The Sunday Mail
Sifelani Tsiko – Under The Baobab Tree
Fear of the deadly Ebola virus has scared Africans out of their wits and elicited negative stereotypes about the continent.
The mainstream international media has stuck to its “Dark Continent” corner, churning out skewed and scary images of Africa as a continent of unemployment, poverty, famine, wars, Ebola, Aids and “bad leaders”.
Through the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach, the western media has peddled negative stereotypes about Africa undermining the complex and intricate political discourse going on the continent.
Labels such as “Africa’s bloody disease”, “Africa’s deadliest pandemic,” and many others have left thousands of Ebola-affected people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone abandoned and perceived as outcasts.
The use of statistics has been largely alarmist and has painted the whole region bad: “As of 26 September, 6 553 people had been infected with Ebola in West Africa, of whom 3 083 have died.”
This has made Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone orphans of the African continent at a time when analysts say reporting of the Ebola outbreak has lacked depth and context.
Reporting by Western media has not moved even an inch in its portrayal of Africans and even the African media has been singing the same chorus with no attempt to dig into the history of bio-terrorism on the continent.
In a fresh and intriguing dimension, an essay published in the Liberian newspaper the Daily Observer, Dr Cyril Broderick, a US-based Liberian Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Delaware, suggests that the Ebola virus is a bio-terrorism weapon developed by the US and used on Africans.
In his essay, as reported in the media, Broderick says the Ebola virus could be part of the “American-Military-Medical” industry and manufactured as a form of control over West Africans.
“Because of the widespread loss of life, fear, physiological trauma, and despair among Liberians and other West African citizens, it is incumbent that I make a contribution to the resolution of this devastating situation, which may continue to recur, if it is not properly and adequately confronted,” writes Broderick.
He also alleges that various sites in West Africa have been set up over the years to test emerging diseases, including Ebola, with part of the purpose to test vaccinations.
In addition, the fact that there are currently a number of experimental treatments for Ebola victims being tested in the US on a handful of medical and aid workers who have returned from Africa with the virus for treatment also supports arguments presented by Dr Broderick.
The most recent patient, Rick Sacra, an Ebola patient was released from a Nebraska hospital.
Africa has unwittingly underestimated the power of Western bio-terrorism projects which have spearheaded the deliberate release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs (agents) used to cause illness or death in people, animals, or plants.
At the height of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s, anthrax was used as a biological weapon to eliminate freedom fighters and Africans who supported them.
Perhaps the largest recorded outbreak of anthrax in humans occurred in Zimbabwe during the liberation war and there were a number of ‘unusual features of the epizootic’ as one Rhodesian researcher, Meryl Nass once put it, in a paper titled: “Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978 — 1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?”
“The disease spread over time from area to area, until six of the eight provinces were affected. Yet anthrax usually appears as a point source outbreak, without significant geographic spread,” he wrote.
“Only the African-owned cattle in the Tribal Trust Lands were affected, cattle belonging to whites were uninvolved. There is a great possibility that the epizootic could have been a biological warfare event.”
Before the 1970s struggle war, anthrax was a rare disease among African communities in Zimbabwe.
“At the beginning of what was to be a major epidemic, it is safe to say that the majority of doctors in Zimbabwe had never seen a case of anthrax. Yet during the war, anthrax became one of the country’s major causes of hospital admissions,” wrote Nass quoting an article by JCA Davies and others in the Central African Journal of Medicine.
What was puzzling to the Rhodesian era researchers was the geographic scope of the outbreak which was unusual for anthrax.
They found out that most outbreaks were characterised by a high degree of focality — cases occurred in limited areas but from 1978 to 1980, peak period of the struggle war, the disease spread from area to area targeting border points in which freedom fighters used to cross into Rhodesia.
The white commercial farming areas were completely spared as the timing of the bio-terrorism warfare coincided with the final months of the long and brutal independence war.
According to the Southern Rhodesia Report on Public Health, in 1950 there were six human anthrax cases and figures rose sharply to 6 736 by 1980 as the Independence war intensified.
“Inferred from this study is that Zimbabwe’s anthrax epizootic is most consistent with the new introduction of the organism by some means into Zimbabwe,” wrote Nass.
“Weighing all available evidence, it was suggested here that a plausible explanation for the sudden peak of anthrax in the Tribal Trust Lands beginning in November 1978, is that one or more units attached to the Rhodesian military may have air-dropped anthrax spores in these territories.
This action would expose cattle to the disease through ingestion or inhalation (or both) of anthrax spores. Humans would have acquired the disease from meat or meat products.”
From the findings, this epidemic may not have been a natural occurrence and all indicators point to it being a result of deliberate spread — employing anthrax as agent of biological warfare.
Anthrax weapons were developed and tested by Japan, Britain and the US governments during the Second World War and bio-terrorism experts say the British tested anthrax weapons on Gruinard Island, a mile off the west coast of Scotland between 1942 and 1943 releasing exploding bombs by airplanes.
“Either of these two methods or other methods could conceivably have been used in Zimbabwe,” wrote Nass.
The US produced anthrax weapons until about 1970 but as Africans we must not totally believe in this. It is possible that some biological munitions were transferred from the US to other countries prior to the destruction.
According to Ken Flower, head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation during the war, the Rhodesian military was forced initiate bombing campaigns using anthrax as guerillas intensified their attack on Rhodesia.
It was in November 1978, a month after the initiation of the bombing raids, that the first human anthrax cases were reported following an outbreak in cattle.
Poisoning was employed by the Rhodesian military.
In a TV documentary, Jeremy Brickhill, who reported extensively on the war, reported that the Rhodesian CIO and Selous Scouts used anthrax, cholera, thallium-contaminated foodstuffs and organophosphate-impregnated clothing in the later years of the war.
“A case has been made for the possible deliberate use of anthrax as an agent of biological warfare, directed at African-owned cattle, in the final months of the Zimbabwe civil conflict,” Nass further wrote.
“A military role for anthrax can be postulated, given the strategic control of food and other resources that existed at the time.
“Desperate tactics appear to have been used by the Rhodesian military elsewhere as the war drew to a close.”
Zimbabwe and most other African countries must not treat the ebola outbreak lightly nor sideline the anthrax biological war against Zanla and Zipra guerillas and Africans in Zimbabwe as history.
Bio-terrorism is well and truly alive and African governments must support African scientists to design careful and definitive investigations on these issues.
The time for a thorough inquiry has come and this calls for scientific investigation that puts the survival of the African race at the forefront of all scientific investigation.
And Baffour Ankomah, a veteran African journalist, sums it aptly: “As in times past, the template has not changed. US scientists, both government and privately-funded, are notorious for using unsuspecting human beings, mostly African-Americans, as guinea pigs for the development and testing of germ warfare agents.
“Or of rushing in with untested drugs to emergency areas such as the current outbreak of ebola, to test those drugs on victims.”
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