By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

Africa’s history in the twentieth century was shaped by invasion, colonial violence, and long struggles for liberation. From the battlefields of Ghana and Algeria to the valleys of Zimbabwe and the townships of South Africa, African peoples fought not only for independence but for dignity and life itself.

In that history is a wound that has never fully healed, the story of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa and the bitter questions it raises about who benefited from suffering, and who spoke truth.

In 2019, a documentary titled Cold Case Hammarskjöld brought to global attention a shocking claim. In the film, a man identified as Alexander Jones, a former member of a secretive South African group called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), said that his organisation deliberately spread HIV among Black Africans during the 1980s and 1990s.

According to Jones, SAIMR, run under apartheid’s racial terror, used bogus clinics and fake vaccinations as a cover to spread disease in South Africa and beyond in places like Mozambique, to kill Black people and maintain white minority rule. “We were at war,” Jones is quoted as telling the filmmakers. “Black people in South Africa were the enemy.”

This claim was not simply a sensational line in a film. In African communities, where the scars of colonial and apartheid violence are still fresh, such testimony touched a raw nerve.

Many Africans have long believed that diseases like HIV did not simply “happen” here by accident, but emerged within a context of exploitation, neglect, and medical experimentation without consent.

For generations, Africans have watched global powers use medicine and science to dominate, to control, and sometimes to harm. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the United States, in which Black men were denied treatment to study the progression of disease, is one such example that has resonated deeply across the continent and fuelled suspicion toward Western medicine.

But it is in southern Africa, where independence was fought with bullets and bone, that the idea of deliberate harm carries particular weight.

In Cold Case Hammarskjöld, the claimed plot to spread HIV is tied to an even older mystery, the 1961 plane crash that killed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in what is now Zambia.

Hammarskjöld was a key figure in the fight to support the newly independent Congo against secession and outside interference. Some documents uncovered by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggested that white supremacist networks, possibly with foreign intelligence involvement, might have had a hand in his death, though definitive proof remains elusive.

The film’s makers argue that SAIMR was part of the same shadowy network that acted against African self-determination and later sought to weaponise disease.

Jones’ testimony describes clinics in Johannesburg’s poor Black neighbourhoods run by a man named Keith Maxwell, who posed as a doctor despite having no medical qualifications and whose writings reveal a chilling vision of an HIV-ravaged Black population as a means to preserve white rule.

Local people remembered strange “treatments” and “false injections” in clinics that seemed to prey on the desperation of those who had nowhere else to turn for care. The documentary’s claim is stark and disturbing: that apartheid’s violence extended beyond bullets and concentration camps to biological attack.

In this telling, HIV was not merely a disease that spread through neglect and inequality but was deliberately introduced through treacherous means. For Africans whose communities lost millions of lives to AIDS in the late twentieth century, the idea of deliberate harm resonates with the lived truth of oppression.

When so many died in townships, homesteads, and villages across the continent, when resources were withheld, when access to basic healthcare was denied, the pain was real. To be told that this suffering could have been orchestrated by human hands, by design, struck a chord that defies easy dismissal.

But to understand this claim, we must also wrestle with the broader context of how the world has explained or misunderstood HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s and 1990s, as HIV emerged as a global pandemic, African nations were unfairly singled out.

The disease was labelled an “African epidemic” in ways that implied moral failure, backwardness, or cultural blame. African people were blamed for the virus as if collective behaviour was the cause, rather than years of structural inequality, lack of access to care, and the legacy of colonial exploitation.

The effect of that narrative was enormous: it deepened stigma and diverted attention from the real political and economic forces that left African health systems underfunded and overwhelmed.

Western scientists and media, including articles in major newspapers, strongly rejected the idea that HIV could have been deliberately spread.

Critics pointed out that the technical challenges of isolating and distributing a virus like HIV were immense, requiring facilities and expertise beyond the reach of a clandestine operation in apartheid South Africa at the time.

Scientists argued that such a plot was implausible and lacked concrete evidence, and warned that spreading such theories could sow mistrust in public health efforts, discouraging people from seeking testing and treatment.

From an African perspective, however, this dismissal can feel like yet another layer of denial: a refusal by global institutions to reckon with the possibility that power can be used for harm, especially when the victims belong to Black communities.

For decades, Africans have demanded accountability for the brutality of colonial rule and apartheid. Truth commissions in South Africa and elsewhere were supposed to unearth the crimes of the past, but many feel that they stopped short of fully exposing the depths of wrongdoing and the external forces that supported oppressive systems.

If a Western newspaper dismisses the testimony of a Black African whistle-blower as mere “conspiracy,” that dismissal itself reflects deeper questions about whose voices are heard and whose suffering is validated.

In this debate, the figure of Dag Hammarskjöld looms large. He was an international symbol of anti-colonial support and African dignity long before HIV became known.

That his death remains wrapped in mystery, and that the same investigators who sought answers about his plane crash unearthed documents hinting at biological warfare, is itself a testament to the tangled history of colonialism, privatised violence, and global indifference to African life.

The story told in Cold Case Hammarskjöld forces us to confront the lingering truths about apartheid’s violence and the global response to African suffering.

For many Africans, the film did not create the pain of HIV/AIDS; it gave shape to questions that had been whispered for generations: was this disease simply destiny, or was it tied to a system that saw Black lives as expendable?

Was the West’s indifference to early AIDS deaths in Africa itself a form of violence? These are not just academic questions, but wounds felt in homes where mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers died without access to care.

At the same time, Africans know that truth must be rooted in evidence. The community of scientists, including African experts, insists that the origin of HIV is a natural spillover from primates to humans, and that the pandemic’s spread was worsened not by secret biological weapons, but by structural inequality, poverty, and delayed public health action.

Many mourn that conspiracy theories, even when grounded in legitimate anger at injustice, can undermine efforts to provide life-saving medicine and education. Trust in medicine, after all, is essential to ending the epidemic, not tearing it apart.

This tension between the lived experience of oppression and the caution of scientific method is itself part of Africa’s long battle for self-determination.

African nations have had to fight both disease and the politics of knowledge: who gets to define what is real, and who gets to dismiss the suffering of millions when it does not fit convenient global narratives.

If Western scientists dismiss African voices too quickly, they repeat a pattern of ignoring Black pain that has marked centuries of colonial rule. But if we embrace every sensational claim without scrutiny, we risk losing ground in the battle against HIV that Africa continues to wage even now, with powerful antiretroviral therapies saving millions of lives and offering hope for a future free of AIDS.

Ultimately, the question is not just whether SAIMR deliberately spread HIV, but it is about why Africans are drawn to that story, and what it reveals about our collective memory of violence.

The legacy of apartheid was not only economic exploitation and political repression — it was also deep distrust of systems that claimed benevolence while inflicting harm.

In communities where children were orphaned, where entire generations were decimated, the fear that power could weaponise disease is not born of ignorance, but of historical pain.

To dismiss those fears without understanding their origin is to miss the larger truth about Africa’s struggle: that we must confront both the violence of the past and the inequalities of the present.

African leaders and thinkers know that truth must be pursued rigorously, with respect for scientific evidence and empathy for lived experience. We know that HIV/AIDS is real and deadly, that it has cost millions of lives, and that ending it requires unity, transparency, and trust.

But we also know that the wounds inflicted by colonialism and apartheid do not heal simply because the global media declares a claim of “conspiracy.”

The work of healing requires acknowledging the pains of history, listening to African voices, and ensuring that future generations do not inherit the distrust of the past.

HIV/AIDS in Africa will not be understood simply by denying the possibility of human agency in the spread of the disease. It will be understood by confronting the systems of power that allowed neglect, inequality, and exploitation to thrive.

In that struggle, Africa’s voice must lead, not be dismissed, and we must demand that the world reckon with both science and history in equal measure.