Elvis Basudde Kyeyune is the first prominent journalist in East Africa to disclose his HIV-positive status in 2002. Basudde survived AIDS at the mouth of the grave, thanks to antiretrovirals (ARVs) and vowed to become an HIV media activist. In these four-part series, New Vision brings you his story of resistance and activism, which have inspired many to live a positive life. Today, Basudde explains how AIDS took him to the doorstep of death and his miraculous recovery.

After deportation, on my journey from Busia border to home, two things haunted me: what an unpleasantly surprise it would be for my mother. I was in a deplorable shape with untidy clothes, stinking after days without bathing or changing clothes!

Basudde (right) lost his siblings to AIDS: Makanga used to follow Nakazibwe (Middle) who then followed Basudde in birth order. They both died one week apart and Basudde never had a chance to bury.

I could imagine the shock to my mother and the entire village. Secondly, I was picturing the shape in which I would find my mother. She had lost two children a few months earlier, within one week! Ruth Nakazibwe who followed me and who had invited me to Nairobi and James Makanga.

Nakazibwe had become very sick, after acquiring AIDS. We suspected it was her husband, a truck driver, who used to ply Kenya-Uganda route. He had become clinically sick and was taken back to Ethiopia by his relatives.

I brought my sister back to Uganda after realising that chances of her recovery were very slim. It was during the time people who got HIV, progressed helplessly to AIDS and death. There were no ARVs. My young brother, James Makanga, was not sick! He died abruptly. I was at school during break time, when the headteacher called me and asked: “Do you have a relative in Uganda called James Makanga? Somebody called and asked me to let you know that he has died.”

Basudde (third-right) hosting Kirunda Kivejjinja (second-right) as guest of honour at New Kenta Secondary School in Kenya.

I did not know what killed him. But I later came to learn he had also succumbed to AIDS. Barely a week after he was buried, Nakazibwe also died! I had expected her to die any time, but not Makanga. That shock never left me the same. I got so much disoriented that I even lost concentration while teaching and I subsequently lost my job in that school.

The school management could not bear with me, probably I had developed mental breakdown. Unfortunately, I never buried both my siblings because there was no way I could come to Uganda during those bad days. But here I was returning under condition likely to scare my grieving mother.

I expected her to have lost a lot of weight. But luckily, she was still in her good shape. She just looked at me and shed tears. My narration left them cold-blooded. My other young brother led me to the graves of my two siblings and joked: “This means you are next in line!”

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Relocating to Kampala

After staying home for about five months, I relocated to Kampala to look for a job. Initially I stayed at my other brother’s home in Busabala. This one also died later. I got a job with Kampala City Council (KCC) as executive officer, accounts. KCC posted me to Kitante Primary School as the school’s bursar. I worked for two years, under the former headteacher, the late Sozi.

From there, I secured another job as a journalist with The Financial Times newspaper which used to belong to the late Ateker Ejalu. I worked under a veteran journalist, Ojulu Epajjar. Then around 1986, I moved to New Vision and worked under Sam Serwanga, who was the paper’s first news editor. Being a teacher helped me a lot because I found writing easy.

But I wanted to be a professional journalist. I, therefore, did a two-year diploma in journalism, radio and television at the Institute of Business and Media Studies at Old Kampala.

First HIV experience

All that time, it never occurred to me that I could be having HIV. Life was good and I was quite healthy. As a features writer, I concentrated on profiling people living with HIV and describing its devastating effects on them.

I was oblivious of the fact that one day I would be describing the deplorable impact of the scourge on myself. Vision Group was the first media house to profile Can. Gideon Byamugisha, an Anglican priest in Uganda, the first African religious man to publicly declare his HIV status. That was in 1997, and it was me who wrote the story with a shared byline with Antony Mugere (currently a lecturer at Makerere University).

My articles on popular artistes like pop vocalists Prince Jjuuko, Livingstone Kasozi, Herbert Sekabembe among others, who succumbed to AIDS, ran in 1995 and 1997 respectively. Five years later, in 2002, my turn to face AIDS caught up with me!

Discovering HIV

Towards August 2002, I started losing weight abnormally and steadily, subsequently becoming increasingly weak and disabled. I developed haemorrhoids (piles), a rare infection that is one of the primary indicators of HIV.

I also got a persistent hiccup over a month. I suspected HIV and was very terrified. Within a month, I was down to 37kg from 83kg! I confided in my good friend then, Alice Emasu, who advised me to go for testing.

I must have got the virus from Kenya where I was teaching in the 1980s. It was believed then that HIV took an average of 8-12 years before AIDS came through.

While I was teaching in Nairobi, Kenya my former Ugandan girlfriend of Senior Four came to Nairobi. She had dropped out of school and turned into a business woman. She used to frequent Nairobi where the two of us re-united. The first time I accidently met her was on Byashala Street in Nairobi.

I was surprised to see her after many years. She told me she dropped out of school at Senior Six, the time I was proceeding to Nairobi at the invitation of my sister. We logically started dating and whenever she came to Nairobi, we met although I already had a girlfriend. I later leant that she died of AIDS!

When I relocated to Uganda in the early 1990s, I probably had the virus already. I soon fell sick and deteriorated very first. I could not work and yet, I did not tell anyone (except Emasu) at the New Vision, not even my editor then, Barbara Kaija.

I literary hid myself in my house in Namasuba, Kampala where I was renting. I didn’t want to become a laughing stock, as was the case then with people with AIDS. There was a lot of stigma.

Kaija saves my life

After a month of disappearance, I got a surprise call from a colleague at the workplace. It was a driver. He told me our features editor then, Barbara Kaija, had asked him to call me. She wanted me to direct the driver to my home so that I am taken to hospital.

I was truly astonished by Kaija’s intervention. How did she know I was sick? Who told her? It had to be Emasu! But I was particularly impressed about Kaija’s unprecedented love. Instead of reprimanding me for absconding from duty, here she was offering me a company vehicle to take me to hospital. That was amazing.

The driver drove me to the Joint Clinical Research Centre (JCRC) where I was immediately admitted with full-blown AIDS at its most advanced stage. I stayed in the hospital on a “death” bed for six months.

At the time of admission, my CD4 cell count was 12, (normal is 400-1,600), meaning my immune system was almost non-existent. I looked at my body and I could not recognise myself. I saw a stranger, not me! I was in a total mess. My face was sunken. I had a brain scan and the doctor said my brain had shrunk too. I was frail, emaciated and pale. There was nothing else to expect, but death.

I was feeding through stomach tubes and the waste products were being extracted by tube catheter. I became unconscious and went into a comma for eight hours.

Resurrection

My mother, who was taking care of me, watched me wasting away till she started crying all the time. The pain of losing yet another child to AIDS must have been too much. Eventually, I began drifting into micro commas and felt my breath was failing.

Each breath was a painful effort in a battle I realised I was inevitably losing. I took the opportunity to say farewell to my mother. I summoned up my last strength and asked her to stop crying and promised to meet her in heaven. Before I closed my eyes, a sister in Christ came along, to my death bed and caused a stir in the hospital.

These sisters of Christ used to come often and pray for the sick at JCRC. It must have been God who sent her to me because she read a verse from the Bible which provoked my spirit to fight harder.

“The purpose of your illness is not death, but for the glory of God. I, the Son of God, will receive glory from this situation. Start preparing your testimony; you are going to live,” she read from John 11:3-4.

That was the time and year, 2002 I got saved. I responded to her with a weak smile, but felt a strong wave in my body that encouraged me to try and sit up. When I tried, I was able to sit! My mother gasped in visible amazement. I told that sister of Christ that I was refusing to die.

I said I was seeing the salvation of the Lord and that I very strongly believed that God was going to drag me away from death. Up to today, my testimony is that my faith and that Bible quotation from the sister in Christ, gave me the strength to step back away from the grave.

For the next five minutes, I felt strong enough to eventually believe I could live. It would take some months for my body to fully recover because I was extremely frail. But my body had given up and so I had body paralysis. I could not walk unassisted.

On the path to recovery

In the space of the next few months, I felt I was being dragged away from death in body, mind and spirit, towards the light of health, vigour, dynamism and sanity. I developed my appetite again and talking started being effortless. Thanks be to God, that was the time ARVs came through.

By the time of my discharge, I had started taking them. Today, 21 years since I got AIDS and survived my death sentence, I am an irrefutable example of health and vitality and I demonstrate to trace of my former condition.

Those who saw me in 2002 on my sick bed can testify that a miraculous recovery truly occurred. I am completely free from AIDS and my viral load is zero, meaning that my virus is no longer detectable in my blood. The drugs have cleared it, and this is the best result. It may be hidden in other reservoirs but not in my blood.

Birth of activism

I have gone from the frightened victim of AIDS, to an AIDS activist, to an HIV dissident, to a spokesman for new views about HIV and AIDS, and I, unquestionably, know that I am set to celebrate more birthdays. This is because I live positively with HIV.

As demoralising as I was at the moment, I didn’t fear dying from AIDS, but I feared living with the truth. It took me some good months to come to terms with the reality. After being discharged from hospital, I spent two miserable and dark years, home-bound in immobile state.

I had been struck with serious paralysis. I had to be confined in a wheel chair. Meanwhile, I had an appointment to visit Mulago Hospital twice a week to do physiotherapy. My son had simplified this because he offered a vehicle to be taking me whenever it was needed.

At the beginning, I was in a shock, and then I was angry. Anger mounted to heartbreak, to grief, to surrender and acceptance. There was need to bear witness, to strike back, not just wait to die.

I decided to take action against HIV. I had a duty to tell Ugandans and the whole world that I didn’t choose to be infected with this dreaded virus. I vowed to fight the scourge using a pen, being a journalist. There is a general belief that a pen is mightier than a gun. True or not true, that is what I chose to use to mitigate the impact of the scourge. I, therefore, launched an anti-AIDS crusade.

The first step was to publicly disclose my HIV status, starting by writing my own experience of living with HIV in the New Vision.

Media activist

I came out of my hideout, and found a popular media stage where I started telling the whole world that I was not a victim, but rather a messenger of hope. I wanted people to agree with me that although the virus had robbed me of my good health, it did not take away my humanity and dignity.

Through my writings, all I required from the people was not pity, not even sympathy, but I wanted them to appreciate me as a person, as a citizen and not to stigmatise me. I wanted them to know that while the virus had weakened me, I still mattered as a human and not a number (statistics).

I considered myself an activist and hero. Some of the reasons for going public about my condition were altruistic, others selfish. The epidemic was decimating the community around me, including my relatives.

Many had died when they shouldn’t have because they chose to live in denial and not access treatment, which is even free. Apart from the positive blood test, many people appear quite healthy.

HIV had turned me and many others into walking time bombs. There was a need to bear witness, to strike back, not just wait to die. I, therefore, declared my HIV-positive status publicly and went down into archives in East and Central Africa as the first journalist to announce that I was HIV positive.

But, most importantly, I wanted to give a face to HIV, like Philly Bongole Lutaaya did. My focus was on fellow journalists and the professionals, who needed to know that, with good care, love, moral and spiritual support, AIDS could be defeated.

Today, with ARVs, one can still enjoy a good degree of health and even continue practicing their profession in spite of living with HIV.

TOMORROW: BASUDDE’S SECRET OF SURVIVING HIV FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS