So it has come to this. A protest in Kenya, ostensibly over a US-funded Ebola centre, turns deadly. The UK government, in a rare display of moral clarity, warns against ‘neo-colonial health policies.
’ One almost hears the ghost of Lord Lugard chuckling from the grave. But let us dispense with the polite fiction that this is about public health. It is about power.
It is about the endless, tragic cycle of the West trying to ‘save’ Africa from itself, and Africa, quite rightly, resenting the saviour. The Victorian missionaries brought Bibles and quinine. Today they bring PCR tests and contract researchers.
The result is the same: a simmering resentment that occasionally boils over into violence. The US Ebola centre, for all its good intentions, stands as a monument to a relationship that has never been equal. The Kenyan protesters, however misguided their methods, have at least grasped this essential truth.
The UK’s warning, meanwhile, is a masterclass in hypocrisy. For it was British medicine, after all, that first carved up the continent with quinine and gunboats. We tut-tut at American neo-colonialism, conveniently forgetting our own history.
The real scandal is not that a protest turned deadly. The real scandal is that we are still having this conversation in the 21st century. The Fall of Rome was preceded by a similar arrogance: the belief that barbarians could be pacified with bread and circuses.
Today, our bread is antiretroviral drugs; our circuses are NGO photo ops. The barbarians, it seems, are at the gates once more. And they are not accepting our prescriptions.
