A familiar diagnosis I sat in a conference hall in Rio Branco, Acre State, Brazil. My mind was in a sanatorium of Algeria. This was where my mother was sent as a girl. They told her she got tuberculosis because she was an “indigène musulman”. In 1938, the year of my mother’s birth and after over a century of colonization, about 5 out of every 100 Algerian people got infected with tuberculosis each year. French colonial reports show that Algerians died from tuberculosis at much higher rates than French settlers. They claimed the disease was endemic due to the supposed inferiority of our people. And that she was going to die. Colonialism is a liar. She survived. And it took less than eight years for an independent Algeria, free of the scourge of colonialism, to eradicate the scourge of TB. Listening to the leaders at Brazil’s First National Seminar on …
