Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Mabhena
WHEN epidemics break out in the world civilisation politics quickly set in. So suddenly disease is blamed on certain people in certain places and their historical and cultural background is mobilised and used to explain illnesses and suffering. HIV and Aids for instance were reduced to the superstition and dirtiness of Africans that ate and had sexual intercourse with monkeys and other primates. China has not been spared the brunt of blame and condemnation since the Covid-19 was first identified in the city of Wuhan. Similarly, the Great Lakes Region of Africa has had the ebola virus explained as a sign of the dirty and primitive habits and lifestyles of the people that habit that area of the world. Illness and the diseases that cause it are not looked at as natural disasters or human problems but as faults and deficits of certain people and some places of the world. Hegemonic scientific information and knowledge are used to mobilise public and international opinion into a state of terror and scare that does not encourage thinking but inspires fear, panic and obedience to official scientific instructions and commands. In other words powerful world organisations and states take over the information about epidemics and maladies and command the world to obey certain quickly written rules and regulations. In this article I seek to explore the coloniality of knowledge and power that frequently surround the reportage and politics around illness at a world scale. It is no accident, I argue, that powerful and privileged discourses emanating from powerful centres tend to monopolise information and truth about illnesses, diseases and the epidemics. Epidemic and large-scale maladies, in that way, are imbricated in coloniality. Much like terrorism and the war against it that are together implicated in terror, illness and scientific knowledge and medication may not be simply innocent.
Illness as Metaphor
Regarding the feared illnesses, Tuberculosis and Cancer, Susan Sontag wrote a compelling essay: Illness as Metaphor, in 1978. In that seminal essay Sontag took full advantage of her powers as a critical theorist to observe how information about illnesses is powerfully- controlled for purposes of political power and profit-making. The fear of death from disease and the love for life by people are used to discipline them. Myths and fictions are created around diseases that keep societies in docile obedience to instructions and commands, most of which have nothing to do with the preservation of life but the promotion of societal control and the markets.
Sontag noted how the language used to describe and name diseases conceals rather than reveal the truth. Victims are, not in so many words, blamed for their illness and bludgeoned with scientific jargon and propaganda to obey instructions. Science as a business relies on problems such as disease for its existence and validation. In such a scenario, medical science and illness become not the exact opposites but guilty conspirators against humanity.
Governments of poor countries are instructed to spend on certain drugs and other interventions without asking questions or questioning the costs of the interventions. Epidemics create emergencies that do not permit thought and reasoned decision-making. Medical scientists are elevated to almighty gods and their wisdom and instructions are fetishised. That drug manufacturers and related scientists are in business and seek profit from maladies is not supposed to be thought of or discussed. To think of or question the criminal profit motives of scientists and drug manufacturers reduces one to a conspiracy theorist and a public enemy. Like in the most dogmatic of religions, governments and their peoples are instructed to be faithful, believe and follow the oracles of medical scientists and the urges of global pharmaceutical corporations that expeditiously dispense medicines that are frequently for prevention and not cure. Curative medicines are not good for business. Preventative ones are. Donors invest money and scientists their time and effort in researching to produce vaccines and mediatory medicines; not curative remedies.
The Trial of Thabo Mbeki
First as the Vice-President of South Africa and then as the President of the Republic Thabo Mbeki took on scientists and global pharmaceutical corporations on scientific facts about HIV and Aids. Mbeki questioned the exorbitant prices of the drugs that African governments were supposed to buy in bulk. Why was there monopoly in the manufacturing and selling of drugs? Where was the free market competition that would improve the quality and reduce the prices of the drugs? Mbeki asked. That the disease killed mainly the poor black people forced Mbeki to talk about the political economy of HIV and Aids, and the legacy of inequality bequeathed to South Africa by the history of apartheid that made the black poor primary candidates for disease and death.
Stubbornly, Mbeki and his government resorted to buying affordable drugs from India that worked the same way as the label and designer tablets from the USA. For questioning scientific information and knowledge Mbeki was called a dissident and HIV and Aids denialist that was a kind of genocidist that sacrificed so many South African lives on the altar of intellectual and political curiosity. Some HIV and Aids activists called Mbeki an intellectual pretender that punched above his weight questioning scientific authority.
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