The last time I went to see a doctor, I almost walked out right in the middle of my appointment. My primary care doctor had referred me to a “specialist” so that I could get some insight into a health concern, but instead of receiving answers and direction, all I got was condescension and obvious indifference. After my less than five-minute consultation, I made it known to the doctor and her office that I wouldn’t be returning–and I began to process my experience. It wasn’t the first time I had been treated this way by a healthcare professional, and I knew that my experiences were not out of the ordinary.
As with every other system under colonialism, the healthcare system in the United States, and around the world, with few exceptions, is not there to address the needs of African people. Medical doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals have historically willingly participated in using their skills and specialized training to attack African people for the benefit of the colonizer population. Many of us may be familiar with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service in their attack on the African community in Alabama, but may not be familiar with Wouter Basson, aka “Doctor Death,” who led Project Coast, a chemical and biological weapons program that targeted African people in Occupied Azania (South Africa) from 1981 to the mid-1990s.
And what about Robert Koch, a German doctor who “transformed East Africa into a living laboratory” developing and overseeing medical concentration camps during the sleeping sickness epidemics of the early 20th century? Remember the two French doctors who suggested on live television that a potential vaccine for coronavirus should first be tested on our people in Africa? And it’s not just a case of a few bad apples doing obviously horrific things. In an article titled “Doctors Still Believe Black People Don’t Feel Pain; And It’s Being Taught in Medical School,” authors cited a study published in 2016 that showed that about half of the white medical students and residents surveyed held false beliefs about biological differences between Africans and Europeans, including the belief that Africans feel less pain. The medical students and residents in the study were also “more likely to suggest inappropriate medical treatment for black patients.”
In another study, researchers examined data from 14 previously published studies of pain management in American emergency rooms (ERs) that altogether included 7,070 white patients, 1,538 Indigenous patients, and 3,125 black patients. Compared to white patients, the analysis found that Africans were 40 percent less likely, and Indigenous patients were 25 percent less likely to receive medication to ease acute pain. This explains among other things why comrades and family members who suffer from sickle cell anemia face humiliation and contempt, accusations of being drug-addicted, and are often denied appropriate pain medication when they seek medical care or rightfully advocate for themselves in doctors’ offices and hospitals.
So what’s the solution? African Internationalism, the political theory developed by Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and leader and founder of the Uhuru Movement, helps us to understand that the primary contradiction in the world today is colonialism. We live in a world that is split between oppressed and oppressor nations. And African people, no matter where we may find ourselves in the world, are a part of the oppressed African Nation. We are a dominated people who have been robbed of our right to self-determination. We do not currently have the power and control of the systems needed to feed, clothe, house, educate and take care of the health and well-being of our people–and instead are at the mercy of systems set up by the colonizer nation to keep us sick, uneducated and in a weakened position to fight back.
So, if we know that, we also know that the answer is to move towards recapturing our capacity to do those things for ourselves, to build the organization that can propagate the ideas, build the programs and institutions that can allow us to capture and grow our self-reliant capacity immediately, even as we make the wider political struggle necessary to win our total freedom which would be consolidated in a Black Power State.
The organization we need has already been established – the African People’s Socialist Party. It’s more than 50 years old now and has built and leads the Uhuru Movement which includes mass organizations such as the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP); with the mission to win African people around the world to contribute our skills toward building African community-led development programs in the areas of agriculture, education, healthcare, disaster preparedness and emergency response. Over the last 16 years, AAPDEP has built important healthcare programs such as our infant and maternal health project that successfully helped to train African midwives and traditional birth attendants and deliver more than 300 babies without the death of the mother or child.
attendants and deliver more than 300 babies without the death of the mother or child. PHOTO: THE BURNING SPEAR
We have trained hundreds of African community healthcare workers on the prevention and identification of water-borne diseases and Ebola virus disease, and provided life-saving information, education and support to our people through our free COVID telehealth program that lasted for almost two years during the coronavirus pandemic. I want to salute AAPDEP’s Medical Advisory Team Member, Dr. Loretta King. Based in St. Louis, Dr. King is a family nurse practitioner with more than 30 years of nursing experience. She has worked in emergency care, ICU, Dialysis, Women’s Health and Primary Care. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and despite an already tremendous workload, Dr. King volunteered to help build and then serve as the lead provider for AAPDEP’s COVID-19 telehealth program, giving freely of her own time while also recruiting other African medical workers to do the same.
Dr. King never said no to an appointment. She always made herself available, even at odd times, in order to accommodate appointments from Africans in other parts of the world. The feedback we received from those who were helped through our program was that Dr. King always made them feel heard and supported and that they were provided with the education and insight they needed to take care of themselves or a loved one who was ill with COVID.
We know that there are many Dr. Kings out there, and AAPDEP intends to recruit them to bring their skills to the African Nation and continue to build programs that counteract the negative impacts of colonialism on the health of our people. More than that, though, we intend to win all that can be won to become conscious participants in the wider African Liberation Movement that has as our goal ending the colonial oppression and domination of our people altogether.
