TFW you listen to a three-part podcast (‘Behind the Bastards') about the Belgian Congo and one of your special interests is horrifying zoonotic diseases and that's why you can't ever be happy.
Yes we all know (I hope) that King Leopold II of Belgium was a straight-up monster who stole land and people to create a country so he could enslave it for his own enrichment, and killed millions of people in the process. And while Leopold finally died to much rejoicing in 1909, colonial rule would last until 1960.
I did not know that the newly-independent First Congolese Republic had a perfectly good leader in Patrice Lumumba. Who was then just straight-up assassinated by a combination of the Belgian government and the CIA in 1961. And that following a few years of civil war, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was installed in a CIA-backed coup in 1965. He would then rule for over 30 years.
The narrative we get is that as soon as Belgium moved out, the country immediately fell to civil war and dictatorship. Implication: colonialism wasn't that bad actually. Implication: see the savages really can't rule themselves.
No. Bullshit. Belgium and the CIA did that. Belgium because they were actively funding and encouraging at least two factions in the multi-way civil war. They'd promised not to re-conquer the Congo. They hadn't promised not to re-conquer anyone who split off from it. The CIA because once the UN failed to restrain Belgium, Lumumba turned to the Soviets in desperation. And there was a slight Cold War happening at the time.
So far so bad but I can make it worse. The other big thing that was happening in the Congo around that time was the start of the global outbreak of HIV-1-M. Twelve different strains of HIV have jumped to humans from other primates on twelve different occasions (that we know of). HIV-1-M jumped from Congolese chimpanzees to humans around 1920ish, but really started exploding and going international in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The earliest HIV samples we have are from then-Leopoldville at this time. HIV-1-M is the strain responsible for about 90% of the ongoing AIDS pandemic and deaths.
Now maybe all the political stuff is completely irrelevant. It's not like ANYONE dealt well with the emergence of HIV. But I have a hunch that it's harder to notice and contain a new disease when the people dying from it are people you see as disposable (see also: Ronald Reagan, gays and homeless, 1980s), or when Belgium and the CIA just set the country on fire. And the movement of people in and around Leopoldville was definitely a factor in the spread; people tend to move more when a) you're using them as slave labour in your country-sized rubber plantation and b) you started a civil war.
(And THAT'S how you get to "The CIA did AIDS to keep the Africans down" but in a way that is actually accurate to history and virology.
So much shit that ACTUALLY HAPPENED in the Cold War kind of explains why conspiracy theorists are Like That. But also HIV came from SIV and causes AIDS, take your antiretroviral medicine if you can please. And everyone should have free healthcare to make that possible.)
