Uganda gives Aids-weary Africa hope

By ALEX DUVAL SMITH

DURBAN - Gideon Byamugisha is Ugandan. He is a priest. He is HIV-positive. And he talks about it.

Those facts alone stunned the World Aids conference in South Africa yesterday.

Byamugisha, a 40-year-old Anglican, told delegates he was one of the "34 million casualties of the silence surrounding sex and sexuality."

"The first time I heard about condoms was the day I received my positive result. It was after my wife died in 1991, yet I should have had an HIV test before I was married in 1987."

Byamugisha, who five years ago became the first priest in Africa to declare publicly that he was HIV-positive, has been at the forefront of a community-led information campaign which has made Uganda the Aids success story of a continent with 34 million HIV carriers.

The campaign has worked from the grassroots, and Uganda is the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to reverse the epidemic. Once the country with the highest per capita infection rate in the world, it has fallen to No 14 on the list.

Uganda started dealing with Aids 14 years ago - when Europe and the United States, with all their information technology and education, still considered it a deviants' plague.

In May 1986, Health Minister Dr Rukahana Rugunda told the World Health Assembly in Geneva: "We have a problem with Aids in Uganda and we would like the support of the international community."

Rugunda told the Aids conference in Durban yesterday: "African ministers were scandalised by my speech. They said we had brought shame on Africa. They said tourism would suffer and the good image of Uganda would be lost. But the Ugandan Government said 'to hell with tourism' and resolved to deal with the problem."

At a time when Uganda had just emerged from five years of war and its infrastructure and economy were crumbling, President Yoweri Museveni in 1986 created a national Aids committee which included churches, charities and traditional healers. After 20 years of dictatorship and repression, Museveni used people's enthusiasm and rediscovery of free speech to get them talking about sex.

Although he can often be cryptic, his message on hundreds of regional tours was clear: "If you go into a field and see an anthill full of holes and then you put your hand into a hole and you are bitten by a snake, whose fault is it?"

One of the President's biggest successes was to include the churches in the solution to the Uganda Aids crisis, rather than, as often happens in Africa, allow extremist forces to hijack the debate.

"We have got people talking and the churches have been instrumental," said Byamugisha. "Some of our best HIV test clubs are in churches."

But he still encounters prejudice.

"Once I went to Rwanda, where I was not allowed to address a Christian rally because of my HIV-positive status," said Byamugisha, who in 1995 married a woman who is HIV-positive. "To many, HIV-Aids is still associated with sin."

- INDEPENDENT