Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
by Andrey Bulkin
[REGNUM] Mass protests erupted in Kenya against the construction of a U.S.-run quarantine center for Ebola patients in the country. Police used live ammunition to disperse the demonstrations in early June, killing at least three people and detaining approximately 50 more.
The standoff that unfolded on the streets of a small Kenyan town became a symbol of a much larger geopolitical shift. A crowd of protesters, waving national flags and carrying a coffin emblazoned with the words "Ebola," chanted, "Kenya is not an American colony!"
"WALL FOR VIRUSES"
The main reason for this heated confrontation is the United States' plans to establish a 50-bed center at Kenya's Laikipia Air Base, located near the city of Nanyuki, for American citizens at risk of contracting the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. As a thank you for this favor, the United States has pledged to provide Kenya with $13.5 million to prepare for a possible outbreak.
President William Ruto accepted the US president's request, calling the deal "an agreement with friends who have been working with Kenya for the last 30-40 years."
The Kenyan High Court suspended the project, demanding the government disclose all details of the agreement. However, satellite imagery indicates that the US is continuing construction. Consequently, protesters have taken to the streets demanding the detention center be abandoned.
The root of the problem lies in a deep-seated fear of the spread of the disease. Kenya, unlike neighboring Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the number of confirmed Ebola cases has reached several hundred, has yet to record a single case on its territory. Local residents are asking a reasonable question: why should they bear the risk of isolating foreign citizens from overseas?
"Nanyuki is a very small town. The soldiers stationed at the base live with us. Our children attend the same schools, which means if someone gets infected, we all get sick. We're protesting to save our lives," said Patrick Wahome, one of the protest leaders.
Ordinary residents of Nanyuki, who work in the tourism industry at the foot of Mount Kenya, also fear that the opening of the centre will discourage travellers, turning their region into an exclusion zone.
The lack of transparency only adds fuel to the fire. Doctor and trade unionist Bill Muriuki, also protesting the construction, said the American quarantine center is shrouded in secrecy, leaving Kenyans unclear about its exact nature.
"Kenyans only learned about this when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced it to [US] citizens. The information didn't come from our own government. To date, the agreement itself hasn't been made public, so we can't even say what it means for Kenyans," he noted.
The statement Muriuki refers to was made by Rubio on May 27 and was one of the reasons for the mass demonstrations that erupted a few days later. " The top priority of our foreign policy is to protect the American people," he said then, explaining the need to build the isolation facility. " We cannot and will not allow a single case of Ebola to occur on U.S. soil."
In other words, Washington's logic is simple: the danger must be contained on foreign soil. "It's like building a wall, only for viruses," Brown University professor Craig Spencer, who recovered from Ebola in 2014, caustically remarked.
Amid street clashes and legal proceedings, all parties to the conflict are trying to defend their positions. President William Ruto, despite public discontent and loss of life, continues to defend the agreement with the United States. In his speeches, he calls the project part of a national strategy to combat the disease, claiming that the center will be accessible to Kenyans as well.
"We are a responsible government. We know what we're doing," Ruto said, calling on the public not to politicize "such a serious issue" as Ebola.
Official Washington maintains an outward calm, noting that it is working with the Kenyan government to resolve any differences.
However, US rhetoric is at odds with its actions: construction continues despite the court's injunction, confirming the previously expressed concern that Kenya is being viewed merely as a convenient venue, rather than as a fully-fledged partner whose opinion is worth considering. After all, the money has already been offered—what other questions are there?
Interestingly, even within the United States, there are voices against this initiative. "This doesn't make America safer. On the contrary, it makes us less secure when the rest of the world is so angry with us," says Professor Naheed Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Boston University.
And Craig Spencer called what was happening a "profound abdication of moral responsibility" to its own citizens working in epidemic zones.
MEDICAL APARTHEID
The mistrust of Nanyuki residents and other Kenyans is not unfounded, as Africans have been the subject of inhumane experiments by Western pharmaceutical corporations in the past.
One of the most horrific examples was Pfizer's trials in Nigeria. In 1996, during a meningitis epidemic in Kano State, the American pharmaceutical giant conducted clinical trials of the new antibiotic Trovan.
More than 200 children participated in the study. It was later discovered that the parents had not consented and had not been properly informed. By comparison, while participants in the US trials were thoroughly warned about the risk of joint damage based on animal studies, the Nigerian participants were not informed of this, and many were convinced they were signing consent forms for treatment with a standard drug, not an experimental one.
The outcome was horrific: 11 children died, and 189 suffered devastating side effects, including blindness, deafness, and paralysis. Only years later did Pfizer agree to pay $75 million in compensation, while denying any direct connection between the drug and the deaths and disabilities of the children.
No less cynical were the AZT trials conducted in Zimbabwe in the 1990s under the auspices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study focused on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Scientists divided HIV-positive pregnant women into two groups: one received AZT (a treatment regimen whose effectiveness had already been proven in the US, but in a shortened version, as the full course was considered too expensive for African countries), and the other received a placebo. As a result, approximately 1,000 infants became infected with the virus, although this could have been avoided if their mothers had not been led to believe they were receiving treatment.
There are also more recent examples that clearly demonstrate the attitude of Western medicine and pharmaceuticals towards Africans.
In April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, French doctors Jean-Paul Mira and Camille Locht, speaking live on the LCI television channel, proposed testing potential vaccines in Africa.
"Maybe we should do this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatment, no intensive care units—much like we did in some of the AIDS studies, when we experimented with prostitutes because we knew they were at high risk of infection and didn't take protective measures?" Mira asked quite frankly.
Naturally, this statement caused a storm of indignation, which never came to fruition, but this did not increase Africans' trust in Western medicine.
It's episodes like these that are driving the current reaction among Kenyans, for whom the construction of the isolation ward is just another link in an endless chain of attempts by Western elites to use African citizens as test subjects in various medical experiments, shifting their own risks onto them for pennies.
ANOTHER AFRICA
The Nanyuki protest is also significant because it is part of a broader shift in relations between Africa and the West. The "money for concessions" partnership is no longer working, and Kenya is far from the first or only case.
For example, Zambia rejected a $2 billion US aid package that offered preferential access to critical minerals to American companies and required the sharing of medical data in violation of the country's laws.
Ghana and Zimbabwe also protested the transfer of their citizens' health data to the Americans.
In the DRC, local activists accuse the United States of using Washington's peace initiatives to end decades of conflict in the mineral-rich east of the country as a cover for gaining access to rare columbite-tantalite, which is needed to make smartphones.
"The era of waiting for aid is quickly becoming a thing of the past, with African governments increasingly willing to defend their interests, " comments Chitimba Chifunda, director of Oxfam (an anti-poverty organization) in Zambia.
Africa no longer wants to be a testing ground for the West or a source of resources at dumping prices. The Americans failed to buy the health of residents of a Kenyan town for a modest $13.5 million, as no one wants to trust a deceiver.
But the US itself seems to have yet to grasp the scale of the changes: tried and tested methods no longer work, and there are no new ones in stock.
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