by TAKUDZWA HILLARY CHIWANZA
Western scientists and doctors still believe that Africa is a testing ground
The distorted view of the Western medical and science community towards Africa when it comes to diseases is rooted in a long history of racism and colonial conquest. For Western scientists, Africa was a living laboratory during the sleeping sickness epidemics of the early 20th century.
The epidemics decimated the cheap African labour for the colonial capitalists who were hell bent on subjugating the continent for profits and racial superiority. The European colonizers had to intervene, and chief among them with extreme forms of the intervention was Germany.
Sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, was rife across much of East and Central Africa. It is a parasitic disease that is transmitted by tsetse flies. A person who is infected has slow movement, apathy, joint pains, speech disorders, headaches, a fever, and drowsiness. When the pathogen passes the blood-brain barrier, it infects the central nervous system, resulting in a person becoming lethargic or insane, falling into a coma, and dying. Clearly, the European colonizers had to intervene so that their colonial projects would not go to waste, considering the devastating effects of sleeping sickness.
Africans had always been aware of sleeping sickness as evidenced in animals (animal trypanosomiasis or nagana). Cattle were the most affected among livestock, showing fevers and deteriorating health. Cattle herders in East Africa always avoided tsetse-infested areas. They would sometimes set fires to bushes to clear the area of flies and of warthogs, bush pigs, and other wild animals that hosted the tsetse flies.
In the precolonial era, epidemics of sleeping sickness would break out, but the ancestors had found ways to strike a balance between two ecosystems. The first being the human and domestic, and the other being the natural and wild. They knew how to avoid tsetse-infested areas. This balance was destroyed by the abrupt social changes that colonization came with. The invading Europeans caused great upheaval regarding the ecological balance that existed, causing diseases and famines.
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