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Abstract
This tribute traces the life and times of the late Philly Bongoley Lutaaya, a Ugandan musician renowned for his campaign against HIV/AIDS in Uganda and for making a contribution to the revival of Ugandan popular music in the post‐civil war era. By unveiling his HIV‐positive status at a time when AIDS patients were ostracized, Lutaaya used his stature to mobilize consciousness around the epidemic. He gave a human face to living with AIDS and helped to counter the perception of the disease as a monstrous thing, suggesting that even a city‐based social icon was not immune to problems that someone in the village could have.
Notes
1. Charlie King, interview on Desert Island Discs programme, Capital Radio, Uganda, Sunday 27 April 1996. Alban, who released a song and his fourth album (coincidentally titled Born in Africa) in 1996, met Lutaaya when a medical student working as DJ at the Kilimanjaro Club in Stockholm. He later practised as a dentist, a disc jockey and musician and worked with several other Ugandan musicians at his Doctor Records company in Sweden.
2. Luganda is spoken by the Baganda, the largest ethnic group in Uganda. In most regions of the country it is a medium of exchange within the business community.
3. Angela Kalule, musician, interviewed by Joel Isabirye on 19 November 2004 in Kampala, Uganda.
4. Ernest Lule Basajja Nkambwe, radio presenter, interviewed by Joel Isabirye on 16 March 2007 in Kampala. The author is greatly indebted to Basajja Nkambwe, a legendary broadcaster in Uganda, for his insight into the cosmopolitan nature of Kampala’s nightclub life from the 1950s onwards. Basajja Nkambwe was born in 1947 and passed away on 7 August 2007, while this text was in the final stages of preparation.
5. Robert Mayanja, musician, interviewed on 10 October 2004 in Kampala by Joel Isabirye.
6. Lingala is the dominant language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
7. Lutaaya’s arrest at the popular Lidos Bar in “the Musakos swoops” hastened his departure. The Musakos swoops were a Kenyan security campaign to evict illegal immigrants, many of whom were Ugandans in exile.