This COVID-19 crisis has done more than any other previous crisis to expose the uselessness of African neocolonial governments.
We know there is a debate about whether COVID-19 is a natural virus or made in a laboratory, but one thing we know for certain—colonialism is the creator of COVID-19 and all other viruses and diseases that are killing African (black) people around the world.
Coronavirus is colonialism attacking the African Nation. Africans in Africa should not be fooled by reports in the bourgeois press that coronavirus is not killing us in great numbers, as predicted by the white bourgeoisie.
Colonial coronavirus is killing the African Nation in Brazil, the UK, France, Belgium and the United States. These are our brothers and sisters; the African Nation is one, be it in or outside of Africa.
Only the colonial powers have interests in creating viruses as biological weapons against colonized people, used for population and resource control. They kill us every other way; it should not be surprising that they weaponize germs to wipe us out.
That is why the African People’s Socialist Party has said all along that this is a colonialvirus. Our People’s War campaign is the appropriate response because it will lead us to victory with the creation of an international Black Power State. This is the only cure against international colonization of the African Nation.
Africa is identified with diseases imposed by colonialism
If Africa is today identified with diseases, it is because colonialism has been working for over 500 years to make Africa a parasite-ridden continent.
The white bourgeois press does not miss an opportunity to brand Africa as a continent harboring nearly all dangerous diseases to human kind.
Fortunately for us, all these lies are exposed by The Burning Spear, the mighty scientific and revolutionary voice of the African working class.
According to an article written by Nafha Ebrahimi in The New Vision, “All old infectious diseases that ravage Africa today originated from outside…”
The author lists numerous deadly diseases introduced to the colonies by the European colonists, “Captain Cook took typhoid to Hawaii in 1779. Spaniards took smallpox to Mexico in 1520 and by 1618 Mexico’s population had reduced from 20 million to only 1.6 million.
“Euroasia was also itself devastated by these epidemics as one community passed them over to another. …
“In Uganda, shortly after the arrival of European colonists, there was an explosion of epidemics of hitherto unknown diseases of smallpox, plague, gonorrhea and syphilis. Later measles, cholera and typhoid.”
Ebrahimi’s article continues, “Dr Albert Cook’s analysis of diseases at Mengo Hospital (in Uganda) from 1897 to 1902 showed that 80 percent of disease occurrence was syphilis.
“In 1839, according to British medical records, six infectious diseases accounted for almost all deaths in Britain: TB, typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery and smallpox. No record or history of such diseases exists outside Euroasia before the advent of European adventures.”
The point is clearly made that colonialism is the virus that we need to kill in order to eradicate all the other viruses which are kept alive by white power colonialism.
“European colonizers brought with them rinderpest, commonly known as cattle plague, which destroyed much of the indigenous cattle population, and jiggers, a small flea-like pest that burrows into feet, crippling the infected person and sometimes leading to gangrene,” Ebrahimi showed.
The consequence of these British-imported diseases into Kenya was devastating! Nanjala Nyabola writes in The Nation magazine that up to 40 percent of the Maasai population may have been decimated by disease during the colonial invasions.
At the same time, King Leopold II of Belgium who colonized the Congo was cutting off our hands and limbs in order to enrich the white nation with our labor and rubber, killing in the process a minimum of 10 million people.
Colonial, neocolonial States cannot create programs benefiting the African working class.
Colonial violence attacks every aspect of the lives of the colonized.
The colonial State in Africa never had a social or economic function, like planting and harvesting vegetables, cleaning the roads, helping children to go to school, etc.
So why should we expect them to carry out a medical mission amongst the African working class?
The U.S. army did not carry out a humanitarian mission for the African community during Hurricane Katrina. They always carry out a colonial mission against African people.
That is why the armies of Nigeria, Congo, Kenya and others see combating COVID-19 as the same thing as combating the people.
Our task is to expose that any military or police violence in the name of combating COVID-19 is pure colonialism; it is war against the people, war against Africa.
Organize The People’s War against COVID-19 as part of the war against colonialism
Under colonialism we have no healthcare system, no production of medicines that serve our health needs and not enough doctors or nurses being trained. When Africans become medical workers, they are poorly paid and the environment is so derelict that many medical workers end up immigrating to imperialist centers.
Since the end of formal direct colonial white rule, African neocolonial governments have been put in power to maintain the status quo. They are opposed to any kind of massive hospital building programs and any investment in healthcare for the people.
In most instances, the fraction of the colonial budgets allocated to health indicates the government is not fighting diseases in the country, particularly diseases that are easily curable amongst the masses of the people.
The militarization of COVID-19 by the governments of South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and DRC are just a few examples of the governments not in war against the coronavirus, but in a war against the African working class and poor peasants.
As Nanjala Nyabola summed up in an article in The Nation on May 11:
“As Covid-19 races its way across Africa, there are two stories happening at once. The first is of governments using their armies and militarized police to beat, threaten, and shoot their way to public health. This is the story of Kenyan police killing more people than the disease in the week after its first recorded case and of a pregnant woman dying on the street because Ugandan police would not let her motorcycle taxi take her to a hospital after curfew. It is the story of governments closing their borders too late, diverting money to security instead of hospitals and waiting for someone from somewhere else to save them.”
In the absence of African working class run governments in Africa, only we African workers can save ourselves. We need political and revolutionary organization and capacity. We need the African People’s Socialist Party and the African Socialist International across the African continent, and wherever African people have been forcibly dispersed, to stop the spread of the colonialvirus.
Be the solution!
Join the African People’s Socialist Party today at apspuhuru.org.
