Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 27, 1992 TAG: 9203270253
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KRIS BANVARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In fact, he was much better known than Dan Rather is here. That's because the East African nation has only one TV station; when you turned on the news, there was Joshua Rubongoya.
It's a long way from Uganda to Salem, especially if you come by way of Denver, as Rubongoya did. Now he can't go home again.
He left his troubled homeland in 1984 to work on a doctorate in political science at the University of Denver. But while he was away, the government changed - as it often does - and that meant Rubongoya no longer could work in television.
With the change of regime, there were a number of people "whose return and existence in Uganda would not be particularly welcome," said Rubongoya, who last fall became a professor of political science at Roanoke College. "I found out I was among them."
The government controls the TV station he used to work for. Depending on who's in charge, the government has a habit of exiling out-of-favor journalists, maybe after roughing them up and putting them in prison for a while. Word circulated that Rubongoya was a spy - or at least that would have been the pretext for his arrest.
This partly explains why Rubongoya was standing at the front of the Roanoke College student center ballroom packed with students and faculty Thursday, delivering a scholarly lecture on the big AIDS story he worked on in his TV days.
The lecture was on AIDS and its relation to sorcery and witchcraft. Rubongoya knows much about the magic arts, in addition to international relations and other political science subjects he teaches.
Witchcraft and sorcery - or rather, people's fear of them - still help keep public order in many parts of Africa where governments are corrupt and weak, Rubongoya said.
During the early 1980s, after the acquired immune deficiency syndrome first hit Africa, news reporter Rubongoya began snooping around southern Uganda. He came across a tale the locals used to explain why so many people were suddenly getting sick, losing weight, coughing a lot, losing their hair, then dying.
Seems a Tanzanian businessman had crossed the border into a Ugandan town to do some shopping. While he was there, a bag in which he carried money was either lost or stolen, Rubongoya said.
As Tanzanians have a reputation for being powerful sorcerers, people took seriously this man's public threat that if his bag was not returned, there would be suffering.
Soon enough, whole families started dying of a disease they called "slim," because of the way victims lost so much weight.
AIDS "was spreading like a rumor on the Roanoke College campus," Rubongoya said, to laughter from his audience.
In recent years, however, much more has become known about public health in Uganda. The spread of AIDS is attributed more accurately to the sexual practices of long-haul truck drivers and prostitutes than it is to sorcery and witchcraft.
And although his journalistic skepticism kept him from believing that the Tanzanian businessman actually practiced black magic, Rubongoya told his listeners that some things happen for which there is no rational explanation.
In Uganda, he once saw someone being lifted from a bed by an unseen force, then slammed against a wall. A "panel" of experts in the magic arts convened, and their theory was that the person's grandparent had been involved in a murder and that the victim's spirit was out for revenge.
Whether that was true, Rubongoya doesn't know.
But "I do believe objectively that there is such a thing as witchcraft," he said. "I have observed acts that defy scientific explanation."
by CNB