With trade, travel, global investments, it just ain't that kind of world any longer. Africans, meanwhile, are more alone than ever in their struggle against the onslaught of cryptic new diseases, ailments that could prove to be the plagues of the 21st Century. Over the gilded 1990s, a decade of economic boom times in America and Europe, black Africa's nations got poorer, part of a global trend toward the concentration of more wealth in fewer hands. And about the only people getting rich in Africa these days are the muti men, the traditional healers who have a bonanza of misery to reap. One in South Africa has just bought a DC-3 airplane for his private airstrip.
Health is the first ingredient in pride.
Today, a lot of Gabonese hate being Gabonese. She described bitterly how senior government officials had stolen thousands of dollars worth of medical supplies left after the outbreaks by foreign donors. But I will do it again. That is my job. I'll do what I can with cotton balls and water.