The Myth & Reality Of AIDS & Famine In Africa
By
H. Kent Craig




Growing up as a middle-class child from a comfortable lifestyle in the American South in the mid-60's, I would routinely hear about "...those starving children in Africa..." from the network news, from reading Newsweek, but when I would write to my siblings who actually were living in Africa as the children of my missionary relatives and express all sorts of concern about their well-being facing such imminent starvation, they'd aerogramme me back saying "there's no mass famines anywhere like that, it's mainly a well-intentioned fund-raising ploy, or it might be a local 'famine' caused by some civil dispute, etc.", and I'd be left wondering what the Sam Heck is actually going on. Over the years, I realized exactly what was going on, that the Western Press in general and the America Media in particular were routinely being duped both by our own Government and the governments of various African nations for their own individual and mutually collective political agendas.


Africa in many ways is like American West was 120-150 years ago. Totally lacking in all but the barest of public infrastructure necessities and sometimes not even that, the majority of the population in many African nations still engage in subsistence farming, growing enough for themselves and their families but often not much more for sale as cash-crops, usually lacking in modern farm machinery and means of other capital equipment production facilities such as grain dryers, silos, field freezers and canning units, etc. It is within this backdrop of the late 20th Century version of 40 acres and a mule that spot crop failures do create spot famines which do devastate individual farmers, sometimes village-areas, once in a great while entire regions of a particular country, and when that happens, yes, malnutrition and even starvation can and does occur in those regions. But such spot crop failures and mini-famines happen routinely in America and the Western Countries on a yearly basis, yet except for individual farmers and sometimes entire farming communities being heavily financially hit by such spot disasters, the typical American consumer doesn't know or usually care that they happen, except when their lettuce or carrots or strawberries go up a few cents at the supermarket, and no American farmer who gets walloped by Mother Nature ever becomes malnourished let alone starves to death because his crops fail.


The lingering legacy of failed socialism in many African countries and the still occasional vampirage of whole countries by a single blood-sucking dictator, most of the time residual effects of the Cold War depending on who's side of the coin they were cast as, while not wholly responsible for all the blame in these regards never the less is responsible for a majority of the problems regarding non-modernization of infrastructure, distribution systems, etc. Going all the way back to when Kenya was British East Africa and Tanzania (Tanganyika) was German East Africa, other than putting clothes on those nekkid savages and spreading the word of Christ to the literally unwashed masses of heathens on the African Continent, Western Colonialism attitude has been of one indifferent, arrogant, if not downright malphaesant contempt towards the actual people they sought to rule by power of the gun and power of the purse. Build roads, but don't teach them how to maintain them, or give them machinery to keep the roads in good shape. Give them seeds, but not fertilizer or even improved ploughs. Give them electricity in the cities for the primary convenience of the Colonial Masters, but "screw the peasants in the countryside, they're just cow-blood drinking heathens, anyway." Just as Britain caused mass starvation in India in WWII by siphoning off the locally grown rice that the populace needed to survive to feed its Indian regiments, so too were Western methods of farming, such as open-furrow ploughing in arid regions that received less than 15" of rain per year meaning the soil soon dried out and Western-originated crops often withered and died because of lack of soil moisture, rammed down the throats of local people because of politics. And when Western-style methods of farming failed, the Colonial Masters blamed the locals for being stupid and lazy, rather than accepting the fact that you can't grow wheat in Masai land that gets 10" of rain per year when in Europe and the American Midwest the same strain of wheat would need and normally receive at minimum 25" of rain during the growing season to be healthy. So in the face of apparent "failure", these Colonial Masters Of Ignorance thought it a waste of resources (or maybe it was a secret, unspoken fear of competition from Africa to their own farmers "back home") to help these nations install proper infrastructures.


But lack of infrastructure and Colonial misanthropy can't be held to blame for all famines and mass starvations, either. Starvation and malnutrition has long been used in Africa as a weapon of political terror and genocide, much as we Americans used it on our own First Peoples, much as the it was used a siege warfare tool in the Middle Ages, much as it has always been used in war-torn regions to weaken and kill an enemy. In the most recent examples in Chad and Somalia, if war disrupts the local cycle of local food production, and if that same war prevents the marketplace from performing its function by equalizing areas of excess supply to areas of excess demand, then yes, it's inevitable there will be areas of mass malnutrition and even starvation, and nothing save a peace and a stable Government can prevent that in a war-ravaged country.


My points are these: yes, there are spot crop failures in countries on the African continent, just as there ones here every year in the United States and in Europe; and, no, most of the populations in most African countries aren't starving, nor are they really malnourished or even hungry most of the time. And despite the lack of what we would consider modern infrastructure, areas which have surpluses inevitably sell their excess on the open marketplace, residual socialistic policies aside, and people in those areas of crop debit inevitably buy those surpluses albeit at higher prices, just like the rest of the world does. Does Africa need help, do most African nations need foreign aid and help in building their infrastructure systems up? You betcha. Should the West help them do so? We'd be stupid not to, because every dollar we help them with is returned back to us many times over because we're the ones selling them the means and method for such infrastructure.


The above represents only one portion of a single problem in the basket case which is modern Africa. Without a foundation of modern economic system paradigms to help a given nation function, such as the ability to collect taxes, the ability to offer and acquire business and personal property insurance (virtually unheard of in many African nations), etc., Africa has to routinely go begging in the West for dollars and francs and deutschemarks and pounds when and wherever and however it can, and one of the best examples of this I like to use is how the West views AIDS in Africa and how many African nations use AIDS as a political and social conscious begging tool to pry foreign aid dollars loose.


Whether AIDS originated in Africa is a moot point in this discussion, though I personally think it did, having its genetic heritage in Simian Virus (SV) 38 & 39 "branches". The one big "secret" about AIDS that the American public generally does not know and I wish it did is that there are actually three strains of AIDS, AIDS I, II, and III, respectively. AIDS I is what the vast majority of AIDS cases in American and the West are; it's virtually impossible to transmit to another person except by blood-borne contact, but once caught, your mortality curve shortens and your death before what would have been your time is all but guaranteed. However, in most of Africa, AIDS III is the most common type; it can be transmitted more easily by more body fluids, but since it's primarily afflicting Africans instead of Americans research money which should have gone into AIDS III has been woefully slanted towards AIDS I instead, and AIDS III can be very easily transmitted by ordinary sexual intercourse, which is how 95%+ of all AIDS III new transmission cases are caused by in Africa; and it's mortality curve is much longer, and often goes statistically unchallenged in 3rd-World countries where the typical lifespan is much shorter than in the West.


Now for the biggest semi-open secret about AIDS in Africa: the total number of new cases of AIDS (all types) reported as having come out of Africa via African Public Health Ministries is way overblown. Why? 1) Because such international organizations as the World Health Organization (WHO), the public health arm of the United Nations, won't fund basic public health projects except on the most limited scales possible for such basics as childhood immunizations, projects to improve potable water supplies, childhood nutrition and vitamin supplementations, etc., but they will throw money around like drunken sailors in a five dollar brothel for anything that has even the slightest imprimatur of those four magic sesame initials, A-I-D-S. 2) Since they can't get money from the West through WHO or other public or private organizations for even the most humanitarian of public health needs such as childhood Vitamin A supplements to help prevent a certain type of childhood blindness, even if they're the most honorable people imaginable they are forced to lie through their teeth to get the funding for one thing, AIDS awareness and prevention, to spend it on something even more basic, like a new well for an old village to prevent recurring cholera outbreaks. 3) Keeping in mind the near-total-lack of infrastructure in most areas of most African countries, do you really think that every person diagnosed with AIDS in Africa had actually been tested for such and the results came back positive? In the absence of a cheap, reliable AIDS test that can be used in less-than-US-Hospital-Lab conditions, where do you think all these hundreds of thousands of new AIDS cases in Africa originate from?


They originate from desperation, desperation for any money from anywhere that will improve the lives of a country's given populace. They originate from ignorance, from a lack of proper testing labs so that any persistent cough, any general malaise, any unusual skin condition is quickly slapped with a label of AIDS. They come from the bounty which Western public health organizations placed on every new AIDS case. And they come from a darker, disturbing place in the Western psyche, that somehow in its darkest corner simultaneously blames and pities Africa for being the probable epicenter for the AIDS epidemic, which African Public Health officials take full advantage of.


Is the AIDS pan-demic in Africa real? Yes. Should we be doing more to help with awareness and prevention? Yes. And, but, we should also being doing more to help improve the most basic of primary health concerns. With improvement in early childhood epidemiology comes a longer and healthier lifespan. With a healthier lifespan comes an improvement in per-person productivity, which feeds on itself, improving the health of subsequent generations to come exponentially. With a healthier and more productive lifespan, also comes a lessening of cultural influences that help create a climate of hopelessness and fatalism about catching such a dread disease. Give a people reasons to live healthier, longer, happier lives, and they will.




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