By Lans Gberie
The impulse to regard infectious diseases that cause sudden deaths as forbidding mysteries that befall only the despised ‘other’ is an ancient one. The Hebrew authors of the Old Testament did not evoke mystery when they happily narrated how, responding to the wish of their necromantic leader Moses, God inflicted 10 plagues on the ancient Egyptians who were holding their ancestors captive. But they were less certain about a latter plague which befell their mortal (and far superior) enemies, the Philistines.
The story is narrated in the First Book of Samuel which tells us how, after the Philistines defeated the Israelites in battle and captured their ark of the covenant, “rats appeared in their land, and death and destruction were throughout [their] city”. Feeling triumphant at first at the horror that had befallen their enemies, the Israelites were shocked to find that when the Philistine tactfully returned the ark to them, they, too, became afflicted, and many of them died. The deaths were sudden, the victims apparently afflicted with hemorrhoids whose pathogens may have been buboes (from rodents), perhaps the first instance of the bubonic plague. The Israelites, however, knew God, but not science – so that every instance of defeat or disaster was ascribed to their failure to please God.
Modern Europeans, children of the Enlightenment, are bound to think differently. When the first modern outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred in 1894-1901, Europe had had centuries of devastating encounter with such killer viruses, and they quickly found its origin: in Asia, from where it spread from the port of Hong Kong to the rest of the world, its movement facilitated mainly by British merchant ships and the logic of Empire. It killed many people in the port cities of Africa, and this movement – through the lines of anxiety drawn by the British Empire and the imperatives of European merchant capitalism – may have helped coin the phrase ‘diseases of civilization’.
There have been many such ‘diseases of civilization’ in Africa – new diseases or more potent variations on indigenous ones. They include all kinds of venereal diseases (syphilis in particular), tuberculosis (the result of unhealthy industrial work environments mainly), even malaria, and, most notorious, cholera. Today, 95% of all cholera cases happen in Africa, in its ever-sprawling neocolonial slum-cities.
It was only a matter of time for a properly indigenous African killer virus of a highly infectious nature to emerge. At first, HIV Aids seemed like it was an affliction of a biblical nature (remember Sodom and Gomorrah – there go our Hebrew fantasists again) on California’s Bay Area. Some researcher, very soon however, traced it to the monkeys in the Congo. It helped, perhaps not that slightly, that the area was the same place that Ebola had first been detected a few years earlier, so please excuse my long preliminary digressions.
This article, I make haste to say, is about the current Ebola outbreak. This highly infectious and deadly disease – variously called Ebola virus disease (EVD) or Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF) – affects human beings as well as primates. It was first identified – by Peter Poit, a Belgian scientist who now heads the London school of Tropical Medicine – deep in the rainforest in Zaire, the nonsense name that Joseph Mobutu gave to the Congo. A variety of it has been found in monkeys from the Philippines (the virus was isolated in the United States in 1989) and there may have been an earlier outbreak in the Sudan, but its Congo origin has long been firmly embedded in the popular imagination. The Congo, after all, is the setting for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a place where ‘civilization’ (as represented by Mr. Kurtz) succumbed to the imperatives of ‘primitivism’; and Ebola is, if anything, the quintessential disease of ‘primitivism’, of the ‘other’ in Western imagination.
The remote rural rainforest origin of Ebola appears to be its most consistent truism. The current outbreak began in early February in the southeastern forest region of Nzérékoré in Guinea. But though hidden in the verdant wet forests, this area is strategically placed among a system of inter-connected waterways tied to the large Moa (or Makona) river which connects Guinea to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The ruling elite in Conakry have long regarded people in this remote rainforest community as fetish worshippers beyond the pale. The virus quickly spread from there, taking one route, to Conakry, and another, to Lofa County in Liberia, by late March. When I was in Monrovia that month, few people I met among the country’s effete elite thought the affliction in Lofa was happening to Liberians, despite President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s very early radio messages about the virus’ ravages.
Ebola struck Sierra Leone in May, well over two months after the Guinea outbreak. Nearly two months into the outbreak, with over 100 people dead in Kailahun and Kenema districts, few among the country’s Freetown-based political elite took any notice. This reaction was shocking but not surprising; it mirrored almost exactly the attitude of the ruling elite then to the rebel war when it started in almost the same places in 1991. And it is the result of the debilitating mix of graft, smug ‘tribalism’ and simple incompetence that is the bane of the country’s politics.
When I was in Freetown in June, I heard dark talk among some of those people that the afflicted people in Kailahun had brought the virus on themselves by their quaint culinary habit. I also heard talk about a herbalist from those parts who had crossed the Moa river to attend a funeral of a relative in Guinea and who then brought the disease to Sierra Leone on her return. She died; and because of her fame, her burial attracted the helpful hands of many people who naturally contracted the virus, helping to start a pandemic.
Out of this fairly pedestrian story clueless young Frankie Taggart, a reporter for Agence France-Presse seeking, as is common among so many starry-eyed journalists thrusting themselves like connoisseurs of death-bed anecdotes into hot zones, confected his own more mysterious version. “Tribal chiefdoms” have been laid waste, he wrote in a report for that agency on 20 August 2014, by an outbreak which need “never have spread from Guinea …except [sic] for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma” in Kailahun. Taggart quotes from a Mohamed Vandi, “the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema”, as saying: "She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment."
A lot of blame has been spread all around for the engulfing calamity. President Ernest Bai Koroma, who did not bother to visit Kailahun himself to find out how people there are doing until 10 weeks into the outbreak, glumly blames the “international community” for not being as helpful as it presumably should. He then skewedly distributed funds he had collected to combat the disease, so that Koinadugu, unaffected, got more money than Kailahun - the epicentre accounting for 40% of cases! Poor overwhelmed Dr. Vandi can only blame a dead herbalist!
The entire Kailahun and Kenema Districts have, meanwhile, been militarily cordoned off from the rest of humanity, in an operation – The New York Times has helpfully reminded us – reminiscent of medieval Europe during the Black Death. Cut-off, a version of remoteness, is another Ebola truism.
Its broader application to the region can be dated to 20 July 2014, when Patrick Sawyer, an American citizen who happened to also call Liberia his home, boarded a flight from Monrovia for Lagos, Nigeria, taking Ebola along with his bulky self. Sawyer had been told in Liberia that he had contracted Ebola – probably from his sister, who had died in his care of the disease – and was told not to travel. He should have been forced not to travel, but as an elite figure, such rules had no applicability to him. He flew in the Nigerian airline ASKY from the near-derelict Sprigs Payne Airport, which few other commercial airlines use; and the CCTV camera showed him lying down, obviously very sick, at the airport minutes before boarding the plane. He must have been assisted to board the flight, probably spreading the virus from that point. For that singular act of callousness or desperation, all major airlines are now shunning Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, against the entreaties of the World Health Organisation, which continues to insist that Ebola is not airborne.
And now from a distance these effectively quarantined countries only evoke Pieter Brueghel’s famous painting, inspired by the Black Death, of hell (which is its perfect definition): a horror and neurotic zone where you cannot live, and cannot leave.
(C) Politico 28/08/14
