Where are Africa's Intellectuals? (Part2)

The Perspective (Smyrna, Georgia)
OPINION
December 0, 1000
Posted to the web October 22, 2001

Tarty Teh
In an interior village in Liberia, two women were working in a palm grove when it began to rain. Then there was lightening. They had felled a palm tree and were working off its branches to get to the soft interior (which we call palm cabbage in Liberia) at the time the lightening struck a nearby tree. But only one of the two women felt a jolt strongly enough to cause her to fall down. And that was the issue.

Why was it that only one woman - standing only inches from the other - absorbed the jolt? The lady who was unhurt was, therefore, accused of causing the lightening which she had aimed at the other lady with the aim of killing her. It made even more sense when you factored in the fact that both women were married to the same man and had had more disputes between them than most pairs sharing a single husband.

So the other woman was accused of witchcraft and was grilled by the town's witchcraft monitoring council until she confessed; because any treatment administered without the confession would not have worked. Therefore, delayed confession would have compounded the crime. Luckily, there was quick confession, and a life was saved.
Sadly, this is expected in the interior of Liberia that had only lately felt the influence of modern science which explains some otherwise baffling phenomena. This village was the home of an elementary school at the time of this report. So when the schoolteacher heard about the incident, he tried to intervene with his knowledge of science before a witchcraft verdict had been reached. He did intervene, but it made no difference. Instead, he was lectured about the complexity of the witchcraft. Some of the people enlightened enough to profess knowledge of both modern science and "African Science" comforted the bewildered teacher about his fruitless attempt at intervening in a witchcraft case.

Mr. Dixon Donmo, the principle of the elementary school in the town, had explained that the fact that only one of two women took the charge from the lightening was explained by the kind of implements each woman was holding when the lightening struck. The axe with a purely wooden handle did not transmit the charge as directly or as forcefully as the machete that had iron pins in its otherwise wooden handle. The evidence was reviewed before the charge of witchcraft was leveled on the woman whom the lightening had not charged.

I was born in a village barely ten miles from the school where Mr. Dixon Donmo taught, and where he sought to explain nature to a generation steeped in witchcraft. He failed, but he banked on the future because he hoped that his students would grow up with much better understanding of nature than their parents or, perhaps, than their teacher. That was 1958 in the Liberian village of Jatoke, in what is now Pallipo District.

In March 2001, BBC Online carried a Ghanaian wire story that "A Ghanaian man has reportedly been shot dead while testing whether a magic spell has made him bulletproof." The story originated with a Ghanaian news agency that, "Aleobiga Aberima, from the village of Lumbu in northeastern Ghana, had asked a jujuman - a local witchdoctor - to make him invincible to bullets."
Of course the man died from one test blast from a shotgun. But the British who are normally superb headline writers because of the cramp space of their largely tabloid formats nevertheless passed up a wonderful opportunity to poke fun at Africa in titling the story. So instead of saying, for instance, "Friendly Fire Kills Test Dummy," they wrote the bland "Ghanaian Killed in Magic Bulletproof Test."
All this is sad, but understandable in areas that are still considered the stronghold of ignorance. That is not my focus. Again, my concern is the strain of ignorance that has survived supposedly good education. Here is an example.

In 1978 one of my high school classmates earned his Ph.D. from a well-known university in the United States. I was working at the Liberian Information Center in Washington as a research assistant when he came to Washington. I was happy for him and cherished the prospect that he might be teaching in the Washington, D.C., area.
However, my friend first weighed the possibility of returning to Liberia to work for the government of then President Williams Tolbert. Because he majored in mass communications, naturally his interest was in the government Ministry of Information. The agency was headed by another Ph.D., Dr. Edward Kesselly. My friend wrote to the Minister of Information for, I supposed, a job and got a reply by mail.

When he told me that he was unhappy about the letter he received from the Ministry of Information, it took me a while to figure out what he found so offensive about the letter. The letter simply said that since he was planning a trip to Liberia, the Minister of Information would be delighted to meet him to see exactly where his interests in the agency lay.

Well, I found out soon enough that it was not what the letter said, but rather the person who wrote the letter, that bugged my friend. The letter was by a Deputy Minister of Information who merely had a Master's Degree in something. Did my friend not understand what the letter said for being written by a mere Master's Degree holder, was my question. No. But if it had come from the Minister of Information proper, my friend reasoned, then "at least we would be on the same level."

Now, I was confused all over again. So I told my friend that as far as levels went, and from the way I saw the situation, he was below the Deputy Minister of Information for being merely a job applicant, and for being - albeit temporarily - without a job. Also, if that letter had been signed by the Minister of Information himself - as would have pleased my friend - it would probably have been composed by a mere high school graduate or a university student working as a cadet at the Ministry.
This is one example of how we waste our own time, and other people's as well, trying to prove - where no proof is needed - that we are bigger than what we really are, which usually ends up having the net (and unintended) effect by showing how small we really are.

An unacceptably large number of African intellectuals are of the variety just described. If I sought to compile a compendium of sad utterances by Africans in higher places, I would have ended up depressing myself. Here is an example. A few months ago my nephew, who is a computer scientist, told me about a comment that BBC carried about an African member of parliament regarding AIDS.
It was in the discussion about means of preventing transmission of the disease that the African parliamentarian suggested that a condom was no defense against transmission because the sperms of African men are so strong they'd go right through the shield. I did not see the story, but I believe there was a picture of the parliamentarian wearing a smile, which compounded my nephew's shame and sadness.

I won't even go on the limb to claim that South African President Thabo Mbeki is now persuaded that the HIV virus causes the disease AIDS. He probably still believes that witchcraft does. And this is the ruler of the land where the first successful human-to-human heart transplant was performed 24 years ago. AIDS is a bad disease, but this is probably worse.

With people like these in decision-making positions, it is difficult to regard whatever they preside over as a system by any standard.

Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)
October 26, 2001
Posted to the web October 25, 2001

A bizarre speech by President Thabo Mbeki at Fort Hare University has been construed as "tragic and inexorable" evidence that he is a closet Aids dissident.
Mbeki's address, at the inaugural ZK Matthews memorial lecture on October 12, makes no direct reference to the disease.

However, after referring to medical schools where black people were "reminded of their role as germ carriers", he says: "Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease."

He returns to the theme two paragraphs later: "Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust."
Wits University lawyer Mark Heywood, head of the Aids Law Project, said the Fort Hare speech "appears to describe those who believe Aids is a virologically caused, mostly sexually transmitted disease that can be medically contained, as stigmatising and demeaning black people".
"The evidence tragically but inexorably suggests that the president is an unreconstructed Aids dissident," Heywood added.

He said the dissident view rested on three pillars: that HIV is a harmless organism that causes no illness; that Aids, if it exists at all, is caused by factors unrelated to HIV; andthat drugs supposed to treat Aids do more harm than good.

"Despite evasion and obfuscation, all these positions emerge from the president's statements over the past two years." The Fort Hare address was a particularly glaring example.

Mbeki's stand on Aids was a tragedy of momentous proportions, Heywood said. "The onus is on him to dispel the view that he is a dissident, which is widely held in South Africa and internationally."

A similar racial take on HIV/Aids was suggested by Mbeki's comment last year, in his exchange of letters with Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon, that the theory of the African/Haitian origin of Aids was "insulting".
Also reacting to the Fort Hare speech, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) spokesperson Nathan Geffen said Mbeki was using unscientific arguments as an excuse for not treating people with HIV/Aids.

Mbeki's carefully prepared response in Parliament this week on the HIV/ Aids pandemic gave little indication of urgency in the government's response to the crisis and he stumbled, once again, into controversy over his view of the epidemic.

He ducked a question, from Leon, on whether he thought 0,6% of the provincial and national health budget was remotely adequate in view of the urgency of the situation. He also did not answer the Inkatha Freedom Party's spokesperson on health, Dr Ruth Rabinowitz, on why the government had not accepted offers of free medication or entered any partnerships with private companies and foreign governments to fight HIV/Aids.

Instead, Mbeki stuck to his position about the need to find out what was the true cause of death in South Africa before the government changed any of its programmes, and sniped at people who had taken up the Aids issue as a religion.

"We have to look at all these matters, not as a matter of religious belief, as matters about which you campaign in the street, but as matters we focus on properly, accurately, in order to save our people from ill-health and from unnecessary disease," he said.

Leon responded by saying Mbeki "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If President Mbeki doesn't believe the reports, he should go and visit hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries and funeral parlours to see the grim reality of Aids for himself. HIV/Aids is not just another disease. It is an unprecedented threat to our nation. The government needs to revise the health budget urgently to take cognisance of new evidence of the scale of the HIV/Aids pandemic," Leon said.

Twice in his replies to questions from Abe Nkomo (African National Congress) and Patricia de Lille (Pan Africanist Congress), the president said the United States government guidelines on anti-retroviral drugs had been "radically revised" to take account of their extreme toxicity.

However, opposition MPs point out that the guidelines nowhere suggest that anti-retrovirals should not be used. The US government's Centres for Disease Control had merely revised the treatment regime.

Mbeki also admitted that he had not seen the 1999 World Health Organisation(WHO)/UNAids figures of 250000 deaths in South Africa, but he had quoted the WHO statistics of four years' previously in his letter to Minister of Health Mantho Tshabalala-Msimang asking for an investigation into the cause of death in South Africa. Both reports were available on the same website.

Leon described this as "bizarre" and accused Mbeki of "selectively playing with figures to downplay and deny the scale of the Aids pandemic".

Earlier this week, the National Council of Provinces social services committee took a different approach in their report on their hearings on the Intergovernmental Fiscal Review 2001.

The committee said: "Transforming our response to the impact of HIV/Aids has become fundamental when the statistics show that more people are dying of Aids than had previously been the case. The strength of the response will not only lie with ensuring that medicines and medical care is being directed to those who have the disease but becomes more holistic."

Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya and most of the MECs in the provinces had raised concerns that the social security system was not tailored for the HIV/Aids pandemic and careful decisions had to be made for the allocation of funds to slot into key programmes. The Director General of Social Development, Angela Bester, had indicated to the committees that the implementation of home- and community-based care "has not been smooth" and was receiving urgent attention.

In the National Assembly Mbeki said the government constantly evaluated its programmes, including health, to ensure they remained relevant to realities. In this context Tshabalala-Msimang had been asked to evaluate the latest known statistics on the cause of death in South Africa.
The reports from an interdepartmental task team and the Presidential Council on Aids were still outstanding and the government was not considering any reapportionment of funding until the cluster of social ministers had studied them.

"We want to have a proper profile of the incidence of the disease. The government is not an NGO ... focused on one particular disease. We are not a TB NGO or an Aids NGO or a pneumonia NGO [applause].

"We are concerned about the health of our people. I am concerned about the incidence of disease and the incidence of mortality comprehensively. We need to have a look at that so that we can see whether our programmes are correct.

Mbeki said health programmes do not consist only of drugs and medicine. "They include improving the general health conditions of our people, and this includes nutrition, clean water ... It includes the question of the violence in this society.

"We have to look at all of those questions indeed to make sure our spending not only in health but generally throughout government responds to that particular health profile.

- Desmond Tutu this week criticised South Africa for "dithering" while people died of HIV/Aids, adding that lives could be extended "by getting the right drugs"
Tutu said the disease was "the new apartheid, the new enemy". Discussing whether this or that is the cause is a luxury we cannot afford."

For the history of Mbeki's Internet excursions see Internet Aids expert Mbeki strikes again here.

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