In a speech addressing the international community, United States President Obama criticized the world leaders for their slow and inadequate response to the Ebola outbreak. Authorities warn for an exponential increase in the number of infections and even consider the possibility that Ebola could become endemic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y70NmnU1kDw&feature=player_embedded
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Like other anthropologists who have woken up mid-career and found the countries where they’ve lived and worked awash in mass deaths (and let’s be real… that’s quite a lot of us), my initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to hope that the experts had the situation under control, and bury my head in the sand.
Soon, the epidemic outpaced the global health response, and the calls for help grew more urgent, but anthropologists’ phones have stayed startlingly quiet. While leaders at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and the World Health Organization explained how factors like culture, weak governance systems, human behavior, and social organization made the outbreak unintelligible to the global health community, academics who work in the region like Danny Hoffman, Rosalind Shaw, Mats Utas, Chris Coulter, Mary Moran, Susan Shepler, Adia Benton, Mike McGovern, Sasha Newell, Gwen Heaner, and Marianne Ferme, not to mention anthropologist from the global south like Sylvain Landry Faye, have remained untapped as resources for understanding and creating innovative new approaches to attacking the Ebola outbreak at its source.
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Hillary Clinton at ICG Annual Award ceremony (Picture borrowed from glkcreative.com)
Recently the New York Times caused turmoil among prestigious and influential US think tanks when it published an investigative article about concealed connections between these non-profit research organisations and a broad range of foreign countries, among them Norway, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (NYT online, 6/9/2014). The article revealed that leading think tanks like the Center for Global Development, the Brookings Institution and the Atlantic Council are receiving funding from foreign governments in exchange for influence on the organisations’ recommendations to US policy-makers. The article criticized this practice for its lack of transparency and the supposed loss of intellectual freedom and objectivity. ‘The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington’, the authors cautioned. The attacked think tanks rejected the accusations, pointing to ‘credibility’ and ‘scholarly independence’ as their major ‘currency’, although one interviewee admitted that self-censorship could be a future problem because in times of dwindling funding sources, saving one’s job could well trump the urge to be critical.
This weekend, Newsweek published a relatively controversial article about the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Here’s the cover:
Let’s just say it’s not exactly an original piece of journalism either.
I found myself frustrated not only by the cover and the article, but also by the editor-in-chief’s condescending response to his critics:
Not exactly the kind of response you want from an editor-in-chief, right? I vented to Facebook friends about the magazine cover, the thin claims of the article and its editor-in-chief’s rude response to critical tweets. One of my friends pointed out that the magazine has been propagating race-baiting click bait for a while now. (Yes, I used the word ‘bait’ twice, and we, the scholars, have bitten). So it shouldn’t be surprising to see the old trope of apes standing in for black folks or sexually charged Grubb Street prognostications regarding ‘back door’ entry of Ebola into the US gracing its front pages. (As one tweeter noted, It doesn’t take a semiotician to see what’s going on here).
In a recent response to questions about the role of the war and the attacks on foreign health workers, I wrote:
…. if war has changed anything, the incredible influx of humanitarian interventions and aid workers during the war and its immediate aftermath — where outsiders and their local cronies seemed to benefit openly from others’ suffering — has also engendered suspicion that has helped fuel the backlash against local and international health workers.
Here, I am expanding on this claim, which is intended to complement Susan Shepler’s piece about mistrust of the ‘vampire state’.
Coming back to Sierra Leone at the end of June and traveling on to Liberia in July, I’ve seen a big change. There have been hundreds of deaths, and people are definitely taking the issue more seriously now.
The virus is primarily spread by contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, so one of the precautions advised is to not shake hands with people. But I’m finding that very hard in Sierra Leone and Liberia. We shake hands with everyone we meet. A driver told me, “I carry all kinds of people in my car. My children are playing with all kinds of children and then we all sit together at home. What can I do?” I was sitting in a crowded public transport vehicle in the Red Light neighborhood, just outside Monrovia the other day, waiting for the vehicle to fill with passengers so we could leave. A vendor came by, hawking green garden gloves, boasting that they could be used to prevent Ebola. People around me laughed.
It’s only in the last few days that I now see hand-washing stations outside government ministries and some NGOs (though not all). It seems a little futile when the same people go out to eat in the same cook shops with the same shared utensils.
Outside the Ministry of Education in Monrovia
In the mid-1980s, FBC sneezed. Radical students, alienated by Siaka Steven’s brutal one-party regime, decamped to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya. The move set in motion a train of events which meandered, in fits and starts, towards the outbreak of the rebel war. By the time the students returned to Freetown in the early 1990s, Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was laying waste to the country’s south-eastern flank and their idealistic dreams of revolution had evaporated. The combative student movement that had flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s seemingly slipped off-stage.
Out of the shadows a massive procession of handicapped young street dwellers appears. We are in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone, and they move slowly like zombies of the night whilst parts of metal on crutches and wheelchairs glow in the darkness and metallic sounds echo in the otherwise empty street. It’s the opening scene of Shado’man, a film shot in darkness.
“Development” reflections from a long awaited return to Sierra Leone
Among my friends in Sierra Leone I have a reputation for “not knowing how to walk properly” (“waka fine”) especially at night. One time in April 2009, during field research for my PhD thesis and after a late evening visit to a friend, I even stumbled into a nasty ditch that I “should have grown used to” (so I was told) a long time ago, since I regularly frequented the same street during daylight. I ripped my jeans, received a cut on my ankle and had to suffer the amused assistance of bystanders who pulled me out of the ditch. According to next day’s gossip I managed not to cry but was so ashamed of my clumsiness that I begged my friendly helpers to please keep quiet about the incident. However, my Western inability to gracefully cope with Bo Town’s road conditions and nearly constant blackout was just too delightful.
![c9c233_296a56047d6d4e95a6a03217ab047e1e.png_srz_295_225_75_22_0.50_1.20_0[1]](http://matsutas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/c9c233_296a56047d6d4e95a6a03217ab047e1e_srz_295_225_75_22_0-50_1-20_01.png)
We just launched a new website with images and texts from Freetown, Sierra Leone. The site is a platform for both a photo exhibition: Pentagon (photos and texts from my fieldwork) and a film: Jew-Man Business (directed by Maya Christensen, filmed by Christian Vium and produced by me). The new website has been created by Hanna Berhanusdotter who has been an academic intern at NAI. Please have a look: http://www.economyofthestreet.com/
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