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/ 27 September 2004
His left leg missing, Jackson Acama stands uneasily on crutches. At 42, he is one of the oldest former rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army to have taken up residence at the World Vision rehabilitation centre in Gulu, northern Uganda. By Acama’s own account, he was a major in the notorious guerilla movement. e Acama, many ex-rebels say they heard about the amnesty on the radio, especially Gulu’s Mega FM.
The women of the Kawempe Positive Women’s Union are among the new faces of the HIV/Aids epidemic in Uganda. The recent Aids conference in Bangkok, Thailand, shed light on the growing feminisation of HIV: 57% of those infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women. And 75% of the young people infected are females aged 15 to 24.
Uganda will receive more than $90-million in Aids funds this year from the United States. But activists fear Washington may be showing too great a preference for abstinence-based programmes in its allocation of these funds — and that alternative prevention efforts such as condom distribution could suffer as a result.
Of the 12 people in her immediate family, only Mamerthe Karuhimbi and her mother survived the Rwandan genocide. But 10 years later she has little hope for her future. ”I have no life because I don’t have a family or children,” Karuhumbi says. Her words are echoed by Elizabeth Onyango, programme coordinator for African Rights — an NGO based in Kigali and London.
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/ 18 February 2004
”We are going to shout about bride price across Africa and we are going to say ‘no’ to the sale of women,” exclaimed Atuki Turner to a crowded hall at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Turner was speaking at the opening this week of the first international conference on the tradition of bride price.