Even though I was trained as a historian, I found myself in the late 1970s traveling to Africa frequently, in order to oversee a tropical disease research program. One afternoon, while dining in Dakar, Senegal with friends, I found myself seated next to a garrulous, young West African doctor. He began telling me a story so disturbing in its implications that even years later, I could not quite shake it from my thoughts. The incident he recounted had taken place in a hospital in Abidjan, the capital of the neighboring country of the Ivory Coast. One morning, a young African in his twenties was admitted to the emergency room of that hospital suffering from flu-like symptoms. The nurse who took the patient’s medical history reported that, according to the friends who had brought him in, this Southern African had been the picture of health until becoming ill the previous day. Despite the hospital personnel having taken all possible measures, his condition continued to deteriorate and he died several days later. Strangely, the same scenario repeated itself a week or so later, when two other young men were brought to the emergency room with nearly the same symptoms as the earlier man. When autopsies were finally performed, the doctors were stunned to learn that these young men had died of malaria, the most common and oftentimes easily diagnosed disease in West Africa. But how could this have happened, members of the deeply-chagrined medical staff kept asking themselves?

At this point in the story, I realized that everyone at our table had become riveted on my Senegalese dinner companion. The problem in a word, he explained was “race.” He went on to say that these unfortunate young men were all from an inland region of Southern Africa, who had been treated by experienced doctors, but whose expertise was in medical science and not genetics. Had these patients been Europeans suffering from similar symptoms, the proper measures would have been taken immediately. However, the hospital staff’s fatal mistake was in failing to realize that the sickle cell gene that conferred some degree of protection on West Africans against fatal attacks of malaria, was not present in the blood of peoples sharing the same outward physical characteristics, but whose ancestral history emanated from different, non-malarial regions of the African continent. “Perhaps race,” the young doctor concluded, “is not what it seems.” I nodded in agreement. Who afterall would accept a blood transfusion based solely on the color of the blood donor's skin?