Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH
When Aids began to take its appalling toll on humankind, we were all scared as hell of it, of course. We listened with rapt attention to what the scientists had to say, for if anyone was going to save us from it, it was the scientists who had discovered the thing in the first place, and who, in all likelihood, were going to find its antidote.
But then the scientists began to provide racists with one more weapon to thrash Africa with: that Aids had originated from Africa. I realised how serious the situation was when certain right-wing British newspapers began to canvas the idea that would-be visitors to the United Kingdom from Africa should be tested for Aids before they were allowed into the country. There loomed the prospect of the following type of dialogue: “Have you had sexual relations recently, sir?”
“Er … well … I mean … you know … er … yes.”
“Was it with a man or woman, sir?”
“Man or woman?”
“Yes, sir, man or woman.”
“Well, I could only have had sex with a woman?”
“That’s all right, sir. Have you been screened for HIV, sir?”
“No! Where I come from, I wouldn’t even trust them to screen me for malaria! They might end up giving me hepatitis.”
“You do have a droll sense of humour, sir. Off you go.”
And so on. And all this because a scientist, Dr Robert C Gallo, had written in the Scientific American (no 256, 1987) that a virus found in the African green monkey “may well be the ancestor of the Aids agent”. Having used “may”, Gallo suddenly changed gear to forthright assertion: “The Aids virus,” he wrote, “still most prevalent in Central Africa, has spread to the rest of Africa, Europe and both Americas.”
Africans who read apocalyptic articles by journalists based on such “scientific findings” had to ask, “But if Africans have been eating green monkeys since time began, and yet Aids has only just been discovered, then what could have been happening? Was the Aids agent in the green monkey dormant for thousands of years and suddenly resurrected itself to affect Africans?”
Questions like this one were greeted with a contemptuous silence by the scientific community. But gradually the African green monkey theory bit the dust.
That was not the end of the story as far as Africa was concerned, however. It was alleged that a gay man from Haiti who had worked in Kinshasa had taken the disease to the United States and had infected gays in the US, who passed it on to gay partners, who probably shared syringes with heterosexuals with whom they “shot” heroin, who passed it on to females, some of whom were prostitutes, who passed it on to … millions, especially in Africa! QED.
Later on, there was a major scandal about rivalry between USand French scientists cheating each other about who isolated the Aids virus. Then came news of contaminated blood given in transfusions. France and Germany, two of the countries whose medical facilities are supposedly second to none in the world, fell victim to this scandal.
The questions kept arising: if contaminated blood could be given in Germany and France, how much more Uganda, Congo, Angola, or the other African countries, where injuries arising from civil wars, would make any donation of blood acceptable, and where equipment used for blood screening is lacking even in city hospitals, let alone in makeshift jungle health posts?
Another question: had any scientists used the opportunity provided by civil war injuries in Africa to test viruses there? Who would even know if such experiments ever took place?
And now the African green monkey has been dethroned by a chimpanzee called Marilyn. Scientists have discovered that Marilyn, who was taken “from Africa to an American Air Force station as an infant” had died after 30 years or so of being used for scientific experiments.
Her body had not been thrown away but kept in a freezer. Someone was about to clean up the freezer, after 10 years, when he remembered that a group of scientists from the University of Alabama were studying chimps for certain viruses.
The scientists were called, and, hey presto, they discovered Marilyn carried a virus that, if passed to man, could cause Aids but which did not infect chimps themselves. By studying how the chimps developed their immunity against Aids, perhaps a way might be found to provide man with the same immunity against Aids.
Excellent news. Except that it once again raises the question: if Marilyn and her kinsfolk had graced the tables of Africans in Central and West Africa since time immemorial, why did they only pass on the Aids virus to man in the 1980s, or if you want to be generous, only in this particular millennium?
The scientists’ answer is that there has been an increase in the number of chimps hunted for food “in the bushmeat trade” in West and Central Africa, as a result of commercial activities in the forests, such as logging and road-building.
I am afraid that answer is codswallop. Balderdash. Balls. For most Africans know that logging and road-building in fact drive animals farther away into the deep forest, making their hunting more difficult, not the other way round!
One questionable statement does not, of course, render a whole scientific discovery invalid. But it does make it rather suspect. With such a frightening disease like Aids, however, raising any doubts makes public education that more difficult. We most certainly don’t need that.