AFRICA – Social murder and the ruthless national oppression of the East and Central African peoples by world imperialism continues as the Ebola outbreak claims the lives of nearly 380 out of 1,300 Congolese in the Ituri, North and South Kivu provinces. The haemorrhagic virus has also made its way to Uganda, with 650 suspected cases and more than 150 suspected deaths in Kampala and two other cities. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s National Institute of Biomedical Research noted detection of an infected person who traveled to Haut-Uele.
Health officials in the DRC declared the Ebola outbreak on May 15, as U.S. Imperialism’s dominance and massive cuts to foreign aid worsened the conditions for response.The virus attacks immune cells and blood vessels, causing severe inflammation, internal bleeding, organ failure, and, in many cases, death. The latest outbreak is linked to the Bundibugyo strain, for which there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments. Health researchers have been left to work overtime testing various antivirals and antibodies, including remdesivir. Despite basic precautions for medical care of people affected by the virus, the oppressed nations and peoples of the region, forcibly left with little to no social means to care for their own, are abandoned to survive amid displacement, reactionary war, land oppression and military violence by the African comprador-bureaucrat capitalists.
In Kenya, the political conditions of the recent outbreak have been met with widespread resistance by the Kenyan people. A proposed 50-bed Ebola quarantine facility at Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki, linked directly to U.S. Imperialism, was intended to exclusively house asymptomatic Americans. The masses gathered outside of the site, demanding the facility be shut down entirely. They were met with armed violence from the Old State’s police and military forces, killing three people. The government has tried to hide the true nature of the facility; Health Minister Aden Duale, a representative of the Kenyan Old State, stated that the country’s agreement with the U.S. is part of a push to strengthen Kenya’s emergency response systems and the quarantine facility is for “everyone.” However, the nationally oppressed peoples of Central and East Africa are not ones to be played fools.
The high court in Nairobi blocked the Trump regime from opening the Ebola camp; however, imperialism is ruthless. Now, the Old State is moving to allow for Center for Disease Control officials to expand screening and monitoring efforts for passengers from the outbreak-affected countries; on the other hand, a temporary ban of people without U.S. passports has been implemented, including visitors from the DRC, Uganda and South Sudan.
The imperialist system is the sole cause of the social murder of millions of African peoples and purposely committing the heinous acts of national oppression. While the Trump regime terrorizes the working and immigrant masses at home and deports migrants to the continent, it is weaponizing public health abroad. Instead, the U.S. is pushing to send domestic cases out to the semi-colonial countries, a stark representation of imperialism’s failure to even provide the most basic social necessities for their own as well. Eastern Congo, dominated by the M23 paramilitary, is compounded by super-exploitation, patriarchal violence, disease, and unequal development, rooted from centuries of colonial and imperialist enslavement of the African continent.
The African people constitute the deepest and lowest oppressed masses in the Old society, entirely left to the mercy of U.S., EU, and Russian Imperialism and Chinese Social-Imperialism. Proletarians, poor peasants, urban poor, and national minorities have endured terrible exploitation and plunder, theft of national resources, mass death, and reactionary and chauvinist vilification. Since the Berlin Conference, world Imperialism has carved up the African continent for its resources, including cobalt, petroleum, cocoa, gas and lithium. This plunder leaves the African masses impoverished while comprador and bureaucrat Capitalists grow rich, pit oppressed peoples against each other, and prostitute national resource reserves to multinational corporations and monopoly cartels.
Africa lies at the center of the world Imperialist system, and the Ebola outbreak shows again how disease becomes deadlier under conditions of plunder, war, displacement, and imposed poverty. The African masses are not dying simply because a virus exists. They are dying because world imperialism has stripped whole regions of the social means needed to prevent, treat, and contain disease, while comprador rulers and monopoly corporations continue to profit from land, labor, and resources.
The fight against Ebola therefore cannot be separated from the fight against the conditions that allow it to spread: foreign domination, collapsed health infrastructure, military violence, forced migration, and the subordination of African life to Imperialist profit. The U.S. multinational proletariat, including New Afrikans and African immigrants, must unite with the African peoples in the cause of anti-imperialism and national liberation across the continent. No chauvinist separation of Africa from the world revolution can realize national self-determination or Socialism. Proletarian internationalist politics must stand at the center of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle.
