This article describes the findings of a qualitative study on knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and practices towards children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus in four regions of Uganda. Focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were held with parents of children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, policy-makers, and service providers. Our findings describe how negative knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and practices create barriers to treatment and inclusion of children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus and their parents in Uganda. The findings show how knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and practices evolve over time, are both similar and differ in the various regions, and become more conducive towards accessing treatment and achieving inclusion. Sensitisation and early intervention including parents and service providers in dissemination of knowledge, rehabilitative care to set the trend for positive change and support, as well as longitudinal studies of children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus and their parents are recommended.

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By only looking at the biomedical significance of this new syndrome, we will miss important aspects of how this illness is being experienced and understood. In our future dealings with NS, we will have to consider and re-conceive the relation between culture and neurobiology.

Tanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activating bongo, ‘the brains’.

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