself a career in the music industry of Sweden. Of all places, seriously?
He also became the first person to serious start a discussion about the stigma of the disease. The prevalence rates of HIV/Aids in the country was as high as 17 percent of the population.
Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria, Rakai district on the trade corridor linking Rwanda, DR Congo and Burundi, Kampala the capital and also on the shores of lake Victoria as well as Busia on the boarder with Kenya were all battling with a disease which left disaster and desert in those communities. They were also the trade hubs in the region.
Museveni was the first leader whose face became synonymous with the fight against HIV/Aids in the world and success or strategy stories the face told. The coinage of a new breed of African leaders was fully inscribed on his image. Ugandan became the go to place for all the world do gooders. Museveni then cemented his place as a statesman.
Rwakitura and the triangle that it created from Lyantonde to Masaka was the Mecca for all the visitors and people of note in the country as well as many who had an interest in fighting HIV/Aids. Yet the place was also among the most severely attacked b the disease. The soldiers guarding the presidential home as well as the intelligence network they held were the chief medium through which the entire trade hub was spread with the deadly disease.
There was also a contradiction of a president fighting a strange disease everywhere and his soldiers spreading the same disease amongst the local people.
In 1997 my Mother Jane Mbabazi was working for President Museveni and his wife Janet at the headquarters of the above-mentioned hub of HIV/Aids and trade. Museveni’s home in Rwakitura unlike others spread across the country was a mini commercial and social centre in itself. It covered the triangle of Lyantonde, Rushere and Mbarara. Rwakitura with the soldiers guarding the presidential compound, the large household staff and other supporting agencies was a hub. My mother headed this hub which had its own school known as Karo Karungi a Runyankore name appropriately loosely translated as ‘a good village’.
This school never had an examination centre because it was populated by privileged kids in the neighbourhood of Museveni's country home, they were not academically disciplined and they were racists. I attended the school for only three weeks.
On holiday from boarding school I visited with my mother and since The nearest and biggest commercial centre to Rwakitura was Lyantonde I made frequent trips there, for family errands as well as ‘a night out on the town.’
Lyantonde was a town besieged with HIV/Aids but since nobody or just a few people at the time knew the disease in the way we know it today everyone called it an invention of witchcraft.
For those of us in our early teenage years we were told that most people in Lyantonde were agents of witchcrafts, magicians and wizards. We were told not to even dare eat the food in the town. We carried everything we needed around us. We were even warned not to go in washrooms in Lyantonde. Any contact with a person from Lyantonde meant contact with the magicians, witches and wizards. We were even warned not to look in their eyes. We were told tales that some men and boys who went with a woman from Lyantonde after a night in the clubs would wake up wrapped around by a snake or the would turn out to have a goats hooves in the morning.
Unfortunately this became the misery of People Living with HIV/Aids in the country, the stigma around patients was so huge. A person that contacted the disease was immediately fired from their jobs, with no income the women resorted to prostitution and the number of victims multiplied.
I996 was just two years after the South Africans had gotten rid of Apartheid, the embargoes and sanctions that had bedeviled the country during the white supremacy rule were loosened and South Africa became the giant of Africa. Their economy was expanding; they started the first mobile telecommunication industry on the continent and spread the industry across Africa. They started with Uganda first in 1998. I had the pleasure to work in the construction company that built the MTN switchboard in Bugolobi at the time. I was aged 16.
South Africans had been under the yoke for so long the end of apartheid granted them freedoms never before dreamed of, they took this freedom with both hands. And that was about the time that HIV/Aids attacked them with vigour. By the end of 2000 prevalence rates in the country were 12 percent.
Unlike in Uganda were the disease concentrated its wings in this landlocked country and mainly never affected neighbours like Rwanda, DR Congo, Tanzania and Kenya; in South Africa the epidemic spread across to Botswana and currently the two leading economies of Africa are threatened with the HIV/Aids.
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