AIDS in Uganda is a tragic history of a decaying society under threat of a mythical virus. A society whose way of life is characterized by ignorance, disease, squalid and grotesquely unsanitary living conditions, born of political and civil strife led by tyrannical oppressive and dictatorial, insensitive and selfish leaders. Its people are bound to believe in anything unreal and mythical like ‘HIV’ because of lack of knowledge, unparalleled intimidation and gross abuse of human rights.
The AIDS situation in Africa and in Uganda in particular, is not a crisis, it is a holocaust imposed on its people by their ignorant and intolerant leaders and perpetuated by genocidal racists and greedy Western governments that plunder the continent for their well being. The advent of AIDS grew from the dirt and ignorance on the part of the Ugandan natives, and Westerner’s bizarre and racist beliefs in the sexual habits of Africans. When these intertwined, the deadly mixture grew into a ruthless slow killer Monster ‘AIDS’.
This monster can be traced from the relationship between Uganda and Tanzania. A relationship that has wavered between peace and war. The people of Uganda and Tanzania share a political border and, although physically separated by the vast waters of Lake Victoria, they are joined by this dwelling place of the spirits that unites them in traditional worship and witchcraft.
From pre-colonial days to the partition of Africa and up to the present day, they have had intermarriages and cross border informal trade referred to by governments as smuggling. The tribes along the political borders do not need passports, visas, or work permits to go and live or work or graze their animals across the border where they may stay for long period or for ever depending on their needs. They actually do not understand these artificial political limitations. The languages, cultures and cultural practices blend, they worship the same gods and spirits, practice witchcraft and share and receive services from the same medicine men and traditional healers. And these are very important in bad times like wars, environmental catastrophes and epidemics. They have had the same share of Western religions – Christianity and Islam, and all their different sects.
In politics and government they support one another. They make alliances and sometimes in peace times carry voters across the borders to help them win votes. People across the borders also fight wars and commit atrocities against their own brothers. In most of these wars, most of the soldiers that go into battle fight for causes they do not understand at all. This has been the leading cause of suffering to many societies visited by these senseless wars. Most of the social problems including the new diesease AIDS that the people are battling with are visited on the communities by intolerant dictatorial leaders presiding over repressive and murderous regimes, relying on the unimaginable ignorance of the population.
These diabolical circumstances formed the genesis of AIDS in the tiny village of Kasensero. AIDS by description is a foreign name adopted by the local authorities as handed down by great America to describe conditions that have no correlation with the AIDS conditions and way of life in America and Europe, we read from the few books donated to us. These western prescriptions are taken as gospel truth due to lack of independent intelligentsia and technology in the absence of an indigenous health care system and a dilapidated semi-modern western health care structure left by the colonialists.
Kasensero village, from where Silimu as it is known in Uganda, a corrupted English word ‘slim’ meaning the thinning of the body due to malnutrition or poor feeding, endemic diseases, lack of medical care and poor sanitation as it was at that time and is largely so in many communities due to poverty, is a very filthy unhygienic place anybody in their right senses would never dream of living in.
Kasensero village is a fish-landing site. It is a small sandy beach on a rocky plateau inhabited by fishermen of all sorts who left their village and are considered as ne'er do wells in their villages and are thought as having been lost. And equally the women found on this little unsanitary village less than a quarter of a square kilometer, are regarded as useless women not fit to be married in their home villages. Thus it is a place or home to social misfits or outcasts. Kasensero is an isolated place about 10 km from the rest of other villages separated by bush and forest and very deep in a rural area. This landing site is famous for smuggling of goods from neighboring Tanzania across the vast Lake Victoria.
People on this landing site live in largely wooden shacks. Their livelihood depends on the lake. The lake provides fish, and when there is no food coming from other villages these fishermen eat dried fish as food and fresh fish as soup. They don’t have toilets. They use the lake water for drinking, washing their utensils and clothes. Their animals also drink from the lake and it serves as a disposal place.
This kind of dirty life style was made desperate by political upheavals to give birth to Silimu ‘AIDS’ conditions, especially from 1971 when Idi Amin took power in a bloody coup. His nine years of rule destroyed any health care system that was in place. Traditional healers filled the gaps created and witchcraft became rampant. In 1979 a war to oust Amin was started from Tanzania and the gateway was the villages near Kasensero. The life of the communities were totally disrupted and for those who survived the war sustaining life was an up hill task. Two years later, in 198, people at Kasensero village started dying after a long period of ill health that made them very thin and people started referring to this condition as Silimu or ‘Slim’ disease. This is the original SILIMU (AIDS).
Due to the absence of medical health care people fell back on their traditional methods to diagnose the disease. When a group of smugglers stole goods from Tanzania, an evil curse was pronounced on those Ugandans by Tanzanian medicine men believed to be very powerful. The curse included those who used the stolen goods. This story was believed as people beyond Kasensero village also started dying. Even the few ill-trained health workers living in these communities believed it. This unscientific interpretation of events led to people fleeing their homes especially after a family member’s death. The surviving members would leave the village to other places to escape the evil spell or for the young ones to their extended family relatives in other villages for support or survival especially when the breadwinner died. People started even throwing out property and items suspected of coming from Tanzania.
This situation festered because, even today, the health authorities do not have monitoring systems to detect emerging health problems or threats to life until a catastrophe happens. Then politicians from impromptu emergency committees at national level are sent to investigate, with very few health professionals to help them. Because they are unfit for the job they appeal for international help in the form of experts, equipment and money. They expect people from America and Europe who have never set foot on the African continent to find the cause of the problem and provide the solution. Our leaders enjoy this, as it means some dollars will fall into their hands to embezzle, as it is very difficult to keep track of money in a disaster situation. This has led to extreme exaggerations for want of free money at the expense of their poor countrymen. This is a folly for which we are paying a high price.
This SILIMU was never investigated because the country was entering into another bloody guerrilla war that devastated entire villages of Luweero and raged on for five years. During the entire period, as the war raged on to engulf the whole country nothing was done to find out what was the cause of Slim (AIDS). Then stories of AIDS started filtering in from journalists that a similar disease was being experienced in the US and Europe.
Six years later at the end of the civil war US experts from CDC and NIH came and told us this was AIDS, incurable and caused by a virus passed on by having sex with an infected person. However this AIDS thing was more rampant in areas mostly devastated by war up to this day. In a society where people had suffered terrible stress and other war problems sex was a liberating instrument for a new morality.
From the homosexual unscientific distortions already created in the US, AIDS became a heterosexual mayhem and assumed a grotesque stigma. Despite Kasensero having been an isolated unsanitary beach deep in a rural place, no where near the Trans African Highways, the experts deflected the ill prepared and equipped doctors and politicians to track drivers and prostitutes in sprawling filthy townships on the Trans African highway. Even among these semi-prostitutes and track drivers nobody bothered to look at the totality of their lifestyle.
It is common knowledge that most truck drivers are drug addicts and alcoholics and work in stressful conditions and so are their prostitute friends. They all live on the fringe of society. Prostitution is illegal in Uganda. Women do not engage in prostitution in the sense of the word. They just offer themselves for survival such as getting accommodation, food and clothing. Thus with economic and social hardships in these years young girls, widows found themselves drifting to townships. In the townships they would work for food and a room to sleep in, in the numerous restaurants, small hotels and bars littering the Trans-Africa high way in the hope of earning some money from the truck drivers through sex. Most of these would become part time wives of these drivers who would bring them things from their long distance places like the East African Coast of Mombasa. Some of these women still do the same work; others got permanent men and got married. Those who remain in this underworld service are looked down by society. They are alcoholic, underfed and highly stressed. They live only to exist. The stress, hunger, alcohol and the bleaching of their bodies with all sorts of cosmetics and other detergents and toxic and highly hazardous chemicals and oils have never been studied to find the effects on their immune system.
Upon this confusion of poor diets, indulgence in poor crude potent gin brewed locally and consumed with zest as people bury their sorrows, poor sanitation, political intolerance, poor feeding habits, hunger, endemic diseases, drug abuse, poor medical services and abuse of medical drugs, the Ugandan President (Yowel Museveni) was convinced his people were being devastated by a lethal virus spread through sex. Desperate to get the much-needed dollars to rehabilitate the society he had participated in destroying he declared Uganda as being devastated by an AIDS epidemic caused by HIV.
The Expert Americans pronounced HIV on us and that our sexual habits were responsible. They set up the ‘Rakai Project’ in collaboration with the Uganda government and started haunting our sexuality and culture looking for all sorts of cultural practices that could explain why people were dying of supposed HIV/AIDS. Interestingly for the last 16 years also since no single symptom has been attributed to HIV.
Up to now the Rakai project is still searching for the virus dynamics, the sexual networks, the relationship of HIV to other STDs among poor, illiterate, scared people with a very poor nutritional status, high disease burden of endemic tropical infections in a dilapidated health care society of which Kasensero is part – but no studies are done in this particular unsanitary village - the cradle of AIDS.
Ever since we were told AIDS is a sexual problem, the only intervention is the ‘Sex can kill’ song of sensitization and all year round convincing our illiterate and semi-literate and unsuspecting population to use condoms. Condom use to date is almost a slogan that even the young ones of 5 years can sing. Already they know their parents have sex, and will get AIDS and die. It is a traumatic situation we are living through!
For a few of us, who can see through this genocide, do not have resources to carry out counter education to enlighten our people of the real issues. We can only do person to person and the structures of government and the mass media that parrot messages for the sake of earning money and enjoying themselves drown our voices.
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