LONDON–As the death toll from Ebola increases in West Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an “international health emergency” after 1,000 people were infected and died from the virus in Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia, with reports that it is has spread to Cameroon as well.
Equally shocking has been the inability and the unwillingness on the part of neocolonial leaders in Africa to solve the crisis.
Ebola virus can be stopped
Although this is the worst outbreak of Ebola ever, it is not the first. Ebola virus outbreaks have been common since 1976, introduced by the U.S. government in the same way HIV was prior to the global population being aware of it.
The U.S. government has developed multiple ways of containing and stopping African resistance to its dominance.
It uses various methods from corrupting or killing African leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X to putting drugs in the African community as biological warfare.
Based on previous outbreaks of Ebola, research shows that although it is highly contagious and typically kills 90 percent of those infected, when the illness is detected early, the patient’s chance of survival is increased. In this current Ebola outbreak, the death rate has been dropped to roughly 60 percent due to early treatment.
Africa’s neocolonial governments have responded to the Ebola crisis by using more military repression on the ordinary African—blocking roads and stopping movements of Africans between African states.
In some areas they are doing house-to-house searches under the guise of hunting for Ebola victims.
They have also been unable to coordinate their effort to stop malaria which kills African children every minute.
According to statistics from the WHO, in 2012, malaria caused an estimated 627,000 deaths (with an uncertainty range of 473,000 to 789,000)—mostly among African children.
Imperialist news organizations reinforce the image of Africa being a backward place. Yet in the 11th century it was Europeans dying from diseases and fleeing oppression.
The slave trade and colonialism left our populations decimated and destroyed our economies and our capacity to organize to resolve our own problems.
In the 1960s, at the height of the independence struggle, Nkrumah struggled for a united African government, but was defeated with the help of African neocolonial forces such as Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today we have the neocolonial African Union (AU), which is funded and controlled by the U.S. and the European Union.
Despite health officials from Congo having nearly 40 years of experience containing the Ebola virus, the AU and the regional group ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) were unable to call upon their own resources.
Instead they are using the crisis to beg for more money from imperialist nations.
Currently, Britain’s National Health Service relies on the service of 1,418 doctors from Sudan, 5,695 doctors from South Africa, 3,936 from Nigeria amongst other African nations.
Findings published in the British Medical Journal in 2011 showed how the cost of training a doctor in Uganda was $21,000 and in South Africa was $59,000.
The report also calculated the economic loss to Africa. In total, the nine sub-Saharan countries in the study lost the equivalent of $2 billion as doctors left the Continent to work overseas while the UK benefited by the equivalent of $2.7 billion and America benefited by $846 million.
What this report and other equivalent research shows is that imperialist nations have no problem mobilizing skills from other nations to resolve their problems, whether it was Africans in the First Imperialist War liberating Britain and France from German occupation or African doctors helping to keep the health service of the UK going.
But what must be said about this latest (Ebola) biological warfare against Africans is that we know, despite what Europeans say, that they have historically deliberately brought infectious killer diseases to the non-white peoples of the world.
It was smallpox-infected blankets, along with the gun, that were used in the genocide of the Indigenous people throughout the Americas.
There were the decades-long experiments of deliberately infecting Africans in the U.S. with syphilis just so they could study it. And this was done at a predominantly African university in Tuskegee, Alabama with the African petty bourgeoisie well aware of the project.
And of course there is the creation of the AIDS virus and spreading that deadly disease throughout Africa.
And what about the years and years of chemical warfare against the heroic people of Viet Nam where they tried to poison all the vegetation in that country.
It was the Euro-Americans who dropped the atomic bomb on innocent Japanese civilians, murdering hundreds of thousands of them and leaving many, many more diseased.
And is there a number we can place on the African lives that the white man in South Africa, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, went through in his quest to perfect the heart transplant?
So, Yes! Ebola is theirs, too!
When Africa is free, the working class will demand not just reparations for the damages caused by the UK, U.S. or EU, but this leadership would mobilize all the African people back to Africa to solve all our problems.
They Have Stolen Everything and Given Us AIDS, Ebola and Oppression!
Organize to End the Imperialist Attacks, Biological and Otherwise!
