Season of migration to the north is nigh, bearing the burden of being an African

It’s the season of migration to the North, yet again. And coming in the wake of Ebola-mongering, I’m curious what kind of reception I’m likely to encounter, first in London, and later in Houston in the US.

I hear London’s Heathrow airport has set up an Ebola screening centre; Houston is just a stone’s throw away from Dallas in Texas where some nurses were diagnosed with Ebola after picking the infection from a Liberian man they were treating.

Yes, you and I know where Liberia is, but many Americans do not; at least most of the freshmen that I taught couldn’t locate Kenya on the world map.

But this is not just about Geography; a top preacher in that country, Pat Robertson warns his congregation to be careful when they travel to Kenya because they could pick HIV from towels.

Now, that’s a rather interesting proposition, but before we dissect those possibilities, let’s first dispense with the question of screening.

This is not the first time Heathrow is setting up a screening centre; many moons ago, when I attended school there, it was respiratory infections they were interested in.

And if you thought this would be a random survey, you are wrong; immigration men and women, the unsmiling type, had a list of countries they were to pay attention to. Kenya was among them.

And since those were the days before the invention of machines that can peer through your bones, the sort used in major airports today, one had to drop their shirts for an x-ray. Alternately you took an x-ray with you.

I preferred the latter, so I took a set of films with me. The lady attending to me did not bother opening the envelope.

“What are you going to study at City University?” she asked. I responded.

“Very impressive,” she said, and the jelly in her double chin melted in a plastic.

I’m not sure if it’s the course that she found impressive, the institution, or the manner in which I said it. I did not seek a further clarification.

CONSIDER WARNING

I did not think further about the matter – perhaps because I was too excited about setting foot in London – although this was a flagrant display of prejudice, as some court ruled later, and scrapped the screening on account of discrimination.

Since Western technology is somewhat more advanced than what we have in our midst, it is possible they know things we do not about diseases. Like the preacher who has divined HIV is transmittable through towels in Kenya.

 

The man, I hear, has enormous following across the world, and as a man of God, no one would think he is not telling the truth. Put another way, members of his flock who do not know how HIV is transmitted, will consider his warning as nothing but gospel truth.

Now, one might say we have a problem if someone believes that HIV can be transmitted in such a manner, but that’s not necessarily true since Kenya is in Africa. And in Africa, anything is possible. So they continue their slander against this continent because past episodes are absorbed without question.

For the avoidance of doubt, there is an interesting book, Africa That Never Was edited by Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow that documents some of the racist tosh that Europe propounded in 400 years of fiction. And the HIV towels will make for a useful addition.