Tuesday, May 03, 2005

The Other Side of HIV/AIDS

I received this email from a friend about what Maathai (Kenya's new Nobel Peace Prize winner) said about HIV/AIDS before she received the Nobel Peace Prize. From this article she thought HIV/AIDS was a hoax; however, after she won the Nobel Peace Prize, she started singing a different tune. Talking about flip-flopping, this woman is now talking out both sides of her mouth. It just goes to show you, with the right price tag, most people can be easily bought off. I guess she is now saying, the hell with the rest of the people, so what if they die, I got paid. I tried linking to the original article, but they have blocked all access to the article.

Maathai: AIDS made to kill blacks
AFP 11 oct 04

KENYA'S new Nobel Peace Prize winner believes the virus causing AIDS was a deliberately created biological agent unleashed on Africans.

"Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that," Wangari Maathai told a news conference a day after winning the prize. Ms Maathai, an ecologist and trained biologist, became the first African woman to win the prize on Friday for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation.

"Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet.

"It's true there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not have invaded Iraq.

"We invaded Iraq because we believed that Saddam Hussein had made, or was in the process of creating agents of biological warfare," said Ms Maathai, also Kenyan deputy environment and natural resources minister, who has gained a reputation as a fearless speaker.

"In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare," she added.

"Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.

" Africa accounts for 25 million out of the estimated 38 million people across the world infected with HIV, and the vast majority of infected Africans are women, according to UNAIDS estimates.

In August Kenya's daily Standard newspaper quoted Ms Maathai saying HIV/AIDS was created by scientists for the purpose of mass extermination.

"We know that the developed nations are using biological warfare, leaving guns to the primitive people," the Standard quoted Ms Maathai as telling a public workshop in the central Kenyan town of Nyeri on August 30.

"AIDS (is) not a curse from God to Africans or the black people.

"It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did".


This is the start of the email

Hotep sisters and brothers:

I heard Wangari Maathai on the radio shortly after she won the Nobel Peace prize say that she "never said" the part about HIV being biological warfare to destroy blacks. She was on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. I heard it, I taped it and it just so happens that Democracy Now has each of their interivews transcribed from every broadcast and can be found on the democracynow.org website. here is what I heard her say with my own ears and the web address so you can read the entire interview for yourself as well. I think you can also stream it and listen to it:

"WANGARI MAATHAI: Well, I would like to say that I never said that it was an agent created to destroy the black people. That, I don't know where it came from. And I have stated quite clearly that I didn't say that, and I don't believe it. I am not an expert on AIDS. I don't even know where it came from, and I'm waiting like everybody else to be guided by the scientists..."

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/1444212&mode=thread&tid=25

So, we have a couple of questions we could ask ourselves as critical Afrakan thinkers. Look at the dates. The article at the top of the email from the Australian Herald Sun (heraldsun.news.com.au) is dated October 11 2004. It quotes her as having made these statements in August, presumably of the same year. Don't they announce the Nobels in January? The Democracy Now! interview was on March 8 2005--after the award. Do you think she is back-tracking now that she won that award? Or do you think that maybe the Australian reporters spun her words to make her look like a dangerous, whyte-hating "extremist" in the eyes of her white friends and the people who were considering her for the award? Certainly it would have been known that she was being considered for it in October of '04. When whytes don't want us to have something they think is important or that they use to reinforce in the minds of the world their superiority in all things human (like a Nobel Prize), it is their way to accuse assimilators and house negresses of saying things that Afrakans should be saying, to make them look like they can't be trusted by the masters.

Whatever happened, as far as this Nobel Prize winning thing is concerned, it is important for us to note what Chinweizu, one of our brilliant and shining Afrakan fathers, wrote about it years ago. Two of those essays can be found in the collection Decolonizing the African mind, Published in 1987. In the first essay entitled "Pan-Africanism and the Nobel Prize," he says:

"Actually, I've never thought much of the Nobel Prize. In 'Olympics, Nobel Prizes and the Black World' (Africa, October 1980), I spelt out why I consider it undesirable for Africans--namely, its role as a betwitching instrument for Euro-imperialist intellectual hegemony, and the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes, all by themselves, should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the diverse cultures of the whole world...

...I don't see why any self-respecting African, who understands the cultural role of the Nobel Prize, should lust for a moment for the damn thing. (pp. 175-176).

The pro-Western bias of the Nobel Prize may elude those who accept its image as the world prize without peer...[but] What is judged excellent are works which a committee of Swedes considers significant for Western values and Western power. Each category of the prize can be shown to operate in that way. The peace prize is for preserving the peace on Western terms, or for engineering a battle truce on terms compatible with the intrests of the West, or for limiting the damange to Western interests from insurrections by the oppressed. Thus, when rebellios seriously challenge Western hegemony and white racism, the Peace Prize is brought out to manipulate them into channeles least threatening to Western power. Cases in point are the awards to Martin Luther King, Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu (pp. 177-178).

"An unexamined garland, they say, is not worth wearing: it could turn out to be a noose for leading us astray and strangling us..."(p. 176)

And now Wangari Maathai can be added to the list of people who, while ostensibly speaking for blacks, protects the interests of the power structure that is rewarding her. For a prize worth in excess of "one million euros"--as Amos Wilson also said about Colin Powell--"you know she can't be rallying the slaves." When you read the Democracy Now! transcription or listen to the show itself, and visit her website (http://www.wangarimaathai.org/news.php), you will see things that sound perfectly reasonable--if you don't know anything about being an Afrakan and the dire necessity of returning to it. It sounds as though anybody could be speaking about Africans--asking for Western pharmaceutical medicine for AIDS and the like. Her website is also rife with terms and phrases that you would hear coming out of any whyte mouth. Please see for yourself--and because each of our choices indicates the content of our consciousness, please don't miss the fact that beneath that gelee around her head lies straightened, lightened hair (that does nothing to accentuate her lovely features).

in Mer of Afrakan people,
Kheru
posted by Cynthia   Permalink| Comments(2)|

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