‘Deadly gonorrhoea’: history, collective memory and early HIV epidemiology in East Central Africa

Abstract

This article combines local oral reminiscences with recent epidemiological literature to sketch a historical context around the onset and expansion of the HIV-1 epidemic in southern Uganda and north-western Tanzania. The local historical imagination has associated the appearance of AIDS in two ways. First, with specific socio-economic structures and circumstances common in the region since the 1960s and their enhancement during the 1970s due to economic changes at national and global levels. Second, the epidemic is associated with changes in the epidemiological situation. Local perspectives are supported by recent phylogenetic research and circumstantial historical evidence, on the basis of which a hypothesis on the expansion of HIV-1 in East Central Africa (southern Uganda, north-western Tanzania, Rwanda) is presented.

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, STDs, Idi Amin, Tanzania, Uganda, prostitution, Kagera, Rakai