The Importance of an African Social Epistemology to Improve Public Health and Increase Life Expectancy in Africa

Abstract

Foreign medical experts widely assume their expertise and moral initiative are required to control fatal African epidemics, to compensate for indigenes’ malaise. But censorious disregard for African-based expertise is misguided and costs lives. The 2014–2015 emergency response to Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone illustrates how global authorities’ misinformation camouflages and exacerbates the conditions actually responsible for maintaining high rates of mortality and chronic illness in Africa. Relieving the disproportionately heavy disease burden of the Two-Thirds World requires locally based humanities specialists collaborating with indigenous leaders, public health practitioners, medical researchers, and healing specialists to liberate health care programming and national expenditures from the dictates of research monopolies, the priorities of foreign defense alliances, and the interests of mega-national drug-manufacturing conglomerates.