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

Fantastical Science

When the Sierra Leone Sickle Cell Disease Society released its 2012 annual report recently (http://www.sleonesickle.org/2012AnnualReport.html) it reminded me that there has been little progress in the treatment of sickle cell disease in recent times, even though affected children in rich countries have been surviving well into adulthood. But survival into adulthood does not necessarily guarantee relief from the continuing anxiety induced by the threat of early mortality. Besides, other severe, but not necessarily lethal complications of the disease, such as acute severe pain and strokes and infection remain a constant blight on lives of patients, whether they live in a rich country or in a poor one.

Doctors and researchers, worldwide, are doing their damnedest to discover new and effective treatments for the disease, but the promise of a magic bullet that cures all the ills of sickle cell remains unfulfilled. That is perhaps not surprising because, the deeper we dig, the more complex the sickle cell story becomes. When sickle cell became the first “molecular” disease to be linked to the inheritance of an abnormal hemoglobin, the blood pigment that carries oxygen and gives it its red colour, it was hoped that the cure would not be long in coming. Those were simple times: All one had to do, it was thought, was to discover or design a chemical that would engage the wayward hemoglobin and force it to behave itself.

Now, it has become clear that the out-of-control hemoglobin is just one part of the problem. The inheritance package consists of not just hemoglobin, normal or abnormal, but, as well, of all the other characteristics that make us who or what we are. Teasing out all the factors that contribute to the bad act that sickle cell disease is has, since, become a complicated business. And I am not even talking about the social aspects. I am not going there. You can wrestle with that one yourself, considering that two parents are required to produce the individual affected with sickle cell. I am  talking biology here.

That brings me to the complexity and anxieties surrounding big research. I was listening to a radio programme the other day in which four experts were discussing the relevance and cost of current research not only in the biological sciences, but also in the physical sciences as well. The problem for physics, it was said, is that it has become too theoretical to the point of being almost nonsensically abstract, whilst biological science has become too big for its boots, claiming that it can cure just about everything, from “making the blind see, the crippled walk and the deaf hear” (I quote here), especially invoking the use of stem cells. Meanwhile, Big Pharma is going completely out of control. 

The remedy? Theoretical physicists have to stop “stringing” us along a path to weird universes. And biology should stop twittering on about stem cells and the marvels they can accomplish. As for Big Pharma, it should stop holding the public to ransom with fabulously expensive nostrums which even rich countries can ill afford.

What relevance do string theory, stem cells and Big Pharma have with sickle cell disease? Well, at least some of the money spent on research in these areas can be applied to research in sickle cell disease. Some of this money can, hopefully, find its way to researchers in Africa where the burden of the disease is greatest, and perhaps, combined with the vast riches in the African eco-system, productive connections can be made for effective therapies for the disease. That would be fantastic. After all, sickle cell is the human genome’s response to the gauntlet thrown down at it by another forest-dweller, the malaria parasite.

Too bad Bill Gates does not read this blog.

Tell Fren Tru

Post Script: June 19 is World Sickle Cell Day

A look into "The Freetown Bond. A Life Under Two Flags"

I don’t know what it is about Freetown. It is a small city, spread along a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic to the north and a range of mountains to its south. And as far as cities go, it is somewhat unprepossessing, and is not all that old, either, compared to say, Jerusalem, Timbuktu, Rome or Benin: Its most recent founding dates to not much more than a couple of centuries ago, although in some contexts it has been known to describe itself, not without a touch of irony, as “ancient and loyal”. Perhaps it is this sense of rootedness and loyalty that ensnares the imagination of those who were born there and who grew up among its narrow streets and lanes.

But it is not just its own citizens, but outsiders too who, for good or ill are drawn to it and who never seem able to divest themselves of its charms. Indeed, some have written about what amounts to a love-hate relationship that arises from the city’s irritating habit of seducing and repelling almost simultaneously. Others are much less ambiguous and remain captivated till their dying day. However, the telling of its story has not always been worthy of the city and it was with much anticipation that I looked forward to Eldred Durosimi Jones’ telling when I heard he was writing his memoir. I fully expected that he was going to give an account in which the city was bound to be a prominent participant.

I have not been disappointed. Man and boy, Eldred Jones is the quintessential Freetonian, with connections spanning the city from the Maroon Town neighbourhood in the west where his mother's family originated to the village atmosphere around Holy Trinity Church in the east where he grew up. His description of his early school days at Holy Trinity Infant School is especially evocative because this blogger also started school there and remembers the formidable Teacher Carrie, who left her mark on her charges, if you know what I mean. Perhaps some of us needed a firmer hand than others, but the progression to the CMS Grammar School was more or less a natural trajectory that Eldred Jones made with enviable ease.

That school, now called the Sierra Leone Grammar School, is another institution that has left a mark-all along the West African coast and even beyond-and is only a few decades younger than the city itself. Jones’ descriptions of what went on there are highly entertaining, and indeed provide some lessons as well. He reminds us that the school was a creation of the Church Missionary Society, which also founded the first institution of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa, and which, in due course, Jones was to progress to as he dug his roots deeper into the city. The fact that the college, Fourah Bay College, was temporarily displaced by the exigencies of the Second World War to a place outside Freetown only emphases its pathway towards becoming a national institution. Now Fourah Bay College is part of the University of Sierra Leone and the mark it has made in the development of higher education and in other spheres not only in Sierra Leone, but in the whole of West Africa as well and even farther, is almost legendary.

After graduating from Fourah Bay, Eldred Jones went on, in the mid-fifties, to read English at Oxford. Predictably, after that, he went right back to Freetown, pulled by that bond in the title of the memoir. Apart from sabbaticals abroad, necessary for recharging his batteries, he has stayed at Fourah Bay, deeply entrenched in its academic life but also in the social life of the city as well, weaving town and gown together into a single seamless garment. Besides, the college was a vantage point from which he observed, participated in and indeed occasionally become embroiled in in some of the tumultuous events that engulfed the city, as the capital of a country, stumbling its way into democratic governance.

As Eldred Jones relates in modest and subdued tones, his academic achievements and honours, combined with his commitment to duty mark him as one of the truly great personalities of the city. This is even more remarkable because for the best part of two decades he has been vision-impaired up to the point of blindness. But by his own admission, a lot of what he achieved would not have been possible without the help of his wife, Marjorie, who also co-authors “The Freetown Bond” and who, in her own right, is a most remarkable Freetonian too.

The question then is, is “The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags” worth its $45.00 price tag? Well, the answer to that depends. If you enjoy a western income, it is worth every cent of its 174-page content. But for the earner of Sierra Leone Leones, the price may very well be too steep. But wherever you derive your income this is a book that you must try your best to get hold of.

Tell Fren Tru