Statistical Footnotes or Suffering Human Beings? Humanising AIDS in Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles.

Abstract

Uganda is perhaps the only country in the world that has been able to reduce its AIDS infection rates from about 30% in the late 1980s to 6.1% at the turn of the 21st century. This dramatic reversal has been partly attributed to Uganda’s openness about and/or communicative strategies that promoted abstinence, faithfulness and condom use in the fight against AIDS. While a huge corpus of Ugandan medico-anthropological archive that documents this phenomenon privileges statistical data to foreground the impact of the disease on society, another library — consisting of mainly fictional texts — offers an alternative understanding of the disease by foregrounding the corporeality of AIDS through skilful use of characterisation and setting. The fictional representations of AIDS in the Ugandan public sphere, unlike the medico-scientific renditions that essentialise and reduce the disease and its victims to statistical footnotes, offers readers a personalised understanding of the of the disease that unravels its complex contours. In this article, I centre the idea that fiction as an affectively didactic type of knowledge production in AIDS discourses to argue that it is capable of offering profound insights into complex realities like AIDS. Thus, I explore how Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles fuses third person focalisation with spatial and temporal setting to capture the terrifyingly complex and intricate contours of the plague that other documents elide.