Spaces of Healing, Places of Refuge: The Role of Mission Hospitals in Idi Amin's Uganda

At the time of independence in 1962, Uganda had one of the most well established Western health care systems in Eastern Africa. In particular, a broad network of both state and mission run hospitals provided biomedical care, and these hospitals were often staffed by foreign doctors and African physicians locally trained at Makerere University. During Idi Amin’s tenure from 1971 to 1979, the health care infrastructure run by the state all but collapsed in Uganda. Mission hospitals, Anglican, Catholic or otherwise, continued to function as sites of care, healing, and for some, refuge.

This paper recounts the lived experience of providing care at one such mission site, Kisiizi Hospital. Located in the middle of a valley approximately fifty miles from the Rwandese border, the hospital has run continuously since it was founded in the late 1950s by the Church Missionary Society Ruanda mission. Turned over to the Church of Uganda after independence, the hospital remained functional during the 1970s largely by reorienting the medical supply chain through Rwanda.

Through oral histories with physicians, nurses, clergy, laboratory technicians, and other hospital staff, I ask how scarcity, uncertainty, and the reverberations of state sponsored violence shaped healing practices and medical care. I also use Kisiizi Hospital’s admission records and the archival offerings of the CMS to further contextualize the memories of the staff and provide an epidemiological sketch of the community in the 1970s.

Interrogating the history of care at Kisiizi Hospital in the 1970s provides an opportunity to closely investigate the impact of Amin on health well beyond the capital city of Kampala. It also provides a window into spaces of resistance, creation and innovation during a period largely marked by terror and devastation.