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Orthodox descriptions and treatment of Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis are subject to robust controversy among research experts and clinicians who raise questions about the tests used to define the crisis, the statistics used to document the crisis, and the drugs marketed to curtail it. Despite this critical scientific corpus, fanciful misconceptions about chronic illness and mortality in Africa are sustained by ahistorical and apolitical analyses misrepresenting Africans' contemporary morality, social reality, and public health care needs. JEL classification: I12; I38; H51; O19

The global arena is dominated by the popular conviction that Africans require foreign direction in the socioeconomic management of their own societies. This essay challenges the belief that economic development in contemporary Africa is impeded by bad governance.

Throughout this retrospective, our purpose is to illuminate an evident knowledge handicap, cutting across the diagnostic procedures, reportage and mathematical modelling of chronic illness affecting African public health demographics, which we trace to three epistemic injustices (methodological, documental, and professional) in the way medical research in Africa is managed and monitored by foreigners. We propose that the mutual reinforcement of these three different kinds of epistemic transgression underlies the chronic failure of immunologists and public health practitioners to subdue the inflated rates of morbidity and short life expectancy persistent throughout Africa. Substandard data collection and implausible infection modelling count as injustices because they are traceable to a routine disregard for best scientific practice at the upper echelons of global health authority, which is betrayed by an inordinately high tolerance for diagnostic error concerning populations that are disproportionately disadvantaged as a norm, who are therefore regarded as low credibility risks in the global production and dissemination of medical knowledge. To ground these claims, we rely upon direct observations and anecdotal evidence culled from two different sorts of public health crisis in Africa which have received widespread publicity: (i) the eighteen-month-long international emergency response to a West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015, and (ii) attempts over the last quarter century to quell an extensively researched African HIV/AIDS pandemic.

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