Even elite African leaders and Nobel laureates embraced the AIDS-as-weapon conspiracy theory

Evidence

The belief that AIDS was created to destroy black communities became widespread in various African countries, too: Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe once described AIDS as a “white man’s plot.” In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan biologist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, called AIDS a biological weapon created to “wipe out the black race.” The disease is “not a curse from God to Africans or the black people,” she told a group in Nyeri, Kenya. “It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did” it. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 178

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Maathai’s and Mugabe’s embrace of the theory trace to the same KGB Operation INFEKTION source, showing global diffusion, or to an independent logic?
• CANDY: A Nobel-winning biologist and conservationist publicly called AIDS a biological weapon to wipe out the black race.
• XREF: connects to: The Soviet KGB seeded the CIA-created-AIDS conspiracy that still shapes black American distrust — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 177; Conspiracy theory is a global phenomenon that state elites themselves deploy — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60; A majority of surveyed African Americans believed the government withheld an AIDS cure. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 180

Broader Connections

• Conspiracy theory is a global phenomenon that state elites themselves deploy #expands (0.85) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60
• A majority of surveyed African Americans believed the government withheld an AIDS cure. #exemplifies (0.80) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 180