Baffour Ankomah
L et’s start this week by looking abroad before coming home. We all know Donald John Trump, the 45th and current President of the USA. If Trump were African, they would say Africans are daft to have elected him president. But Trump won the presidential election in the USA!! He is the man who calls us “shithole countries”. Last Wednesday, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and one of his fiercest defenders who worked with him on business and personal deals for 10 years, told the Congressional Oversight Committee in Washington DC that Trump “is a racist” who once told him that black people were “too stupid” to vote for him.
According to Cohen: “The country has seen Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries shitholes. In private, he is even worse. He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole’. This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States.
“While we were once driving through a struggling neighbourhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. And yet I continued to work for him,” Cohen said, his face ashen.
Well, what can one say about Trump? He seems to have an issue with black people. But his type of species does not deserve to be president of any country. That he was in fact voted as president by the Americans shows the depth that the once great “God’s own country” and its people have sadly sunk. So let me concentrate on the here and now.
Dancing with wolves
Last week this column ended at where I was retelling Ben Geer’s narration of how the Americans diverted a contingent of their soldiers who were returning home from Vietnam to fight in Rhodesia. For the benefit of those who missed last week’s column, let me get Geer’s original words. (Geer is a white South African mercenary who fought for Ian Smith’s government against ZANLA and ZAPU. In 1997, he published a book titled Something More Sinister, recounting those days).
Geer tells the story of how in late December 1979, while he was in the USA, a chance remark to him by a former American soldier who fought in Vietnam prompted the writing of his book.
“The soldier stated that he had been one of a contingent of US troops en route from Vietnam who had been actively deployed in the Rhodesian Bush War. They were given no reasons for being in Africa. Engaging the local militia, and having killed a number of persons on their march over a number of days to the coast, they were picked up by the US navy and shipped home. The soldier was not aware of any further involvement in Rhodesia by the US. What were they doing there?”Geer asks.
Dear reader, please remember Geer’s words as you journey with me through this piece. He says the Americans, their long noses bloodied in Vietnam, came here, in Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) to fight against the nationalists who were fighting the “Hondo” that brought independence to Zimbabwe in 1980.
The American soldier said they “were given no reasons for being in Africa. Engaging the local militia [presumably ZANLA], and having killed a number of persons on their march over a number of days to the coast, they were picked up by the US navy and shipped home. The soldier was not aware of any further involvement in Rhodesia by the US.” So, Geer asks: What were they doing there [in Rhodesia]?”
This is a very important question whose significance will become apparent later in this piece, so please bear with me.
But before I go further, allow me to ask: How many Zimbabweans remember or even know that during the “Hondo”, Ian Smith’s government operated a Biological Warfare Unit? And for what purpose? We shall see in due course.
Cheap black bodies
Many years ago, a knowledgeable source told me in London that the countries that had the most advanced medical research and practice in the world – and he specifically mentioned the USA and South Africa – had access to cheap black bodies for medical experimentation. That remark explained very well how South Africa came to have one of the most advanced medical systems in the world – even to the extent of achieving the world’s first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town as far back as December 3, 1967.
Both the USA and South Africa have a surfeit of black people – over 40 million black people live in the USA and the same number live in South Africa – the two countries that had “segregation” (USA) and “apartheid” (South Africa) as official policies.
Remember, segregation and apartheid are synonyms, and those two countries could do anything with the bodies of their black people.
If you don’t believe it, hear it from Alexander Jones, the apartheid era operative who says he and his colleagues at the South African Institute of Maritime Research (SAIMR), which masterminded coups and other violence across Africa in the 1970s and 80s, deliberately spread the HIV virus in the Southern African region to wipe out black people.
Jones was interviewed live on camera for the recently released Danish/Swedish-made documentary, “Cold Case Hammarskjöld”, which investigates the case of the former UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a mysterious plane crash near Ndola, Zambia, in 1961. Jones told the filmmakers, Mads Brügger (Danish) and Göran Björkdahl (Swedish): “We were at war. Black people in South Africa were the enemy.”
Jones confessed that he and his SAIMR colleagues “spread the HIV virus” in the 1980s and 90s under the command of their leader Keith Maxwell, who wanted a white majority country where “the excesses of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have no place in the post-Aids world”.
Maxwell died in 2006. People who knew him say he had no medical qualifications but operated clinics in the poor black neighbourhoods of Johannesburg. His headquarters was at Putfontein where his signpost with his name “Dokotela Maxwell” still hangs in front of the building where he operated. One local shopkeeper said Maxwell had given “false injections”. Jones insists that Maxwell used the cover of a doctor to do “sinister experimentation”.
Sources say SAIMR was linked to South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) programme, which had links with Rhodesia’s Biological Warfare Unit.
Jones told the filmmakers: “We were involved in Mozambique, spreading the Aids virus through medical conditions”. He revealed that he visited one research facility in the 1990s that was used “for sinister experimentation” and that the intent was “to eradicate black people”.
“What easier way to get a guinea pig than [when] you live in an apartheid system?” Jones says in the film. “Black people have got no rights, they need medical treatment. There is a white ‘philanthropist’ coming in and saying, ‘You know, I will open up these clinics and I will treat you.’ And meantime [he is] actually the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Damning evidence At this juncture, I would like to take readers back in time to 1970 to see the connections I am trying to communicate in this piece. In 1970, the US Department of Defence (known by its metonym “Pentagon” because of the shape of its headquarters in Arlington County, Virginia) went to the Congressional Appropriations Committee and asked for a grant of $10m to pay for research into “an organism that does not naturally exist but which will affect the immune system”. This organism, the Pentagon said, would be part of America’s chemical and biological weapons. The Pentagon told the Appropriations Committee that the Soviet Union, America’s mortal enemy of the Cold War era, was doing exactly such a research and if the Americans did not follow suit, it would be a disaster if the Soviets were the first to get such an immune-systemdestroying weapon.
The Appropriations Committee was frightened enough to approve the grant. The Pentagon assured the Committee that in 10 years’ time from 1970, “an organism that does not naturally exist but which will affect the immune system” will be ready as part of America’s CBW weapons.
Exactly 10 years to the dot, “an organism that [did] not naturally exist but which affected the immune system” was identified in 1980 to be the cause of a “syndrome” first identified in gays in San Francisco, USA. The “syndrome” was originally called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), which later, by some rare magic, morphed into HIV-Aids and conquered the world, particularly Africa.
Of course, some people, intoxicated by Western propaganda, will call what I am narrating here “conspiracy theory”. But they should wait for the “conspiracy facts”, because the record of the Pentagon request to the 1970 Appropriations Committee is kept in the Congressional Library in Washington DC.
During the 1990s, when the USA and its allies were trying hard to pin the origin of HIV-Aids on Africa, after they had unsuccessfully tried to pin it on Haiti, the London-based New African magazine, of which I was editor, got a copy of the congressional record and we published it as evidence that there was something more sinister to HIV-Aids than the medical orthodoxy, based in the West, was telling us.
More questions than answers
There are many serious questions that can be asked here, including: (a) After receiving the $10m grant, where exactly did the Pentagon do its research – was it done only in the USA or abroad? (b) If they did part of it abroad, where exactly abroad? (c) And was the research successful?
Nobody has any hard evidence as yet, but circumstantially, we can say the Pentagon research was successful because exactly 10 years after the $10m grant was given, “an organism that does not naturally exist but which affects the immune system” was identified to be the cause of GRID, a new syndrome that first attacked gays in San Francisco in 1980.
But let’s come back home to Zimbabwe while we keep the Pentagon’s 1970-1980 “research” in view. I am just trying to explore the “linkages” between the Pentagon “research” and the Southern African region, though I don’t have any hard evidence in my hand.
But whatever you do, please don’t forget the year 1976 – it is a very critical year in the annals of both Rhodesia and South Africa.
Now, if the availability of cheap black bodies lead to advanced medical research and practice, the most likely place that the sort of the 1970- 1980 Pentagon research could be linked with was Apartheid South Africa, and by extension its sister-nation Rhodesia.
Incidentally, these two “white” African countries happened to be supported to the hilt by the USA and its allies despite the imposition of UN sanctions against Rhodesia and later South Africa, and despite South Africa and Rhodesia’s oppression and suppression of their black people. Crucially, these two “white” African nations also happened to be the only sub-Saharan countries that had advanced CBW programmes.
Next week, we shall continue to explore Geer’s questions in a bid to get to the bottom of Alexander Jones’ confession that apartheid-era operatives spread Aids in the region, and if this had anything to do with the high devastation that Aids wrought in Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe.
