Friends
In as much as Acholi and Langi stand to state that all is well, but what we
need is Museveni’s departure, Uganda Is suffering from violence. We have many
that die and are simply neglected. The numbers of such that are dying are way
out numbering the George Okellos and Gwokto that sing Museveni is the problem.
We are the problem. When a Ugandan stands up publicly to state that Baganda
women get raped for their men are sexually weak, stop and wonder what that dead
man or woman thought last as he was abandoned by all of us. Ugandans I raised
the HIV issue in Kyotera and Rakai, an issue many of you neglected as you
neglected the Acholi violence. Well non Ugandans out there cared to travel
through the region when Acholi were running our country. Among those that
travelled the Kyotera Rakai Masaka axis, to see what really HIV did in the
region was Robert Caputo. This is what he saw that you as Ugandans never saw,
but never even cared to see. We are dedicating this series to Robert Caputo and
what he saw that he wrote under a heading Uganda : A land beyond sorrow.
As you keep quite at the Acholi violence my question is very standard, who
protects these people that die if not you?
UGANDA : Land Beyond Sorrow
written by Robert Caputo
_____
Once Known as "the pearl of Africa," Uganda has been ravaged by genocidal
warfare costing perhaps 800,000 lives and is stalked now by an AIDS crisis that
alarms world health officials. Jane Nakarima, right, is a victim of the
disease, as is her year-and-a-half-old son. Yet fertile soil and good climate
keep starvation at bay, while the nation searches for the first steps on the
long and difficult road back.
JANE NAMIRIMU was 22 years old. When I went to visit her, she was lying on the
floor of her parents' house near the town of Kyotera, her thin frail body
cushioned from the cold concrete by only a torn piece of old foam rubber. A
rash covered her body, she had chronic diarrhea, and she vomited when she tried
to eat. Her breathing was shallow and short. There was no ointment to soothe
her skin, or even aspirin to cool the fevers that gripped her. She was too weak
to walk, and spent her days staring out the open door at children playing in
the yard.
Jane was pregnant with her first child. She was the tenth victim of AlDS I had
visited that day in Kyotera, a town of about 2,000 near Lake Victoria (map,
pages 474-5).
"Jane has been sick for about six months," her father told me. " We took her to
the hospital, and to a traditional healer. She did get better for a time. But
then it started again. And what can we do? I do not have more money, and
everyone just dies with this slim."
"Slim" is the word Ugandans use for AIDS because of the skeletal appearance of
victims in the last stages of the disease. AIDS has reached epidemic
proportions in this strifetorn country in which perhaps 800,000 people have
been slaughtered in 20 years of intermittent civil war.
The government officially reports 2,369 cases of AIDS, but the real number is
undoubtedly far higher. Nobody knows. The breakdown of communications and
health-care systems makes it impossible to compile reliable numbers, but
informed sources estimate that one in every five sexually active adults in
Kampala, the capital, may be infected. When a Ugandan dies on a remote
homestead, the cause of death goes undiagnosed. Like Uganda's ongoing civil
wars, AIDS claims primarily those between 18 and 40 years old.
In the countryside near Kyotera I stopped at almost every house I came to, and
in every one the scene was the same: Someone had recently died, or was dying,
of AIDS. Hospitals are few in Uganda and cannot cope with the numbers of
patients; most are cared for by their families. In house after house I saw
mothers and grandmothers keeping vigil over loved ones who were slowly wasting
away. I went to funerals almost every day-sometimes several in the same day. I
often saw scores of mourners winding their way through the fields, on their way
from one funeral to the next.
The underlying numbers are staggering: About half of the adult medical patients
examined at a Masaka hospital tested positive for the human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, as did 40 percent in Kampala's Mulago Hospital,
which admits five new AIDS patients a day. A survey of truck stops showed about
70 percent of the prostitutes and 33 percent of the truck drivers to be
infected. In a 1986 survey at another Kampala hospital, seven out of every 50
pregnant women tested positive for HIV antibodies, and the same was true for
adult male blood donors. A more complete picture of the extent of the disease
awaits results of a national blood survey just begun.
" It is already a disaster," one foreign doctor working in Uganda told me, "and
it's going to get worse. We don't know enough about the disease to make firm
predictions-there are many possible scenarios. It could be that hundreds of
thousands of people are going to die. They may already be infected."
"I don't know what to do," said Jane Namirimu softly while I sat with her. "I
want to have a family, and a farm , and a home like this one. But I feel I am
haunted by ghosts that will not leave me. I can just pray that things will be
the way they should be."
NOTHING is the way it should be in Uganda. As independence from Britain
approached in 1967. it seemed that Uganda, " the pearl of Africa, " was well on
its way to a long and happy life as a modern state. The fertile south,
populated by the Baganda and other Bantu-speaking peoples, was highly
developed. Kampala swelled on a tide of economic activity based on agricultural
riches: Cotton, coffee, and tea exports earned foreign exchange that repaid the
farmers with roads, schools, hospitals, and manufactured goods. Southerners
made good livings as businessmen, bureaucrats, and professionals.
In the north, where the land is poorer, development was slower. To make up for
this, and to take advantage of the Nilotic tradition of warriorhood, the
British recruited northerners into the army and police. Thus both groups had
avenues for advancement.
But the dream of independence became a nightmare of insecurity, brutality, and
economic collapse. Milton Obote, of the northern Langi people, was elected
prime minister. He soon ousted President Sir Edward Mutesa, the hereditary
Baganda king, and made himself president. Obote's corrupt regime was overthrown
in 1971 by another northerner, Idi Amin, who embarked on an orgy of bloodshed
in which an estimated 300,000 Ugandans were shot, tortured, and battered to
death.
In 1979 Amin was driven out by the army of neighboring Tanzania and the Uganda
National Liberation Army (UNLA), and Obote returned. But the UNLA did not
liberate Ugandans from savagery. Things got worse.
In 1981 the UNLA sought revenge on Amin's Kakwa people and other groups living
in Nile Province. Obote's soldiers laid waste the land, slaughtered untold
thousands of people, and drove almost 450,000 more into Sudan and Zaire as
refugees.
In 1982 the UNLA was drawn into the Baganda heartland in force by southerners
fighting to overthrow Obote's regime. In what must rank with the worst
atrocities in human history, men of the UNLA ravaged the countryside and
slaughtered between 200,000 and 500,000 people before they were defeated by the
National Resistance Army (NRA), whose leader, Yoweri Museveni, is now
president.
The scene of this carnage was the Luwero triangle, a wedge of rich farmland
that points at Kampala, a few miles to the south. It is hard to imagine that
the massacres went on there, a 30minute drive from the foreign diplomatic
missions, for more than two years before the outside world knew about them or
would believe they were occurring. But the evidence is there for all to see, as
I discovered when I visited the town of Nakaseke.
JOSEPH KARIANGO, an old Baganda farmer, crouched to stare at something in his
field that was not visible from where I stood. I went nearer. Lying in the dirt
was a small pile of bones. Joseph looked up at me.
"It is my wife," he said.
Joseph pointed to a pair of rusty shock absorbers lying next to the skeleton.
"The soldiers killed her. The men of Obote beat her with those things."
Joseph motioned me to follow him to the edge of the field. He pushed aside some
of the tall elephant grass with his hoe. There was another skeleton.
"This is my daughter. They shot her when she tried to run. And my son was
killed when the soldiers caught him in my shop. I myself ran fast into the
bush, and I was very lucky to get away from them. Everybody that the soldiers
did catch they would kill. Everybody in all this Luwero area there was nobody-
everybody was killed, or they ran away. I want to bury my family, but you see,
we fear to bury just bones like that. Unless the body is whole, we cannot bury
it."
The Nakaseke Hotel, a brown, three-story structure, served as UNLA headquarters
in Nakaseke. Bullet holes pockmarked its wall and those of nearby houses,
mostly abandoned. Only 50 people had returned to a town where more than 300
formerly lived. Above the doorway to an abandoned shop next to the hotel, some
UNLA soldier had written th theme of their occupation: "A good Mugand is a dead
one."
I went into the hotel. The walls were covered with graffiti: boasts of prowess
in battle or love, drawings depicting torture methods dripping molten plastic
from a jerry can onto victim's face, or the "three-point," in which the
victim's elbows were tied together behind his back so that he could not
breathe.
>From the roof I could see Joseph's fields and the reach of ruined shops along
>the road. They, the idle power lines, and derelict gas station indicated what
>used to be.
A companion, Fred Wamala, pointed to the grassy field below: "Those soldiers,
they used to bring people here. Especially they would catch young girls, girls
of 12, 14. They tied their arms with wire. Then they raped them, and when they
were finished, they threw them off this roof."
The evidence was clearly visible: skulls, small piles of human bones, bits of
rotting clothes, the twisted wire that had bound the victims' wrists.
In Luwero, the story is everywhere the same. This is beautiful country: swamps
of papyrus and reeds nestle between gently rolling hills of dark brown earth
and luxuriant green foliage. Anywhere else in Africa such fertile land would be
crowded with people. Luwero's eerie emptiness is evidence of the multitude of
the dead.
Small stands, originally built to display tomatoes, bananas, and other produce,
exhibited human skulls gathered from the killing fields. At Kigoogwa, only 18
miles from Kampala, I stopped to photograph one of the racks of skulls and
bones.
"Yes, yes, yes," said a man who introduced himself as Katende Sserunjogi, a
local official. "You make your photos. You take your photos back to America and
show your people what that man Obote did. There are no soldiers there," he
said, pointing to the rows of skulls. "No soldiers, just people."
REMNANTS OF THE UNLA fight on in the north, and the ongoing guerrilla war eats
up as much as 40 percent of the country's budget and diverts energy and
manpower from the pressing needs of reconstruction. President Yoweri Museveni's
government, which took power in January 1986 after driving the UNLA out of the
south, is determined to pursue a military solution. "We have to kill them all,"
one high-ranking official told me.
Ugandan and international groups allege that Museveni's government is torturing
prisoners, that thousands of political opponents and suspected rebels are being
held indefinitely without charge. The army is accused of destroying houses and
crops, of raping and massacring civilians in the north and east.
It is difficult to know what the situation really is. Despite Museveni's
personal promise to arrange a trip for me, I was unable to visit the north and
east-only reporters from the government newspaper were allowed. Even the
International Committee of the Red Cross had been barred, presumably because
the regime does not want witnesses.
"These people in the north are defeated really, thoroughly," President Museveni
assured me. But the war rages on. The NRA claims overwhelming victories;
northerners recently arrived in Kampala speak of government defeats and NRA
atrocities. Somewhere in between, perhaps, is the truth.
ORPHANS, WIDOWS, WIDOWERS: The exact death toll is impossible to determine. Now
AIDS adds its numbers of dead and dying. As one Ugandan put it "It is as if we
have been cursed for all the terrible things we have done to each other."
Though it is probably no harder hit than other countries in central and eastern
Africa- Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire, and Zambia-Uganda's willingness to
allow foreign journalists to cover the AIDS epidemic is unique. A National
Committee for the Prevention of AIDS is in place, as is a program coordinated
by the World Health Organization (WHO), to which donor nations have pledged 7.5
million dollars for education, medical equipment, and supplies. Public meetings
are held to discuss AIDS, and a curriculum incorporating AIDS education is
being prepared for the schools. Warning leaflets have been printed in ten
languages. Slogans of the campaign are "Love Carefully" and "Zero Grazing," an
agricultural metaphor.
"To not be open about AIDS is just ignorant," President Museveni told me. "This
is an epidemic. You can only stop it by talking about it-loudly, so that
everybody is aware and scared, and they stop the type of behavior that
encourages the spread of this disease."
In Uganda, AIDS affects both sexes equally. The ratio of male to female AIDS
patients is one to one. "There is every indication," a foreign doctor working
in Uganda told me, "that AIDS is a heterosexual disease spread primarily
through genital-to-genital contact."
The second largest category, about 10 percent of reported AIDS cases, is the
transmission of the disease from mother to infant. There are some cases of AIDS
infection through blood transfusions and unsterilized needles, but Ugandans'
access to health care has been so disrupted that these play a marginal role.
AIDS was first noted in Uganda in the early 1980s by people in small fishing
and smuggling villages along Lake Victoria. Smuggling was a major economic
activity, and these ramshackle mud-hut villages, where the odor of drying fish
hangs in the air, throbbed with commerce. Boats traveled between Uganda,
Tanzania, and Renya, and lorries traveled along the roads between Uganda,
Zaire, and Rwanda. Bars and hotels sprang up, local breweries went into
production- and prostitutes by the hundreds descended on the lake, attracted by
the free-spending, hard-drinking traders.
According to this theory, the traders returned to their homes carrying the
organism with them, as did truck drivers from as far away as Mombasa, on the
Indian Ocean. These men infected their wives. lovers. or other prostitutes, who
passed the organism on to other partners. The lines of AIDS concentration in
central and eastern Africa follow very closely those of commerce.
But AIDS is not limited to the high-risk group of prostitutes and truck
drivers. It has been reported in every district in Uganda, and it strikes
farmers and townspeople alike. One of the hardest hit areas lies west of Lake
Victoria in the Rakai District, a poor, rather isolated area of gently rolling
land vhere the first case in Uganda was diagnosed in 1984. Most people eke out
meager livings on small farms scattered across the countryside. Barefoot, they
carry their matoke (cooking bananas) and beans to market in the district's main
town, Kyotera, which was bustling in the smuggling days but is now rather
somber.
Really, it is not possible to know how many people have died from this slim
around here."Badru Rashid, the local government official, told me. "In the last
week ten people that I know of died. I myself have lost two brothers and a
sister. And our town, it used to be so busy. But a lot of the traders died, and
others left here because they were afraid. Can you see all the empty shops? So
many orphans have come into town, but there is nothing for them, and they start
to steal to get food."
As I wandered through the streets, I was continually approached by young men.
The see few foreigners in Kyotera and assumed that my visit must have something
to do with AIDS. They seemed desperate for reassurance: "You must find some
medicine for this. It is a real curse. We are all going to die-we are always
burying people!"
Many people asked me about condoms, which are new to them, as is any
information about AIDS. The question I was asked most frequently was, "Is it
true that slim is gotten through sex?"
When the local people first noticed this new disease." Badru Rashid explained
to me "they thought it was witchcraft. They believed that Tanzanians were
cursing people who had cheated them. Even now, a lot of people still think it
must be witchcraft because one person in a house gets sick and dies, and then
others. Like a curse on the family."
The health of people in Rakai is generally poor-nutrition is inadequate,
malaria is endemic, and so are a host of debilitating parasitic diseases. There
is no hospital in the district, and the single clinic seldom has drugs.
People's immune systems are constantly under assault, making them susceptible
to new infections.
Sexually transmitted diseases are widespread, and mostly go untreated. Many of
the doctors with whom I spoke speculate that the open lesions caused by
untreated sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis may increase the risk
of transmitting AIDS. Even though people in Rakai have begun to learn that AIDS
is spread through sexual contact they are reluctant to change their behavior.
"You see," Badru explained to me, "a man has a wife, and a woman has a husband.
But they also have many, many good friends."
Most of the people in Rakai spend all the daylight hours digging in their
fields and doing the chores-fetching water and firewood cooking-that enable
them to survive. It is hard existence with few rewards.
We cannot live without sex," one man put it "what else is there, where is thc
enjoyment; we might as well be dead."
These words were spoken during a conversation one evening in the bar of the
Milano South View Inn. where I had a room. I was drinking beer with some of the
men from town. A dim bar bulb cast a ghostly light on the bar Girls leaned
forlornly on the counter. Disco music blared from poor speakers, its tempo
varying with the fluctuations of the power supply.
The manager of the bar had committed suicide because he thought he had AIDS. In
Uganda the infection is often marked by weight loss, chronic diarrhea, fever,
and skin rash. Some other diseases, which are treatable, may have similar
symptoms. But because so many people have been dying of AIDS, a tendency has
developed to assume that anyone who gets sick has that disease.
"You see," Badru explained, "people get sick with something like
tuberculosis-something that has the same symptoms as slim. They think they have
that disease, and so they do not try to get treatment because they know slim
cannot be cured. They just stay home and they die. But they did not have to
die."
The conversation-about condoms, sexual practices, whether people should be told
the results of their tests-was punctuated by long and deep silences. When one
of the men remarked that last year there were many more bar girls, one of those
present looked up from idly drawing rings on the wet countertop. "It is
doomsday," she said.
The entire time that I was in Uganda, where the cars are in poor condition, the
roads are abysmal, and people drive like demons, I was frightened by the
prospect of getting into an automobile accident and needing a blood
transfusion. In some parts of the country I was worried about the general
lawlessness and large number of guns.
In Kyotera, despite my understanding of the ways AIDS is spread, I was afraid
of mosquitoes in my room, of the sheets and blanket on the bed, and, most of
all, of the unspeakable toilet at the end of the hall. But these fears, I had
been assured, were unfounded.
Much more difficult to overcome were the periods of depression and the part of
me that wanted to withdraw from the people I spent all day with. I was in
Kyotera for two weeks, and every day I went to funerals or to the homes of
people who were dead or dying of AIDS. The population of Rakai was scared and
confused.
Though death is no stranger to Ugandans, they did not understand this disease
that struck down people in their prime. But I have never met people who were
kinder or more generous to one who was intruding on their most intimate and
sorrowful moments.
The patients gave me some of the precious little time they had left. The
families allowed me to sit with them at wakes, while they cried and wailed over
the loss of a son or daughter raised with years of care and love. They let me
go with them when they carried the bodies, shrouded in bark cloth, to their
graves.
I felt helpless. Famines or wars have solutions, however elusive. The situation
in Rakai was hopeless. There was nothing to be done for the people who were
dying of a disease for which there is no cure, and they knew it. I remember
especially sitting on the floor with Jane, holding her hand, listening to her
soft fading voice, her eyes lit with a strange inner light, like a candle flame
swollen by the wind in the moment before it goes out.
I made a second trip to Kyotera, three months after I had first stayed there.
All but one of the patients I had visited earlier were dead and by the time of
this writing he too had died. Jane had given birth to a baby who lived for only
a few days, and then she herself had died. Her mother took me out into the
matoke field behind the house. There were two new graves: Jane's. and beside it
the smaller one of her infant child.
"I have nothing to do," Jane s mother said,"This life is not good since my
daughter died. Every time the memory of her comes to me, I had to cry."
Stay in the forum for Series fourty on the way ------>
EM
On the 49th Parallel
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika
machafuko"
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