CHAPTER 12

With the help of some of these intellectuals, we have learnt to analyse the acronym AIDS. The omnipotent apparatus told us that this is a disease. What we have come to understand is that it is a syndrome. It is uncontestable that AIDS stand for the - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Central to this is the proposition of immune deficiency (ID). There is no question but that there is such a condition with regard to human health.

Accordingly, there is no debate about the ID in AIDS.

AIDS also represents the concept - acquired. This is to distinguish acquired (secondary) immune deficiency from primary immune deficiency. Again, there is no controversy about this. It can be proved scientifically that there are both primary and acquired immune deficiencies.

This means that, so far, there is no dispute about the AID in AIDS.

Whether through primary or secondary factors, it is possible, and does happen, that immune deficiency develops. As a result of this deficiency, the body is unable to defend itself from a large variety of otherwise curable diseases. The collection of these diseases that, most typically, attack the person suffering from immune deficiency, together constitute a syndrome.

It is therefore clear that the concept and the reality of AIDS is one of the challenges that we, the Africans, have to deal with. We have to wage a war against the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). All this is simple to understand and to explain.

The omnipotent apparatus then intervenes. It says that immune deficiency is acquired solely from the HI Virus. It also says that AIDS is one disease, with one cause and one set of symptoms. It is not a syndrome that manifests itself in a number of diseases!

And, therefore, the 'syndrome' is deliberately designated as a 'disease'!

It is here that the problem begins, because the question must be answered whether we are dealing with a disease or a syndrome. This question arises despite what we quoted earlier, from what a French scientist said about AIDS not being a 'disease' in the 'ordinary' sense of the word, but a 'disease' nevertheless.

Marcuse foresaw a day when the intelligentsia would lose its fear of the omnipotent apparatus and act in the interests of the ordinary working people. Many African lives would be saved, if this intelligentsia picked up courage now, simply to state what is objectively scientifically correct with regard to the many matters that relate to AIDS.

As Africans, one of the matters we have come to understand is that the critical issue to which we have to attend is immune deficiency.

This means that we have to do everything possible to protect and strengthen our immune systems. These healthy immune systems would then be able successfully to discharge their mission of protecting our bodies from the diseases to which they are exposed.

This is the matter on which we are focused as we wage a relentless fight against AIDS. The objective we seek to achieve is that our immune systems must be strong enough to defeat everything that attacks the body, including HIV.

On the contrary, the omnipotent apparatus demands that we should focus on fighting HIV with anti-retroviral drugs. Despite the fact that these drugs cannot destroy this virus, which the omnipotent apparatus admits, nevertheless it demands that we must buy and use them.

These drugs also work further to weaken the immune system. Whether the omnipotent apparatus acknowledges this or not, a large volume of scientific information exists that proves the toxic, anti-immune effect of these drugs, as indicated above.

Certainly the US health authorities, as we have indicated, have had the courage publicly to admit that the drugs designed to fight the Virus, rather than strengthen the immune system to fight the Virus, are, indeed, highly toxic. These authorities have therefore laid down specific rules governing the prescription of these drugs.

It is perfectly clear that we, the Africans, cannot meet these conditions, which we explained earlier in this monograph.

From this point of view, we can deduce that the question that life has posed is simple and straightforward. It is - what should the focus of scientific research and development be!

Should it be the development of medicaments to fight the HI Virus!

Should it be the development of medicaments to strengthen the immune system so that the body can fight the HI Virus!

One of the problems with this is that the former creates the possibility for those who produce drugs to make a lot of money. The latter creates the possibility for those who produce drugs to lose a lot of money.

To ensure the success of the latter, in the interest of the people, guarantees that a war will be waged against these, to serve the interests of those who want to make a lot of money. This makes it certain that, ahead of us, we have a hard fight, unless, of course, we succumb to the notion that condoms and anti-retroviral drugs constitute the solution to our problems.

Conscious of the might of the omnipotent apparatus, Marcuse said:

" The price of progress is frightfully high, but we shall overcome. Not only the deceived victims but also their chief of state have said so."

It is clear that there are some within African society who are not prepared to pay this price. These think that the view that we shall overcome is mere and poisoned pie in the sky. This includes some of the intellectuals that Marcuse would summon to the barricades.

Writing of such an intellectual in 1912, the Irish poet and patriot, W.B. Yeats, said:

" I have had an interminable letter from a man called Strangways suggesting alterations in (the Indian poet Rabindranath) Tagore's (Yeats) translation. He is the sort of man societies like the India Society fatten. He is a manifest goose. I want (you) to get the society to understand that I am to edit this book & that they are (to) send me proofs as any other publisher would. I cannot argue with a man who thinks that 'the ripples are rampant in the river' should be changed because 'rampant' suggests to his goose brains 'opposition to something'. I am very busy - I work like a clerk - and I cannot carry on a correspondence with this man. I have replied politely saying I would go carefully through the text in proof but do please see that he goes back to his pond."

(Quoted in: "W.B.Yeats, A Life: I - The Apprentice Mage", by R.F. Foster, Oxford University Press, 1997.)

We too have our own geese, posing as writers, thinkers and scientists, who have been fattened by the equivalent of the India Society. To justify their feed, they work hard to build repression from within our ranks. It would be good if we could assist them to return to their ponds as quickly as possible, taking their goose brains with them.

These are the same cats that seek to befriend the elephant, of whom Mark Twain was ashamed.

Whether cats or geese, one purpose they serve for those who fatten them, is to medicalise poverty and underdevelopment. Thus problems that require a determined global effort to end African poverty and underdevelopment are presented, with African acquiescence, as problems that can be solved with condoms and drugs.

Given a bout of sustained public agitation, the affluent societies, the friends of the Africans, can meet the cost of the latter. Happily for them, this would unburden them of the responsibility to find the unimaginably larger resources that are required to address the former.

Once this was done, we, for our part, would have no basis to urge the affluent to act in solidarity with us. After all, we would have been rescued from a catastrophe and a cataclysm worse than our poverty and under-development - the HIV/AIDS pandemic!

The omnipotent apparatus has adduced all manner of argument precisely to lead us in this direction. Among other things, it has sought to ridicule and denounce even accessing of the Internet by some of our leaders, as the height of risible and "unscientific" behaviour.

It has also advanced the extraordinary argument that our political leaders in government should not comment on scientific questions. It demands - leave science to the scientists!

If our government heeded this absurd argument, it would then have to cede the exercise of the function of government to the specialists!

The logic of the argument of the omnipotent apparatus is - leave the economy to the economists!

Leave education to the pedagogues!

Leave agriculture to the agriculturalists!

Leave mining to the engineers and the geologists!

Leave social development to the sociologists and the anthropologists!

Leave defence to the generals!
Leave the environment to the ecologists!

Leave politics to the political scientists!

Leave health to the medical doctors!

Leave sanitation to.and so on!

Conscious of the need to access the best available scientific advice on the all-important issue of HIV/AIDS, without abandoning its responsibility to govern, our government did, in fact, constitute a Presidential International Scientific AIDS Panel, to help provide answers to the questions posed in this document.

The Panel has published its Interim Report, which includes the decisions it has taken to seek to answer these questions, scientifically. But because the scientists who make up this Panel decided to behave as scientists, the omnipotent apparatus decided to treat their Interim Report as part of the non-conformity it is committed to punish.

Because it could not denounce the scientists for behaving as scientists, it decided to kill and bury their Interim Report by silence. In this instance, it applied the principle it knows well - if it is not known, it does not exist!

Not known, though known, is precisely the fact that, contrary to what our government is being charged with not doing, it has, in fact, gone back to the science intelligentsia whose task it is to inquire, and asked them to inquire and to advise the government, as scientists.

But the omnipotent apparatus is intent that this known fact should become unknown. Thus will its campaign succeed to present our government as a monkey troupe of imbeciles, intent to trouble an established and comfortable world of ecclesiastic belief and practice.

It believes that unless it is stopped, this simian troop of African clowns will thrive and grow fat and important, feasting on dangerous ignorance.

We hope that the Panel of Scientists will do their work, loyal to their consciences as scientists and true to their courage as people of integrity. What they have to do is of the greatest importance to us as a people. Inevitably, for no fault of their own, what they have to do is both about science and politics.

For us, the recipients of their expert knowledge and advice, their work is about our health and our dignity as human beings. It is about helping to find answers to many unanswered questions about HIV/AIDS.