Let's get real about Africa's burden of malnutrition

In the past, I have received criticism for my work linking malnutrition to underdevelopment and social dysfunctionality. My critics have suggested that, by identifying problems in African society and highlighting the "stigmata of malnutrition," I am giving racists ammunition for their claims that Africans are genetically inferior to other races.

I beg to disagree with my critics. First, race is not a biological category. It is a socially constructed category. I have no essentialist arguments to make about Africans. What I do talk about is nutrition, which can be changed willfully by people who have choices. The point of my intervention is to raise awareness of the kind that will increase the number of nutritional choices available to most people.

No reasonable man or woman would dare to claim that the nutritional needs of most of Africa's children were being met. Conditions such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, rickets and others are commonplace in our communities. Any African who has lived in a community where having one meal a day is a luxury knows that children do not thrive under those circumstances. They do not thrive physically: Their bodies are stunted, and they succumb easily to diseases and parasites. The children do not thrive emotionally either: Hunger does not breed joy, nor is competition for limited resources in the home conducive to cooperation between family members. Families quickly become dysfunctional. They do not thrive intellectually: How can they, when their bodies are ailing and their brains do not receive the nutrients necessary for the growth, development, and optimal function of the brain? Furthermore, they may also be vulnerable to mental disease as teenagers and adults. Remember that mental disease is like any other form of disease: It thrives where there is chronic malnutrition, stress and trauma.

These are the challenges that the majority of Africans (who are poor) must wrestle with as they raise their children. Their children, in turn, grow into adults who are physically and psychologically marked by the deprivations they suffered. They may be small in stature, prone to falling ill, may have failed to reach their full intellectual capacity, and may experience undiagnosed depression and other forms of mental disease. All these factors can be attributed, not to their race, but to chronic lifelong malnutrition and the other difficulties they have endured. Anybody who takes the time to study the experiences of populations the world over that have historically been subjected to similar deprivations will notice similar problems.

Boer residents of British concentration camps in Southern Africa in the early 20th century endured such deprivations. Furthermore, prisoners in the Russian Gulag experienced similar forms of deprivation, as did Jewish people and other European minorities in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Kikuyu families who were put into concentration camps by the British during the so-called Mau Mau Emergency experienced similar deprivation. Those occupants of the Sahel and the Sahara who have lost their livelihoods to drought, and have had to seek refuge at relief centers decade after decade have experienced the same. A quick internet search will reveal that Asia and the Americas have similar stories to tell.

Whether chronic malnutrition results from poverty, natural catastrophes, wars or political repression and marginalization, it deprives entire communities of their potential. Thus, observations about diminished intellectual capacity and physical stamina, and vulnerability to physical and mental illness in such communities are a testament to the long reach of malnutrition. They are not essentialist claims about "the nature of a race."

If the nutritional needs of most of Africa's children were somehow to be met, then there would be no reason for us to be having this conversation. Africa would be a self-sufficient continent, confident in her dealings with itself and the rest of humanity. But we all know that that is not Africa's present reality. A country like Kenya can afford to pay its parliamentarians world class salaries, but the average person in the village or in the urban slums often struggles to get one square meal on to the table daily. The cycles of famine and drought, which have come to define Eastern Africa, are destined to continue, punctuated by emergency cabinet meetings to deliberate the hunger crises.

Educated Africans must take a step beyond their comfort zone. Instead of spending most of their energy trying to deny the deep-seated problems that plague our societies, they should look at the bigger picture. The underdevelopment burden due to malnutrition across sub-Saharan Africa is real. By not accepting that there is a problem, Africa's educated elites become part of the problem; they stand in the path of advocacy for better nutritional health. Once we accept that there is a problem, policy makers can be pressured to diversify agricultural production on the continent. Africa's educated elites need to shed the disdain they hold for the majority of their own people and, instead, start using their skills to offer transformative advocacy and support.

Why Do We Believe Conspiracy Theories?

http://fromthoughtsintowords.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-conspiracy-theories.html

 

I’ve been following the controversy surrounding Barrack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright with amazement. Mind you, I am not amazed at the words that Wright spoke, but at the fact that those words stirred up the amount of disbelief they did. I’ve lived in the USA a short time, but long enough to understand that conspiracy theories are the bread and butter of the average human being. Is it really surprising that several believe that HIV was designed in a laboratory and African peoples deliberately infected with it? Is it surprising that people believe the federal government was involved in facilitating the influx of drugs into inner city communities a few decades ago? It shouldn’t be surprising at all, folks. We’re living in the age of paranoia, and given the events of the past 500 years, understandably so.

Just take a look at the annals of recent human history and you will see a legacy of brutality and sadism that will wrench your insides. Governments have been known to turn a blind eye as atrocities are committed. Not surprisingly, governments have also been implicated in sponsoring assassinations and forms of experimentation on civilians. Think of the Holocaust and of the racist experiments carried out by the likes of Dr Mengele. African Americans certainly can’t afford to forget the Tuskegee experiment. And who knows what happened in South Africa under the apartheid era. The indigenous societies of the Americas and Australia also have sad stories to tell.

Unfortunately, we readers of history have short memories. We forget how much power we cede to religious leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians to make decisions about our everyday lives, and then we are shocked when one or more of these people is able to use that power to cause irreparable damage. Victims don’t forget, though. Perhaps it is the memories of the victims that makes us uncomfortable and makes us want to turn the page when confronted with uncomfortable truths from our past and present. And yet, even when we willfully forget, there is something in us that maintains a fearful fascination with what we call evil. If you don’t believe me, pay close attention to religious and political discourse, to the types of books that top the best seller lists, and to the most popular programming on television. You will start to suspect that the American public, and humanity at large, is obsessed with the idea of dark, powerful, underground forces controlling the world.

Frequently, conspiracy theories are dismissed in the media as ludicrous or absurd. Very few take the time to examine the relevant question: why do people believe in them? It’s not necessary to share a person’s beliefs in order to understand where those beliefs are coming from. So why, when faced with these theories, does the mainstream media tend to shut down any attempt to examine them or discuss them? Why do reporters and anchors spend more energy being offended that people can believe such theories, than investigating the theories and the people who subscribe to them?

I suspect that conspiracy theories have such a strong hold on people because, first of all, there’s a certain amount of truth in them. For instance, the idea of a government designing viruses for specific population groups is not a far remove from the following facts: that some nations are acknowledged to possess biological weapons, that the Tuskegee experiment on African American men was allowed to proceed, unhindered. When these facts are brought together in an environment where racial injustice, prejudice and suspicion prevail, then a conspiracy theory is inevitable.

Secondly, conspiracy theories manage to tie up all the loose ends and to explain the mysteries that the official narrative leaves unaddressed. Official theories explaining the origins of HIV/ AIDS and its epidemiology are often self-contradictory and convoluted while the conspiracy theory gives a clear-cut black and white explanation; no ambiguous grays are allowed to linger. The result is that people are more attracted to the version with a clear beginning, middle and end and where the good guy and the bad guy are easily distinguished from each other.

Thirdly, conspiracy theories tend to fit in with the predominant Judeo-Islamic religious narrative in the community. If the community is Muslim, Christian or Jewish, then it is predisposed to believing in scenarios that end in catastrophe (the apocalypse, the end of the world, the decimation of the entire community by disease) and involve a battle between good and evil.

Conspiracy theories should not be dismissed, however ludicrous they may sound. If people believe strongly in a conspiracy theory, then it is probably because they are living in fear and believe they have no power over their own destiny. These feelings are understandable among people living in extreme poverty, people battling an epidemic that has crippled their entire society or people who have been victimized time and again and continue to be victimized. Journalists are uniquely placed to identify the fears that predispose people to believing conspiracy theories. By examining those fears and asking questions about them, they could expose gross inequalities in society, thus provoking people to address those inequalities.

Admittedly, that is an idealistic scenario. Media exposés don’t always lead to corrective actions being taken. However, I would like to believe that talking about our fears as a community could help us gain some kind of agency and make it possible for us to dream of surmounting the Kilimanjaros in our lives.

This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to use my writing for non-commercial purposes and do credit my name, Rose Kahendi, as the writer.