Only Africans Can Help Africans
I watched the movie, Constant Gardener, this past weekend. The movie is about an activist who moves to Kenya with her diplomat husband. This woman stumbles upon a case where a drug company was using Africans as guinea pigs to test a drug. Before the woman had a chance to expose what was going on, she dies mysteriously. Her husband's sebsequent investigation of her death leads him to a drug company.
Although the movie is fiction, such incidents are not unprecedented. Please look at the following sites:
The Body Hunters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11939-2000Dec15
Tuskegee in Africa: Deadly U.S. AIDS experiments
http://rwor.org/a/v19/920-29/926/aids.htm
One can do more searches on Google to find related articles.
Perhaps this will give others an insight into why certain people in Northern Nigeria were so adamant about being vaccinated for polio recently.
For me, this movie repeats the recurrent theme in many works of literature and movies that narrate the hopelessness of Africa whose destiny has become out of the hands of its people. The heavy dependence of the continent on foreigners for its basic livelihood and its people's inability to defend themselves from outside forces marks the continuation of colonialism. We have two tricky choices on our plates: Death or Slavery. We should slowly rid ourselves off foreign dependency and take our tolls and move on. When everything clears, we will be better off. More importantly, those of us Africans who are able (such as the ones in Disapora) should make plans to move back to our communities and strive to make a difference. Only Africans can have genuine reasons to help Africa.
Related Book:
A continent for the taking: A great book on the recent politics of Liberia, D.R. Congo, Nigeria, Mali, Congo Brazzaville... This is a brilliant book by the NY times reporter, Howard French. It is a must read.
