This article is a bit dated [U.S. rapper Nipsey Hussle (Ermias Asghedom) was shot on March 31, 2019, in Los Angeles] but I found the Caribbean and AIDS-cure connection fascinating. Joel Julien (Trinidad & Tobago Guardian) points out possible connections between his death and Honduran herbalist Dr. Sebi (Alfredo Bowman, see photo below) and his Trinidadian wife (Patsy Bowman). Here are a few excerpts:
[. . .] But as condolences poured out across social media, one conspiracy theory about his death also gained momentum. The theory was simple, Hussle was executed as part of a plot to silence his upcoming documentary about herbalist Dr Sebi who purportedly had evidence of curing AIDS.
Videos of Hussle talking about the documentary which he said would be focused primarily on the 1988 New York Supreme Court trial of Dr Sebi were also posted as evidence to support the theory.
Hussle used Dr Sebi’s products and in an interview on The Breakfast Club radio show explained the reason he wanted to do the documentary. “I think the story is important. I think it’s a powerful narrative. Imagine this if I said somebody cured AIDS you all will be like ‘yeah right’ and I can show you an example of him going to trial and proving in a court, to a jury that he cured AIDS,” Hussle said then. “You all will be interested in that and you all will look into the way he did it, so I feel like more so than championing his products or explaining his methodology put some light on that case,” he said then.
[. . .] But who is Dr Sebi? And why does all this matter? Well, Dr Sebi was a Honduran herbalist whose real name was Alfredo Bowman. He was not a licensed physician. And his wife Patsy Bowman, 62, was born right here in Trinidad and Tobago. “I am Trini to the bone,” Patsy said during a telephone interview from her home in Grenada. She is popularly known as “Mrs Dr Sebi”. The couple met in 1981 in St Croix, the largest of the US Virgin Islands. Patsy, who was living in that country at the time, was on her way to a job interview when she met Sebi. The couple sat on the waterfront and talked for hours as Patsy missed the interview. She said her life changed positively when she met Sebi. “Even though I was a vegetarian before I met him when I met him it kind of advanced, meaning there were certain things I was still consuming that were not real vegetables so the journey started since then,” she said. [. . .]
Was Sebi a threat to medical industry?
Unfortunately, Hussle was not the first person to die while trying to promote Dr Sebi’s work, she said. [. . .] Conspiracy theorists believe that Sebi became a threat to the multi-billion-dollar medical industry that supposedly relies on continued sickness to thrive. “One of the first people that said they were going to make us famous was Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and she ended up being dead as well,” Patsy said. In 2002, Lopes of the popular group TLC died in a motor vehicle accident while in Honduras on one of Sebi’s healing retreats. “The second one was Michael Jackson, he died too and then my husband, and now (Hussle) who was doing the documentary on the court case,” she said. Jackson died from cardiac arrest in 2009.
Sebi died at the age of 82 while he was battling pneumonia and in police custody after being arrested for money laundering. He died on the way to the hospital.
A 29-year-old man named Eric Holder has since been charged in connection with Hussle’s murder.
[. . .] In 1988, the state of New York sued Sebi for making “unsubstantiated therapeutic claims” after he paid for ads saying “Aids has been cured”. Sebi provided examples of 77 patients he claimed to have cured and won the case. [. . .]
[Photo above by Marcio José Sánchez: Rapper Nipsey Hussle at an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Milwaukee Bucks in Oakland, California.]
For full article, see http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/nipsey-hussles-trini-connection-6.2.824720.166e23e444
Repeating Islands 