Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - July 10 2000
Taban Lo Liyong
Chimpanzees in Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are supposedly the culprits. But if HIV originated from chimpanzees, how was it transferred to humans? The usual supposition was that Africans ate chimpanzees carrying the HIV virus. I would like to sketch another scenario.
It was a common secret in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up in northern Uganda that there were kula-bantu - man-eaters - who snatched people at night, especially during festive occasions. People were warned not to loiter on the streets.
Who the human snatchers were and what they did with those that they kidnapped has never been investigated. But I think I know who they were, where they took those that they kidnapped and just what they did with them.
Near the Congo-Sudan border there is (or was) a small station called Kilo-Moto. There were strange goings-on here. The locals feared the place. For good reason. There was an experimental station there with laboratories for testing drugs.
I am not sure whether the station was owned by the Belgian government or by another European consortium, but the activities taking place there were sanctioned by the Belgians. (When independence came in 1960, the laboratory might have closed down.) It is also possible that there were other experimental laboratories in the French, German and Spanish colonies.
Some manufacturers of drugs may have needed chimps - man's nearest animal relative - on which to test new drugs. The drugs were tested on the apes in the early stages, but at the advanced stages of testing human guinea pigs were needed.
Where would you find men and women who would act as guinea pigs? Nowhere and everywhere; they were snatched at night from the roads and towns of Uganda, Southern Sudan, Central African Republic, Ruanda-Urundi and Congo, and taken to Kilo-Moto.
There, the story goes, they were drugged or had some sensory organs removed so that they lived like animals. They would have been caged, chained, confined to observation rooms and used for testing the new drugs.
A more sinister scenario is this: that drugs were being developed for biological warfare and some Kurtz was involved in developing the means to exterminate them all. If not, then reduce their numbers. Perhaps by a new type of disease.
Whether the virus was artificially manufactured before being injected into the chimpanzees, whether it was inborn in the chimps, I do not know. How it was transferred to humans, whether it was done purposely or accidentally, I do not know. But the experimenters are sure that it was transferred from chimpanzees to Africans.
My point is that Kilo-Moto should be investigated. It may tell us more sinister stories about the scientists from Europe who cared so much about the health of Europeans that they had to experiment on chimpanzees and Africans.
Whoever wants to find out how HIV/Aids originated and developed had better follow the lead back to Kilo-Moto. Or Kilo-Motos.
I and all Africans who were alive in Uganda and Yei District of Southern Sudan in the 1940s and 1950s were afraid of being out on the road at night. When we saw vehicles coming we ran into the bush. Nobody wanted to be captured and taken to Kilo-Moto to become a guinea pig. For HIV/Aids tests, as it has turned out.
Professor Taban lo Liyong is the director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Venda.
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