Rape, threesomes, and brutal violence, children’s books in Uganda have it all and more. According to the BBC:
The book How Kwezi Got Into Trouble has a picture on the cover of a girl sobbing into a tissue at a school desk. So when I saw it, I thought Kwezi might have got into trouble for handing her homework in late, or perhaps she had been copying somebody else’s exam paper. Then I looked at the text on the back cover and got quite a shock. It read: “At her mother’s funeral, Kwezi is raped by her late father’s best friend.”Kwezi has no-one to tell but her mother lying in the grave. Though she gets Aids, Kwezi is determined to let other pupils know how dangerous Aids is.” It is a surprising storyline for a book aimed at eight-to-10-year-olds.
According to Ugandan President Museveni, “When a lion enters your village, you must raise the alarm loudly.” In the past few years, the HIV rate in Uganda has dropped from 20% to 6.7%.