Foreign governments and corporations have long used the promise of saving lives as a guise to justify the extraction of Africa’s natural wealth. Moreover, medical humanitarianism often came to include biomedical extraction from the continent — as viruses, parasites, plants and human subjects themselves became yet another resource upon which professional careers and commercial profits, largely benefiting Western scientists and corporations, were made.
This current situation recalls an earlier episode when Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, with the full support of the U.S. government, tried to use medical assistance in Liberia to solidify control of land, labor and the Liberian government in the making of a vast rubber empire. The Liberian government stood its ground and the attempt largely failed. Nevertheless, the promotion of medical assistance continued to aid Firestone’s grip on the country and helped turn Liberia into an experimental laboratory for American biomedical research.
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag. Then, in 1926 Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the U.S. rubber and tire manufacturing conglomerate that bore his name, secured a 99-year lease for up to 1 million acres of land from the Liberian government to grow a source of rubber free from British control.
Within three years, the Firestone Plantations Company had amassed a workforce of more than 10,000 Liberians, who cut down and cleared the rainforest. In its place, Firestone workers planted thousands of seedlings of the Pará rubber tree, to be cultivated for industrial rubber production.
Firestone’s capital investment was not without risks. Labor was in short supply. Conflict could erupt at any moment. And disease could easily destroy this newly built plantation world.
In 1929, a yellow fever outbreak along the coast of West Africa threatened to bring Firestone’s Liberia operations to a halt. The outbreak claimed many lives, including those of not only Firestone workers, but also the U.S. minister and Consul General William Francis, other foreign diplomats, traders and missionaries. Harvey Firestone, and his eldest son, Harvey Jr., pushed the Liberian government to cede control of its public health and sanitation operations to an American adviser.
Such a move would solidify the American company’s economic and political control in Liberia — an important development since the company neither owned the land nor controlled the labor where its rubber trees had taken root. The more Firestone could take power from the Liberian government by putting its affairs in the hands of American experts, the more opportunity it had to impose its will.