Re-Discovering the HIV Fight...

Re-Discovering the HIV Fight or Re-Creating Stigmatization – Job lines again?

Sam Mwaka-karama

Puppet on the string starts another stroke: jumping this side and then that side - HIV/Aids – is historically known to have started somewhere around mid to late 1970s. In between a period of about five years 1975 to 1979 is the gray area internationally known and have been established by WHO and other Global health concern entities; as the period the disease initially materialized.

In the early days of people generally discussing HIV verbally or in writing – which began more seriously around the [1988-1991s] – the concept of what people now loosely talk of as [HIV Fight] was also established in this secondary period. I personally made my written contribution in discussing HIV in my own publication of a personal ‘Newsletter’ in 1991. My maiden publication [MONAKK] printed by Uganda Co-operative Alliance UCA on Nkrumah Road circulated in Kampala, Jinja and my home town Gulu, was also the initial point of my entry into writing and publishing material that could be internationally read and digested. Basically HIV/Aids was at that time a darkness unknown ambiguity globally.

After this initial period of people widely and publicly talking about and discussing HIV/Aids; something that in Uganda here was limited to then very scanty press and media and wide-eyed café, restaurants, bars and beer hall scares – actually to think backwards a little; it was a most difficult time for anybody who cared to think at all… because at the top of the world’s most advanced health ‘Think Tanks’ so many abstracts were devised, crafted then advanced, modeled and re-modeled, then juggled about in Journals, magazines and academic publications and forums; abstract theories that practically scared people virtually to the very death…

Compounded by a terrorizing tabloids horde of weird shifting and sieving wild analyses and, scrap definitions of compound laboratory genetic findings: mostly ambiguous stuffs like “human Carriers” of the molecular HIV [x or y chromosomes] genes… that once fused with certain other blood types [in sex] instantly sparked [full blown] cureless HIV/Aids!

The academics abroad in their disease anthropology - researched some colonial time disease called; “Brucellosis” which quickly zeroed the suspicions on a spot inside Uganda close to the Tanzanian border – where colonial health officer Bruce ones carried out his research among roadside communities… and the disease defined by Bruce way back in the 1950s was apparently of similar identifiable symptoms and general characteristics as that of HIV/Aids.

The world of the academia can be very brutal and merciless or insensitive – as the world of the media is cramped with daring, hard and terribly malicious minds as well. Between those two important worlds of ethics, back then, fragile emotions [among early day’s victims] were crushed! Falling infected people thronged about swayed by the winds of wheeler-dealer and brave-minds that capitalized on the ambiguity of HIV/Aids prevalence; Thus creating [stigmatization] and, soft hearted people began to accept publicly that they were HIV sufferers – with this concept of stigmatization the acronym [HIV Fight] came to existence. Very quickly things boiled down to bare ‘escape goat’ stigma thinking… which gave birth to the enormous blame syndrome; someone else less known, but of notoriety of some kind was always the blame victim.

To us Africans ‘blame syndrome’ is a natural to most of our cultures – feuding family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, competing individuals against one another – actually it all started with the focal-point area of the disease Brucellosis findings in Rakai district.

The silent stigma fight saw many people blaming each-other to death causing many others to flee… then the scenario painters in the press brought in the concept that ‘Transit truckers’ were initially the ones that infected the area; now that brought to attention ‘trucking Somali drivers’ and the beginning of the metamorphoses of the stigmatization phenomenon. Its wild bush-fire burning effect spread country-wide - from Bruce’s focal point Rakai.

My Newsletter articles; one of the earliest really objective observation of the HIV/Aids problem and positively encouraging layman view became the fundamental material that fed clearer thinking among victims and concerned local thinkers, writers and discussants; some form of analysis that cleared hearts and minds clogged by abstract academic publications and distressing tabloids and other genre mainstream media views – I got encouraging feed-back that time – I recall funders were suddenly running around with cash in hand putting together Journalists to found some new robust newspapers… I wasn’t a trained Journalist so I was unknown; so that my inspiring newsletter folded as suddenly in Gulu; I found myself a HIV Stigma! I am not from ‘Bruce’s Rakai’, nor was I more importantly one of the early victims – but I became “suspect” – to this day now about or nearly thirty years down the road I am still not HIV positive. Though back then it became very difficult for me to do anything at all… I was caught-up in a vice that has now lasted 27 years; lost two daughters in Germany and a son in California. Branded that I was the infector of all the victims – to this day I am not living on ARV.

Stigmatization then and Stigmatization now    

Philosophically a fight is two sided: on one side you and on the other side the enemy – actually in this sort of ‘vice’ situation [the enemy] is not necessarily your enemy nor are you necessarily his enemy either – he is just some Guy whose character [and or tribe or race] you often didn’t just like; he is dangled there with the ambiguous [escape goat] accusations as ‘the enemy’ and, so what! It serves the purpose; the fight begins, like it did between 1988/1991.

And like in the [cock or bull] fights those who stake them out benefit on bets and collections from those who are entertained, stake holders and gamblers on whoever wins the [HIV/Aids Fight]. In the rough and tangle that embodied the three or four year fight: the Berlin wall came down! Northern Uganda bled! Wall materialized between Israel and Palestine! Twin Towers came down! The Black Hawk came down! Bosnia was aflame! South Sudan broke free! Rwanda bled! DR Congo and other parts of the African continent ‘saw red’! Iraq was a-storm – And things now evidently are getting better though the under-belly of the world still rumbles; the rhetoric, claims, talks, dialogues and discussions even accusations still goes on…

What I believe is the fertilizers of renewed local political problems are those political fall-outs among allies of the [HIV Aids fights] being the ones who will publish the real [beans] smear books someday… former allies who irrationally become enemies are the ‘squealers’; the ‘turn-coats’ who leave and then double-back are the 4’ 2” Gnomes still clinging to the [old] vain, useless stigmatization because obviously they didn’t even have the innovations to even find some scrap ‘reformative themes…’ and go back to try and eat-up the stinking hair of some Rasta…   

An HIV/Aids victim who has weathered the storm managing to somehow prolong his life should not try to play the old [stigmatization] lyrics again and yet again: the house you built out of it should be enough; the cars you bought out of it should be enough – jumping here and there is sometimes good politics - but there are certain old songs that might trigger stray thinking back to days gone-by that many might no-longer want to revisit. What stigmatization did for you then… should not be what you pursue now – compose a new song and create a change of heart and mind; a quarrel on phone between a [father and his son] should not be your early morning TV breakfast material… why not retire and write a book about how you survived the pre TASO much hurting period – instead of getting in-between a man and his son! 

The early day HIV victims – and the stigma               

It is not the purpose of this blog article to name anyone… for the benefit of refreshing memory and in solidarity with the living sufferers – in a small way I want to observe here that the early victims mostly died away quietly actually guilt-ridden; they were the ones who never benefitted from the subsequent phenomena of “Counseling” which came much too late for many! Counseling effectively began after the good women of TASO had established their organization – in time to save those who were infected much later. By then the tough-hearted who also publicly accepted that they were the earliest… to be infected with HIV/Aids had survived the first generation victims – who hopelessly died enmasse.

Those tough-hearted mostly survived through quest for knowledge and ceaseless reading and formulating of survival kits of their own: like regular vitamin and nutrition intake to enhance their resistance and eventually stayed the demise-point. Till TASO came to the rescue - It is only the lucky few who merited there otherwise in Uganda even the highly educated succumbed – despite their abundant knowledge and even money! The early day victim who was lucky enough to have had money and basic survival skills and is still alive today – is a great person. ***

Writer is an Independent Thinker, blogger and book Author