Anyway, the Britons should smarten up. These are the days of restitution. The wages of sin is death!!!! For years Europe underdeveloped Africa, impoverished her and took the best of her sons and daughters as slaves to North and South America. Until Europe humbles herself and accept blame for her ignoble role in Africam=, the heavy and just hand of nemesis may never leave her shores.

A quick reference to the woes of Pharoh and his Egyptian nation is an interesting parallel here. For 450 years, Egypt enslaved the Jews and used them to build the strongest empire that then was. And when the time was due, divine visitation rained judgement on Pharoh and his folk.

"He that is often rebuked and yet hardens his neck, will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy." (Prov. 29:1)

What is central in this discussion of 'suspecting the African other' is not the versity of statements but how they are sustained through inappropriate use of western cultural constructs to define and interpret epidemiology in general. These suspicions and accussing discourses and counter-discourses are ideological terrains used to insulate percieved uninfected other from the afflicted. Stereotypes and generalizations about particular populations percieved to be agents of unfortunes have provided a misleading backdrop for policy formation because they underestimate the diversity of cultures within seemingly homogenous sub-groups.

---Miki

In Britain cattles are fed offals from other cattles to cut cost. Food production become part of the American style botton line managerialism that puts econometrics before anything. Organic and traditional farming seem to be the popular proposal most reasonable people are putting foward. We Africans should learn from this.

Closely related to this food security issue is the recent upsurge of certain 'civilized' diseases among Africans. Most of us now eat at mcdonaldized 'fast' food places and this is blamed for the rise in diabetes etc.

This reminds whole thing reminds me of the 'Hunter and Wolve' aphorism by the Dead Prez. In short the story is about how hunters in the artic hunt wolves by buring the handle of a sharp knife in the ice so that only the blade is sticking out. They then pour blood all over the blade knowing the wolve will smell the blood. This is the artic food is scarce so the wolve smells blood and descends on what in his minds is food as he licks the blood he cuts himself, thinking he is really feasting until he kills himself. This is what is happening to us and the hunters blade of civilization that we are feasting on.

The AIDS epidemic, the BSE disease and now the mouth and foot dieses are from Africa, why us again. When will the European learn to live us alone. We have not forget the different disease that they brough to us all.

If no man can ask the Europeans for the sins committed against us, Jehovah God shall surely do. We shall prevail.

The bible book of Revelation states that Jehovah God will destroy those who are destroying the world.

That the European farmers has decided to do was is naturally unacceptable by feeding animals with animals, then they should bear their burden alone and not accuse Africans.

Azuka Osunde

Let's be reasonable in our judgement of the situation. We should educate others about Africa.
AS IT IS NOT REASONABLE TO SAY THAT ALL NIGERIANS ALL DRUG PEDDLERS, IT IS NEITHER REASONABLE TO SAY ALL THE WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE RACISTS!!!!!

I agree with you 100%. Every evil that befalls the world is blamed on Africa, yet we never polute the environment. We live in harmony with the earth, but the West and Europe because of their evil nature, seek to destroy the earth and put the blame on we Africans. They are going to pay. For all the evil they have inflicted on poor innocent Africans, from slavery to colonialsm. Also, Africans who have inflicted pain and suffering on fellow Africans are going to pay. Those who embezzle funds and starsh them away in these European banks. They will pay one after the other. There is no statute of limitation on evil.

This is another evidence to show that we have the right food in Africa. Ours is not contaminated and is not mixed with all sorts of chemicals. Instead of eating the nutritous food which made our fore fathers strong like gari, kenke, and akpu, ewedu, etc. some ignorant Africans seek junk food such as corned beef, hamburger and hot dog i scream, etc. as substitutes; thinking they are more 'civilized' than you and me. I laugh at them fools. Oloshi

So, I say to our African farmers, beware of the oyinbo people. Don't let them brain wash you into growing their style. We must go back to the days of our fore fathers when men lived like men and grew yams, cassava, corn etc. and the children never starved.
Colonial mentality should be a thing of the past from this day forth!

I read your piece with great interest and I agree with most things you said but I feel the need to urge you to take your contention to the fundamentals because the opposite of what you are trying to say could be read in your piece.

Try and consider this quote from a Western friend who said that 'the greatest admirers of the West are those who want to out do the West in their own game and they are all from the Southern hemisphere'.

This nuked-up militarist India that you refer to is in fact not India at all but a product of colonialism. If you know anything about Indian indigenous cosmology you will know that the belief system and consciousness driving the present 'Indian' 'progress' is fundamentally Western. Prominent Indian intellectuals have been writing about this so, this argument is neither original nor new.

Yes o! a lot of us are out doing them in their own knowledge processes but it is their own not ours. The funny thing is that we actually believe we are winning them by playing their game their way in a game they invented for themselves. The most meaningful arguments against Western dominance have all been made by Westerners like Wittgenstein, Derrida and most recently by Prof. Bruno Latour who wrote the book 'we were never modern'. It is people like Latour who are exposing the fallacies of Western science and knowledge processes - those things that we are now outdoing them in.

Afrocentics are more interested in reversing western categories of civilization and superiority. Civilization is about the content of a people consciousness, values and characters not their structural engineering skills. We must reject all western values and categories if we are to come out of our blindness. You can not get out of a large circle by constructing smaller circles within the large circle thinking you have escaped the large circle by getting into the smaller circle. The fundamental truth is you are still in the large circle.

dear patriot...welcome to the matrix

Thank you for your insight. No qualms whatsoever. You have the right to your opinion, as long as we agree to disagree. It's very hard for one who never recognized the west to outwest the west.
It is unequivocal that we are all in the circle, but, what matters is where one is positioned within the circle. Take care my brother or sister Riva.

Patriot

Dear Patriot,

Thanks once again. We are not in disagreement at all. I am only trying to take the discussion to the bottom line. I still believe our salvation lies in rejecting Western values, categories, religion, cosmology etc.

I do not believe we can escape the large circle of colonialism, slavery and mental slavery by buying into the same way of thinking that dominated us. This is exactly what happened to the West.

The Germanic/Anglo saxon groups were considered Barbaric by the Romans. The city of chester in the North of England was actually one of the living symbols of the brutal Roman domination of Britain but today English people are ignorantly showing it off as part of their Roman 'heritage'.

Westerners are not the descendants of Romans and Greeks, their were colonized by the Greco-Roman 'civilization' and they basically continued this vicious cycle of domination upon domination. I do not think we should join the dominionist band wagon. Who are we going to dominate? Our brothers in Benin republic?

I am a UK resident and blame lies on our own doorstep.
BSE arose in the UK because our farmers wished to increase profit by feeding dead animal material back to their livestock, plain and simple. This was asking for trouble.

I seem to remember media reports at the time of the BSE outbreak questioning the logic of feeding dead sheep remains back to cattle, particularly as the sheep carried diseases anyway.

No sane individual in the UK would believe that BSE came from Africa and your suggestion that we should look at the root cause of disease (in our own country) is absolutely right.

The current outbreak of Foot & Mouth in the UK has not been helped by the intensive farming mechanism that we apply here and whilst we can be certain that the disease has been imported (we are an island afterall) the control and spread of the disease lies in our hands and nobody elses.

Unfortunately, the number of people inhabiting our island (55 million) does create a demand for cheaper meat and we accept that the farming methods used today are a by-product of this demand. However, once disease becomes prevelant that method needs to be scrutinised and mistake learnt from.

What I find amazing about your response is the fact that you chose to ignore the general impression of these statements; the timing of this statements and in fact what the relevance of making statements like 'bringing in dead monkeys in suit cases' is, knowing the colossal prejudice that exist in the UK today.

At a time when the whole farming industry in the UK is in a state of emergency why should the focus be on
"Potentially diseased meat in their
luggage'

I do not want to get into how they arrived at the conclusion that the meat is 'potentially' diseased or why 'potentially' diseased meat should be the focus of people with ACTUALLY diseased meat
How is that 'a real problem that needs to be addressed' in such a dire situation?

Now you said 'potentially diseased meat', where is the smoking gun that justifies this singling out of west Africans in the popular press in the UK. Do you remember what the British government said during the early days of the BSC crisis it was accusing the continental press of generating moral panic - what do you call this?

Your response is exactly like the original report a gross case of ancient prejudice dressed up in pretentious semantic ambiguities - a classical case of framing or packaging of information to create an implicit impression.

Where is your evidence that ‘the disease has been brought into the UK from somewhere else (maybe Africa, but maybe Eastern Europe and maybe Asia)’ or is it another case of ‘even though there is no evidence’.

I can tell you that there have been no media reports I am aware of in the UK that suggests any link between the current Foot & Mouth crisis and Nigeria or any other African country for that matter.

What is clear though, is that as an Island, if Foot & Mouth cannot lie dormant for 40 years and assuming the disease has not escaped from a laboratory storage facility somewhere, the disease must have been imported from foreign shores.

We have a rather odd political viewpoint in Europe. We have an injected vaccination for foot and mouth but European political policy states that to use it would imply that foot and mouth is present in Europe so it is not used. This was reported in the UK media recently.

Your comments on diseases being introduced to Africa whilst sounding slightly paranoid do raise a question many UK residents have been asking for some time, namely:

If HIV & Aids came from Africa, why is it that it has only done so in the last twenty years or so?.

Many of us have wondered if HIV & Aids was manufactured by mankind rather than originating naturally. If one looks at HIV & Aids as a biological weapon, it is quite an effective one isn't it?.

That said, I do not believe that the disease or any other were deliberately spread by westerners providing vaccination jabs for polio. Such a suggestion is rather insulting to the men & women who devote their lives to trying to rid world of these devastating diseases.

Western medical practice includes the use of sterilsed needles and this practice is presumably enforced during the vaccination procedures for Polio in Africa.

We still live in a racist world, like it or not and I dare say there are individuals in all countries who like to make use of bullitin boards such as yours to aire their racist views. We should all strive to ignore such sentiments. They have no value in the minds of inteligent individuals either in the UK or in Africa.

I shall continue visting your site with great interest.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004562447833553&rtmo=kCC11oJp&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/et/01/3/2/nfnm202.html

and this one

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004562447833553&rtmo=kCC11oJp&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/et/01/3/2/nfnm02.html

I agree with you entirely that this article is predjudiced, inflammatory and just plain stupid. What I wanted to say is that it's not representative. I live in the UK, I've been following the progress of the disease quite closely, and the focus in the media isn't on this story. The only place I've heard this story is in this article.

>Your response is exactly like the
>original report a gross case
>of ancient prejudice dressed up
>in pretentious semantic ambiguities -
>a classical case of framing
>or packaging of information to
>create an implicit impression.

I hope I'm not being ambiguous. I think that the article was wrong to use this topic to imply that visitors from Nigeria or Ghana were somehow responsible for this epidemic. There is no evidence whatsoever that they were.

>Where is your evidence that ‘the
>disease has been brought into
>the UK from somewhere else
>(maybe Africa, but maybe Eastern
>Europe and maybe Asia)’ or
>is it another case of
>‘even though there is no
>evidence’.

Foot & Mouth is contagious. Western Europe has been free for many years, so the recent outbreak must have arrived from somewhere else. The strain of the virus that is causing the problems in the UK is the same as a strain which has caused recent outbreaks in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Therefore it's probable that it came in from somewhere in these regions.

And Nigerian banned import of livestock products from the EU because of foot and mouth disease - this is the fact.

THE BOTTOMLINE IS THIS, ANY ANIMAL WITH FOUR OF TWO LEGS IN EUROPE CAN BE ROASTED LIKE SUYA FOR ALL I CARE.

HAVE THEY HEARD OF ANY AFRICA DYING FROM BSE OR EGOLI OR IS AFFECTED BY FOOT AND MOUTH DIESEAS. THIS IS WHAT FELA KUTI SAID IN ONE OF HIS HINTS THIS NA OYIBO WAHALA.

DAFE

>Thank you for the education Eze.
>Unfortunately not all europeans are
>as knowledgeable, but we must
>continue to educate them as
>we have been doing from
>the beginning of time. Where
>they want to humiliate us,
>we must educate them. I
>hope they can learn from
>your lessons and curb their
>disease.

http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=3%2F27%2F2001&PrgID=2

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Illegally Imported Meat Suspected Cause of England's Foot-and-Mouth Epidemic Wednesday, 03-28-01

Investigators have traced the source of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in England to swill fed to pigs on a farm in northern England. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown says it's not clear how the disease was introduced into the swill, but the focus is on illegally imported meat from Asia. The highly contagious livestock disease was first detected in Britain last month and has gone on to establish footholds in the Netherlands, France and Ireland. Britain has 669 confirmed cases of the disease, but the outbreak has not yet peaked, Brown told Britain´s House of Commons yesterday. Industry experts say Britain long has been vulnerable to meat traders hoping to sell cheap beef, lamb and pork smuggled from countries where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic. Hear more about how investigators go about tracking the source of such a disease as All Things Considered host Robert Siegel talks with Lester Crawford, director of the Georgetown Center for Food and Nutrition Policy.

Copyright © 2001 National Public Radio.

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