Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

(Part I of a Series)
By Vira Lynn Jones
This article is a frantic scream for help in exposing my three-year fight with the New York City Housing Preservation and Development Agency (HPD).  The battle has left me both emotionally and mentally scarred, but I refuse to feel defeated.   The sad reality is, I may lose my house.  In  October 2001, HPD slapped an $86,000 lien on my four-family Clinton Hill home for a violation that existed on the property when I purchased it in 1996. 
Despite the fact that the real estate developer and former owner, Alfred Basal of Aviv Development, failed to install the sprinkler system or fire escape that is required for a four-family house, the NYC Buildings Department issued him a legitimate Certificate of Occupancy  (Cof O) which assured that the house was violations-free.  This document satisfied the bank in setting my closing date. 
The original lien was nearly $100,000.  After some pressure on my part, it was reduced a few thousand dollars; yet, I have since paid more than $12,000 towards the installation of a fire escape (something that should have been done by Mr. Basal and enforced by the Buildings Department). The $86,000 looms, like a dark cloud. Years of protest against having to pay for the mess created by the developer and the Buildings Department has been to no avail.   Meanwhile, other homeowners in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant have shared with me similar horror stories of the pressure wrought by groups, associations and city departments to move, to vacate, to sell and even to give up the homes and apartments that they worked all their lives to keep and pass on.   Gentrification is a nice word but in the hands of the unscrupulous, it is a benign cancer.  The evil form of it is festering not only in our local New York City neighborhoods.  It is growing throughout America, in urban areas where hardworking homestead owners of African descent are losing all that they spent years to build and grow.
Some of us will not surrender without a fight, and I am one of them.   I worked two full-time jobs for five years to purchase this brownstone.  Financial considerations forced me to go out and look for a building; I was tired of paying huge rents for small apartments. Yet it was my heritage that inspired home ownership as a life goal.  My parents were of a Southern background and they were obsessed with owning land.  My father always said, “You don’t sell it, you pass it on.”
HPD officials told me that the agency is not in the business of taking possession of private homes, yet they admit that the lien against my property can be sold to an investor. This investor has the right to charge me 25 percent interest, force me into foreclosure and take possession of my house.  Some nights I wonder if the law would allow Mr. Basal to come back into this building’s life and purchase the lien that is against it.
Mr. Basal owned this property for only two years – from 1994 till 1996.  He converted it from a boardinghouse or Single-Room Occupancy dwelling (SRO) to a legal four-family dwelling. A copy of the architect’s plans that Basal filed with the city reveals that a sprinkler system was included in the plans but never installed. HPD has never explained to me how Basal was issued a valid C of O when the house should not have passed Buildings Department inspection.  Instead of receiving an answer, I have been treated as the culprit.  Little did I realize, however, that my battle was just beginning.
In August 2001, after I had lived in my house for almost four years (it has now been seven years), an official from the HPD’s Brooklyn office appeared on my stoop demanding to access the building to inspect my sprinkler system.  When I told him that I did not have one, he left.  I thought the issue was over.  However, two hours later, a fire engine pulls in front on my building.  To keep them from smashing in the door with their axes, I thrust it open as three firemen rushed in and up the steps, explaining in their haste that they had arrived to inspect the sprinkler system.  They froze in their footsteps and left after I said that I did not have one.  It did not stop there.
By September 2001, the situation had further deteriorated.  An HPD official gained access to my building without my knowledge and slid an “Order To Repair Vacate” notice under the door of every occupant in the building.  The order demanded that everyone had three days to vacate the premises.  The order was only rescinded when I faxed HPD official Nari Motwani a copy of my C of O and he verified that it was a valid document.  On that day I also found out that my house was still noted on record as a boardinghouse.  As my problems with HPD continued to escalate, I called Consumer Affairs to investigate whether Basal had any complaints lodged against him because of the nightmare he had caused me.  Basal’s claim of a so-called newly renovated property was actually bubble gum, tape and Band-Aids to hold the building together until he could flip it.  He had installed and painted PVC plastic pipe to trick one into believing it was cast iron.  It eventually pulled apart at the joints and flooded two apartments and the basement.  A supposedly new boiler burned out after only four years.  Three days after my closing date, I went to Keyspan (formerly Brooklyn Union Gas) to have the gas switched to my name.  Two week later, Keyspan sends me a bill for $5,000.  Basal had tapped into the gas line and was receiving free gas.  After presenting evidence to the Keyspan investigator, I did not have to pay the bill.  The gas meters that were already installed in the basement were listed on a Keyspan list as stolen.  So were the electric meters that Con Edison removed.  There was carpeting throughout the apartments and I had to pull it up and install hardwood floors.  As I was told by the carpenter, “If you do not stabilize the floors, one night you will wake up and your tenants will be in your bedroom.”  Despite explaining this to HPD officials and showing them evidence, I was beginning to be treated as the criminal culprit who created this mess.  Little did I know HPD was not finished with me.
A few days after the vacate order was rescinded, HPD had a surprise waiting in my house that was never discussed with me.  I arrived home from my day job to find two strangers in my building.  At first, they did not identify themselves.  When I threatened to call the police and have them removed, they explained that they were from Epic Security and were assigned to my house by HPD.  I called HPD and protested profusely.  Joseph Manganiello, an HPD official in the Manhattan office, said if I tried to have the guards removed that he would call the fire department and have me and anyone else living in the building physically removed.  I told him HPD was harassing me.  Manganiello said HPD was only doing its job.
The security guards were posted in my house 24 hours a day, six days a week for six months until the fire escape was installed because a permit had to be obtained from the landmarks commission. The security guards caused me a tremendous amount of grief.  I had refused HPD’s request to give the guards keys to the building because I felt they were poorly supervised.  Every other day a new security guard would appear.  Some guards never showed up for their shift and the front doors would remain unlocked as I slept through the night.  More than once the guards would disappear up the street on a break leaving the doors sitting open inviting anyone walking by to easily access the building.  I had resigned myself to expect to come home and be informed that the building had been burglarized.  My worst fear was to walk into the building and surprise an intruder who would rob me, or even worse, take my life. After complaining to Epic Security about its employees, a drastic change took place.  The guards were not only more professional but they started to share information with me.
Since my building was a private house and not an HPD-owned property, they did not understand why guards had been placed in my building.  They also wanted me to know that Epic Security Guards were stationed in many other properties throughout Clinton Hill.
At the beginning of this entire ordeal, I bombarded HPD and the Buildings Department with letters and telephone calls asking for emergency funds to install the fire escape.  No response ever materialized.  Finally after a year (when the statute of limitations has already passed to take any action), I received a letter from HPD Associate Commissioner Vito Mustaciuolo.  He said he realized that the incident was not my fault, that I had paid for the fire escape but I would be held responsible for paying the $86,000 for the fire watch.  When I asked about a payment plan, he advised me to get an attorney.  I had already been through an ordeal with attorneys.
The Brooklyn Bar Association referred me to an attorney who wanted a $7,500 retainer on the spot before he would take the case. I walked out of the office.  Other attorneys saw my distressed situation as an opportunity for economic gain.  They all wanted large retainers.  Finally, in June 2002, PrePaid Legal referred me to Bradley Zelenitz of _____________, who assured me, after paying a $2,000 retainer, that I would finally receive justice by suing the city, the seller, the lawyer who conducted my closing and the title company.  A year later, the law firm has not done anything but sue Alfred Basal.  Then Zelenitz told me that if I did win the case against Basal, I would probably never collect because he has hidden his funds.  Now the attorney does not return my calls and I have no idea about the status of my case.  Then I thought that the elected officials, whom I was told were voter-friendly, would help me.  Months after sending letters to the Public Advocate’s Office, the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I haven’t gotten any response.
Friends and acquaintances laughed and told me that I am paranoiac.  I mentioned that the powers that be want my house and why have I heard other African-Americans in the neighborhood say they are experiencing similar problems. This reality hit me in November 2001 when two men from HPD’s Anti-Abandonment Unit paid me an unexpected visit.  Their boss had sent them to inspect the interior of my house.  Through the compliments on the renovation job that I was doing, they asked me if I realized that my house would one day be worth a million dollars.  I had never thought about it but it made me realize one thing.  Because of its predominantely African American homeownership population, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill are probably the only two neighborhoods in the entire United States that have a disproportionate number of millionaires if they were to sell their homes.  Longtime residents say the neighborhood was once plagued by drugs and prostitution, and one could not give the brownstones away.
I feel that this problem is larger than the ordeal that I have experienced.  Many others are going through the same thing because I am often asked in conversations, “Why are so many black folks losing their homes all of a sudden”?  If I must go down in defeat, like a soldier I will fight to the end by exposing what I think is a larger problem in the Clinton Hill community.

In Africa, as we look upon places like Lakes Albert, George, Edwards and Victoria and Stanley Pool and Livingstone Falls, we find that the banks of these waters have been drenched in blood.   Seeing those names is  comparable finding Adolph   Hitler=s name on a village square in Poland.  Only by invoking Hitler=s name, can you prepare for the level of human destruction that those British names on African soil represent.   This becomes abundantly clear, while reading Adam Hochschild=s AKing Leopold=s Ghost >A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa@. 
In a novel-like fashion, this riveting text tells the story of how the African continent was invaded by bands of European terrorists, led by Henry Morton (ADr. Livingstone, I presume@) Stanley, a journalist and explorer.  In this passage, Hochschild shows how Stanley and his men went about their work: ATo those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley=s officers wrote in his diary, >We finished our last plantain today …the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women.= When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, >Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round=. Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day=s work.  Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest.  He fell like a stone… Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

AOne member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.@   This description, horrible as it sounds, was the regular course of conduct of the expeditions that crossed Africa through the years 1871-1887 and only the beginning of what was to come.
As Stanley blazed a path of terror across Central Africa, emptying villages and forcing people into the wild, he lead the way for Belgian=s King Leopold II and the rest of the Western world, to come and extract the ivory and then the rubber from the continent. As he prepared for one expedition, AStanley was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker=s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute.  The new gun, Stanley said, would be >of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.=@
Hochschild shows us that as part of the process of supplying the world with the then Amagic commodity@– rubber– the Europeans used Africans as recalcitrant beasts of burden and in their doing so, cut the population in half by killing, starvation, disease and a Aplummeting birth rate@.  When we spoke in the opening about banks awash in blood, that was not hyperbole, it was descriptive.   Here is another passage from AKing Leopold=s Ghost@:  AThe territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally.  Where a river flows into lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E.V.Sjoblom, >I sawYdead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed.  It was for the rubberYwhen I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water.  As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, >Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown in the river=@.
In 1890, the Dunlop Company began making tires, and by the mid 1890s rubber was becoming a Amust have@ ingredient.  Automobiles had arrived and rubber was needed for tires and fittings.   Hochschild says, ASuddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commodity, and its price rose throughout the 1890s.  Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people=s lives than in the equatorial rain forest, where wild rubber vines snaked high into the trees, that covered nearly half of King Leopold=s Congo.@  It was around that time that the life-styles depicted on the ivory tusks of the period (See Figures 1-3 page 4), would be changed forever.

African-American Missionary and Explorer William Shephard was there.  In a story appearing in 1908, he wrote about what happened in the Kasai region as the peaceful Kuba people were driven to rise in revolt against the rubber terror.  AThese great stalwart men and women, who have from time immemorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas, tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and leopard for their skins, who have always had their own king and a government not to be despised, officers of the law established in every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe.  Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all the African tribesY
But within these last three years how changed they are!  Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected.  The streets of their towns are not clean and well swept as they once were.  Even their children cry for bread.
Why this change?  You have it in a few words.  There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it.  In the majority of villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give and answer concerning their soul=s salvation.@   (From William Shephard=s writings in the American Presbyterians annual newsletter, the Kassai Herald, January, 1908)

These repeated invasions and forced labor, destroyed all normal systems of the Africans, including the food system and normally developing trade relationships.  On the internet, we can see this in the art collection of the National Museum of African Art (http://www.si.edu/nmafa/exhibits/currexhb.htm).   Here we find, ABy the 19th century, after several centuries of contact and trade with Europe, workshops specializing in carving export objects for the foreign trade were established along the Loango coast. These workshops produced objects in wood, soapstone, and ivory for sale to both Europeans and Africans. Export objects in ivory included cane handles and stamps for sealing wax. The most famous objects in ivory, however, were carved figurative tusks that ranged from 20 centimeters to one meter (eight inches to three feet) in length. Using iron tools, artists carved African and European figures engaged in activities of daily coastal life in relief on the tusks. The artists carved and arranged the figures to heighten the naturalism and expressive power for which Kongo art is famous, paying great attention to detailCdress, hairstyles, gestures, and comportment. The scenes were carved and probably meant to be read starting at the base and ending at the top. This lively tradition of genre art in ivory lasted from about 1850 to 1900.@   The Loango coast stretches along the west African Coast, centering at the mouth of the Congo River.   (For a description of this area after 1900, see Joseph Conrad=s AHeart of Darkness@.)
The tusk carvings give indications of the African diet and relationship with animals.   Regarding the scene of a man about to sacrifice an animal, the museum tells us, AAnimals are prominent in Kongo art, myths, and rituals. The scene of a man preparing to sacrifice a bovine (see below)  may allude to an important event, such as a funeral or rite of passage.  Animals are also an important part of Kongo daily life. Kongo peoples raise fowl, goats, pigs, and, in the southern part of the kingdom which is relatively free of the tse-tse fly, cattle. The elite ate pigs, chickens, goats, and sometimes beef; while the non-elite Kongolese often used animals to pay tributes to rulers and subsisted on vegetables, eggs, and herbs.@   While there were slave caravans moving through the villages, these depictions are of stable societies.  But that was before the arrival of Stanley, Leopold and white supremacy as big business. 
As the Museum notes, the art tradition embodied in the carved ivory stopped around 1900, which would be during the ever-quickening rubber trade.  The method used to harvest the sap from the rubber vines was forced labor, which continued through the First and Second World Wars.  AIn 1916, by colonial officials= count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1,359 of the porters were worked to death or died of disease.  Famines rage.  A Catholic missionary reported, >The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!=@  There was no more time for carving ivory or raising fowl.  This was a life-style of intense individual and social trauma. Trauma to the point where people were starved and desperate enough to eat what they would not normally consider food, fellow primates for example.  
  There are many African stories about monkeys, stories that involve them as mischievous spirits and companions.  Searching the literature has turned up many, African food dishes, encompassing a wide variety of foods, but we have found no recipes suggesting monkey meat.  (There is one South African dish with Amonkey glands@ but it specifies that no monkeys are used.)   Because recipes for monkeys are not easily found, it may indicate they were a eaten only out of desperation.  This is something that African-Americans should easily recognize.  Africans did not eat pig=s foot and chitlin=s until they were brought to America and had to eat whatever was left after the slaughter.  Nowadays, there are many people who still enjoy a pig=s foot, long after the necessity has passed.  Similarly, Africans were not regular eaters of monkey meat, until the slave labor system used to extract the rubber and ivory from the Congo and surrounding areas drove them from their homes, their fields and their gardens, into wild areas, a starving people. 

The European invasions and system of forced labor had disrupted the social fabric of the Africans.  Run from their villages, the Africans had to eat whatever could be caught and whatever the Europeans did not want.  They did this under continual and extraordinary trauma, stress and fatigue which lowering their immune systems and increased the likelihood of viral infection at a time and in places when they were most likely to encounter new viruses.  It is with that as a background that we turn to scientific, Apeer review@ literature.
In Nature magazine we find the following article, AAn African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.@    They report, ADr. Tuofu Zhu of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and colleagues report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences of an HIV-1-seropositive plasma sample taken from an adult Bantu male in 1959 living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The researchers studied 1,213 plasma samples obtained from Africa between 1959 and 1982; the 1959 sample tested positive for HIV-1… The plasma sample is the oldest confirmed case of HIV-1…The sample taken from the Bantu man has a viral sequence that lies near the ancestral node of subtypes B and D in the major group, suggesting that these HIV-1 subtypes may stem from a single introduction into Africa soon before 1959. The team notes, however, that >given the large genetic differences between HIV-1 and HIV-2, the divergence of these viruses could not have occurred in the late 1940s; that branching point must have come considerably earlier.= The findings highlight the need for continued surveillance, they assert, noting the diversification of HIV over the past 40 to 50 years.@*
In an article entitled APeer review and the origin of AIDSC a case study in rejected ideas@ appearing in BioScience, 1993, Brian Martin looks at the arguments for contaminated polio vaccines being the cause of the AIDS epidemic.  AToday=s standard theory of the origin of AIDS is that a simian immunodefinciency virus (SIV) carried by an African monkey was transmitted to and survived in a human to become human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This transmission could have happened in any of a number of ways: blood from a butchered monkey entering a human=s blood through a cut, monkey blood being injected into humans as part of sexual customs, a human eating undercooked African monkey meat, or a monkey biting a human (Gromek 1990, Hardy 1987, Karpas 1990). However, there are a large number of other theories, such as the manufacture of HIV by biological warfare laboratories (Lederer 1987, 1988).
AIn 1987, an independent scholar named Louis Pascal, based in New York City, developed the idea that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the late 1950s.  After reflection and study of the medical literature, he developed some strong arguments and unearthed considerable evidence for this hypothesis. Here, in outline, is the argument:
AThere are two main types of HIV, called HIV-1 and HIV-2. Current variants of HIV-1 (linked with AIDS in most parts of the world) appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from central Africa a little before 1960, whereas current variants of HIV-2 appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from western Africa. The closest known relatives to HIV are SIVs found in monkeys and chimpanzees. An SIV very similar to HIV-2 is known, but no SIV has been conclusively shown to be highly similar to HIV-1; however, further SIVs continue to be discovered.
APascal noted that polio vaccines are cultured on monkey kidneys and therefore that SIV from an infected monkey could have contaminated a batch of vaccine. An infected monkey could easily have been used, since monkeys with SIVs may show no sign of disease. Polio vaccines could not be screened for SIV contamination before 1985, the year SIVs were discoveredY.
APascal identified a live polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, as the one most likely to have led to AIDS, and even named the batch most likely to be responsible. This vaccine was given to 325,000 people in central and west Africa in the years 1957-1960. Pascal (1991) says that it is no coincidence that the rate of HIV infection is extremely high in central Africa and in Kinshasa, Zaire.
AA point in immunology aids the argument.  Pascal (1991) points out that in order for a virus to infect a different species, it is helpful to reduce the resistance of the new host=s immune system. Koprowski=s polio vaccine was given to many children less than one month old, before their immune systems were fully developed. Furthermore, these infants were given 15 times the adult dosage because they produce antibodies less easily.@

Contaminated Vaccines,
Only Part of the Story
Pascal=s theory of contaminated polio vaccines may be true, but it does not account for the 1959 death of an adult Bantu man from HIV infection, or the time needed for viral mutation from HIV-1 to HIV-2 before 1940.   It also does not explain the presence of  Karposi=s Sarcoma, an AIDS marker, beginning in 1914.    These are accounted for by the eating of contaminated monkey meat during the forced labor system in East, West and Central Africa, from the 1890s to the 1940s.   This system, with its social disruption, would also have lowered the immune systems of the people.
How Did AIDS Spread?
Writing in The British Medical Journal in 1998, Juhani Leikola, in an article entitled Achieving self sufficiency in blood across Europe, says, AWhen the development of blood component therapy was in its infancy, countries were by and large self sufficient for whole blood. Large scale export and import of plasma started in the 1960s and early 1970s, when both albumin and coagulation factor VIII became commercially available.
The industry needed more and more plasma, and the development of plastic bags made plasmapheresis feasible. Large plasma donation centres were established, primarily in the United States but also in countries such as Nicaragua and Haiti. Exploitation of donors gained wide publicity, and the trade in Ared gold@ became an important international media event.@   Other blood collection sites were in Kinshasa, West African and Lesotha, South Africa.   
At the conservative  FreeRepublic.com,  not a peer review site, we find this well-researched analysis of the spread of AIDS.  AWe know of four primary routes of HIV transmission: sexual contact, transmission in utero from mother to offspring, intravenous administration of the virus with contaminated needles, and the use of infected blood products. Only the last two factors are relatively new.  Could contaminated needles and the harvesting and administration of blood products be the critical new factors accounting for the AIDS pandemic?
AAll of the critical factors can be present in the process of plasmapheresis. This procedure involves the extraction of whole blood from human donors, the separating out of the plasma, and the reinjection of the remaining cells back into the donor. If not done properly and with sterile equipment, plasmapheresis represents a powerful vector of HIV transmission. Moreover, since factor concentrates involve the pooling of plasma from thousands of donors, an entire pool can be contaminated by the inclusion of a single unit from a donor infected with HIV.  So plasma collection would have represented a great risk if present in the very same place and time as the first appearance of HIV.
AThe scenario is not merely hypothetical. Western equatorial Africa, where chimpanzees infected with the ancestral simian virus were being slaughtered and consumed, where AIDS was first endemic in the 1970s, was precisely the place where, at that same time, blood donor centers were harvesting the source product for a lucrative and quickly growing worldwide trade in blood plasma!
AYWas it just coincidental that the plasma brokers of Montreal and Zurich traded blood plasma at that time from the areas of central Africa near Kinshasa, Zaire?[Formerly Leopoldville, eds.] That this was the region of west central Africa we later found to have had the earliest and heaviest concentration of AIDS?  That this was the very same place where we now know lived the chimpanzees that carried the virus ancestral to HIV? We know this: blood products from this particular region of Africa were being shipped to the United States at the same time that the first cases of AIDS were developing in Americans with hemophilia.@  
ABy 1987 a few scientists like Matilde Krim publicly theorized that a biological accident could have initiated the AIDS epidemic in gay menY.Krim postulates that gamma globulin in the early 1970s was made from Apooled@ human blood brought in from Africa and the CaribbeanY.
ADr. Peter Jones, director of the Haemophilia Center at the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle, in northeastern England,  wrote a letter published by the British Medical Journal in 1985. 
AHe said, >it may be pertinent@ that blood products coming into the United States in the 1970s, when there was a shortage of home supplies, originated in >exactly the areas now known to be endemic for Kaposi=s sarcoma and other AIDS-related diseases.=
AHe identified the areas as Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire; Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal. A similar blood-donor center operated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he saidY.the supply was organized by >international plasma brokers= based mainly in Zurich, Switzerland, and Montreal.  >These facts suggest that the disease was introduced into the United States, not by sexual transmission, but via plasma obtained in the endemic areas,= Jones said.@

At latest report,  the western governments through the International Monetary Fund, are offering African nations a loan of a billion dollars at 7% interest to pay for buying drugs from western pharmaceutical companies.   After all they have taken and the genocide they have caused, an interest-bearing loan is the only bone they can throw.  This is the behavior of despicable men.  These people have no shame.  They have no shame at all.
*An African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.  
Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahinias, Andre J.; et al. Nature (02/05/98) Vol. 391, No. 6667, P. 594 (The CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention makes this information available as a public service only. Providing this information does not constitute endorsement by the CDC. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however, copies may not be sold, and the CDC National AIDS Clearinghouse should be cited as the source. Copyright 1996, Information, Inc. Bethesda, MD)

In Africa, as we look upon places like Lakes Albert, George, Edwards and Victoria and Stanley Pool and Livingstone Falls, we find that the banks of these waters have been drenched in blood.   Seeing those names is  comparable finding Adolph   Hitler’s name on a village square in Poland.  Only by invoking Hitler’s name, can you prepare for the level of human destruction that those British names on African soil represent.   This becomes abundantly clear, while reading Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost: A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.”
In a novel-like fashion, this riveting text tells the story of how the African continent was invaded by bands of European terrorists, led by Henry Morton (Dr. Livingstone, I presume) Stanley, a journalist and explorer.  In this passage, Hochschild shows how Stanley and his men went about their work: To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley’s officers wrote in his diary, “We finished our last plantain today …the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women.” When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, “Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round.” Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

“It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work.  Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest.  He fell like a stone… Immediately a volley was poured into the village.”

One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.*   This description, horrible as it sounds, was the regular course of conduct of the expeditions that crossed Africa through the years 1871-1887 and only the beginning of what was to come.
As Stanley blazed a path of terror across Central Africa, emptying villages and forcing people into the wild, he lead the way for Belgian’s King Leopold II and the rest of the Western world, to come and extract the ivory and then the rubber from the continent. As he prepared for one expedition, Stanley was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker’s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute.  The new gun, Stanley said, would be “of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.”
Hochschild shows us that as part of the process of supplying the world with the then magic commodity– rubber– the Europeans used Africans as recalcitrant beasts of burden and in their doing so, cut the population in half by killing, starvation, disease and a plummeting birth rate.*  When we spoke in the opening about banks awash in blood, that was not hyperbole, it was descriptive.   Here is another passage from AKing Leopold’s Ghost: “The territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally.  Where a river flows into lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E. V. Sjoblom, ‘I saw dead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed.  It was for the rubber when I crossed the stream, I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water.  As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, ‘Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown in the river’.”
In 1890, the Dunlop Company began making tires, and by the mid 1890s rubber was becoming a must have@ ingredient.  Automobiles had arrived and rubber was needed for tires and fittings.   Hochschild says, Suddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commodity, and its price rose throughout the 1890s.  Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people’s lives than in the equatorial rain forest, where wild rubber vines snaked high into the trees, that covered nearly half of King Leopold’s Congo.@  It was around that time that the life-styles depicted on the ivory tusks of the period (See Figures 1-3 page 4), would be changed forever.

African-American Missionary and Explorer William Shephard was there.  In a story appearing in 1908, he wrote about what happened in the Kasai region as the peaceful Kuba people were driven to rise in revolt against the rubber terror.  “These great stalwart men and women, who have from time immemorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas, tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and leopard for their skins, who have always had their own king and a government not to be despised, officers of the law established in every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe.  Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all the African tribes.
But within these last three years how changed they are!  Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected.  The streets of their towns are not clean and well swept as they once were.  Even their children cry for bread.”
Why this change?  You have it in a few words.  There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it.  In the majority of villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give and answer concerning their soul’s salvation.@   (From William Shephard’s writings in the American Presbyterians annual newsletter, the Kassai Herald, January, 1908)

These repeated invasions and forced labor, destroyed all normal systems of the Africans, including the food system and normally developing trade relationships.  On the internet, we can see this in the art collection of the National Museum of African Art (http://www.si.edu/nmafa/exhibits/currexhb.htm).   Here we find, By the 19th century, after several centuries of contact and trade with Europe, workshops specializing in carving export objects for the foreign trade were established along the Loango coast. These workshops produced objects in wood, soapstone, and ivory for sale to both Europeans and Africans. Export objects in ivory included cane handles and stamps for sealing wax. The most famous objects in ivory, however, were carved figurative tusks that ranged from 20 centimeters to one meter (eight inches to three feet) in length. Using iron tools, artists carved African and European figures engaged in activities of daily coastal life in relief on the tusks. The artists carved and arranged the figures to heighten the naturalism and expressive power for which Kongo art is famous, paying great attention to detail, dress, hairstyles, gestures, and comportment. The scenes were carved and probably meant to be read starting at the base and ending at the top. This lively tradition of genre art in ivory lasted from about 1850 to 1900.@   The Loango coast stretches along the west African Coast, centering at the mouth of the Congo River.   (For a description of this area after 1900, see Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness@.)
The tusk carvings give indications of the African diet and relationship with animals.   Regarding the scene of a man about to sacrifice an animal, the museum tells us, Animals are prominent in Kongo art, myths, and rituals. The scene of a man preparing to sacrifice a bovine (see below)  may allude to an important event, such as a funeral or rite of passage.  Animals are also an important part of Kongo daily life. Kongo peoples raise fowl, goats, pigs, and, in the southern part of the kingdom which is relatively free of the tsetse fly, cattle. The elite ate pigs, chickens, goats, and sometimes beef; while the non-elite Kongolese often used animals to pay tributes to rulers and subsisted on vegetables, eggs, and herbs*   While there were slave caravans moving through the villages, these depictions are of stable societies.  But that was before the arrival of Stanley, Leopold and white supremacy as big business.
As the Museum notes, the art tradition embodied in the carved ivory stopped around 1900, which would be during the ever-quickening rubber trade.  The method used to harvest the sap from the rubber vines was forced labor, which continued through the First and Second World Wars.  In 1916, by colonial officials’ count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1,359 of the porters were worked to death or died of disease.  Famines rage.  A Catholic missionary reported, “The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!’”  There was no more time for carving ivory or raising fowl.  This was a lifestyle of intense individual and social trauma. Trauma to the point where people were starved and desperate enough to eat what they would not normally consider food, fellow primates for example.

There are many African stories about monkeys, stories that involve them as mischievous spirits and companions.  Searching the literature has turned up many, African food dishes, encompassing a wide variety of foods, but we have found no recipes suggesting monkey meat.  (There is one South African dish with monkey glands* but it specifies that no monkeys are used.)   Because recipes for monkeys are not easily found, it may indicate they were a eaten only out of desperation.  This is something that African Americans should easily recognize.  Africans did not eat pig’s foot and chitlin’s until they were brought to America and had to eat whatever was left after the slaughter.  Nowadays, there are many people who still enjoy a pig’s foot, long after the necessity has passed.  Similarly, Africans were not regular eaters of monkey meat, until the slave labor system used to extract the rubber and ivory from the Congo and surrounding areas drove them from their homes, their fields and their gardens, into wild areas, a starving people.
The European invasions and system of forced labor had disrupted the social fabric of the Africans.  Run from their villages, the Africans had to eat whatever could be caught and whatever the Europeans did not want.  They did this under continual and extraordinary trauma, stress and fatigue which lowering their immune systems and increased the likelihood of viral infection at a time and in places when they were most likely to encounter new viruses.  It is with that as a background that we turn to scientific, peer review literature.
In Nature magazine we find the following article, An African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.@    They report, Dr. Tuofu Zhu of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and colleagues report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences of an HIV-1-seropositive plasma sample taken from an adult Bantu male in 1959 living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The researchers studied 1,213 plasma samples obtained from Africa between 1959 and 1982; the 1959 sample tested positive for HIV-1… The plasma sample is the oldest confirmed case of HIV-1…The sample taken from the Bantu man has a viral sequence that lies near the ancestral node of subtypes B and D in the major group, suggesting that these HIV-1 subtypes may stem from a single introduction into Africa soon before 1959. The team notes, however, that >given the large genetic differences between HIV-1 and HIV-2, the divergence of these viruses could not have occurred in the late 1940s; that branching point must have come considerably earlier.’ The findings highlight the need for continued surveillance, they assert, noting the diversification of HIV over the past 40 to 50 years.@*
In an article entitled Peer review and the origin of AIDSC a case study in rejected ideas@ appearing in BioScience, 1993, Brian Martin looks at the arguments for contaminated polio vaccines being the cause of the AIDS epidemic.  Today’s standard theory of the origin of AIDS is that a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) carried by an African monkey was transmitted to and survived in a human to become human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This transmission could have happened in any of a number of ways: blood from a butchered monkey entering a human’s blood through a cut, monkey blood being injected into humans as part of sexual customs, a human eating undercooked African monkey meat, or a monkey biting a human (Gromek 1990, Hardy 1987, Karpas 1990). However, there are a large number of other theories, such as the manufacture of HIV by biological warfare laboratories (Lederer 1987, 1988).
In 1987, an independent scholar named Louis Pascal, based in New York City, developed the idea that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the late 1950s.  After reflection and study of the medical literature, he developed some strong arguments and unearthed considerable evidence for this hypothesis. Here, in outline, is the argument:
There are two main types of HIV, called HIV-1 and HIV-2. Current variants of HIV-1 (linked with AIDS in most parts of the world) appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from central Africa a little before 1960, whereas current variants of HIV-2 appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from western Africa. The closest known relatives to HIV are SIVs found in monkeys and chimpanzees. An SIV very similar to HIV-2 is known, but no SIV has been conclusively shown to be highly similar to HIV-1; however, further SIVs continue to be discovered.
Pascal noted that polio vaccines are cultured on monkey kidneys and therefore that SIV from an infected monkey could have contaminated a batch of vaccine. An infected monkey could easily have been used, since monkeys with SIVs may show no sign of disease. Polio vaccines could not be screened for SIV contamination before 1985, the year SIVs were discovered.
Pascal identified a live polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, as the one most likely to have led to AIDS, and even named the batch most likely to be responsible. This vaccine was given to 325,000 people in central and west Africa in the years 1957-1960. Pascal (1991) says that it is no coincidence that the rate of HIV infection is extremely high in central Africa and in Kinshasa, Zaire.
A point in immunology aids the argument.  Pascal (1991) points out that in order for a virus to infect a different species, it is helpful to reduce the resistance of the new host’s immune system. Koprowski’s polio vaccine was given to many children less than one month old, before their immune systems were fully developed. Furthermore, these infants were given 15 times the adult dosage because they produce antibodies less easily.

Contaminated Vaccines,
Only Part of the Story

Pascal’s theory of contaminated polio vaccines may be true, but it does not account for the 1959 death of an adult Bantu man from HIV infection, or the time needed for viral mutation from HIV-1 to HIV-2 before 1940.   It also does not explain the presence of  Kaposi’s Sarcoma, an AIDS marker, beginning in 1914.    These are accounted for by the eating of contaminated monkey meat during the forced labor system in East, West and Central Africa, from the 1890s to the 1940s.   This system, with its social disruption, would also have lowered the immune systems of the people.

How Did AIDS Spread?
Writing in The British Medical Journal in 1998, Juhani Leikola, in an article entitled Achieving self-sufficiency in blood across Europe, says, “When the development of blood component therapy was in its infancy, countries were by and large self-sufficient for whole blood. Large scale export and import of plasma started in the 1960s and early 1970s, when both albumin and coagulation factors VIII became commercially available.
“The industry needed more and more plasma, and the development of plastic bags made plasmapheresis feasible. Large plasma donation centres were established, primarily in the United States but also in countries such as Nicaragua and Haiti. Exploitation of donors gained wide publicity, and the trade in red gold. became an important international media event.”

Other blood collection sites were in Kinshasa, West African and Lesotha, South Africa.
At the conservative FreeRepublic.com,  not a peer review site, we find this well-researched analysis of the spread of AIDS.  “We know of four primary routes of HIV transmission: sexual contact, transmission in utero from mother to offspring, intravenous administration of the virus with contaminated needles, and the use of infected blood products. Only the last two factors are relatively new.  Could contaminated needles and the harvesting and administration of blood products be the critical new factors accounting for the AIDS pandemic?
“All of the critical factors can be present in the process of plasmapheresis. This procedure involves the extraction of whole blood from human donors, the separating out of the plasma, and the reinjection of the remaining cells back into the donor. If not done properly and with sterile equipment, plasmapheresis represents a powerful vector of HIV transmission. Moreover, since factor concentrates involve the pooling of plasma from thousands of donors, an entire pool can be contaminated by the inclusion of a single unit from a donor infected with HIV.  So plasma collection would have represented a great risk if present in the very same place and time as the first appearance of HIV.”
The scenario is not merely hypothetical. Western equatorial Africa, where chimpanzees infected with the ancestral simian virus were being slaughtered and consumed, where AIDS was first endemic in the 1970s, was precisely the place where, at that same time, blood donor centers were harvesting the source product for a lucrative and quickly growing worldwide trade in blood plasma!
Was it just coincidental that the plasma brokers of Montreal and Zurich traded blood plasma at that time from the areas of central Africa near Kinshasa, Zaire?[Formerly Leopoldville, eds.] That this was the region of west central Africa we later found to have had the earliest and heaviest concentration of AIDS?  That this was the very same place where we now know lived the chimpanzees that carried the virus ancestral to HIV? We know this: blood products from this particular region of Africa were being shipped to the United States at the same time that the first cases of AIDS were developing in Americans with hemophilia.
By 1987 a few scientists like Matilde Krim publicly theorized that a biological accident could have initiated the AIDS epidemic in gay men. Krim postulates that gamma globulin in the early 1970s was made from pooled human blood brought in from Africa and the Caribbean.
Dr. Peter Jones, director of the Hemophilia Center at the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle, in northeastern England,  wrote a letter published by the British Medical Journal in 1985.
He said, “It may be pertinent, that blood products coming into the United States in the 1970s, when there was a shortage of home supplies, originated in exactly the areas now known to be endemic for Kaposi’s sarcoma and other AIDS-related diseases.’”
He identified the areas as Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire; Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal. At similar blood-donor center operated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he said, the supply was organized by “international plasma brokers’ based mainly in Zurich, Switzerland, and Montreal. These facts suggest that the disease was introduced into the United States, not by sexual transmission, but via plasma obtained in the endemic areas.”

At latest report,  the western governments through the International Monetary Fund, are offering African nations a loan of a billion dollars at 7% interest to pay for buying drugs from western pharmaceutical companies.   After all they have taken and the genocide they have caused, an interest-bearing loan is the only bone they can throw.  This is the behavior of despicable men.  These people have no shame.  They have no shame at all.
*An African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.

Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahinias, Andre J.; et al. Nature (02/05/98) Vol. 391, No. 6667, P. 594 (The CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention makes this information available as a public service only. Providing this information does not constitute endorsement by the CDC. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however, copies may not be sold, and the CDC National AIDS Clearinghouse should be cited as the source. Copyright 1996, Information, Inc. Bethesda, MD)

In Africa, as we look upon places like Lakes Albert, George, Edwards and Victoria and Stanley Pool and Livingstone Falls, we find that the banks of these waters have been drenched in blood.   Seeing those names is  comparable finding Adolph   Hitler=s name on a village square in Poland.  Only by invoking Hitler=s name, can you prepare for the level of human destruction that those British names on African soil represent.   This becomes abundantly clear, while reading Adam Hochschild=s AKing Leopold=s Ghost >A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa@. 
In a novel-like fashion, this riveting text tells the story of how the African continent was invaded by bands of European terrorists, led by Henry Morton (ADr. Livingstone, I presume@) Stanley, a journalist and explorer.  In this passage, Hochschild shows how Stanley and his men went about their work: ATo those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley=s officers wrote in his diary, >We finished our last plantain today …the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women.= When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, >Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round=. Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day=s work.  Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest.  He fell like a stone… Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

AOne member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.@   This description, horrible as it sounds, was the regular course of conduct of the expeditions that crossed Africa through the years 1871-1887 and only the beginning of what was to come.
As Stanley blazed a path of terror across Central Africa, emptying villages and forcing people into the wild, he lead the way for Belgian=s King Leopold II and the rest of the Western world, to come and extract the ivory and then the rubber from the continent. As he prepared for one expedition, AStanley was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker=s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute.  The new gun, Stanley said, would be >of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.=@
Hochschild shows us that as part of the process of supplying the world with the then Amagic commodity@– rubber– the Europeans used Africans as recalcitrant beasts of burden and in their doing so, cut the population in half by killing, starvation, disease and a Aplummeting birth rate@.  When we spoke in the opening about banks awash in blood, that was not hyperbole, it was descriptive.   Here is another passage from AKing Leopold=s Ghost@:  AThe territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally.  Where a river flows into lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E.V.Sjoblom, >I sawYdead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed.  It was for the rubberYwhen I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water.  As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, >Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown in the river=@.
In 1890, the Dunlop Company began making tires, and by the mid 1890s rubber was becoming a Amust have@ ingredient.  Automobiles had arrived and rubber was needed for tires and fittings.   Hochschild says, ASuddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commodity, and its price rose throughout the 1890s.  Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people=s lives than in the equatorial rain forest, where wild rubber vines snaked high into the trees, that covered nearly half of King Leopold=s Congo.@  It was around that time that the life-styles depicted on the ivory tusks of the period (See Figures 1-3 page 4), would be changed forever.

African-American Missionary and Explorer William Shephard was there.  In a story appearing in 1908, he wrote about what happened in the Kasai region as the peaceful Kuba people were driven to rise in revolt against the rubber terror.  AThese great stalwart men and women, who have from time immemorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas, tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and leopard for their skins, who have always had their own king and a government not to be despised, officers of the law established in every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe.  Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all the African tribesY
But within these last three years how changed they are!  Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected.  The streets of their towns are not clean and well swept as they once were.  Even their children cry for bread.
Why this change?  You have it in a few words.  There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it.  In the majority of villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give and answer concerning their soul=s salvation.@   (From William Shephard=s writings in the American Presbyterians annual newsletter, the Kassai Herald, January, 1908)

These repeated invasions and forced labor, destroyed all normal systems of the Africans, including the food system and normally developing trade relationships.  On the internet, we can see this in the art collection of the National Museum of African Art (http://www.si.edu/nmafa/exhibits/currexhb.htm).   Here we find, ABy the 19th century, after several centuries of contact and trade with Europe, workshops specializing in carving export objects for the foreign trade were established along the Loango coast. These workshops produced objects in wood, soapstone, and ivory for sale to both Europeans and Africans. Export objects in ivory included cane handles and stamps for sealing wax. The most famous objects in ivory, however, were carved figurative tusks that ranged from 20 centimeters to one meter (eight inches to three feet) in length. Using iron tools, artists carved African and European figures engaged in activities of daily coastal life in relief on the tusks. The artists carved and arranged the figures to heighten the naturalism and expressive power for which Kongo art is famous, paying great attention to detailCdress, hairstyles, gestures, and comportment. The scenes were carved and probably meant to be read starting at the base and ending at the top. This lively tradition of genre art in ivory lasted from about 1850 to 1900.@   The Loango coast stretches along the west African Coast, centering at the mouth of the Congo River.   (For a description of this area after 1900, see Joseph Conrad=s AHeart of Darkness@.)
The tusk carvings give indications of the African diet and relationship with animals.   Regarding the scene of a man about to sacrifice an animal, the museum tells us, AAnimals are prominent in Kongo art, myths, and rituals. The scene of a man preparing to sacrifice a bovine (see below)  may allude to an important event, such as a funeral or rite of passage.  Animals are also an important part of Kongo daily life. Kongo peoples raise fowl, goats, pigs, and, in the southern part of the kingdom which is relatively free of the tse-tse fly, cattle. The elite ate pigs, chickens, goats, and sometimes beef; while the non-elite Kongolese often used animals to pay tributes to rulers and subsisted on vegetables, eggs, and herbs.@   While there were slave caravans moving through the villages, these depictions are of stable societies.  But that was before the arrival of Stanley, Leopold and white supremacy as big business. 
As the Museum notes, the art tradition embodied in the carved ivory stopped around 1900, which would be during the ever-quickening rubber trade.  The method used to harvest the sap from the rubber vines was forced labor, which continued through the First and Second World Wars.  AIn 1916, by colonial officials= count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1,359 of the porters were worked to death or died of disease.  Famines rage.  A Catholic missionary reported, >The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!=@  There was no more time for carving ivory or raising fowl.  This was a life-style of intense individual and social trauma. Trauma to the point where people were starved and desperate enough to eat what they would not normally consider food, fellow primates for example.  
  There are many African stories about monkeys, stories that involve them as mischievous spirits and companions.  Searching the literature has turned up many, African food dishes, encompassing a wide variety of foods, but we have found no recipes suggesting monkey meat.  (There is one South African dish with Amonkey glands@ but it specifies that no monkeys are used.)   Because recipes for monkeys are not easily found, it may indicate they were a eaten only out of desperation.  This is something that African-Americans should easily recognize.  Africans did not eat pig=s foot and chitlin=s until they were brought to America and had to eat whatever was left after the slaughter.  Nowadays, there are many people who still enjoy a pig=s foot, long after the necessity has passed.  Similarly, Africans were not regular eaters of monkey meat, until the slave labor system used to extract the rubber and ivory from the Congo and surrounding areas drove them from their homes, their fields and their gardens, into wild areas, a starving people. 

The European invasions and system of forced labor had disrupted the social fabric of the Africans.  Run from their villages, the Africans had to eat whatever could be caught and whatever the Europeans did not want.  They did this under continual and extraordinary trauma, stress and fatigue which lowering their immune systems and increased the likelihood of viral infection at a time and in places when they were most likely to encounter new viruses.  It is with that as a background that we turn to scientific, Apeer review@ literature.
In Nature magazine we find the following article, AAn African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.@    They report, ADr. Tuofu Zhu of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and colleagues report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences of an HIV-1-seropositive plasma sample taken from an adult Bantu male in 1959 living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The researchers studied 1,213 plasma samples obtained from Africa between 1959 and 1982; the 1959 sample tested positive for HIV-1… The plasma sample is the oldest confirmed case of HIV-1…The sample taken from the Bantu man has a viral sequence that lies near the ancestral node of subtypes B and D in the major group, suggesting that these HIV-1 subtypes may stem from a single introduction into Africa soon before 1959. The team notes, however, that >given the large genetic differences between HIV-1 and HIV-2, the divergence of these viruses could not have occurred in the late 1940s; that branching point must have come considerably earlier.= The findings highlight the need for continued surveillance, they assert, noting the diversification of HIV over the past 40 to 50 years.@*
In an article entitled APeer review and the origin of AIDSC a case study in rejected ideas@ appearing in BioScience, 1993, Brian Martin looks at the arguments for contaminated polio vaccines being the cause of the AIDS epidemic.  AToday=s standard theory of the origin of AIDS is that a simian immunodefinciency virus (SIV) carried by an African monkey was transmitted to and survived in a human to become human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This transmission could have happened in any of a number of ways: blood from a butchered monkey entering a human=s blood through a cut, monkey blood being injected into humans as part of sexual customs, a human eating undercooked African monkey meat, or a monkey biting a human (Gromek 1990, Hardy 1987, Karpas 1990). However, there are a large number of other theories, such as the manufacture of HIV by biological warfare laboratories (Lederer 1987, 1988).
AIn 1987, an independent scholar named Louis Pascal, based in New York City, developed the idea that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the late 1950s.  After reflection and study of the medical literature, he developed some strong arguments and unearthed considerable evidence for this hypothesis. Here, in outline, is the argument:
AThere are two main types of HIV, called HIV-1 and HIV-2. Current variants of HIV-1 (linked with AIDS in most parts of the world) appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from central Africa a little before 1960, whereas current variants of HIV-2 appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from western Africa. The closest known relatives to HIV are SIVs found in monkeys and chimpanzees. An SIV very similar to HIV-2 is known, but no SIV has been conclusively shown to be highly similar to HIV-1; however, further SIVs continue to be discovered.
APascal noted that polio vaccines are cultured on monkey kidneys and therefore that SIV from an infected monkey could have contaminated a batch of vaccine. An infected monkey could easily have been used, since monkeys with SIVs may show no sign of disease. Polio vaccines could not be screened for SIV contamination before 1985, the year SIVs were discoveredY.
APascal identified a live polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, as the one most likely to have led to AIDS, and even named the batch most likely to be responsible. This vaccine was given to 325,000 people in central and west Africa in the years 1957-1960. Pascal (1991) says that it is no coincidence that the rate of HIV infection is extremely high in central Africa and in Kinshasa, Zaire.
AA point in immunology aids the argument.  Pascal (1991) points out that in order for a virus to infect a different species, it is helpful to reduce the resistance of the new host=s immune system. Koprowski=s polio vaccine was given to many children less than one month old, before their immune systems were fully developed. Furthermore, these infants were given 15 times the adult dosage because they produce antibodies less easily.@

Contaminated Vaccines,
Only Part of the Story
Pascal=s theory of contaminated polio vaccines may be true, but it does not account for the 1959 death of an adult Bantu man from HIV infection, or the time needed for viral mutation from HIV-1 to HIV-2 before 1940.   It also does not explain the presence of  Karposi=s Sarcoma, an AIDS marker, beginning in 1914.    These are accounted for by the eating of contaminated monkey meat during the forced labor system in East, West and Central Africa, from the 1890s to the 1940s.   This system, with its social disruption, would also have lowered the immune systems of the people.

How Did AIDS Spread?

Writing in The British Medical Journal in 1998, Juhani Leikola, in an article entitled Achieving self sufficiency in blood across Europe, says, AWhen the development of blood component therapy was in its infancy, countries were by and large self sufficient for whole blood. Large scale export and import of plasma started in the 1960s and early 1970s, when both albumin and coagulation factor VIII became commercially available.
The industry needed more and more plasma, and the development of plastic bags made plasmapheresis feasible. Large plasma donation centres were established, primarily in the United States but also in countries such as Nicaragua and Haiti. Exploitation of donors gained wide publicity, and the trade in Ared gold@ became an important international media event.@   Other blood collection sites were in Kinshasa, West African and Lesotha, South Africa.   
At the conservative  FreeRepublic.com,  not a peer review site, we find this well-researched analysis of the spread of AIDS.  AWe know of four primary routes of HIV transmission: sexual contact, transmission in utero from mother to offspring, intravenous administration of the virus with contaminated needles, and the use of infected blood products. Only the last two factors are relatively new.  Could contaminated needles and the harvesting and administration of blood products be the critical new factors accounting for the AIDS pandemic?
AAll of the critical factors can be present in the process of plasmapheresis. This procedure involves the extraction of whole blood from human donors, the separating out of the plasma, and the reinjection of the remaining cells back into the donor. If not done properly and with sterile equipment, plasmapheresis represents a powerful vector of HIV transmission. Moreover, since factor concentrates involve the pooling of plasma from thousands of donors, an entire pool can be contaminated by the inclusion of a single unit from a donor infected with HIV.  So plasma collection would have represented a great risk if present in the very same place and time as the first appearance of HIV.
AThe scenario is not merely hypothetical. Western equatorial Africa, where chimpanzees infected with the ancestral simian virus were being slaughtered and consumed, where AIDS was first endemic in the 1970s, was precisely the place where, at that same time, blood donor centers were harvesting the source product for a lucrative and quickly growing worldwide trade in blood plasma!
AYWas it just coincidental that the plasma brokers of Montreal and Zurich traded blood plasma at that time from the areas of central Africa near Kinshasa, Zaire?[Formerly Leopoldville, eds.] That this was the region of west central Africa we later found to have had the earliest and heaviest concentration of AIDS?  That this was the very same place where we now know lived the chimpanzees that carried the virus ancestral to HIV? We know this: blood products from this particular region of Africa were being shipped to the United States at the same time that the first cases of AIDS were developing in Americans with hemophilia.@  
ABy 1987 a few scientists like Matilde Krim publicly theorized that a biological accident could have initiated the AIDS epidemic in gay menY.Krim postulates that gamma globulin in the early 1970s was made from Apooled@ human blood brought in from Africa and the CaribbeanY.
ADr. Peter Jones, director of the Haemophilia Center at the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle, in northeastern England,  wrote a letter published by the British Medical Journal in 1985. 
AHe said, >it may be pertinent@ that blood products coming into the United States in the 1970s, when there was a shortage of home supplies, originated in >exactly the areas now known to be endemic for Kaposi=s sarcoma and other AIDS-related diseases.=
AHe identified the areas as Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire; Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal. A similar blood-donor center operated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he saidY.the supply was organized by >international plasma brokers= based mainly in Zurich, Switzerland, and Montreal.  >These facts suggest that the disease was introduced into the United States, not by sexual transmission, but via plasma obtained in the endemic areas,= Jones said.@

At latest report,  the western governments through the International Monetary Fund, are offering African nations a loan of a billion dollars at 7% interest to pay for buying drugs from western pharmaceutical companies.   After all they have taken and the genocide they have caused, an interest-bearing loan is the only bone they can throw.  This is the behavior of despicable men.  These people have no shame.  They have no shame at all.
*An African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.  
Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahinias, Andre J.; et al. Nature (02/05/98) Vol. 391, No. 6667, P. 594 (The CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention makes this information available as a public service only. Providing this information does not constitute endorsement by the CDC. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however, copies may not be sold, and the CDC National AIDS Clearinghouse should be cited as the source. Copyright 1996, Information, Inc. Bethesda, MD)

In a novel-like fashion, this riveting text tells the story of how the African continent was invaded by bands of European terrorists, led by Henry Morton (ADr. Livingstone, I presume@) Stanley, a journalist and explorer.  In this passage, Hochschild shows how Stanley and his men went about their work: ATo those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley=s officers wrote in his diary, >We finished our last plantain today …the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women.= When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, >Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round=. Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day=s work.  Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest.  He fell like a stone… Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

AOne member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.@   This description, horrible as it sounds, was the regular course of conduct of the expeditions that crossed Africa through the years 1871-1887 and only the beginning of what was to come.
As Stanley blazed a path of terror across Central Africa, emptying villages and forcing people into the wild, he lead the way for Belgian=s King Leopold II and the rest of the Western world, to come and extract the ivory and then the rubber from the continent. As he prepared for one expedition, AStanley was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker=s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute.  The new gun, Stanley said, would be >of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.=@
Hochschild shows us that as part of the process of supplying the world with the then Amagic commodity@– rubber– the Europeans used Africans as recalcitrant beasts of burden and in their doing so, cut the population in half by killing, starvation, disease and a Aplummeting birth rate@.  When we spoke in the opening about banks awash in blood, that was not hyperbole, it was descriptive.   Here is another passage from AKing Leopold=s Ghost@:  AThe territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally.  Where a river flows into lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E.V.Sjoblom, >I sawYdead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed.  It was for the rubberYwhen I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water.  As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, >Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown in the river=@.
In 1890, the Dunlop Company began making tires, and by the mid 1890s rubber was becoming a Amust have@ ingredient.  Automobiles had arrived and rubber was needed for tires and fittings.   Hochschild says, ASuddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commodity, and its price rose throughout the 1890s.  Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people=s lives than in the equatorial rain forest, where wild rubber vines snaked high into the trees, that covered nearly half of King Leopold=s Congo.@  It was around that time that the life-styles depicted on the ivory tusks of the period (See Figures 1-3 page 4), would be changed forever.
African-American Missionary and Explorer William Shephard was there.  In a story appearing in 1908, he wrote about what happened in the Kasai region as the peaceful Kuba people were driven to rise in revolt against the rubber terror.  AThese great stalwart men and women, who have from time immemorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas, tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and leopard for their skins, who have always had their own king and a government not to be despised, officers of the law established in every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe.  Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all the African tribesY

But within these last three years how changed they are!  Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected.  The streets of their towns are not clean and well swept as they once were.  Even their children cry for bread.
Why this change?  You have it in a few words.  There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it.  In the majority of villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give and answer concerning their soul=s salvation.@   (From William Shephard=s writings in the American Presbyterians annual newsletter, the Kassai Herald, January, 1908)

These repeated invasions and forced labor, destroyed all normal systems of the Africans, including the food system and normally developing trade relationships.  On the internet, we can see this in the art collection of the National Museum of African Art (http://www.si.edu/nmafa/exhibits/currexhb.htm).   Here we find, ABy the 19th century, after several centuries of contact and trade with Europe, workshops specializing in carving export objects for the foreign trade were established along the Loango coast. These workshops produced objects in wood, soapstone, and ivory for sale to both Europeans and Africans. Export objects in ivory included cane handles and stamps for sealing wax. The most famous objects in ivory, however, were carved figurative tusks that ranged from 20 centimeters to one meter (eight inches to three feet) in length. Using iron tools, artists carved African and European figures engaged in activities of daily coastal life in relief on the tusks. The artists carved and arranged the figures to heighten the naturalism and expressive power for which Kongo art is famous, paying great attention to detailCdress, hairstyles, gestures, and comportment. The scenes were carved and probably meant to be read starting at the base and ending at the top. This lively tradition of genre art in ivory lasted from about 1850 to 1900.@   The Loango coast stretches along the west African Coast, centering at the mouth of the Congo River.   (For a description of this area after 1900, see Joseph Conrad=s AHeart of Darkness@.)
The tusk carvings give indications of the African diet and relationship with animals.   Regarding the scene of a man about to sacrifice an animal, the museum tells us, AAnimals are prominent in Kongo art, myths, and rituals. The scene of a man preparing to sacrifice a bovine (see below)  may allude to an important event, such as a funeral or rite of passage.  Animals are also an important part of Kongo daily life. Kongo peoples raise fowl, goats, pigs, and, in the southern part of the kingdom which is relatively free of the tse-tse fly, cattle. The elite ate pigs, chickens, goats, and sometimes beef; while the non-elite Kongolese often used animals to pay tributes to rulers and subsisted on vegetables, eggs, and herbs.@   While there were slave caravans moving through the villages, these depictions are of stable societies.  But that was before the arrival of Stanley, Leopold and white supremacy as big business. 
As the Museum notes, the art tradition embodied in the carved ivory stopped around 1900, which would be during the ever-quickening rubber trade.  The method used to harvest the sap from the rubber vines was forced labor, which continued through the First and Second World Wars.  AIn 1916, by colonial officials= count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1,359 of the porters were worked to death or died of disease.  Famines rage.  A Catholic missionary reported, >The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!=@  There was no more time for carving ivory or raising fowl.  This was a life-style of intense individual and social trauma. Trauma to the point where people were starved and desperate enough to eat what they would not normally consider food, fellow primates for example.  
  There are many African stories about monkeys, stories that involve them as mischievous spirits and companions.  Searching the literature has turned up many, African food dishes, encompassing a wide variety of foods, but we have found no recipes suggesting monkey meat.  (There is one South African dish with Amonkey glands@ but it specifies that no monkeys are used.)   Because recipes for monkeys are not easily found, it may indicate they were a eaten only out of desperation.  This is something that African-Americans should easily recognize.  Africans did not eat pig=s foot and chitlin=s until they were brought to America and had to eat whatever was left after the slaughter.  Nowadays, there are many people who still enjoy a pig=s foot, long after the necessity has passed.  Similarly, Africans were not regular eaters of monkey meat, until the slave labor system used to extract the rubber and ivory from the Congo and surrounding areas drove them from their homes, their fields and their gardens, into wild areas, a starving people. 
The European invasions and system of forced labor had disrupted the social fabric of the Africans.  Run from their villages, the Africans had to eat whatever could be caught and whatever the Europeans did not want.  They did this under continual and extraordinary trauma, stress and fatigue which lowering their immune systems and increased the likelihood of viral infection at a time and in places when they were most likely to encounter new viruses.  It is with that as a background that we turn to scientific, Apeer review@ literature.

In Nature magazine we find the following article, AAn African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.@    They report, ADr. Tuofu Zhu of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and colleagues report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences of an HIV-1-seropositive plasma sample taken from an adult Bantu male in 1959 living in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The researchers studied 1,213 plasma samples obtained from Africa between 1959 and 1982; the 1959 sample tested positive for HIV-1… The plasma sample is the oldest confirmed case of HIV-1…The sample taken from the Bantu man has a viral sequence that lies near the ancestral node of subtypes B and D in the major group, suggesting that these HIV-1 subtypes may stem from a single introduction into Africa soon before 1959. The team notes, however, that >given the large genetic differences between HIV-1 and HIV-2, the divergence of these viruses could not have occurred in the late 1940s; that branching point must have come considerably earlier.= The findings highlight the need for continued surveillance, they assert, noting the diversification of HIV over the past 40 to 50 years.@*
In an article entitled APeer review and the origin of AIDSC a case study in rejected ideas@ appearing in BioScience, 1993, Brian Martin looks at the arguments for contaminated polio vaccines being the cause of the AIDS epidemic.  AToday=s standard theory of the origin of AIDS is that a simian immunodefinciency virus (SIV) carried by an African monkey was transmitted to and survived in a human to become human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This transmission could have happened in any of a number of ways: blood from a butchered monkey entering a human=s blood through a cut, monkey blood being injected into humans as part of sexual customs, a human eating undercooked African monkey meat, or a monkey biting a human (Gromek 1990, Hardy 1987, Karpas 1990). However, there are a large number of other theories, such as the manufacture of HIV by biological warfare laboratories (Lederer 1987, 1988).
AIn 1987, an independent scholar named Louis Pascal, based in New York City, developed the idea that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the late 1950s.  After reflection and study of the medical literature, he developed some strong arguments and unearthed considerable evidence for this hypothesis. Here, in outline, is the argument:
AThere are two main types of HIV, called HIV-1 and HIV-2. Current variants of HIV-1 (linked with AIDS in most parts of the world) appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from central Africa a little before 1960, whereas current variants of HIV-2 appear to have diverged from a common ancestor from western Africa. The closest known relatives to HIV are SIVs found in monkeys and chimpanzees. An SIV very similar to HIV-2 is known, but no SIV has been conclusively shown to be highly similar to HIV-1; however, further SIVs continue to be discovered.
APascal noted that polio vaccines are cultured on monkey kidneys and therefore that SIV from an infected monkey could have contaminated a batch of vaccine. An infected monkey could easily have been used, since monkeys with SIVs may show no sign of disease. Polio vaccines could not be screened for SIV contamination before 1985, the year SIVs were discoveredY.
APascal identified a live polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, as the one most likely to have led to AIDS, and even named the batch most likely to be responsible. This vaccine was given to 325,000 people in central and west Africa in the years 1957-1960. Pascal (1991) says that it is no coincidence that the rate of HIV infection is extremely high in central Africa and in Kinshasa, Zaire.
AA point in immunology aids the argument.  Pascal (1991) points out that in order for a virus to infect a different species, it is helpful to reduce the resistance of the new host=s immune system. Koprowski=s polio vaccine was given to many children less than one month old, before their immune systems were fully developed. Furthermore, these infants were given 15 times the adult dosage because they produce antibodies less easily.@

Contaminated Vaccines,
Only Part of the Story
Pascal=s theory of contaminated polio vaccines may be true, but it does not account for the 1959 death of an adult Bantu man from HIV infection, or the time needed for viral mutation from HIV-1 to HIV-2 before 1940.   It also does not explain the presence of  Karposi=s Sarcoma, an AIDS marker, beginning in 1914.    These are accounted for by the eating of contaminated monkey meat during the forced labor system in East, West and Central Africa, from the 1890s to the 1940s.   This system, with its social disruption, would also have lowered the immune systems of the people.

How Did AIDS Spread?

Writing in The British Medical Journal in 1998, Juhani Leikola, in an article entitled Achieving self sufficiency in blood across Europe, says, AWhen the development of blood component therapy was in its infancy, countries were by and large self sufficient for whole blood. Large scale export and import of plasma started in the 1960s and early 1970s, when both albumin and coagulation factor VIII became commercially available.
The industry needed more and more plasma, and the development of plastic bags made plasmapheresis feasible. Large plasma donation centres were established, primarily in the United States but also in countries such as Nicaragua and Haiti. Exploitation of donors gained wide publicity, and the trade in Ared gold@ became an important international media event.@   Other blood collection sites were in Kinshasa, West African and Lesotha, South Africa.   
At the conservative  FreeRepublic.com,  not a peer review site, we find this well-researched analysis of the spread of AIDS.  AWe know of four primary routes of HIV transmission: sexual contact, transmission in utero from mother to offspring, intravenous administration of the virus with contaminated needles, and the use of infected blood products. Only the last two factors are relatively new.  Could contaminated needles and the harvesting and administration of blood products be the critical new factors accounting for the AIDS pandemic?
AAll of the critical factors can be present in the process of plasmapheresis. This procedure involves the extraction of whole blood from human donors, the separating out of the plasma, and the reinjection of the remaining cells back into the donor. If not done properly and with sterile equipment, plasmapheresis represents a powerful vector of HIV transmission. Moreover, since factor concentrates involve the pooling of plasma from thousands of donors, an entire pool can be contaminated by the inclusion of a single unit from a donor infected with HIV.  So plasma collection would have represented a great risk if present in the very same place and time as the first appearance of HIV.
AThe scenario is not merely hypothetical. Western equatorial Africa, where chimpanzees infected with the ancestral simian virus were being slaughtered and consumed, where AIDS was first endemic in the 1970s, was precisely the place where, at that same time, blood donor centers were harvesting the source product for a lucrative and quickly growing worldwide trade in blood plasma!
AYWas it just coincidental that the plasma brokers of Montreal and Zurich traded blood plasma at that time from the areas of central Africa near Kinshasa, Zaire?[Formerly Leopoldville, eds.] That this was the region of west central Africa we later found to have had the earliest and heaviest concentration of AIDS?  That this was the very same place where we now know lived the chimpanzees that carried the virus ancestral to HIV? We know this: blood products from this particular region of Africa were being shipped to the United States at the same time that the first cases of AIDS were developing in Americans with hemophilia.@  
ABy 1987 a few scientists like Matilde Krim publicly theorized that a biological accident could have initiated the AIDS epidemic in gay menY.Krim postulates that gamma globulin in the early 1970s was made from Apooled@ human blood brought in from Africa and the CaribbeanY.
ADr. Peter Jones, director of the Haemophilia Center at the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle, in northeastern England,  wrote a letter published by the British Medical Journal in 1985. 
AHe said, >it may be pertinent@ that blood products coming into the United States in the 1970s, when there was a shortage of home supplies, originated in >exactly the areas now known to be endemic for Kaposi=s sarcoma and other AIDS-related diseases.=
AHe identified the areas as Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire; Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal. A similar blood-donor center operated in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he saidY.the supply was organized by >international plasma brokers= based mainly in Zurich, Switzerland, and Montreal.  >These facts suggest that the disease was introduced into the United States, not by sexual transmission, but via plasma obtained in the endemic areas,= Jones said.@

At latest report,  the western governments through the International Monetary Fund, are offering African nations a loan of a billion dollars at 7% interest to pay for buying drugs from western pharmaceutical companies.   After all they have taken and the genocide they have caused, an interest-bearing loan is the only bone they can throw.  This is the behavior of despicable men.  These people have no shame.  They have no shame at all.
*An African HIV-1 Sequence from 1959 and Implications for the Origin of the Epidemic.  
Zhu, Tuofu; Korber, Bette T.; Nahinias, Andre J.; et al. Nature (02/05/98) Vol. 391, No. 6667, P. 594 (The CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention makes this information available as a public service only. Providing this information does not constitute endorsement by the CDC. Reproduction of this text is encouraged; however, copies may not be sold, and the CDC National AIDS Clearinghouse should be cited as the source. Copyright 1996, Information, Inc. Bethesda, MD)