Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Human rights advocate and executive director of UNAIDS, formerly Oxfam International, and Uganda's first female aeronautical engineer and MP.
On the island
Eight records
It's a happy song. It's a woman who's happy to be in love. I chose it because I find love in the work that I do. Even though it's about people who suffer, there's joy in the work I do.
New London Symphony Orchestra, Norman Luboff Choir, Leopold Stokowski
because it makes me remember the Christian missionaries who educated me. And I acknowledge the role that this particularly the Irish women, they played in protecting us, in shaping us, in giving us confidence as girls that we were going to build our country, that we were equal. I just am so grateful to those women.
To me it reminds me so much of that period where we were suffering under Idiamin, but the whole of Africa was under the grip of powerful civilian or military dictators. So he sang, and these it was artists who were resisting, who could speak, but they would pay with their lives. And Bukaka too was killed because of those songs he sang.
heart of glass and it reminds me of those wonderful English girls I found in the Hall of Residence, Saint Gabriel's Hall at Manchester. They were Northern girls and they were so warm and nice and they received me and they really helped me to settle in a country that I didn't know. And in this rainy city, and to have fun, and we danced to Blondie, and I loved Blondie.
It's a song by a South African woman whom I adore, Yvonne Shakashaka. It's called Umkompoti. It's a local brew in South Africa in the Zulu language. But it sounds like um kombozi, and mkombozi in Swahili means a liberator, and it became like a liberation song that we would sing to celebrate the victory we had had and the empowering phase we were in.
The earliest memories of talking about injustice were those songs my father would play on his old piano. He loved this one Steal Away, and he would explain to us that African Americans taken to America working as slaves on plantations, in homes, would sing these songs as a resistance, and they would be speaking to each other, giving each other hope and plans on how to escape to freedom. So I love the African American spirituals. They speak to me powerfully about yearning for freedom, resisting oppression.
Or be happy. By Bobby McFerrin. This song came out right at the time when my brother was diagnosed and I'd put it on my CD player in the car as I drove him to different clinics to be tested, would be put on treatment, and we'd sing it and and I just put a smile on his face and I'd say, Banner, don't worry, be happy. I feel I'm honoring that promise I made to him that one day there would be a cure.
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be FreeFavourite
It has to be a song by Nina Simone. I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. That is what drives. People like me are search for freedom for myself and for others, for all to be free. So life is about reaching out for freedom.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:36How do you manage to stay true to yourself when you're holding organisations and governments to account?
That's a difficult one. But I never forget who I am. I always remember that I'm that little girl that grew up in a village, in a poor country. And that I'm not ashamed of who I am, I'm actually proud of who I am. And in every situation I just tell my truth.
Presenter asks
2:50What emotions come to the surface when you think about the girls you grew up with who didn't have the same opportunities?
Ah, like you said, a burden. A burden of actually guilt. One of them, Maimona, is my close friend. She was pulled out of school at the age of about fourteen. One day we were playing with our banana fibre dolls. The next day she was a bride. We cried, and she cried. And she's never overcome poverty really. This shapes my understanding of the world that the people at the top aren't so rich, and the people at the bottom aren't sinking farther. We need to even it out.
Presenter asks
10:03How did life change for you and your family when Idi Amin came to power?
My memories of that time are about seeing death, seeing violence, at school, when families would come to pull a girl out of class and take her away? And then she'd come back after a week with her head shaved. In morning, then we would know that her father has been killed or disappeared, and we couldn't talk about it. People would bury their dead at night because you have to pretend that nobody has died. Because if you do speak about it or show it,
The keepsakes
The book
Simone de Beauvoir
That book is one of the books that woke me up. About my place in the world as a woman I read it when I was at university at Manchester. That's the book. I'd read it again and again to anchor myself.
The luxury
Yes, I would want a needle to make baskets. We used to take reeds, dry them, cut them, take out the fiber, and use it to weave baskets. I could weave baskets and keep weaving another basket and another basket until I'm rescued.
Presenter asks
21:22How did you try to win over the voters when you ran for MP?
I went walking. I put on my sneakers and walked door to door in slum areas, finding women cooking. They don't have kitchens. They put a stove outside their one room home and cook on the veranda, and I would sit on the verandah with them, peeling their bananas and cooking, and I'd sit there, I'd carry the baby and talk to the woman and tell her why I want to run. And they'd get so excited. I won that election with a huge, huge landslide.
Presenter asks
25:25Given your own experiences of sexual abuse, what emotions did hearing about sexual misconduct at Oxfam bring to the surface?
I can remember what the one time I broke down during that crisis was during after an interview by a Canadian journalist who attacked me very hard, tell me how rotten our organization was and all this. I was trying not to be defensive, to say that, you know, I understand the pain of sexual abuse. I wasn't telling him I've seen it in my own life, but in my heart it was there. And after the interview I cried. I felt as if I was being salted 'cause I know the pain, or I knew it, and it all came back. That's why I couldn't but apologize. I couldn't defend. Staff I defended the one who was abused.
Presenter asks
27:02What happened with your brother Bernard's HIV diagnosis and death?
Bernard was first diagnosed when I lived in Paris as a diplomat. He was a very gentle person. He was frightened at that time. HIV was a death sentence. There was a treatment, but it just prolonged your life for a couple of years. I got him on it. And he was healthy for several years while in France. When we went back home, he was one of the lucky ones on treatment because there was a pilot and he was able to be part of the pilot. When he went and met there some people he knew, and he'd not go back. He kept falling out of treatment because he didn't want to be known. There was strong stigma around HIV. My brother now started falling sick. He kept weakening and weakening and we lost him in 2006 we lost him. And I always say that Bernard didn't die of AIDS, Bernard died of stigma. Had he stayed on treatment, if he hadn't been scared of being shunned by people, he'd be alive to day.
“I always remember that I'm that little girl that grew up in a village, in a poor country. And that I'm not ashamed of who I am, I'm actually proud of who I am.”
“One of them, Maimona, is my close friend. She was pulled out of school at the age of about fourteen. One day we were playing with our banana fibre dolls. The next day she was a bride. We cried, and she cried.”
“I said to him right away I was quite a confident little girl, I said, I don't need any help to pass my exams. And I asked him to leave.”
“He put on music on his player. The song was The First Cut Is the Deepest and he came to grab me. I screamed.”
“I always say that Bernard didn't die of AIDS, Bernard died of stigma. Had he stayed on treatment, if he hadn't been scared of being shunned by people, he'd be alive today.”
“I love my own company. I walk alone, I go on long hikes on my own. I sit alone and read a book. I go out to a restaurant and eat a meal on my own.”