Tuskegee North: Canada Matches America

Returning to Toronto a week ago we walked right into a raging storm. Though it had nothing to do with weather, it was a storm that created considerable turbulence, nevertheless. The disturbance came out of the dusty corners of academic research located within a Canadian university department of history. Results of this research were published recently in the journal, Social History in a paper entitled “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952”

The author, Ian Mosby, was a postdoctoral student when he went through records of the Canadian scientific and administrative elite of the era and discovered how they were trying out ideas on the treatment of malnutrition in Aboriginal children held captive in so-called residential schools. Children attending the schools were kept on a starvation diet of poor nutritional quality and ended up being severely malnourished. The scientists, doctors, nurses, anthropologists, etc saw these children as an opportunity to advance their careers, subjecting the starving children to controlled experiments in which one group was given nutritional supplements whilst another was maintained only on the starvation diet that had caused them to be malnourished in the first place. And all this was done neither with the consent of the parents nor the agreement of the experimental subjects themselves, and ignoring the risk of potential injury to them. To add to the indignities and anguish of the defenceless children, the researchers undertook detailed physical examinations and blood sampling procedures that were obviously painful.

Curiously, all this was taking place at the same time that the infamous Tuskegee experiment was in full swing in America. That project, undertaken by the United States Public Health Service, had as its aim, determining the natural history of untreated syphilis among African-American men in Alabama at a time when treatment for the disease was already available.

In circumstances like this, it may be difficult to distinguish Canadian social policies towards its subject population from the Americans’ to theirs. Nor can it be easy to distinguish those of colonial Britain in Africa who, as far as I can recall, sought neither the consent of my parents nor my prior agreement when they descended on my village in the late 1940’s to test its children for malaria parasites (I think) in our infant school. All I can remember is the terror that we felt when the bowl-hatted characters arrived at the school, lancets drawn, to administer punctures and squeeze blood out of our little fingers. The general weeping and wailing that accompanied this assault on our persons remains permanently imprinted on the memory.

And I still feel the pain.

Tell Fren Tru

Funny Old World

It’s a funny old world, innit? In the week that we learn from Transparency International that Sierra Leone has the world’s worst corruption record, we also learn that the scandal surrounding the 1990’s sale of the Sierra Leone High Commission (Embassy) building in London is still on the boil.

          Some of you might remember that in 1998 the High Commission’s Chancery building, 33 Portland Place, located in one of the hottest property neighbourhoods in London was sold for the sum of £50,000. The lucky buyer was a man called Lord Edward Davenport.

One and a half decades on, it is still not clear who authorized the sale or how it was arranged, but it is believed that two of the three principal players involved have gone to their graves. The whereabouts of the last surviving member of this gang of three are unknown. However, the fate of the buyer of this property going cheap in late 1990’s London, remains front and centre in the public eye. First, the “lord” was sent down for nearly 8 years in 2011 for a massive advanced fee scam of the type which, we in West Africa and elsewhere recognize as a ‘419’. Now, this week, his “lordship”, known among his friends as “Fast Eddie”, was in court again defending a confiscation bid, by the Serious Fraud Office, of wealth the office deems he had acquired from the proceeds of crime. The outcome of this action is still pending.

Number 33 Portland Place is now estimated, in 2013, to be worth up to £12 million, not a bad return on investment made just 15 years ago. So Sierra Leoneans are bound to feel aggrieved that a few of their countrymen let them down so badly.

Transparency International’s bid to highlight corruption worldwide fingers Sierra Leone as the most corrupt nation on earth. It takes the breath away just trying to say that. Apparently the methodology for estimating corruption in a country includes asking a random sample of citizens if, during a set period, they had had to bribe a public official in order to receive a public service. A whopping 84% of Sierra Leonean respondents in the most recent survey said that they had, placing us at the very bottom of the rankings. Something to ponder, eh?

Also, this week, I have been reading “Remote Corners”, the memoirs of one Harry Mitchell, a former District Commissioner, the archetypal colonial functionary in the pre-independence Sierra Leone of the 1950’s. I should warn you that you have to have a strong stomach to read this book because you are likely to retch at nearly every paragraph, not least because of its condescension. But for our current discussion, a typical paragraph reads something like this: ‘The monthly wage bills of labourers under my supervision in Bo had suddenly jumped from £700 to £1100’. Mitchell says that when he questioned his Sierra Leonean timekeeper about this increase, ‘the fellow cringed in a most abject way and confessed that he had taken on some more labourers without authorisation’.

Our memorialist then went on to say that the timekeeper had, ‘of course demanded a dash of two or three pounds from each of the illegally employed labourers and was probably imposing a levy on them every month.’ Mr Mitchell then proceeded to broaden the charge-sheet by declaring that ‘Peculation by dishonest clerks is a constant source of worry to most people in managerial positions in West Africa.’

          That was sixty years ago.

Makes you think.

Tell Fren Tru