Professors Claim HIV/Aids Originated From White Racism Against Blacks In Africa

HIV-1, the most widespread strain of the virus, is widely believed to have originated from a zoonotic spillover of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) from chimpanzees to humans in Central Africa. Research published in Science by Beatrice H. Hahn and her colleagues in 1999 identified a subspecies of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) as the likely source of HIV-1. The crossover likely occurred when humans hunted and consumed bushmeat, exposing themselves to infected blood.

However, while the biological transmission event was natural, the broader context that allowed HIV to spread cannot be separated from the legacy of colonialism.

Amit Chitnis, Diana Rawls, and Jim Moore, writer and academics on the origins of HIV and Aids, now claim that the deadly viruses that have killed tens of millions of people worldwide are the result of white racism in colonial era Africa. They propose, collectively, that the virus was a result of “harsh conditions, forced labor, displacement, and unsafe injection and vaccination practices associated with colonialism, particularly in French Equatorial Africa.”

“We know that racism by white european and american colonizers plays a massive role in the growth and spread of deadly diseases. Now there is a clear link uncovered, after years of attempts at making the link, that shows white colonizers are the main cause of HIV,” one of the doctors writes in their book on the topic.

Scholar Jonathan Conrad wrote further on the subject in his book Heart of Darkness, detailing how because colonized africans were forced to work long hours in unsanitary conditions by their white overlords, it caused the perfect storm for HIV to form.

Another professor, David Gisselquist, says white people caused HIV through their colonizing efforts in Africa, though not through forced labor and abuses of the workers, but by trying to make their slaves work harder through forced vaccinations and injections to treat “sleep sickness,” which is what the colonizers called the docile, slow moving behaviors of the african workers. Millions were injeced with unclean needles, somehow spreading the viruses wholesale.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European colonial powers, particularly Belgium and France, established exploitative systems of forced labor in Central Africa, including in the Congo Basin where HIV-1 likely originated. Historian Jacques Pepin, in his influential book The Origins of AIDS (2011), argues that these systems created the perfect conditions for the virus to spread. Laborers were forcibly relocated to crowded work camps, exposed to harsh living conditions, and separated from their families, leading to the breakdown of traditional social structures.

“Colonial labor camps were breeding grounds for disease,” Pepin writes. “The combination of high population density, poor sanitation, and lack of medical care created a situation where infections could easily spread.”

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