AfricaFocus Bulletin
June 22, 2015 (150622)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“Both globally and in Africa, there is good news. Our collective
efforts to end the AIDS epidemic are paying off. Now more people
living with HIV than ever before are accessing treatment, more
people know their status, and AIDS-related deaths are declining. …
This progress, however, belies a dangerous reality: young African
women and adolescent girls are especially vulnerable to HIV.” –
UNAIDS, June 2015

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Progress in scientific research and in treatment for HIV/AIDS
continues, with the most notable recent advance being the START
(Strategic Timing of Antiretroviral Treatment) results released in
May (http://tinyurl.com/on9gsm4). This international study funded by
the U.S. National Institute of Health showed that introducing
treatment at the time of diagnosis instead of waiting until further
damage to the immune system increases rates of survival by over 50%.
Yet this news also highlights the gap between what is now possible
and the results achieved (see latest data at
http://tinyurl.com/nrexvjc).

A new UNAIDS report released this month, and excerpted below in this
AfricaFocus Bulletin, makes it clear that those most vulnerable to
the decades-long pandemic continue to be young women and adolescent
girls in Africa. The response, the report stresses, must include not
only providing additional resources for all aspects of the fight
against HIV/AIDS but also addressing fundamental issues of gender
inequality.

For talking points and previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on health
issues, visit http://www.africafocus.org/intro-health.php

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ebola Perspectives – Update

“The Other Ebola Battle: Fair Pay for Local Health Workers,” June 2,
2105
http://tinyurl.com/o2yvf2j

“Ebola Cases Rise Again in West Africa,” June 10, 2015
http://tinyurl.com/qcjfedr

“Turn on the taps to defeat the next Ebola,” June 15, 2015
http://tinyurl.com/nhonhk2

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

Empower Young Women and Adolescent Girls: Fast-Tracking the end Of
the Aids Epidemic in Africa

UNAIDS

June 2015

[Excerpts only. Full formatted report, with references and graphs,
available at
http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/documents/2015/JC2746]

Foreword

Four decades into the HIV epidemic and response, we have made
encouraging progress. More people living with HIV than ever before
are accessing life-saving treatment; the number of deaths from AIDS-
related causes has declined; fewer babies are becoming infected with
HIV; and new HIV infections have fallen. Africa’s leadership
commitments, the tireless efforts of civil society–including the
women’s movement and networks of women living with HIV–combined
with scientific innovation and global solidarity have helped to
achieve these great strides. The response will be strengthened
further by the commitment from Africa’s leadership to end the AIDS
epidemic by 2030, while promoting shared responsibility and unity.

Yet, despite this progress, adolescent girls and young women are
still being left behind and denied their full rights. They are often
unable to enjoy the benefits of secondary education and formal paid
employment under decent conditions, which would allow them to build
skills, assets and resilience. The threat of violence is pervasive
— and not only in conflict and post-conflict situations. Many girls
are married as children and assume adult roles of motherhood.
Adolescent girls and young women are often prevented from seeking
services and making decisions about their own health. This
combination of factors drives both their risk of acquiring HIV and
their vulnerability to HIV. The impact of HIV on young women and
adolescent girls is acute: they account for one in five new HIV
infections in Africa and are almost three times as likely as their
male peers to be living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

The variables and risks associated with sexual and reproductive
health and HIV among adolescent girls and young women are tied to
gender inequalities that are intricately woven into the
sociocultural, economic and political fabric of society. Unleashing
the potential of half the population of this region and tapping into
the power of the largest youth populace in history will promote both
sustainable progress in the HIV response and wider development
outcomes.

In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If we are to see any real
development in the world, then our best investment is women.” This
holds true for the AIDS response, which needs greater attention,
reaffirmed commitment and resourced action to ensure the health,
rights and well-being of adolescent girls and young women throughout
their life-cycle. The solutions engage all sectors of society and
must embrace innovation.

The key message of advancing women’s rights and gender equality in
order to fast-track the end of the AIDS epidemic among adolescent
girls and young women outlined in this report is an important
contribution to the 2015 African Union theme “Year of women’s
empowerment and development towards Africa’s agenda 2063”. This will
guide our blueprint for future action.

As the African community and the global community stand at the dawn
of a new era of sustainable development, let us reaffirm our
commitment to empowering girls and young women. A firm foundation of
social justice, human rights and gender equality will make the AIDS
response formidable and the end of the AIDS epidemic possible.

Michel Sidibé, Executive Director, UNAIDS

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chair, African Union Commission

**************************************************************

Introduction

With the platform provided by the post-2015 sustainable development
goals, and leveraging the successes of the AIDS response so far,
Africa has a historic opportunity to end the AIDS epidemic as a
public health threat by 2030.

This requires adapting to the dynamism and opportunities of the
continent and reaching people most vulnerable to HIV including young
women and adolescent girls. It also requires taking action to target
the root causes of vulnerability. The magnitude of young women’s and
adolescent girls’ vulnerability to HIV cannot be explained by
biology alone but lies in pervasive conditions of gender inequality
and power imbalances as well as high levels of intimate partner
violence.

Since the 1995 adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for
Action, the reality for most women and girls worldwide, including in
Africa, is that the pace of change has been unacceptably slow. Women
and girls are subject to multiple and intersecting forms of
discrimination. These inequalities are even more acute for
marginalized women, such as women with disabilities, migrant women,
female sex workers and transgender women, who are also at heightened
risk of discrimination and violence (1). There also remain other
large disparities, such as fewer than one in three girls in sub-
Saharan Africa being enrolled in secondary school, women having
unequal access to economic opportunities, and women lacking
decision-making power in the home and wider society (2, 3).

Within the context of HIV, this manifests in different ways. Young
women and adolescent girls acquire HIV five to seven years earlier
than young men, and in some countries HIV prevalence among young
women and adolescent girls is as much as seven times that of their
male counterparts(11, 54). Despite the availability of
antiretroviral medicines, AIDS-related illnesses remain the leading
cause of death among girls and women of reproductive age in Africa
(4).

Many of these young women and girls are born and raised in
communities where they are not treated as equal. Many cannot reduce
their vulnerability to HIV because they are not permitted to make
decisions on their own health care. They cannot reduce their
vulnerability because they cannot choose at what age or who to
marry, when to have sex, how to protect themselves or how many
children to have.

The impacts of gender inequality are far-reaching. Gender equality
matters intrinsically because the ability to make choices that
affect a person’s own life is a basic human right and should be
equal for everyone, independent of whether person is male or female.
But gender equality also matters instrumentally because it
contributes to economies and key development outcomes (3).

To be effective, any health and development agenda needs to focus on
the root causes of the gender gap, and the AIDS response is no
different. But there is also good news on which to build. In the
past 20 years the gender gap has closed in many areas with the most
noticeable progress made in primary school enrolment and completion,
in almost all countries. In addition, life expectancy of women in
low-income countries is now 20 years longer on average than in 1960,
and over the past 30 years women’s participation in paid work has
risen in most parts of the developing world (3).

There is also significant political commitment from Africa to gender
equality and women’s empowerment, with specific goals and targets
for the response to HIV and sexual and reproductive health and
rights. African leaders have enshrined the priorities of gender
equality and rights in (among others) the African Union Agenda 2063;
the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on
the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Declaration 2003); the Solemn
Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (2004); the Sexual and
Reproductive Health Strategy for the Southern African Development
Community Region (2006-2015); the 2013 Ministerial Commitment on
Comprehensive Sexuality Education and Sexual and Reproductive Health
and Rights in Eastern and Southern Africa; the Arab Strategic
Framework on HIV and AIDS (2013-2015): and the Arab AIDS Initiative
2012; the Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development in
Africa Beyond 2014; and the 2013 Declaration of the Special Summit
of the African Union on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The depth and breadth of this political platform and the potential
for action to transform the lives of young women and adolescent
girls in Africa cannot be underestimated.

…

The Aids Response in Africa: Young Women and Adolescent Girls Left
Behind

Both globally and in Africa, there is good news. Our collective
efforts to end the AIDS epidemic are paying off. Now more people
living with HIV than ever before are accessing treatment, more
people know their status, and AIDS-related deaths are declining. New
HIV infections among young people aged 15-24 years are also
declining (460 000 new infections in 2013 compared with almost 715
000 new infections a decade earlier) (55). This progress, however,
belies a dangerous reality: young African women and adolescent girls
are especially vulnerable to HIV.

Globally in 2013, 15% of the approximately 16 million women aged 15
years and older living with HIV were young women; of these over 80%
live in sub-Saharan Africa (55).

Despite declining HIV infection rates, in 2013 globally, there were
approximately 250 000 new HIV infections among adolescent boys and
girls, 64% of which are among adolescent girls (Figs 2 and 3). In
Africa, 74% of new infections among adolescents were among
adolescent girls (55). In addition, AIDS-related illnesses are the
leading cause of death among adolescent girls and women of
reproductive age in Africa, despite the availability of treatment
(4).

…

Furthermore, young women and adolescent girls are missing out on the
scale-up of antiretroviral treatment access for people living with
HIV. Only 15% of young women and adolescent girls aged 15-24 years
in sub-Saharan Africa know their HIV status (6). In the Middle East
and North Africa, only one in five people living with HIV has access
to treatment (55).

Young women and adolescent girls from socially marginalized groups
are at increased risk of HIV because they face multiple challenges.
Stigma, discrimination, punitive laws and a lack of social
protection increase the risk of HIV, notably for young female sex
workers, young transgender women, young migrants and young women who
use drugs (7). In Kenya, HIV prevalence among female sex workers in
Nairobi is 29% — approximately three times the HIV prevalence among
other women in Nairobi (8).

Eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and keeping mothers
alive

Progress to eliminate new HIV infections among children and keeping
their mothers alive has been one of the most impressive achievements
of the AIDS response to date. In 2013, for the first time since the
1990s, the number of new HIV infections among children in the 21
Global Plan 1 priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa dropped to
under 200 000. This represents a 43% decline in the number of new
HIV infections among children in these countries since 2009 (58).

Despite successes, progress among young women and adolescent mothers
has been slow with many challenges. The average adolescent birth
rate in Africa is 115 per 1000 girls, more than double the global
average of 49 per 1000 girls (6). In western and central Africa, 28%
of women aged 20-24 years have reported a birth before the age of 18
years, the highest percentage among developing regions. In Chad,
Guinea, Mali, Mozambique and Niger, 1 in 10 girls has a child before
the age of 15 years (9). In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 36 000
women and girls die each year from unsafe abortions, and millions
more suffer long-term illness or disability (9).

Many young women who marry or enter into partnerships early do not
have the knowledge or the personal agency that enables them to
protect themselves from HIV — for example, they cannot negotiate
when to have sex or to use condoms.

A core strategy to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV is
to prevent pregnancy in young women and adolescent girls who do not
want to have a child at that time. According to the United Nations
Population Fund, 33 million women aged 15-24 years worldwide have an
unmet need for contraception, with substantial regional variations.
For married girls aged 15-19 years, the figures for an unmet need
for contraception range from 8.6% in the Middle East and North
Africa to 30.5% (one in three married girls) in western and central
Africa (10). Among unmarried sexually active adolescent girls, the
unmet need for contraception in sub-Saharan Africa is 46-49%; there
are no data for North Africa (10).

According to 2013 data, in sub-Saharan Africa, only eight male
condoms were available per year for each sexually active individual.
Among young people, and particularly among young women, condom
access and use remain low, despite offering dual protection against
HIV and unwanted pregnancy (11). Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 44%
of all unsafe abortions among adolescent girls aged 15-19 years in
low- and middle- income countries (excluding east Asia) (9).

Governments in Africa have already made important commitments in
this area that can be leveraged. Among the strongest is the 2013
Ministerial Commitment for Comprehensive Sexuality Education and
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Eastern and Southern
Africa. This commitment includes action to “reduce early and
unintended pregnancies among young people by 75%”(12).

Providing access to comprehensive sexuality education, keeping girls
in school and implementing social protection programmes such as cash
transfer programmes have all proven effective in reducing new
infections among young women and adolescent girls.

Stopping child marriage and early pregnancy is also central to
success. Across Africa, 41% of girls in western and central Africa,
34% of girls in eastern and southern Africa and 12% of girls in the
Arab states are married as children (13). Child marriage has been
associated with higher exposure to intimate partner violence and
commercial sexual exploitation (13). Child marriage is a form of
violence.

Intimate partner violence and the association with HIV

Over the past decade strong evidence has emerged on the relationship
between intimate partner violence and HIV. There is equally strong
evidence for and recognition of successful community strategies to
prevent intimate partner violence and vulnerability to HIV (16, 29,
30, 57).

In high HIV prevalence settings, women who are exposed to intimate
partner violence are 50% more likely to acquire HIV than those who
are not exposed (16). Adolescent girls and young women also have the
highest incidence of intimate partner violence (11). In Zimbabwe,
for example, the prevalence of intimate partner violence among women
aged 15-24 years is 35%, compared with 24% for women aged 25-49
years; and in Gabon, prevalence of intimate partner violence among
young women is 42% compared with 28% for older women. In some
settings, 45% of adolescent girls report that their first experience
of sex was forced, another known risk factor for HIV (Fig. 4) (17).
In addition, girls who marry before age 18 are more likely to
experience violence within marriage than girls who marry later (14).
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), globally
120 million girls — 1 in 10 — are raped or sexually attacked by
the age of 20 years (15).

…

Women and girls also continue to experience unique risks and
vulnerabilities to HIV during conflicts, emergencies and post-
conflict periods. In conflict situations, rape can be used as a
weapon of war, increasing the risk of HIV transmission because rates
of HIV among military personnel typically exceed those of the
general population (18). Adolescent girls are particularly
vulnerable and, in some cases, are abducted and used for sexual
purposes by armed groups (15). The 2011 United Nations (UN) Security
Council Resolution 1983 recognizes that the impact of HIV is felt
most acutely by women and girls in conflict and post-conflict
settings due to both sexual violence and reduced or no access to
services (19). As highlighted by the resolution, however, there is
also potential for peacekeeping operations to protect civilian
populations through prevention of conflict-related sexual violence.

Core reasons why young women and adolescent girls are vulnerable to
HIV

Every hour, around 34 young African women are newly infected with
HIV. The reasons for relatively high rates of infection and low
scale-up of services for young women in Africa are complex and
interwoven. Changing the course of the epidemic requires addressing
the root causes and understanding the core conditions that
exacerbate vulnerability. Seven core conditions stand out:

* inadequate access to good-quality sexual and reproductive health
information, commodities and services, in some measure due to age of
consent to access services;

* low personal agency, meaning women are unable to make choices and
take action on matters of their own health and well-being;

* harmful gender norms, including child, early and forced marriage,
resulting in early pregnancy;

* transactional and unprotected age-disparate sex, often as a result
of poverty, lack of opportunity or lack of material goods;

* lack of access to secondary education and comprehensive age-
appropriate sexuality education;

* intimate partner violence, which impacts on risk and health-
seeking behaviour;

* violence in conflict and post-conflict settings.

Individually or in combination, these factors severely inhibit the
ability of young women and adolescent girls to protect themselves
from HIV, violence and unintended or unwanted pregnancy. Gender
inequality and lack of women’s empowerment or agency are key themes
that cut across these drivers.

Women’s agency or empowerment is the ability to make choices and to
transform them into desired actions and outcomes. Across all
countries and cultures there are differences between men’s and
women’s ability to make these choices. Women’s empowerment
influences their ability to build their human capital. Greater
control over household resources by women leads to more investment
in children’s human capital, shaping the opportunities for the next
generation (3). In sub-Saharan African countries, more than half of
married adolescent girls and young women do not have the final say
regarding their own health care and play a low decision-making role
in the household (20).

Poverty is another overarching factor. Poverty can push girls into
age-disparate relationships, a driver of HIV risk for young women
and adolescent girls. For example, in South Africa, 34% of sexually
active adolescent girls report being in a relationship with a man at
least five years their senior. Such relationships expose young woman
and girls to unsafe sexual behaviours, low condom use and increased
risk of sexually transmitted infections (57). The risk of
trafficking and sexual exploitation is also higher for young women
and adolescent girls living in poverty (21).

Poverty also increases the risk of child marriage, and girls in the
poorest economic quintile are 2.5 times more likely to be married as
children compared with girls in the richest quintile (21). In 2010,
67 million women aged 20-24 years had been married as girls, of
which one-fifth were in Africa (14).

In May 2014, after numerous national and regional commitments to
address child marriage (including the 2005 Maputo Protocol, Article
6c), the African Union Commission initiated a 2-year campaign,
starting in 10 African countries 2 , to accelerate the end of child
marriage on the continent by increasing awareness, influencing
policy, advocating for the implementation of laws and ensuring
accountability. Eliminating child marriage will decrease African
girls’ greater risk of experiencing domestic violence, premature
pregnancies and related complications, and sexually transmitted
diseases, including HIV.

There are promising solutions, but the solutions today are not the
solutions of yesterday. Fast-tracking the response is about being
flexible and taking account of the rapid transition taking place in
Africa today, looking at the new risks but also at the new
opportunities.

*****************************************************

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
reposted material, please contact directly the original source
mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
http://www.africafocus.org

By Sam Laird June 12, 2015Source: ProgesoWeekly

AfricaFocus Bulletin
May 25, 2015 (150525)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“The failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of today’s
unequal world order remains a striking weakness of radical as well
as conventional analyses of that order. Current global and national
socioeconomic hierarchies are not mere residues of a bygone era of
primitive accumulation. Just as it should be inconceivable to
address the past, present, and future of American society without
giving central attention to the role of African American struggles,
so analyzing and addressing 21st-century structures of global
inequality requires giving central attention to Africa.”

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As readers are aware, AfricaFocus features reposted material
published recently, with the editor’s own comments limited to a
short introduction. This week is an exception, in that the article
reposted (and quoted in the paragraph above) is one that I wrote
more than a decade ago. I was led to
reread it while trying to reflect on the many recent events
reminding all of us of the unequal values given to human lives in
today’s world order, both between and within countries and
continents. These inequalities are shaped by race, place, class,
gender, and multiple other factors. But they are also molded by a
long history that systematically makes the African continent, those
who live there, and those who come from there particularly
vulnerable.

In my view, the connection between global and African realities is
most directly apparent in the realm of issues such as climate
change, migration, and the unequal flows of economic resources,
which are regularly featured in AfricaFocus. But how these
structural stresses affect the highly visible terrain of political
conflict, violence, and human rights varies enormously in its
particularities by country. General narratives, including that
sketched in this essay, are always inadequate, and in many respects
subjective. But today’s date  (May 25, Africa Day) is also an
appropriate one to turn to more general reflections. I am convinced
that the basic points made in this essay still hold true and hope it
may be of interest to many AfricaFocus readers.

For two publications in which I have attempted to address the
global/African connections with respect to the issue of migration,
see the background paper “African Migration, Global Inequalities,
and Human Rights: Connecting the Dots,” 2011
(http://www.africafocus.org/editor/nai-migration.php), written for
the Nordic Africa Institute, and the short pamphlet “Migration and
Global Justice: From Africa to the United States” 2008
(http://www.africafocus.org/editor/afsc0804.pdf), written for the
American Friends Service Committee.

An earlier related essay on “Global Apartheid,” by Salih Booker and
William Minter, appeared in The Nation in 2001
(http://www.thenation.com/article/global-apartheid).

Links to additional publications available on-line can be found at
http://www.africafocus.org/editor.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

Invisible Hierarchies: Africa, Race, and Continuities in the World
Order

Science & Society, Vol. 69, No. 3, July 2005, 449-457

William Minter

Abstract:

The failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of today’s
unequal world order remains a striking weakness of radical as well
as conventional analyses of that order. Current global and national
socioeconomic hierarchies are not mere residues of a bygone era of
primitive accumulation. Just as it should be inconceivable to
address the past, present, and future of American society without
giving central attention to the role of African American struggles,
so analyzing and addressing 21st-century structures of global
inequality requires giving central attention to Africa.

“We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the
transatlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history
of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also
in terms of their magnitude, organized nature and especially their
negation of the essence of the victims, and further acknowledge that
slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should
always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade, and
are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that
Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian
descent and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and
continue to be victims of their consequences. — Declaration of the
World Conference Against Racism, Durban, South Africa, September 8,
2001

Coming only days before September 11, this acknowledgment by world
governments of the legal premise of the reparations movement gained
little media attention. The 62-page declaration and program of
action, already undermined by a last-minute U. S. withdrawal from
the conference, faded into obscurity even more rapidly than the
conclusions of other global conferences that have proliferated in
recent decades. In any case, the commitments made in Durban to
repair the consequences of racism were even vaguer than most such
conference commitments, such as new pledges to finance development
adopted by consensus at the Monterrey poverty summit in March 2002.

Yet the failure to acknowledge race as a fundamental feature of
today’s unequal world order is not confined to Bush administration
unilateralists or international diplomats crafting new compromise
language for promises destined to be betrayed. With some notable
exceptions, such as Winant, 2001 and Marable, 2004, authors of the
vast array of commentaries on globalization and even of the more
recent crop of writings about empire treat race only in passing —
if they mention it at all. Such reticence about race applies not
only to advocates of the Washington Consensus of free-market
fundamentalism and to cheerleaders for U. S. empire, but also to
more critical analysts of a variety of persuasions from center to
left.

The end of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994 marked the
demise of racial discrimination as explicit state policy, just as
the mid-1960s victories of the civil rights movement in the United
States had marked the end of the Jim Crow system of segregation in
the U. S. south. But the persistence of de facto racial inequality
into the 21st century is pervasive in both nations, as well as
globally. Its relative invisibility in public commentary and
analysis must be considered a fundamental feature of the current
moment requiring explanation.

21st Century Color Lines

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) and other analysts, focusing on the
current U. S. racial order, have posited an ideology of “color-blind
racism,” which allows for continuation of racial inequality while
firmly rejecting overt racial distinctions or discrimination. One of
the key components of this ideology is to deny the link between past
and present, so that people regardless of their background are seen
as starting on a level playing field. This assumption fits well with
the companion ideology stressing the virtues of the neutral market,
which all are presumed to approach with similar possibilities of
success. Such an ideology gains credibility from the visible success
of individuals from the subordinate group, which does in the case of
race mark a break with earlier ideologies of rigid discrimination.
With successful individuals in the foreground, and even celebrated
as illustrating diversity, it becomes easier to view continuing
structural inequality as relatively unimportant, or even to dismiss
it altogether. Persistent poverty or other disadvantages can
conveniently be attributed entirely to individual defects, and seen
as unrelated to past or present discrimination.

The dominant ideology thus diverts attention from the structural
bases of persistent and rising inequality. Contrary views are
portrayed as divisive promotion of class warfare or racial
hostility. Meanwhile, progressive forces have failed to forge a
persuasive counter-perspective integrating both race and class that
similarly facilitates united opposition to the dominant order.
Recently Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have argued that race is
like a miner’s canary, with damage to minority communities signaling
the damaging structural hierarchies permeating the society (Guinier
and Torres, 2002). They further argue that racial mobilization,
combined with openness to wider coalition-building, must be a
fundamental component of progressive action in the United States.
Many others have made similar arguments, while documenting the
persistence of racial inequality, in unemployment, incarceration,
denial of voting rights, and other arenas. Yet it is no secret that
progressive forces have had little success in implementing such
strategies on more than a fragmentary local basis.

Building a progressive U. S. internationalism that acknowledges the
impact of race, both internally and globally, is an even more
intimidating challenge than that on the domestic front. The growing
impact of immigration also makes such issues unavoidable in other
industrialized countries as well. The much-celebrated demonstrations
in Seattle and similar anti-corporate globalization events have been
notable for their failure to make such connections, despite efforts
to do so by many of the activist groups involved (Martinez, 2000).
Despite trans-Atlantic contacts made at the World Conference against
Racism, even for most supporters the U. S. reparations movement
retains an almost exclusive domestic focus, rather than a campaign
situated within the context of damages done to the African continent
as well. Despite overwhelming opposition among Black Americans to
Bush’s war in Iraq, and efforts by groups such as Black Voices for
Peace, the anti-war movement has generally been unable to make
connections with broader opposition to domestic and global
inequality.

Neither the conceptual nor practical solutions to this impasse are
easy to discern. But surely one prerequisite is for progressive
analysts to acknowledge that W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction that the
problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line
applies to the new century as well. Such continuity must surely
count among the deep structures still characterizing the world
today.

This is not to deny the significance of recent changes, whether the
shift from a bipolar to a unipolar geostrategic order, the
accelerating velocity of global communication, the triumph
symbolized by Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994, or the
globalization of threats of terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Nevertheless, both the visible and real global hierarchies, whether
measured in terms of economic power and privilege, human security,
or access to effective political rights, show a close correlation
with the order established by the centuries of slavery, conquest,
and colonial rule.

To the extent that the gatherings of the World Social Forum in
Brazil and India do prefigure another possible world vision, it is
still a world in which one continent — Africa — is strikingly
underrepresented. [as of writing of this article in 2005]
Speculation about the rise of new forces to global prominence to
challenge U. S. hegemony center on the advance of Asia, including
China and India as well as Japan. The potential weight of the Asian
continent, with more than half of the estimated world population of
some 6.4 billion, is clearly linked to sheer numbers as well as to
the structure of the world system. But the profound gap between
Africa (some 870 million people) and less populous continents such
as Europe (729 million), North America (509 million) and South
America (367 million) is easily visible in any compilation of
comparative statistics of development, from life expectancy to gross
national product to vulnerability to the AIDS pandemic.

The point here is neither to rehearse such familiar statistics nor
to call for continent-based quotas in reflections about the current
state of the world. Rather, it is to suggest that the Guinier-Torres
analogy of the miner’s canary applies globally as well as in the
United States. Just as it should be inconceivable to address the
past, present, and future of American society without giving central
attention to the role of African American struggles, so analyzing
and addressing the structures of global inequality requires giving
central attention to Africa.

The mechanisms responsible for creating and maintaining such
inequality are not unique to Africa, but their effects are most
starkly visible there. That is why Africa figures prominently on the
agenda of international institutions, from the World Bank to the
panoply of specialized UN agencies. The fact that Africa
nevertheless remains marginal to public debate across the political
spectrum outside the continent is an indicator of the absence of a
global social contract and of the current weakness of movements to
establish a world order based on principles other than market
values.

Within the United States, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro
convincingly showed in their landmark book Black Wealth, White
Wealth (1995), inheritance remains a central mechanism in
perpetuating racial inequality, even when there is significant
upward mobility in jobs and income for some. On a global scale, the
common-sense case for the lasting effect on the current global
hierarchy of centuries of primitive accumulation of wealth by
violence is so obvious that it seems incredible that it is not
generally acknowledged, whether or not one argues that there should
be a statute of limitations on responsibility for repairing the
damage. Yet in fact such causal links are commonly dismissed as
irrelevant “ancient history” or simply ignored by policy- makers and
scholars alike. The debate opened up by such classic works as Eric
Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and Walter Rodney’s How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) has yet to be integrated into
current reflections about globalization and empire.

Global Apartheid

Certainly there is much that is new about the current moment in
Africa, as elsewhere in the world. The end of the Cold War removed
the primary strategic imperative for outside subsidies to African
re- gimes. The AIDS pandemic, which in the 1980s was largely
confined to central Africa, has swept through much of the continent,
revers- ing previous advances in raising life expectancy. It now
threatens almost every sector of economy and society. Few African
cities now lack multiple internet cafes, and the growth of mobile
phone use is the most rapid anywhere. Although the trend is less
well studied than in the Caribbean or Latin America, the dispersion
of new African immigrants throughout the world has made remittances
a central feature of survival for many African communities and a
major com- ponent of many national economies. Each of these trends,
it could be argued, is a sign of deep structural change as well as a
feature of the current moment.

Nevertheless, continuities with previous periods and reinforcement
of long-established structures are equally striking. As recently
summarized in an article analyzing the causes of increasing world
inequality (Wade, 2004), the statistics on recent inequality trends
are much disputed. Results vary widely with the measures and data
used. But what evidence there is for structural advance in the
global South comes almost entirely from trends in China and India.
At a structural level, despite such blips as a modest increase in U.
S. textile imports from several African countries as a result of
tariff concessions in the U.S.-Africa Growth and Opportunity Act,
the role of African countries in the world economy is still
overwhelmingly that of suppliers of primary commodities, as has been
the case since colonial conquest over a century ago. The dynamics of
world markets are of course different for different commodities
ranging from coffee and cotton to oil and gold. But not even South
Africa has managed to find a sustainable strategy to emulate the
East Asian competitive challenges to the established G-7 economic
powers.

Despite multiple shifts in terminology and emphasis, moreover,
neither reformist African governments nor stronger critics of the
Washington Consensus among African activists and scholars have
succeeded in altering the course of the international financial
institutions that have insisted on putting macroeconomic adjustment
and trade liberalization above all else. The World Bank and the IMF
have indeed forfeited any credibility with both African and
international civil society. But alternative agendas for
“sustainable development” and “human development,” despite
endorsement by multilateral agencies, global conferences, and even
dissenting voices within the World Bank, have lost ground to market
fundamentalism in practice.

While the first decades of African independence saw significant
advances in health and education, subsequent decades have instead
seen an overall pattern of decline. Disparities such as these were
and are reinforced not only by economic structures such as commodity
markets and the accumulation of capital controlled by the capitalist
classes of rich countries, but also by continuities of political
influence. The victories of greater autonomy won by anti-colonial
struggles were eroded first by the Cold War and the continued
influence of ex-colonial powers. Regardless of the political
ideology of post-colonial leaders, the model of the colonial state
remained the dominant guide to the exercise of power. And in
response to the economic crises of the 1980s and the 1990s, African
states lost more and more influence to the directing hand of the
World Bank and clubs of creditors/donors.

While contemporary critics of globalization lament the loss of
autonomy of national states, in Africa the empirical evidence for
such an earlier golden age is weak indeed. Whether for the first
wave of independent states in the 1960s, or for those winning power
in the 1970s and 1980s after armed struggles, the period of hope and
popular mobilization was quickly cut short. The entry of a free
South Africa onto the African scene in the last decade has
significantly changed the context for continental cooperation, and
many see the African Union as an arena for both wider public debate
and action on some of the continent’s crises. But whether one
attributes Pretoria’s compromises to pragmatism or to class
interests, it would be difficult to argue that the vision of African
renaissance has won much leverage for Africa in institutions
deciding global policies affecting the continent.

Debates on the causes of this reality, and on how to find a path
ahead that avoids both Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism, are
complex. But surely it is necessary to go beyond national arenas or
the failure of particular leaders and to include analysis of the
lack of democracy in global institutions that have relatively more
weight in Africa than almost anywhere else in the world. To counter
growing global inequality requires state action on a scale
equivalent to the global mechanisms that reinforce that inequality.

Multilateral institutions dealing with almost every conceivable
issue have in fact proliferated in parallel with economic
globalization. There has also been significant involvement by a
burgeoning “international civil society,” ranging from non-
governmental organizations in the global North to activist groups in
both North and South. The impact at the level of ideas has been
significant. But it is also the case that the more influential the
institution, the more likely its effective governance is effectively
controlled by representatives of rich, predominantly white,
countries.

Whether or not one uses the term “global apartheid” (Booker and
Minter, 2001), any short-hand description of the global order at the
dawn of the 21st century must somehow acknowledge the double
standards implicit in an international system of global minority
rule, based on the entrenched assumption that some human lives are
more valuable than others based on the accident of place and race of
birth. The tragedy of 9/11 and the war on Iraq is not only the
direct damage inflicted by those events, but also the
reinforcement given to diversion of attention from the global
holocaust of the AIDS pandemic and parallel threats to human
security.

It would be a mistake to see this tacit acceptance of the differ-
ential value of human life as simply a cultural or ideological
epiphenomenon less worthy of analysis than the “hard” structures of
global political economy, geostrategic competition, or preemptive
militarism. Long-term rationality, even from the point of view of
the more farsighted guardians of global capitalism, may dictate
attention to the range of global crises that have their most severe
impact in Africa (see, for example, the report of the World
Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, at
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/wcsdg). Seemingly race-neutral
goals such as poverty alleviation and other noble objectives may win
approval in conference after conference.

But just as national divisions are not only conceptual but embedded
in laws distinguishing citizens and non-citizens, so the assumptions
of racial and cultural hierarchy are embedded in the political
discourse and practices that reinforce global apartheid.

Making “another world possible” requires analyses and strategies for
political mobilization that do not evade this stubborn legacy from
the past.

References

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind
Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United
States. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Booker, Salih, and William Minter. 2001. “Global Apartheid.” The
Nation, July 9.

Guinier, Lani, and Gerald Torres. 2002. The Miner’s Canary:
Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Marable, Manning. 2004 “Globalization and Racialization.” Znet,
August 13.

Martinez, Elizabeth (Betita). 2000. “Where Was the Color in
Seattle?: Looking for Reasons Why the Great Battle was so White.”
Colorlines, 3:1 (Spring).

Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. 1995. Black Wealth, White
Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge.

Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London/Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania: Bogle L’Ouverture Publications and Tanzania
Publishing House.

Wade, Robert Hunter. 2004. “On the Causes of Increasing World
Inequality, or Why the Matthew Effect Prevails.” New Political
Economy, 8:2 (June).

Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, North
Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy
Since World War II. New York: Basic Books.

*****************************************************

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
reposted material, please contact directly the original source
mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
http://www.africafocus.org

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekPlWCIxA_c

AfricaFocus Bulletin
May 11, 2015 (150511)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“The [Ebola] epidemic is at its lowest but not over yet. The recent
weeks have seen an important decrease in new confirmed Ebola cases
across West Africa. Liberia is now close to being declared Ebola-
free on 9 May, while Sierra Leone and Guinea are finally getting
close to zero. However, the outbreak is not over until it’s over at
the regional level.” – Doctors without Borders, May 6 update

For a version of this Bulletin in html format, more suitable for
printing, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs15/eb1505.php, and
click on “format for print or mobile.”

To share this on Facebook, click on
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=
http://www.africafocus.org/docs15/eb1505.php

The welcome announcement that Liberia is now “Ebola-free,” having
passed 42 days without a case of Ebola, came with many caveats. The
full picture includes the continuation of new cases in neighboring
Guinea and Sierra Leone. It also includes the massive damage done to
the preexisting inadequate health systems, jobs lost and education
postponed, and, recently, the discovery that even Ebola survivors
are likely to have ongoing after-effects.

Internationally, while there is much attention given to “lessons
learned” and the need for ongoing improvement in health systems and
preparedness for health emergencies still to come, the resources to
implement the lessons learned are still largely missing from the
budgets of international agencies. The burden still falls primarily
on health workers in the countries themselves, who have already made
heroic sacrifices.

For a short video (9 minutes) featuring Sierra Leoneans responsible
for the difficult task of “getting to zero,” see the latest Ebola on
the Ground episode from OkayAfrica and Ebola Deeply, at
http://tinyurl.com/lzmh47l

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a brief excerpt from the latest
Ebola update from Doctors without Borders and longer excerpts from a
feature article from Ebola Deeply on the difficulties of “getting to
zero” in Sierra Leone.

Also recent and of related interest

Long-term impact of Ebola in Sierra Leone Guardian, May 8, 2015
http://tinyurl.com/m79heoh

Interview with Dan Edge, director of PBS documentary Outbreak,
tracing path of Ebola & mistakes made in the response
http://tinyurl.com/ngsx9mc The 54-minute video is available at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/outbreak/

Perseverance in Life and Art: African Voices on Ebola
http://usanafricanvoicesebola.weebly.com/

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Ebola and other health issues,
visit http://www.africafocus.org/healthexp.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

Ebola crisis update – 6 May 2015

[Excerpt. Original at
http://www.msf.org/article/ebola-crisis-update-6-may-2015]

Liberia: Zero cases since 20 March 2015 Guinea: 9 confirmed cases in
the country on 4 May. Sierra Leone: 21 confirmed cases in the
country on 27 April: 6 new cases (3 in Kambia, 3 in Western Area)
from 22-29 April

MSF Staff on ground (as of 21 April)

Total: 185 international and about 1,150 national Guinea: 83
international, around 500 national Sierra Leone: 61 international,
around 310 national Liberia: 39 international, around 350 national

Overview

The epidemic is at its lowest but not over yet

The recent weeks have seen an important decrease in new confirmed
Ebola cases across West Africa. Liberia is now close to being
declared Ebola-free on 9 May, while Sierra Leone and Guinea are
finally getting close to zero. However, the outbreak is not over
until it’s over at the regional level. No country can really be
thought to be Ebola-free until all three countries in the outbreak
have no recorded cases for 42 days.

Even after the end of this outbreak, West Africa will have to remain
vigilant against a re-emergence of Ebola; there must be strengthened
epidemiological surveillance and a rapid response alert system for
when – rather than if, a new Ebola case occurs.

Key ‘pillars’ of the response are still missing

Regional cooperation: Given the high mobility of the population
across the three most-affected countries, surveillance must be
ensured across borders and coordinated on the regional level to
avoid new cases to be ‘imported’ in Ebola-free zones.

Community awareness remains low in some areas, raising the risk of
local people panicking, which can lead to violence against medical
and aid workers. Community mobilization and sensitization efforts
supported by national and local leaders must be reinforced rapidly.

Non-Ebola needs are a persisting concern

Already weak public health systems have been seriously damaged by
the epidemic. The long period of interrupted health services has
caused significant gaps in preventive activities, such as routine
immunization of children, and in retention in care for people on
long-term treatments such as HIV and other chronic diseases. There
is a need to catch up and mitigate the consequences of the treatment
interruption.

…

***********************************************************

Why Sierra Leone Can’t Get Rid of Ebola

April 23rd, 2015 by Mark Honigsbaum

http://www.eboladeeply.org

[Excerpts: for full report visit http://tinyurl.com/occ3vxs]

Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma, the president of the Republic of Sierra
Leone, was having trouble “getting to zero,” and his underlings were
getting antsy. “We need one more push,” said Major Palo Conteh, the
commander of Sierra Leone’s National Ebola Response Centre (NERC)
and a former Olympic quarter miler. “It’s like in the 400 meters
when you’re 20 meters from the finish line, that’s the time to kick
hard.”

Brigadier General David Taluva, a jovial officer with the physique
of a shot putter, had other ideas. “Perhaps we should quarantine
Port Loko,” he mused to a group of officers gathered outside a
Portakabin by the Special Court building in Freetown, now
transformed into an Ebola situation room. “No, wait, then we would
have to quarantine the whole country.”

The officers shuffled their feet awkwardly, then parted to make way
for an official who was late for that evening’s briefing.

Taluva was joking, but of course Ebola is no laughing matter. Port
Loko is one of the most populous districts in Sierra Leone and the
site of Lungi International Airport. Quarantine Port Loko and you
effectively cut the flow of international health workers and aid to
President Koroma’s beleaguered administration. The problem is that
Port Loko, or to be more precise, Lokomasama – the district to the
north of Freetown – is scored with shallow swamps and twisting
rivers perfect for evading the Ebola control measures. And, since
February, that is exactly what fishermen and recalcitrant villagers
in Lokomasama have been doing. The result has been new clusters of
infection up and down the country, frustrating the effort to “get to
zero,” as the World Health Organization (WHO) calls the elimination
of Ebola transmissions (getting to zero requires no new cases to be
reported in a country for 42 days, double the maximum incubation
period of the virus).

“I fear that people have grown complacent,” sighed Professor Monty
Jones, the president’s special adviser, when I caught up with him in
early March at the State House, an imposing stone building with
uninterrupted views over Freetown to Susan’s Bay and Destruction
Bay. “The epidemic has been going on too long. They just want life
to return to normal.”

***

It was a refrain I was to hear again and again during an 11-day tour
of the country that took me from the sun-kissed beaches of Aberdeen
– where during daylight hours fishermen reel in glistening
barracudas and pots stuffed with outsized lobsters – to a surreal
meeting of tribal chiefs and frustrated British officials at Port
Loko, to an overgrown graveyard in Kenema, the district in the far
east of the country where Ebola first erupted in Sierra Leone in May
2014. On the way I met traumatized survivors, inspiring community
activists, and stressed-out scientists doing their best to launch
trials of experimental vaccines and drugs in difficult conditions.

…

Zero transmission of Ebola is theoretically achievable. Indeed, it
is argued nothing less will do, and that unless and until the last
case is found and safely isolated, there will always be a threat of
Ebola rebounding. That is surely right. The question is, at what
cost will containment be achieved?

***

A major exporter of diamonds and iron ore, Sierra Leone is rich in
natural resources and, until Ebola, had one of the fastest growing
economies in the world. Now mechanical diggers lie idle beside the
red, African earth, and investment from China and other foreign
sources has stalled. … Sierra Leone was once a popular tourist
destination: the airport is just meters from a gorgeous sandy beach
…

That image was all but erased by the country’s brutal 11-year civil
war, which only ended in 2002 when British troops helped expel rebel
forces from the outskirts of Freetown. Then came a second blow:
Ebola.

One of the tragedies of the outbreak in Sierra Leone is that it
might have been avoided had WHO acted more decisively at the
beginning of the epidemic. The first official acknowledgment of
Ebola came on March 23, 2014 when WHO was notified of 49 cases and
29 deaths in Guéckédou, a small village bordering a forested area of
southern Guinea inhabited by wild bats, the presumed reservoir of
the virus. Within a week Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was
reporting an epidemic of “unprecedented” magnitude and the spread of
infections to Liberia. Kailahun, Sierra Leone’s most easterly
province, which shares a border with both Guinea and Liberia, was
the obvious next port of call for the virus. Indeed, in April, Dr.
Sheik Humarr Khan, the chief physician on the Lassa fever ward at
Kenema Hospital, who at the time had the only laboratory in the
country capable of testing for Ebola, began warning nurses that
Ebola was ‘coming’ and they had better be ready. But by the time Dr.
Khan confirmed the first positive blood sample on May 24, from a
nurse who had attended the funeral of a traditional healer in Koindu
in northern Kailahun, it was too late: staff had already admitted a
pregnant woman infected with Ebola to the maternity ward. Within
days the ward was overrun with Ebola cases, the majority of them
other funeral goers or their contacts. In all, ten staff would die
battling the virus between May and August, including Dr. Khan and
the hospital’s chief nurse, Mbalu Fonnie.

Kailahun was Sierra Leone’s “shark in the water” moment. Knowing
that a deadly predator had strayed into its territory, the Ministry
of Health should have closed the road between Koindu and Kenema and
flooded Kailahun with health workers and contact tracers –
epidemiological teams equipped to rapidly trace and isolate
infectious patients and their contacts. But at the time Sierra Leone
had just 1,000 nurses and midwives for the whole country. Besides,
at this stage few of the so-called experts, including WHO, seemed to
think there was a danger of Ebola reaching a major town or city –
and those WHO officials in Geneva who did see the danger thought an
international health alert would be counterproductive, stoking
needless fear and hysteria at a time …

But, of course, everything was not fine. To date there have been
12,265 Ebola cases in Sierra Leone – more than any other country in
West Africa – and though Liberia has suffered more fatalities (4,486
to Sierra Leone’s 3,877), in Liberia the epidemic peaked in mid-
September, whereas in Sierra Leone infections climbed steadily
throughout the autumn before peaking at a much higher level in early
December. As new Ebola treatment centers came online and burial
squads – backed by an army of international contact tracers and
outreach workers – descended on rural communities to promote safe
hygiene messages, cases declined – but at the end of January that
decline stalled. Since then the Ebola reduction effort has
plateaued, with the weekly case totals stuck in the mid-70s for most
of February and the mid-50s in March.

…

To get a measure of the challenges facing President Koroma on what
many officials are calling the “bumpy road to zero,” I headed to
Port Loko, where the coordinator of the local District Ebola
Response Center, Raymond Kabia, had called a meeting of the
district’s 12 political leaders, known as paramount chiefs, in order
to address the continued flouting of quarantine measures and
restrictions on ‘unsafe’ burials. The idea was to get the chiefs to
take ownership of Ebola control, but as we sped through unattended
checkpoints and past banners scrawled with fading Krio messages
(“Ebola nor touch am” – “Ebola don’t touch”), the auguries were not
good. A few weeks earlier, a fisherman from Lokomasama infected with
the virus had ignored the official requirement to report to an Ebola
assessment unit, and instead had persuaded three friends to ferry
him to a remote island in the Rhombe swamps. There he consulted a
traditional healer before continuing along Port Loko’s mosquito-
infested coast to Freetown, where he alighted at a wharf in
Aberdeen, a stone’s throw from the Radisson Blu Mammy Yoko, the
city’s premier hotel, then host to more than 50 staff from the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

By now the fisherman was a walking virus bomb, and on disembarking
made straight for an Oxfam-built toilet block, where he vomited
hemorrhagic fluids. As a result, 20 villagers in the Tamba Kula
district of Aberdeen were also infected with Ebola, prompting the
quarantining of the community for 21 days. In theory that should
have been the end of the transmission chain, but despite the best
efforts of contact tracers, one of the contacts got away – hitching
a ride on the back of a motorcycle to Makeni, three hours from
Freetown, where he infected three more people, including a
traditional healer. All four were now being ‘offered’ life-saving
treatment at an Ebola treatment center in Makeni operated by the
International Rescue Committee (IRC), the relief agency headed by
David Miliband. I say offered because, according to the nurse from
Public Health England I spoke to, several patients were refusing
treatment, fearing IRC medical staff were trying to murder them with
what the healer, who has been keeping up a running commentary on the
ward, calls their ‘Ebola guns’ – the hand-held electronic
thermometers that nurses use to record patients’ temperatures.

…

The further you go from Freetown, the fewer Ebola patients you
encounter. On the outskirts of Bo we passed a huge MSF Ebola
management center, deserted save for a few orderlies and a skeleton
medical staff, and in Kenema it was the same. Except for the triage
tents at the entrance to the hospital, you would never know Ebola
had once cut a swathe through the maternity ward here, bringing
misery to a place of life. But while Ebola has now returned to the
forest, Dr. Khan’s Lassa fever unit remains open for business.
Kenema’s diamond mines are a breeding ground for rats, the carriers
of Lassa, and technicians have been processing and storing Lassa
blood samples here for several years. Those stores are proving to be
a serological goldmine: retrospective studies by Tulane University
researchers using Ebola reagents have revealed antibodies in the
blood of several “Lassa” patients. The first of these seropositive
Ebola samples dates back to 2006. In other words, Ebola may have
visited Kenema before but no one noticed. “The scientific question
for us now is why that didn’t turn into an outbreak,” said Dr.
Joseph Fair, a Lassa expert and US Army researcher from USAMRIID who
helped set up Kenema’s diagnostics platform.

Answering that question will require not only a better understanding
of the ecology and the biology of the virus and its interaction with
the immune system, but also what Dubos would have called “social and
environmental factors.” As Dr. Fair recalled: “When I first came to
Kenema in 2006 there was no Chinese highway, just a dirt road, and
the journey from Freetown took eight hours. Now, it takes three, and
instead of jungle all you see are cassava fields. That’s got to have
had an effect.”

One of the reasons Ebola has proved so difficult to eradicate in
Sierra Leone is the attachment to traditional burial customs. These
dictate that the families of the deceased should be able to kiss and
wash the bodies of their loved ones before laying them to the rest.
But, of course, such customs also risk spreading the virus further,
and in an effort to get to zero the NERC has mandated that the
bodies of victims be disposed of within 24 hours – an edict that, in
the case of the Western Area, usually means interment in a hastily
dug grave in Freetown’s King Tom cemetery. At Kenema’s Dama Road
cemetery, however, perhaps because it is further from the center,
the rules were not applied so strictly, and people had time to place
markers on the last resting place of the nurses and technicians who
were among Ebola’s first victims. On a broiling hot afternoon in
March I asked Mohamed Sow, a driver with the Tulane Lassa fever
program, to take me there. Sow did not need to ask directions: when
Ebola struck it was all hands to the pumps, and instead of ferrying
Lassa patients to the hospital he found himself transporting victims
of Ebola, many of them former colleagues, to the cemetery.

Unlike at King Tom, there was no one guarding the gates at Dama Road
and no one insisting we submit to a temperature check. We simply
parked by the entrance and walked in. Although it had been scarcely
nine months since Ebola swept through Kenema, the graves were
already overgrown with tropical vegetation. As we picked our way
gingerly between the plots, at first it was hard to distinguish one
from another. Then we came across a marker commemorating the death
of a local pastor. According to Sow, the pastor had contracted Ebola
after visiting Kenema’s maternity ward to read the last rites to a
patient. He was just 34. “He was a Christian, a man of God, so it
was his duty,” Sow told me matter-of-factly. “He could not refuse.”

Soon, we realized, we were standing in a thicket of Ebola graves.
The majority had crosses like the pastor’s, but in some cases the
names were Muslim and the epitaphs were in Arabic. All seem to have
died in a three-month period between July and September 2014. Sow
wanted to show us other graves, but by now both my driver and I had
seen enough. The earth may have been dry and cracked, but the fear
was still palpable: it was the closest we had come to the virus in
11 days.

On the drive back to Freetown neither of us said very much for the
first half hour. The highway was empty and, even though we were now
speeding toward the epicenter of the epidemic rather than away from
it, we were both relieved to be leaving Kenema. Eventually, however,
we reached a checkpoint and had to stop to show our credentials and
submit to the obligatory temperature check.

“People are sick and tired of Ebola,” said my driver as we pulled
away. “Do you think these vaccines will really make a difference?” I
replied that I didn’t know, but that scientists had a duty to try,
if not for now then for the next time. He paused, considering my
words. Then, smiling, he pointed to a phrase painted on the bumper
of the bus in front of us. It read: “No condition is permanent.”

…

*****************************************************

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
reposted material, please contact directly the original source
mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
http://www.africafocus.org

Our right to be Marxist-Leninists
In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution expresses his profound admiration for the heroic soviet people who provided an enormous service to humanity

Author: Fidel Castro Ruz | internet@granma.cu

may 8, 2015 12:05:40

The 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War will be commemorated the day after tomorrow, May 9. Given the time difference, while I write these lines, the soldiers and officials of the Army of the Russian Federation, full of pride, will be parading through Moscow’s Red Square with their characteristic quick, military steps.

Lenin was a brilliant revolutionary strategist who did not hesitate in assuming the ideas of Marx and implementing them in an immense and only partly industrialized country, whose proletariat party became the most radical and courageous on the planet in the wake of the greatest slaughter that capitalism had caused in the world, where for the first time tanks, automatic weapons, aviation and poison gases made an appearance in wars, and even a legendary cannon capable of launching a heavy projectile more than 100 kilometers made its presence felt in the bloody conflict.

From that carnage emerged the League of Nations, an institution that should have preserved peace but which did not even manage to stop the rapid advance of colonialism in Africa, a great part of Asia, Oceana, the Caribbean, Canada and a contemptuous neo-colonialism in Latin America. Barely 20 years later, another atrocious world war broke out in Europe, the preamble to which was the Spanish Civil War, beginning in 1936.

After the crushing defeat of the Nazis, world nations placed their hopes in the United Nations, which strives to generate cooperation in order to put an end to aggressions and wars, such that countries can preserve the peace, development and peaceful cooperation of the big and small, rich or poor States of the world. Millions of scientists could, among other tasks, increase the chances of the survival of the human species, with billions of people already threatened by food and water shortages within a short period of time. We are already 7.3 billion people on the planet. In 1800 there were only 978 million; this figure rose to 6.07 billion in 2000; and according to conservative estimates by the year 2050 there will be 10 billion.

Of course, scarcely is the arrival to Western Europe of boats full of migrants mentioned, traveling in any object that floats; a river of African migrants, from the continent colonized by the Europeans over hundreds of years. 23 years ago, in a United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development I stated: “An important biological species is in danger of disappearing given the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural life-sustaining conditions. I did not know at that time, how close we were to this.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, I wish to put on record our profound admiration for the heroic Soviet people, who provided humankind an enormous service. Today we are seeing the solid alliance between the people of the Russian Federation and the State with the fastest growing economy in the world: The People’s Republic of China; both countries, with their close cooperation, modern science and powerful armies and brave soldiers constitute a powerful shield of world peace and security, so that the life of our species may be preserved.

Physical and mental health, and the spirit of solidarity are norms which must prevail, or the future of humankind, as we know it, will be lost forever. The 27 million Soviets who died in the Great Patriotic War, also did so for humanity and the right to think and be socialists, to be Marxist-Leninists, communists, and leave the dark ages behind.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 7, 2015
10:14 p.m.