Mental Health in West Africa is Not Your Next Tuskegee – Stay Away America

KUMASI, Ghana –There is an African proverb and it goes like this: If someone called Nakedness promises you a piece of cloth, you should listen to his name.

The New York Times has begun another dangerous propaganda. It is a propaganda that has the trimmings of the giant Pharmaceutical Companies (Big Pharma) at its core, directing public opinion in the United States Media, influencing African governments with bribes and using West Africa as a primary location for testing ineffectual medicines and unnecessary clinical trials.

The latest is an attempt by the New York Times to portray West Africa as a region teeming with mental health patients who can find next to no help; who need the salvation dose of western medicine in Big Pharma.

A recent article titled: The Chains of Mental Illness in West Africa, was quickly followed by another article, the next day, titled: In West Africa, a Mission to Save Minds.

The first article sought to first state a West African health issue and insinuate that governments in the region currently do nothing in terms of enacting constructive healthcare policies that address the special needs of mental patients. The second article is garnished with the appurtenances of The US Big Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex. That paper sought to medicalize a population in Africa in need of mental health medications from the west, hence justifying proposals to set up US sympathetic NGOs, Non-profits and other Agencies to arrive in West Africa, especially the Republic of Togo, to engage in clinical experimentation and medical trials.

The propaganda is exceedingly dangerous! The New York Times effort to lay down the unethical foundation upon which the future of US Big Pharma’s barbarous profits in mental health medication could be built in West Africa is nauseating.

Especially since the United States itself suffers from a great deal of mental health issues. The United States, is only 5 percent of the world’s people but has imprisoned more than 25 percent of the entire world prison population. One in three African American men is destined to go through Americas Prison Industrial Complex, which was fashioned by Ronald Reagan and carried to excess by Bill Clinton with his 1994 Crime Bill – throwing that Land of the Free idiom into the garbage of barbarism.

All for what? For absolutely no law enforcement reason. More than two-thirds of America’s prison population committed no violent crimes, which means, they posed no danger to anybody nor damaged anyone’s property.

Equally stupefying, since 2013, there have been at least 150 school shootings in America — an average of nearly one a week. In addition, each and every day, an average of 88 Americans are killed with guns.

The US is a mass shooting epileptic, throwing fits more often than any nation the world has ever known, and often leaving tens of innocent lives obliterated and their families in tatters. It cannot seem to find a solution to the convulsions – let alone a lasting cure – to the continued prevalence of mass killings by violent young white men who may or may not have mental health problems – Aurora, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Roseburg, etc.

This is why the peculiar treatment of mental health as a problem in West Africa, specifically Togo, by the New York Times over several articles draws highly raised and conscious eyebrows across the region.

In no way does the peculiarities and the timing of these articles published in the New York Times, no matter how suspicious and capitalistically minded, excuse the way West Africa has treated mental health issues in the past hundred or so years under which western Missionary and Colonial Occupation has come to hold sway in large parts of Government Healthcare Policy initiatives.

It is no secret that recent generations in West Africa – so far removed from the practices of traditional healthcare policy of yesteryear’s various institutes of Traditional African Medicine – do not think much of mental health problems, nor can they provide viable and constructive solutions for helping those in the most need.

A West African child who is performing poorly at school would rarely be diagnosed with a syndrome such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Perhaps for good reason. Nor would today’s Christianized or Islamized Africans consider a woman who kills her new-born daughter to be suffering from post-partum depression. No, they would insist, it must be witchcraft.

Of course, where our mentally unstable live and rot – in the neighborhood madman corner, as they would put it – is only associated with crazy people rummaging or rather, rampaging through garbage dumps. No one in Christian West Africa, nor anyone in Colonized West Africa, nor anyone who has conveniently forgotten Africa Communal Medical Practices invokes Schizophrenia to explain homicidal behavior.

And suicide? Well, our notions of suicide in West Africa are stereotypically portrayed in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: so inconceivable that loved ones – who are now prayer warriors extraordinaire in churches and mosques across the continent – either won’t touch the corpse or would rather curse and flog it to express their reproach, while the only remaining upholders of our African traditions, customs and rituals gather to bury their dead with their tails between their legs.

Many stories abound. Some of teenagers who became pregnant while away in Boarding Secondary Schools, and who could not return to their modern-African parents for fear of abortions or even worse, getting thrown out of the Church Choir, or the church in general. Some have only their grandparents in the villages to return to for comfort.

Such is what West Africa has become.

And may God forbid a person dies during an abortion. The church will leave a member to rot in the open unless the traditional family can uproot themselves from their humble and safe abodes of the village huts they built with their own hands, and come and collect their unremarkable dead – in the eyes of westernized Africa – back to the village to bury.

Yes, we have our problems in West Africa.

But we mince no words about them because we recognize that these problems are not entirely through our own actions. We have inherited a burden of complex society from our unfortunate colonial era – Africa’s Pale Ages. This inhumane era when Europeans came to Africa and left her nothing but the ruins of plunder, misinformation and disaster define much of what the makeshift democratic government we have in West Africa do.

The Triple Jeopardies of Colonialism, Slavery and Missionary Work (Christian or Muslim Evangelism), has left West Africa, in particular, devoid of her rich historical past – her medicine, he educational systems and her various religions.

More devastatingly, West Africa, which once dominated the Geo-politics of the world – Ghana, Mali and Songhai – has been left without her ancient pride.

So, yes, we have our fair share of problems in the twenty-first century. We fully recognize the shortcomings. However, it is not the place of the New York Times or the United States to point the figure.

West Africa is still grappling with a wild Ebola virus that killed more than 10,000 people and which we still haven’t gotten any useful answers concerning the involvement of a US laboratory in its outbreak. Many in the region still believe that an American laboratory willfully or coincidentally reintroduced the Ebola virus into West Africa through unapproved experiments with monkeys in Guinea. These allegations are not far-fetched.

A significant number of people continue to believe that the new hegemonic forces of imperialism patrolling the continent in the name of aide are to be implicated.

In numerous studies across the region, polls show that the deadly virus was created as part of an experiment to infect Africans on the continent – echoing the views of a local Christian preacher in Sierra Leone, who died of the virus himself, but who had stressed that Ebola was invented to mitigate Africa’s tripling population.

Much worse, the continent as a whole and in particular, Southern and East Africa, have also for decades being heavily burdened by an HIV virus that numerous African scientists still claim was brought into the continent by crook western scientists. That virus alone has claimed millions of lives in the past 30 years.

Invariably, the United States itself is not immune from this sort of ethical misgivings about the Big Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex that operates within the confines of its government. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment is an example in point. This infamous clinical study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama. These men were told by the US government that they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

But in fact, the 40-year study was a ploy – a plot to infect whole communities of people with a deadly disease. The researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of Penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they claimed they were studying in Black folk.

The notoriety of the US government and its Big Pharma Landlords goes before them. But the formulae of the propaganda that are used by both to establish the public trust they need in order to undertake these clinical trials and experimental treatments are becoming all too familiar.

West Africa is not the only place on earth that this sort of propaganda pushed by the New York Times, in this example, has reared its ugly head.

We are reminded of the genocide of Native Americans a few centuries ago, through diseases like Chicken Pox, before the United States of America as a nation was even constituted. And we are also conversant with the slaughters of Natives in Australia, and beyond, by these same violent empire erectors who poisoned several waterhole creeks where natives obtained their drinking and cooking water. For what?

It is from this historical premise that West Africa, especially the Republic of Togo, needs to understand the implications and repercussions of allowing such mental health studies, led by Big US Pharma, within their borders.

Togo and West Africa must stand firm, and refuse the introduction of US Pharmaceuticals – a ploy and a plot at best at catching unto a health issue in West Africa that is no business of the United States of America.

These ragtag scientists, philanthropists and aid workers have never been agents of good in West Africa nor any part of the African diaspora. The United Nations alone has killed more than 10,000 Haitians in the past few years when it singlehandedly introduced Cholera into the drainage basins of Haiti. That case is still pending and it’s one that if the New York Times could be a fair journalistic outpost, it would lose no sleep in thoroughly confronting.

More poignantly, we can only hope that the good people of the United States of America and Europe will also stand up to the propaganda that news outlets, like the New York Times, bring to their doorsteps for support. We hope that the good people of the United States will deny these mass murderers the public support they ask for. Or you, America, will have another disaster soon to weigh down on your God-given conscience.

West Africa has been here longer than then United States of America. And she will continue to be here long after the United States is gone!

We have problems too, just like any other region in the world, with mental health issues affecting a fraction of our population that require us to rethink new ways of addressing them. Our solutions in no way involves you, nor the New York Times.

We do not want a Tuskegee in West Africa – and that’s only what will bring. We solved our own problems, way before you, and we did better; we know how to take care of our own, unlike you; so, please, for God’s sake, leave us alone and go away with your Big Pharma and your barbarous unrelenting propaganda.

The United States of America is the Nakedness that is promising us in West Africa a piece of cloth. We refuse; we look at its name and we say: Thank you, but no.