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On his short visit to Uganda last week, US President George W. Bush offered up what to me was the big surprise of his trip.
Speaking at The Aids Support Organisation clinic in Entebbe, Bush acknowledged Ms Noerine Kaleeba as a courageous woman, asked her stand up to receive the acknowledgement, and blew her a flying kiss.
Kaleeba is these days referred to as the �veteran Aids activist�. Now working as a community mobilisation adviser for UNaids in Geneva, she first came to local attention in 1987. After her husband died of Aids, Kaleeba decided someone had to do something to fight the pain and stigma.
She became the first Ugandan, and one of the first in the world too, who had been intimately affected by the disease to go public. She went on to form The Aids Support Organisation (Taso).
Bush�s acknowledgement of Kaleeba is important because she is the real heroine of Uganda�s achievement in rolling back the ravages of the disease. In the last 10 years though, that fact is sometimes forgotten, and the politicians have taken the credit for the openness from which many of the smart policies to combat Aids developed.
Because Ugandans generally tend to have a short memory, let us go back 16 years ago. Aids had just began its destructive march. Prejudices were still very high. Rakai was the epicentre in Uganda. The trading centres along Masaka Road were some kind of Aids ghettos.
The view then was that it was a disease of the long distance truck drivers, and the local prostitutes whom they patronised. When Noerine confronted the nation with the death of her husband, and the trauma the family was going through in what, at that time, was a very in-your-face style, we were forced to sit up and accept the fact that Aids was an equally big problem in middle class homes too.
And we could no longer hide from the disease.
However we did still try to run from it. The position of the government then, perhaps nderstandably, was not very enlightened. President Yoweri Museveni focussed very narrowly for a long time on abstinence, and being faithful to one partner. Hence the �zero grazing� notion.
We were bombarded with posters of tethered bulls that could not eat grass beyond the reach of the rope. Museveni, making the point about abstinence, would frequently say in public speeches that those who go poking sticks into holes in the bush, have only themselves to blame if they were bitten by a snake.
Running through all government actions on Aids was the suggestion that those who were HIV positive were to blame. And that was the philosophical divide between the government and Noerine then.
First, she confronted the question of stigma, about which to this day the government has never been able to respond to in an imaginative way. Her line was that there are many people who hurt when Aids strikes a family.
The children should therefore not be made to suffer because of the poor judgement or misfortune of one parent (who got the disease through blood transfusion, for example). And someone should not be penalised because of the HIV status of his or her spouse. And, indeed, the parents should not be made to pay because a child had succumbed to Aids.
Today, it is almost unbelievable that people held these prejudices. But they did. As they did consider condoms sinful. The Museveni government for many years shared the views of the churches and mosques, that condoms did not work, encouraged promiscuity, and were therefore ungodly. Up until early 1994, the advertising of condoms was banned on state radio, TV, and print media! And unlike today, they were not displayed near the cash counters of super markets and pharmacies.
In those times, challenging these attitudes took more than courage � particularly if you were a woman. Noerine did. But she would not have changed the destiny of Aids in Uganda without the help of two other figures.
Without question, the most influential figure was the singer Philly Bongoley Lutaaya, the first publicly self-confessed person with Aids. Lutaaya went on to make the powerful and moving film, �Born in Africa� about how Aids was changing the face of Uganda.
The other person was the worthy Church of Uganda�s Bishop Misaeri Kawuma, who broke with the church�s conservative attitude toward Aids, and followed it up with the highly symbolic act of inviting Lutaaya to sing with the Sunday choir at Namirembe.
Recently the second edition of Noerine�s acclaimed book that tells the story of her husband�s death from Aids; how that tragedy inspired her to form TASO; and how her family dealt with the pain and stigma that the disease brought into their lives, was released.
The book, as those who have read it know, is titled �We Miss You All�.
We miss the millions of Ugandans who have fallen to Aids. We miss people like late Lutaaya who gave their suffering a human face.
We miss late Bishop Kawuma who gave moral strength to people living with Aids and their families. And we miss the example of personal courage that Noerine gave many, and the comfort of knowing that she was �just around the corner�, and many doors they opened.
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