For Europeans eager for foreign territories and wealth, Africa represented the last impenetrable natural fortress for centuries. But it was not made impregnable by wide rivers and endless rainforests, but by severe diseases and an extreme climate. "Fatal Africa! The travelers landed one after the other," wrote Henry Morton Stanley, one of the first great travelers and explorers of the expanses south of the Sahara that the rest of the world then knew only as the coast. "It is a vast continent, and every one of its secrets is surrounded by innumerable difficulties."
150 years ago, white people managed to subjugate, divide and appropriate it, but they never quite coped with the great secrets and enormous difficulties. Africa has mostly remained unknown, a space that causes disgust and repulsion for some, and confusion and discomfort for others. The stereotype of "savages," feared by many modern Europeans, has replaced the stereotype of Africans as "homophobes" loathed by their postmodern descendants. Unacceptably peculiar and strange, black Africa has become a frustrating and distant, somehow invisible place, the flip side of contented and comfortable lives.
"The horror! Horror!", are the key words in the novel that imprinted Africa in the collective consciousness of the West a hundred years ago as an opaque heart of darkness. The Ebola epidemic has revived this old specter. But, as in the seductive prose of Joseph Conrad, the new horror is not only African. The dangerous virus, which during the previous half century appeared occasionally and quickly disappeared in the backwaters of Central Africa, has turned into an epidemic that no longer only worries West Africa. This happened thanks to mistrust, understandings and social relations that were established by the imposition of Western ideas in an unusual context, in a painful collision between European visions of a better life and African reality.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the magnitude and nature of the challenge as well as the fact that the vast majority of the population still does not believe in the existence of the epidemic. In previous months, the central message of the authorities and international organizations was not "how to stop Ebola" - but "Ebola is real". It is estimated that in early August in some of the most affected regions, less than a fifth of people "believed in Ebola".
photo: ap photo...and virus testing in Liberia
THE POLITICS OF EBOLA: Some believe that it is a fraud concocted by local politicians. The authorities have been so irresponsible and rapacious for decades that any concern for the people has become suspect. Many, almost instinctively, associate it with profiteering and observe it in the context of the selfishness of the rulers. The logic of deep-rooted disbelief reads: "now they pay attention to us and our health, because that's the only way they can squeeze more money from foreign donors and stuff it into their deep pockets."
In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the word Ebola became a popular colloquial term for "corruption and filth in government" during the early months of the epidemic, before the killer disease arrived from distant provinces. On top of that, Ebola first appeared in the west of the country, where the population supports the opposition. Many have concluded that the virus is a hoax and a ploy by President Ernest Bai Korome to win the November elections by presenting himself as a savior. In contrast, supporters of the ruling National Congress believe that the virus was manufactured to bring down the president.
However, the most widely accepted view in this country is that it is an artificial, carefully designed disease that enables "organ harvesting" and, at the same time, conceals the cause of death of the victims. This also "explains" why citizens are not allowed to bury their loved ones themselves. By coincidence, in some of the regions the disease appeared during or shortly after one of the three vaccination programs organized or supported by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. It's hard to convince people now that it wasn't secret interrogations that went tragically wrong, or that the goal from the beginning wasn't to have black people serve as guinea pigs again.
photo: reutersSPREAD OF INFECTION: An unsanitary slum in Freetown, Sierra Leone
JUDGE AND DOUBT OF THE WHITE MAN: Volunteers from "Doctors Without Borders" were attacked in a dozen villages last month, and barricades appeared on the roads. Unfortunately, the ugly history of Western interference and colonial rule has made people suspicious of anything coming from the white man. For centuries, black people in this part of Africa were commodities, "fruit" and "raw material" for export, like cocoa and oil today. After all, Ghana was once known as the "Gold Coast" and Benin as the "Slave Coast". It is not easy to take off the glasses colored by such a terrible historical experience.
The existence of the disease is denied by many of those who watched their neighbors or relatives die in the worst agony. They believe that only people who are possessed die. One explanation is that a skilled witch doctor used "juju", black magic, and "made the snake bite the whole family". People in this part of the world generally start from the understanding that nothing, good or bad - from losing a job to winning an election - happens without witchcraft-driven intervention from the invisible world. The AIDS epidemic and the enormous wealth in the hands of a small number of politicians are just some of the numerous "unexplained" phenomena that contributed to the belief in the power of "juju" growing and taking on new forms. Today, the "modernity of witchcraft" is one of the key factors in the confusing African modernity.
In Liberia, the first successes were recorded only when experts realized that the epidemic could be contained only with full respect for "local customs and ways of thinking about medical care." The role of anthropologists was crucial, primarily when it was necessary to convince foreign experts that some of their old, "proven recipes" would have a counter-effect and increase the resistance of the distrustful population. Many had trouble understanding how important "how their loved ones will be treated after death" is to the citizens of Liberia.
One of the biggest problems in the fight against Ebola - which is most easily transmitted by contact with the body of a person who has succumbed to the disease - is the belief that deceased family members play a decisive role in maintaining much-needed communication and harmony with the spirit world. Funerals are important because the dead can determine the future of the living – the worlds they inhabit are seen as equally real and strongly connected. Even acceptance of Islam, as a rule, did not mean giving up "wudu" and related rituals, but it meant adopting a new obligation - that a relative (of the same sex) wash the body of the deceased before the funeral. It is estimated that as many as 60 percent of those infected in Guinea were infected with Ebola at traditional funerals.
And numerous Christian missionaries have noted that the rites associated with death and burial, which generally involve touching the body, are the rituals that have been "least influenced by the gospel." After all, Ebola spread in Sierra Leone at the beginning of May after the funeral of a respected "traditional doctor" who was considered a successful healer of an "unknown disease" in neighboring Guinea, in the area where Ebola spread in December last year. 14 women who participated in the posthumous ritual were infected. They spread the disease to geographically distant parts of the country.
PERVERSE URBANIZATION: Ebola appeared in eastern Guinea in a region where forests have been mercilessly cut down for years, mostly for agriculture. A large number of people settled in the new, fertile plain, mostly immigrants from overpopulated and chronically hungry cities. This greatly increased the likelihood that someone would come into contact with fruit bats that carry the virus but do not have Ebola symptoms.
While "reverse urbanization", the escape from hopelessness in the cities, played a decisive role in the emergence of Ebola, the perverse logic of urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa provided the preconditions for the maintenance and spread of the epidemic. In African metropolises, there are very few things that we consider a prerequisite for city life. Electricity and running water are not available to the vast majority of the population. In the slums of West Africa, those who barely have anything to eat have to pay to defecate in the dirtiest toilets I've ever seen.
Above all, the citizens not only got used to not getting anything from the predatory state, but started to believe that everything is allowed. How much, after years of marginalization and humiliation, after which nothing is sacred for many, is also evidenced by the fact, which is regularly emphasized by selfless local and foreign doctors, that even those who decide to bring a family member to the state hospital usually lie that the infected person was not in the hospital in the previous days. bury or deny that other household members are infected or have already died from Ebola.
DECEPTIVE SYMPTOMS AND DISHONESTED PATIENTS: Unfortunately, the symptoms in the early stages are indistinguishable from those of malaria, severe diarrhea and other diseases that are common in the rainy season. That is why honest answers from relatives are the key to timely identification and isolation of the sick. The high number of deaths among doctors and other medical personnel is a direct result of the dishonesty that pervades every communication with the authorities.
The tendency of patients and their relatives to give false answers to key questions is one of the main reasons why a large number of doctors do not work and why many health centers are locked. The only children's hospital in the country of Sierra Leone was closed last month after it was discovered too late that a four-year-old boy who had been admitted a few days earlier had Ebola. The father lied - the child was at a funeral in his native village, in an area where there is a large number of infected people, which the doctors found out from the stepmother who came a few days later. Thirty doctors and nurses were placed in quarantine. The others refused to return to work.
There are numerous testimonies of people with a severe cut or broken leg who, after several days of desperately searching for a doctor, were barely able to find a gynecologist or dentist who was willing to look at their wound. With hospitals mostly closed, the death rate from appendicitis has become higher than that of Ebola - which in the five West African countries affected so far has seen almost half of those infected survive. More and more people, left to their own devices, are dying of malaria and typhus.
SCOPE AND CAUSES OF NEGLIGENCE: The fact that food is getting more expensive and hospitals are closed does not affect the political class, which is used to spending the rainy season, the period from June to September, when the risk of malaria is enormous, in apartments on the American East Coast or in London. The extent of negligence is evidenced by the fact that the thermometer used to "remotely" measure the temperature of passengers at the airport in Monrovia, which is an important measure to prevent the spread of disease, showed for days that everyone had the same body temperature - 32 degrees. Ebola, however, brought something good. Grinning policemen are afraid to ask for bribes at numerous checkpoints.
The spread of the epidemic can only be understood if one takes into account the alienation of the leaders who rule the West African states and the ignorance of the nature of their rule in the centers of power in the West. The most illustrative example is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia. Although the Norwegian Nobel Committee has made several hotly contested choices in previous years, its peace prize has become one of the most controversial, especially in Liberia itself. It seems that she was awarded more as a result of the desire to have an influential black woman, "the first head of state in Africa", than to have anything to do with the real merits of the former associate of Charles Taylor, one of the most cruel rulers in the history of the unfortunate region.
The National Truth and Trust Commission has placed Sirleaf on a list of 50 people who should be barred from holding any public office for the next 30 years. Her two mandates were marked by nepotism reminiscent of North Korea. Three of her sons are in high government positions - one is the head of the powerful National Security Agency. In most of the key positions in the country with a presidential system similar to the US - but without the middle class - there are friends and relatives of the power-loving Nobel laureate. Each minister, in addition to his salary, has $30.000 a month available for "personal expenses."
MUSIC AGAINST EBOLA: What corrupt and arrogant authorities do not even try or fail to achieve, musicians and popular radio stations try to make up for. Television and print media have negligible influence. Residents generally do not have electricity, and in Liberia, for example, only 37 percent of women and 63 percent of men are literate. The only mass media are radio and "sidewalk radio," an extremely efficient street machine for spreading rumors, truths, and gossip.
Music has long been a powerful weapon in the struggle for social change in West Africa. Ebola is discussed in a series of new songs such as "Ebola is a Reality", "Ebola in the City" and "State of Emergency". The new hit lyrics include "Let's save ourselves and our nation from Ebola / Let's protect ourselves and our families" and "She's no joke / Ebola can kill." New versions of popular tunes were also recorded, including "Sweet Liberia", a big and irresistibly sweet hit from the eighties, with words full of patriotism and optimism. Care was taken to include gospel, which is listened to by older generations, and hip, Liberian rap, which is preferred by the younger world in a country where half of the population is under 18 years old.
The first major Ebola epidemic brought some new, but also long-forgotten challenges. One of the fundamental principles of health care has been turned upside down. As a rule, people go to the hospital to stay alive – in the case of Ebola, going to the hospital meant almost certain death. Hospitals have essentially become morgues. It reinforced the belief that the only way to survive was to go to a "traditional doctor." The next task for local authorities and their partners from UN agencies is to try to convince citizens that there are people who have survived Ebola and that going to the hospital is not a shortcut to the grave.
In some quarters, disbelief has been replaced by paranoia. Many believe that Ebola can be transmitted through banknotes - Lebanese supermarkets are almost completely deserted. At the same time, there are still cases of family members kidnapping a relative from the hospital or quarantine to take him to a healer. Many still hide the sick in their houses. Tarik Jašarević, the World Health Organization's media representative, told the "Washington Post" correspondent that his organization was involved in the training of informants who were given mobile phones and "maybe a little money" to report sick and death cases. Unfortunately, while significant progress has been made, the main challenge remains the same – how to convince people that Ebola exists before they get it.
