Early aids research in rakai: Ugandan experiences and expertise in the creation of the African aids paradigm

This paper revisits criticisms by historians and anthropologists of early AIDS research and interventions in Africa. These critiques identified persistent colonial era-tropes in the narratives about AIDS in Africa, the early foreclosure of certain avenues of inquiry, and the dominant influence of researchers and institutions from Europe and the United States. This paper reconsiders those critiques by introducing an important group of African AIDS researchers, whose contributions to the early research work have been largely overlooked in the historical literature. While these African researchers shared many of the views held by expatriate researchers, their accounts of the early AIDS investigations cast a new light on the choices made by AIDS research programs in the 1980s and early 1990s. These Ugandan physicians and scientists emphasized the coinciding political and epidemiological crises, which led them to take a highly pragmatic and results-oriented approach to AIDS research. While their agendas foreclosed some avenues of investigation, they also permitted researchers to allocate limited resources to a focused set of topics and interventions, generating powerful conclusions in relatively short periods of time.