It’s time to transform the way in which producers of Kenyan culture operate

Abenea Ndago

Most Kenyan scholars who hold a PhD in the natural sciences (especially in medicine) are aware of a not-so-handsome truth about the history of medical research in America, a systematic plot which ran for nearly 40 years from 1932 till 1972, and for which President Bill Clinton finally apologised to African-Americans in 1997. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Alabama involved the state enlisting of 600 African-American men (without their knowledge and consent) in a medical study which sought to find out what happened if black victims of the disease were left untreated.

A depressing aspect of the narrative is that American doctors already knew syphilis could indeed lead to madness and death, and even though its cure, penicillin, was discovered in 1947, the 600 African-American guinea pigs were intentionally neglected. The disease slowly spread from fathers to mothers, and finally to children via breast milk. A frosty relationship between African-Americans and state health services endures to this day.