While working on his master’s degree in Britain in 1987, Uganda native and NC State communication associate professor James Kiwanuka-Tondo found that whenever he mentioned his home country, people only knew two things about it: the former dictator Idi Amin and AIDS.
Discovering that his former home was synonymous with a terrible disease and a terrible dictator led to his understanding of how serious the problem is.
Kiwanuka-Tondo said his experience in Britain in the late 1980s and his work compiling education information and communication materials about health for the United Nations Population Fund helped develop his understanding of the crisis. During this time, he got in contact with the National AIDS Control Programme in Uganda.
“I started understanding the issues of HIV/AIDS, but also during those days we lost a lot of people and I began experiencing HIV/AIDS firsthand [because] many people in Uganda had relatives, people from our extended families dying and leaving behind AIDS orphans, and so I began to understand how big of a problem it was,” Kiwanuka-Tondo said.
When he really began to develop an interest in the disease and health communication, Kiwanuka-Tondo said Uganda had the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world, with more than 18 percent of the adult population of the country affected.
Uganda was the first country in Africa to decrease its rates of HIV/AIDS, according to Kiwanuka-Tondo, and it was the only country in the 1990s able to bring down the rates of the disease. This breakthrough prompted his dissertation.
Kiwanuka-Tondo said the director of the NAACP at the time, who he knew from school, provided him with information about campaigns taking place in Uganda during the 1990s.
“He told me that at that point because of the very aggressive and vigorous campaigns, the rates of HIV/AIDS would peak in 1994 and start falling,” he said. “And it happened, so for me, actually, I decided to find out why.”
Kiwanuka-Tondo＊s dissertation, published in 2013, focuses on what organizational factors led to successful AIDS campaigns in Uganda.
“One of the things I found out is that what was very different about Uganda was not only was everybody involved, the politicians, the president, religious leaders, but the policy was to involve everybody in the whole campaign,” he said.
Kiwanuka-Tondo said that if a health campaign is to be successful, it is necessary to make the intended audience participate and be a part of the whole problem and solution, and said that writing about this topic has been his greatest contribution to his area of research.
When he’s not teaching and doing research at NC State, Kiwanuka-Tondo said he goes back to Uganda every year and to Botswana on study abroad trips with students. In Botswana, he and his students focus on understanding why there is such a high rate of HIV/AIDS. Though the country has economic and political success, it has the second highest rate of HIV in the world.
“[The program] offers the opportunity to understand health issues, particularly how do people understand health issues because people in the US and in Western cultures are individualistic, they understand health very differently from people who are in communal cultures, like in Africa,” Kiwanuka-Tondo said.
Taking students to Uganda serves a somewhat similar purpose. Kiwanuka-Tondo has been working since 1996 with The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), which is the largest AIDS organization in Uganda. He said that when he takes students, faculty and people from the community, they visit TASO so participants of the study abroad can interface with AIDS survivors.
“They call themselves AIDS survivors because they are people who have been living with HIV/AIDS for a long time, 25 years, so many years and they tell us their story,” Kiwanuka-Tondo said.
Tracy Anderson, one of Kiwanuka-Tondo’s former students, went on both trips with him when he was her thesis chair. Her thesis focused on HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in Botswana and health behavior campaigns related to risky behavior that leads to the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
“He was really my guide through all of grad school— in terms of academics, personal development and career development,” Anderson said. “I think he is so well liked by his students because of the genuine passion he has for what he＊s teaching. When we were learning about how to design a social marketing campaign, he was relating real life stories to us about his home country and how the principles that he＊s teaching us are a matter of life and death essentially.”
Anderson also felt that these trips went beyond the typical study abroad experience. She and other participants went to fishing villages and spoke to children and adults there, one time even speaking to Ugandan war victims. They were there to understand the culture and to learn how to bridge connections to NC State.
“He＊s always traveling all the time and working on these extra projects that he has,” Anderson said. “And he does that because he is actually so passionate about making a difference in people＊s lives.”
Kiwanuka-Tondo said his attitude toward the problem of HIV/AIDS has changed over the past three years — to focus more on activism and trying to make sure people understand the problem.
“Since 2000 there has been this sort of feeling that we have overcome the problem of HIV/AIDS, and yet we haven＊t,” he said.
He said that the US is one of the countries with the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, with more than 1,148,000 members of its population testing positive.
Kiwanuka-Tondo currently co-chairs with Sheila Smith Mckoy on an AIDS fund that gives grants to small community organizations that deal with the patients of the disease, and insists that the Affordable Care Act has changed a number of things by allowing AIDS patients to get insurance and granting more access to healthcare.
“It is very difficult [to communicate health issues and prevent the spread of disease] because it involves behavior and attitude changes,” he said. “This is an issue we will deal with until humanity is done; it will never go away as long as we have people on the Earth.”
