Source: https://qz.com/
At a time when footballers have been urged to do more to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was striking to see three Africans who have graced the world stage speaking out.
In a television discussion that has become swiftly infamous, two French doctors—one of them the head of an intensive care unit in Paris—suggested trials for vaccines against Covid-19 should be conducted upon African patients.
The remarks of professors Jean-Paul Mira and Camille Locht met immediately with fury, with the words of Didier Drogba, Demba Ba and Samuel Eto’o attracting particular attention. “It is inconceivable that we continue to accept this”, wrote the former Ivorian international Drogba on Twitter, sharing his tweets in both French and English so as to ensure their widest possible audience
“Africa is not a laboratory. I would like to vividly denounce those demeaning, false and most of all deeply racist words…Do not take African people as human guinea pigs! It’s absolutely disgusting…African leaders have a responsibility to protect their populations from those horrendous conspiracies.”
Demba Ba, the French-born Senegalese international, looked at the broader context of white supremacy. “Welcome to the West”, he commented, “where white people believe themselves to be so superior that racism and stupidity have become commonplace.
Meanwhile, the former Cameroonian superstar Samuel Eto’o delivered a brusque and brutal verdict. “Sons of bitches”, he wrote.
The doctors have since apologized in response to the global outrage but the anger of Drogba, Ba, Eto’o and countless others has deep roots, since Mira and Locht were merely invoking a long tradition of French experimentation upon Africans. To take just one example between 1921 and 1956, millions of citizens were forced by French colonial governments “to receive injections of medications with dubious efficacy and with serious side effects, including blindness, gangrene, and death.”