The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African races
are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for
government.
– Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State
(1918)
AIDS demonstrates how economics and politics cannot be separated
from disease; indeed, these forces shape our response in powerful ways.
–Allan Brandt (1988)
Liberia’s
history of bad governance and foreign exploitation explains citizens’
reluctance to trust the intentions of government officials and international
health workers [regarding Ebola]. Years of extortion by police, vast and highly
visible inequalities in wealth and a sense that even aid workers arrive to
enrich themselves have taken their toll.
–Ashoka Mukpo (2014)
Two months ago, reporting from Liberia, U.S. citizen Ashoka
Mukpo wrote a perceptive article about what one might call the ‘sociology of
Ebola.’ Today Mukpo is himself
battling the disease, after being evacuated to a hospital in Nebraska. The U.S. press is characterizing Mukpo
as a brave journalist risking his own wellbeing to report truthfully from an
afflicted country.
In contrast, some people are accusing Liberian citizen Thomas
Eric Duncan, who died yesterday of Ebola in a Dallas hospital, of a variety of
pre-mortem sins. These include falsifying
documents so he could: escape the epidemic, seek medical treatment abroad, or
take advantage of what the extreme right calls ‘Obama’s Liberian Amnesty’ to
skirt immigration protocols. (This
strange charge seems to refer to the Deferred Enforced Departure directive,
instituted by President George W. Bush in 2007, when the Temporary Protected
Status for some Liberians was due to expire . . . a directive extended by
President Barack Obama. President Obama’s mythical responsibility for the Ebola
epidemic, based on his African roots, is such a disturbingly insane theory,
albeit one gathering steam with U.S. extremists, that I cannot treat it today,
nor can I treat how Ebola is being used in Republican political campaigns. Stay tuned.)
Whatever degree of accuracy adheres to both
characterizations, they share one trait:
they praise or blame the victim, ascribing their fates to individual
agency. People in West Africa
often see things from a different perspective, things including why one is
struck by disease and how one interprets medical assistance. To understand some reactions to Ebola
‘on the ground,’ reactions that can seem either ignorant or ungrateful to some Western
observers, it may be helpful to refer to the attitudes of Haitians toward the
AIDS epidemic that ravaged the country in the late 1980s.
Sending
Sida
At the very time that AIDS was being identified as a ‘Haitian
disease’ in the United States, the illness was spreading through rural Haiti. Sida (AIDS in kreyol) was a new
phenomenon and thus engendered fear and confusion. It didn’t seem to be a ‘normal’ sickness that could be
treated by herbalists, vodou priests, prayer services, or such Western medicine
as was available. Thus it was
frequently attributed to sorcery.
Sida was ‘sent’ against a person, often a person who had offended social
norms in some way or who was marginally better off than his neighbors. But as the epidemic grew, sida attacked
‘innocent’ people as well, and other causes were posited. Primary among these: a brutal and
corrupt government (although Jean-Claude Duvalier had been exiled, the new
regime was seen as ‘Duvalierism without Duvalier,’ and murderous oppression continued)
and the United States, whose long-standing economic exploitation of Haiti – not
to mention its discriminatory policies against Haitian immigrants and would-be
immigrants – was seen as a major factor in aggravating the country’s already
abject poverty.
Sorcery might be at work, but indigenous logic looked for
reasons behind the poverty that made people so envious or desperate that they
might send sida to someone living right next door. In the countryside and in city slums, people competed for
scanty resources – food, water, shelter, employment – made even scantier by the
long alliance between kleptocratic Haitian politicians and United States
business interests. NGOs and
religious missions dedicated to providing health services were also distrusted;
they were suspected of infecting the populace, using people as guinea pigs, or
profiting in some manner by their sickness (suspicions based in part on the
business of exporting Haitian blood, a trade that stopped only when AIDS hit).
Then there’s racism.
Not only did the blatant racism coloring the first U.S. Occupation (1915-1934)
leave permanent scars; a large percentage of Haitians have relatives in the
United States, relatives who reported increased anti-Haitian bigotry (not to
mention the treatment of ‘illegal Haitian aliens’ in Florida detention
centers).
In sum, while poor Haitians understood sida as an evil that
might have as its proximate cause an envious neighbor or a virus, the ultimate
causes were dysfunctional government, civil strife, and U.S. exploitation of
what had been a paracolony for a century or more, plus white and mulatto disdain
for average, darker skinned Haitians, who constitute well over 90% of the
population. Sida was indeed ‘sent’
by enemies.
Ebola
is the brainchild of HIV
This is the conclusion of Dr. Gobee Logan, County Medical
Officer at Tubmanville Hospital, Liberia.
Dr. Logan evidently has some success treating Ebola patients with a drug
from the anti-HIV/AIDS cocktail, a plan he devised after reading that HIV and
Ebola replicate inside the body in the same way.
Other sorts of consanguinity are voiced by other
doctors. Dr. Cyril Broderick,
former Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia and Director
of Research at Firestone-Liberia, directly links Ebola with AIDS in that they
are both pathogens deliberately manufactured and disseminated by Western
pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. Department of Defense. And the doctors of the church are not
far behind. Just as some churchmen
in Haiti and the United States saw AIDS as a divine punishment, so do many
churchmen in Liberia. In July this
year, evangelical protestant pastors, plus Episcopalian and Catholic priests,
issued a unanimous resolution:
That God is angry with Liberia, and that
Ebola is a plague. Liberians have
to pray and seek God’s forgiveness over the corruption and immoral acts (such
as homosexualism, etc.) that continue to penetrate our society.
Ebola is ‘sent’ by God.
And/or big pharma and the United States in general. And/or by the collusion of the Liberian
government with these malevolent interests over the entire history of Liberia
(which, of course, began as a United States paracolony sponsored by an uneasy
alliance of abolitionists and former slaveholders). And/or even ‘sent’ by sorcery, as the rumors of uncanny
‘resurrection’ and ‘Ebola ghosts’ suggest.
It’s not surprising that Liberians can be wary of or hostile
to medical personnel who wear giant white spacesuits to invade rural
communities or who staff clinics and hospitals that are known as places where
one is sent to die – or even worse, as places where rapacious conglomerates
test poisons and deadly viruses on a victimized populace.
There is a foundational similarity between Haiti’s reaction
to AIDS thirty years ago and Liberia’s reaction to Ebola now: a widely held
belief that the causes of catastrophic disease are deeply embedded in the
country’s history, political economy, and social practice – plus a consequent
distrust of the ‘help’ offered by those who may have precipitated the disease
in the first place. The fact that these epidemics followed an extended period
of political chaos and, in Liberia, of horrific all-out war, both periods
marked by U.S. support of venal dictators and refusal to help the imperiled
citizenry, only adds to fear and confusion.
Chimpanzees
and Bush Meat
Then there’s the common denominator of racism. In-country racialized attitudes have
differing vectors: in Haiti, the
mulatto elites vs. the ‘African’ blacks, in Liberia, the descendants of Black
American settlers vs. the indigenous peoples whose land was appropriated, one
(the lighter, or ‘more civilized’) supported by the United States (the Reagan
administration’s temporary support of Samuel Doe is an exception). Racism ‘sent’ from the outside – in
particular, via Western reportage – also contributes to the difficulties
diseased-gripped countries have in dealing with an epidemic.
While poor sanitation, rudimentary medical services, and degraded
infrastructure certainly contribute to the spread of infectious disease, the
way these conditions often are portrayed plays into centuries of racist
discourse. I.e.: Africans are dirty, careless, and
lazy. They are to blame for the
shabby state of their countries – as if colonialism, enabling craven leaders, and
deliberate underdevelopment had no role at all. Moreover, Africans are savage, atavistic . . . close kin to
the chimpanzees from whom they supposedly contracted the disease.
How convenient that both AIDS and Ebola have been traced to
African people’s interaction with chimps.
The ‘science’ about disease origins keeps changing, but the reporting
does not. In the 19th
century, ‘sexual encounters’ between African women and male apes were posited
to have been the source of venereal disease; in the 20th century,
AIDS was transmitted to humans from apes because humans hunted and consumed
apes (a sanitized version of the hoary ‘cannibalism’ calumny); in the 21st
century, Ebola has been traced either to being bitten by a chimpanzee or by
eating ‘bushmeat’ (in itself a racially-inflected term for wild game that
includes great apes but is most often animals that could have been infected by
a chimpanzee). The face of Ebola
and AIDS is . . . a large, violent, disease-ridden monkey?
All that said, it’s predictable that the death of Thomas Eric
Duncan can be read darkly, through a racist glass by African Americans and darkly,
through a racially inflected conspiracy glass by Liberians and other
Africans. As Chiangozie Nwonwu
wrote earlier today:
But, seriously, why would it be
difficult to think that Mr Duncan’s death would have served the US state’s
interest? Think about a flood of people from Ebola-hit regions of West Africa
heading to the land where everyone with Ebola had, until Duncan, survived.
It’s not difficult to think that, particularly given the
current U.S. paranoia about illegal (and non-white) immigration (a factor also
at play during the Haitian AIDS epidemic). In my opinion, Duncan’s death was not deliberately ‘sent,’ but
his race, ‘foreignness,’ and lack of insurance seem to have shaped the initial,
non-vigilant response to his illness. Duncan was caught in a huge web of
layered and intersecting causalities, histories, and rumors, when – as far as individual
agency goes – it appears all he was trying to do was reunite with his son’s
mother, whom he had met in a Cote d’Ivoire refugee camp. As was Ashoka Mukpo caught. No doubt a committed journalist and
humanitarian, Mukpo has been equally subject to the factors that he wrote about
so well, not long ago.
References
[Note: The first illustration is a street
mural in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, by Jerry Rosembert Moise. The second is a detail from a sequined banner by the Haitian artist Myrtlande Constant. The third is a photograph of
nurses removing a corpse from an unspecified Liberian location. The fourth is the cover of Newsweek magazine, August 29, 2014.]
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