IGAMBIRO, Uganda -- Images etched in memory run together, of a nation seemingly adrift and wracked by violence.
Idi Amin's bloody reign of terror blurs into the onslaught of AIDS, of Western tourists hacked to death by teenage fighters and now, of more than 900 cult members who helped forge their own doomsday in compounds spread across luxuriant green hillsides.To much of the West, Uganda is a mysterious country of unparalleled brutality, a place of endless tragedy still living under the specter of a monstrous dictator.
But that, they'll tell you in Uganda, is a myth.
"I am proud of my country," said Nathan Bangirana, a math teacher at the Igambiro Primary School, standing beside the simple brick building on an overcast afternoon as students prepared to head back to homes set amid the rolling hills of southwestern Uganda. "The economy is now stabilized, the security situation is under control, there is money for education."
This East African nation has blossomed over the past decade, with a stable government, a vibrant free-market economy and an all-out assault to slow the spread of AIDS. Increasing numbers of tourists are visiting the volcanic lakes, rolling plains, and mountains that are home to some of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas.
"The pearl of Africa," Winston Churchill called it early in the 20th century, before Uganda's independence from Britain in 1962. After decades in which Ugandans depended on the yield of tiny plots of land to survive, per capita income has grown to $280 -- poor but still more than twice as high as its neighbor, Tanzania.
Idi Amin Dada, the brutal dictator who remains synonymous with Uganda to many people, is long gone, living in exile in Saudi Arabia. Since 1986, President Yoweri Museveni has run the country, engineering political and economic reforms that have advanced the country's standing in the international arena.
"The Ugandans think that the Americans and the Europeans, whenever there is a calamity . . . that is what they know about Uganda. They feel that Americans think Ugandans are living in trees, they are barbaric," said Mwambutsya Ndebesa, head of the history department at Makerere University in Kampala. "And they have a wrong image."
Uganda, to be sure, has its share of problems. Parts of the country face regular attacks by brutal rebel groups and AIDS remains a vicious scourge, with millions infected with HIV. Poverty is widespread in parts of the country of 21 million.
Early last year, in an attack that made newspaper headlines around the world and crippled Uganda's tourism industry for months, eight Westerners were murdered during a trip to see the gorillas.
Today, it the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God that fills the headlines.
More than 900 members of the cult, which preached doomsday theology to more than 1,000 followers throughout Uganda's southwest, have been found stuffed into mass graves or burned alive in recent weeks. Authorities believe they were murdered by their leaders after the world did not come to an end -- as predicted -- on Dec. 31, and many members began turning against them.
But in a region beset by civil wars, famines and crippling official corruption, Uganda in fact is the bright spot, a place where stability is more rule than exception, where jobs can be found and where personal freedoms are guaranteed.
The situation is far different elsewhere in this part of Africa: Neighboring Congo barely functions, neighboring Sudan has seen decades of war, neighboring Rwanda is now remembering hundreds of thousands of people killed in its 1994 genocide.
And for all its high-profile traumas, Uganda has left behind the days when it was a nightmare state.
Stop into nearly any Ugandan town or village and the stories of the dark days -- when Amin and his even more brutal successor, Milton Obote, laid waste to Uganda -- come pouring out. Well over 500,000 people are believed to have died during their regimes, many at the hands of government security forces.
"So many people were being taken away, we don't even know how many," said Norah Mutebi, the head teacher at the Igambiro school. "Still now, we don't know where they were taken."
Bangirana, the math teacher, remembers when arrests were rampant, when lack of funding closed some schools for years and when intertribal violence was near constant.
Now, things are different.
"People get along here," he said, looking at the students, who come from across Uganda. "We have people of all tribes here now."
"And we're proud of that."