Coronavirus in its current form, and fearsome potential, summons my memory to systems that seem to have been known for a long time. As a pioneer in the initial stages towards building the Kuru Kuru Cooperative college we were managed by Buxtonian Skipper Gordon. I can recall some of the strange things at the time the skipper demanded: you couldn’t have a cold symptom-coughing and sneezing, and if you worked either in the chicken or pig pens or you were transferred to land clearing, or as a building auxiliary. The only problem with skipper Gordon is the old school belief that you didn’t have to explain to youth just yet, all the details. Somehow the knowledge that a sneezing human was not good for chickens and pigs and piglets was in some form a workable idea a long time ago. I can only summarise that since the Pandemic Timeline mentioned in my article last week had occurred in its most tragic form with the Spanish Flu in 1918, it is possible that some medical data existed towards animal husbandry. The prospect of Biological Warfare cannot be ever completely ruled out. Biological Warfare is not new, this has been happening as records may show for hundreds of years. Organic biological warfare was used by Afro-Caribbean troops in the battle for Haiti at the siege of fortress Crete-A-Pierrot when surrounded by overwhelming French forces, they cast their dead over the walls, the dead rotted on the plane of the French with flies and stench overpowering. This ruse no doubt with the singing of French revolutionary songs by the defenders of the fort was confusing to the French forces, who were lied to by Napoleon about the loyalty of the Afro-Haitian troops to the revolution. With this enabling situation, they were able to break out of the French siege, early a few mornings later. From CLR James’s Black Jacobins; an independent analysis on the intentional usage of cadavers; it is also believed that the plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century may have had its beginnings according to the memoir of the Italian Gabriele d? Mussi through Biological Warefare. That the Mongal army was infected by the plague, quote- “The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realising that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies in the sea. And soon the rotten corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the tarter army. Moreover, one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defence.” See-CDC Volume 8, Number 9-September 2002 Historical Review- Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa. Others used natural means Toussaint used the season of Yellow Fever against the French and English, he was an astute herbalist who protected his troops with the herbal soups of his mothers of the revolution; while the Europeans died by the thousands; C L R James-Black Jacobins, centuries before, Europe had burnt to the stake their herbalists, in their inquisition. Napoleon, on the other hand, had learnt from Toussaint whom he had slowly murdered, imprisoned in the fortress Fort De Joux.

When in 1809, Napoleon was informed of a massive English fleet headed for Holland, Napoleon was unmoved, telling his troops not to engage the large English fleet, Napoleon breached the dykes ushering in the worse epidemic of malaria Europe would experience, the British invasion was defeated by malaria, they would never forget their encounter with malaria at Walcheren. See pgs 139-153-Fiammetta Rocco ‘The Miraculous Fever-Tree.
Our current age has expanded on the means of mass murder by both chemical and biological warfare. But also, as we defy nature and violate her natural dictates we must recognise that we invoke retaliation against our existence, over aeons our ancestors have humbly observed and heeded inspiration to act in our interest, others through vanity, arrogance and disdain for the proven against the exciting and tantalising new, have fulfilled the warning of the proverb “ Yuh throw away de baby wid de bath watah?” We in Guyana and the Caribbean grew up in the Kaleidoscope of Creole culture, we were told to wash our hands before you eat, sleep, and as soon as yuh come out of the toilet, keep your nails short, “cauze nails duzz carry germs, don’t spit about the place, cause yuh want to give people yuh germs, spit in de gutter. Don’t come in the house wid duh yachting shoe, that yuh walk all over the place with,- wait ah hope yuh dust it off on the mat at the bottom of the step? Don’t lie down on the bed with dem clothes yuh wear pon de road, in the cinema, and at the funeral? Yuh proppa nasty”. Remember those kerchiefs out of white cotton cloth bordered with a silverfish thread on that old but reliable Singer machine, that we were commanded to walk with, to sneeze and cough in? Those are the foundations we have to remember. Many of these things we brought from the old world, for example. It was noticed and recorded “The Ashanti (Kofi, Atta, Accabre) are remarkable for their extreme cleanliness; and take pride in themselves, their clothing and their houses, which some of the other Tribes do not, and the non-African population completely ignore-Both men and women are particularly cleanly in their persons,” he wrote of them, and adds that they washed “daily on rising, from head to foot, with warm water and Portuguese soap, using afterwards the vegetable grease or butter, which is a fine cosmetic” –Hebrewisms of West Africa; by Joseph Williams 1930- abridged.

This writer, however, did not as it was not popular then, connect the fact that the Hebrews were of Khemetic stock (Egyptian) and were Africans, that also had prescribed foods especially meat kind that were not to be eaten and to be eaten “And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the Bat. They shall not be eaten. They are an abomination”-Leviticus 10-11 book of Moses, Priest of Khemet The Holy Bible abridged;  Lastly our Ministry of Agriculture also need to offer assurances that our agricultural practices do not facilitate the possibilities for cross infections of any kind, similar to what is practised not only in Asia but mimicked elsewhere.