Why WHO renamed disease said to have originated in Africa

Three weeks ago, I published a letter titled “NMG should stop this monkey business” in the ‘Readers Have Their Say’ column. The writer, Kinyua Thuku, was concerned that the Nation had continued to use the name “monkeypox”, even after the World Health Organization (WHO) had renamed the disease “Mpox” nearly two years earlier.

On November 22, 2022, the WHO said renaming the disease was necessary to avoid racial discrimination and stigmatisation. Media coverage of the disease named monkeypox promoted racism and racial stereotypes.

The disease was named monkeypox in 1958 when research monkeys in Denmark were observed to have a disease similar to smallpox. However, scientists and public health authorities in developed countries ignored the disease as they regarded it as an uncommon infection in remote areas of Africa.

Then, in 2022, the disease spread to America, Canada, Europe and Australia. This month it was declared a global emergency. The media coverage had been disproportionate, with the visual representation of the disease being shown as African.

News firms such as CNN, The New York Times, Reuters and BBC used images of Africans to illustrate stories even when they were reporting cases in their own countries. This sensationalised coverage contributed to the narrative that Africans were the originators of the disease.

Stigmatise Africans

In the midst of all this negative coverage the Nation was also using the term monkeypox. The Nation used the term in the headlines and text of news stories, as well as in editorials. As late as August 7, the Nation was still calling the disease monkeypox.

The intention of the Nation, no doubt, was not to stigmatise Africans. It was simply that its journalists were not sensitive to the racial overtones of the name monkeypox; or they were careless, or too lazy to follow the WHO advice.

The Nation had actually carried the news of the WHO renaming the disease (See “WHO renames monkeypox due to racism concerns with the name,” by Derrick Oluoch, Nation.Africa, November 28, 2022). As an African newspaper, the Nation should have been on the forefront combating the use of the name monkeypox.

The WHO published in 2015 the best practices in naming diseases. New diseases, it said, should be named with the aim to minimise unnecessary negative impact on ethnic groups, among other things.

But while the disease has been renamed Mpox, the virus that causes it is still named “monkeypox”. This may continue to convey some negative anti-African messages because of the comparison of Africans to monkeys in the minds of many in developed countries.

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The term “monkey” was weaponised to justify colonialism and slavery and to perpetuate racism against Africans. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars came up with pseudo-scientific racial theories likening black people to apes or monkeys.

By suggesting Africans are sub-humans who have not yet evolved beyond the ape stage, the theories justified slavery and colonialism. This also led to simianisation—insulting black people by comparing them to monkeys.

Africans were deemed to be lower down the ladder in Darwin’s theory of evolution. A book edited by Wulf Hund, Simianisation: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race, published in 2015, analyses well the history of simianisation. The book traces simianisation from the time of Plato and William Shakespeare to the popular writings of H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Georges Prosper Remi (known by the pen name Hergé). Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines and Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes, while Hergé authored the comic strip series Tintin au Congo (Tintin in the Congo) that depicts Africans as inferior ape-like creatures.

Today, simianisation is publicly expressed most commonly in football matches in Europe where African players are sometimes greeted with shouts of “monkey”, monkey noises, or bananas thrown at them.

“Monkey chanting” is defined in Cambridge Dictionary as “the act of insulting black people by making the sound that monkeys make, for example by a crowd at a football game shouting at a black player.”

The term “monkey” is also used in politics, the arts, literature and the entertainment industry to insult, ridicule, stereotype and stigmatise black people.

The Public Editor is an independent news ombudsman who handles readers’ complaints on editorial matters including accuracy and journalistic standards. Email: [email protected]. Call or text 0721989264