Editor's note: In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King whose dream lives in every person who looks forward to the day when equality in this world is acheived.

Slavery in the early United States is a stain on the nation's history, as it is on any nation who engaged in this horrific practice. There are repercussions to the horrors of the colonial days of buying and selling of human beings.

Slavery has everything to do with AIDS in Africa. See these articles for more on how and why AIDS in Africa, and the rest of our world, must end.

• African AIDS: Medical Neocolonialism?
• HIV / AIDS and the Humanitarian Crisis in Africa (Also in Afrikaans)
• UNAIDS Africa HIV/AIDS Reports Are Wildly Inaccurate

AIDS in Africa: the effects of malnutrition
From Rebirth Africa, Life on the Continent website.

For the past few hundred years Africa had to face an onslaught, which can be traced separately from the HI virus. The parceling out of African territories to Colonial governments and the ensuing damage to traditional economies followed by bitter decades of war.

The displacement of huge quantities of people resulted in economies and food production systems being wrecked, and even till today a diagonal line can be drawn across Africa from the Atlantic Ocean on Angola's southern border to Sudan's border on the Red Sea. Not even taking into account wars elsewhere on the continent or natural disasters such as drought and floods

Ex Zimbabwean minister of health, Timothy Stamps said in a BBC interview in 1998, that without a doubt the South African apartheid agents had inoculated the Zimbabwean people with diseases such as Anthrax, Ebola and the Bubonic Plague during the liberation war in the 70"s.

In South Africa Wouter Basson faced charges that he headed the apartheid regimes biological warfare and one of his objectives was to inoculate blacks with poisons to reduce their birthrate. South Africa is unique in that social and economic damage was politically driven without waging a full scale war.

In South Africa millions of so called black and colored were forcibly removed from their land and treated as third class citizens in their own country. Education received by the oppressed people was designed in such a way as to prevent them from ever empowering themselves or to compete against "white" counterparts in the local job markets. Special homelands were created so as to isolate blacks from the mainstream of the economy.

The "white" minority government during this time incurred huge debts to fund the monstrosities they committed against the black people of South Africa. This triggered massive defiance campaigns by all opposing political movements against the Apartheid regime, spearheaded by the ANC. When the country headed for total disaster, they released Mr. Nelson Mandela unconditionally and started negotiating a new South Africa, which led to democratic elections in 1994, the first in the history of South Africa.

All over Africa, poverty is a common denominator and it is not surprising that peoples immune systems have been damaged. WHO (World Health Organization) classes malnutrition as the number one killer on the African continent, poverty being the primary factor for AIDS.

In 1998 the report by WHO lists HIV, 8th on the killer list.

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