The Shadow of Fear
During my primary school years in the 1990s, people feared HIV/AIDS as the greatest menace of our era. This invisible danger had no clear origin or destination. Families and individuals faced severe discrimination and painful exclusion; many endured isolation, while others experienced stigma and deep resentment.
Life became a package of myths, superstitions, and uncertainties.
Death cast its shadow over the community. Fresh graves filled the cemeteries. An eerie silence settled in, and a profound stillness gripped the village as if everyone tiptoed, afraid to disturb the spirit of death and provoke it to strike again.
It would often begin with a rumor. Someone developed a persistent fever. Another suffered a miscarriage. A couple delivered a stillbirth. Someone gained or lost weight too suddenly. And I remember vividly, a time when even giving birth to twins could ignite speculation.
Earlier reports from the Ministry of Health indicated that by 1988, HIV/AIDS had infected at least one million people in Uganda, the highest number in Africa at the time. In 1990 alone, more than 50,000 people died as a result of HIV/AIDS.
The Village rumors made the diagnosis
Then and there, the village would “test” and “diagnose” you with HIV/AIDS.
The Stigma That Killed Once suspicion set in, the whispers would begin; loud and soft, direct and indirect.
The gossip would take on a life of its own. People would start pointing, nodding silently, winking knowingly. Your world would begin to shrink. Friends would pull away. Social circles would grow smaller, until the isolation reached your own family.
The myths surrounding HIV/AIDS were so chilling that even blood relatives would abandon you for fear of contamination or shame. Once you became the center of village talk—hmmm, that’s when the real pain began. Depression. Uncertainty. Loss of appetite. Loneliness. The mental weight alone was enough to drain your body. It was not just the virus that weakened you, it was the waiting—the slow erosion of hope. You’d begin to waste away: weight loss that crept in gradually, hair falling out in patches, lips turning a deep red, eyes protruding with unnatural whiteness, shoulders becoming skeletal—hanger-like. You began to look like a ghost of yourself.
Children would flee if they met you on the path, and adults would cross the road to avoid walking too close. Families separated and marked utensils used by the sick to prevent contagious infection. They built makeshift shelters at the edge of family compounds to isolate the sick, or hastily added an extra room to the main family house.
Isolation and resentment
In rare cases, one or two exceptional family members, often women- volunteered to care for the sick. Happiness and joy vanished from those households. Invisible bells of death seemed to ring softly and loudly all at once. People stopped laughing and treated laughter as taboo. They emotionally abandoned the sick, preparing themselves for the inevitable. They stood on a springboard-ready to leap into mourning the moment death arrived.
https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/jc590-uganda_en_0.pdf
That was SILIMU, KAVEERA (I still don’t know why they called it that), MUKENENYA-the drainer. Did anyone ever confirm it? Stigma posed the real threat and often became the actual killer.
I still doubt whether medical professionals properly tested or diagnosed most of the people who died during that time before village rumors condemned them.
Another frightening moment arose when someone returned from the city, Kampala, while ill. The villagers believed that anyone who had lived in the city and came back sick surely carried the infection. They directly linked the city to HIV/AIDS.
Spirits and Belief: A Cultural Response But society had to find a way to cope with the fear and shame.
Spirits in Everyday Life: How Traditional African Communities Understand the Unseen
In traditional African communities, people believed that spirits inhabited water wells, trees, and even individuals. These beliefs helped them make sense of the unexplainable.
Sometimes, families created diversionary rumors to protect a loved one from stigma. They claimed that someone had taken the sick relative’s name to the grave of a person who died of AIDS and cast a spell against them to cause illness.
Although the symptoms resembled HIV/AIDS, we believed witchcraft was the true cause. This belief offered hope. Family members sought help from witchdoctors, visited shrines, and invoked spirits. During these moments, they often named someone they suspected had cast a spell causing the illness with HIV/AIDS-like symptoms.
Suddenly, the diagnosis changed, and so did the outlook. If it wasn’t HIV/AIDS, there was still hope. The sick person began to eat again, gradually regained weight, and their immunity improved. The family could breathe a little easier. Whether or not it was real, this belief gave people the strength to fight for their lives.
The Cost of Spousal Inheritance : A Cycle of Loss and Replacement
Spousal inheritance remained a common practice. When a man lost his wife, her family provided a replacement. When a woman lost her husband, his family assigned her to another brother. If no one came forward, the widow had to raise the children alone, often in her late husband’s home, regardless of her desire to remarry.
Young widows and widowers appeared everywhere. HIV/AIDS caused most deaths, making other causes rare. The elderly seemed to stop dying altogether. When someone died in a road accident, people whispered that the accident only hastened what fate had already decided, they were going to die of HIV/AIDS anyway.
A Generation Touched by Silence In communities where people still believed spirits held power and saw witchcraft as both a threat and a solution, they blurred the lines between reality and belief. Families reframed suspected AIDS cases as spiritual attacks to provide socially acceptable explanations and protect their reputations. Tragically, this also allowed the disease to spread quietly. Some of the young widows who believed they were free from HIV because their husbands had been “bewitched,” moved on and entered new relationships.
Many children contracted the virus at birth, unknowingly caught in a web of silence and misbelief.
And then came the hope.
In mid 1990s, Uganda — under President Yoweri Museveni and First Lady Janet Museveni — launched aggressive campaigns against the spread of HIV/AIDS. It was a rare moment of unity, of political will. The messaging was loud and clear: Abstain, Be Faithful, Stop cross-generational sex, and Use protection. Schools, churches, community centres — every platform echoed these four pillars.
