Huh. So AIDS originated during the Belgian colonial apocalypse of the Edwardian era? From that account, it may very well have been brought into the colonial capital by one of those dying natives conscripted to build the Congo railroad, so memorably described in the opening pages of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". There's some sort of horrible irony in that - AIDS *is* a Western legacy, but it isn't the CIA/Cold War plot of which KGB-planted press libels convinced so many leftist conspiracy-fanatics. It's an ugly, terrible, blind echo of the criminally careless Belgian occupation of central Africa, of the very apocalyptic worst of European colonialism.

H/T.