The long incubation of Ebola

Jeremy Seabrook says that the shrouds holding the remains of Ebola victims, borne by volunteers, should be seen for what they are - human sacrifice to the savage god of an ideology that is ready to deplete the earth of its inhabitants with the same insolence with which it scoops out its treasures.

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THE terrain in which Ebola has raged in 2014 was well prepared for the harvest of death it has yielded. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are haunted by a violent, driven history. Between 55% and 75% of the people live below the imaginary latitude of a 'poverty line' defined by experts in the impoverishment of others. Life expectancy in Liberia is 58, in Guinea 55, in Sierra Leone 47; all have high infant mortality rates, and since Ebola, maternal mortality is again rising.

They suffer the affliction of riches - vast mineral wealth extracted by mining conglomerates which have brought great suffering and negligible benefit to the people. They are subject to alien 'structural adjustment programmes' designed to 'stabilise' their economies, even as they destabilise the health and well-being of the people. Nowhere in the world is there such divergence between favourable reports on economic 'progress', like those which preceded the Ebola outbreak, and the reality of ruined healthcare systems, lack of employment and insecurity, as a global economy gouges the treasures of the earth from beneath the light tread of people whose land harbours diamonds, gold, bauxite, iron ore and titanium.

Liberia was conceived by the American Colonisation Society in 1816 as a site for freed slaves, but it was no philanthropic venture. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky said: 'Can there be a nobler cause than that which, while it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous, portion of our population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilised life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe?'

The descendants of settlers constitute about 5% of the population. The anticipated mass exodus from America never occurred. Former slaves had to fight indigenous people for space. Liberia was recognised by the US in 1847 as the second black republic after Haiti. Liberia furnished the rubber for the making of car tyres in the US. Fear of disease in West Africa ('the white man's grave') gave an impulse to US medical research in Liberia. Gregg Mitman writes in the New England Journal of Medicine (November 2014) of a yellow fever outbreak which 'signified a major threat to American business in Liberia. In 1926, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company gained access to 1 million acres of land supplied to the United States with rubber free from British control. Knowledge of tropical medicine was vital to the company's success.'  In 1928-29, yellow fever killed prominent American, British and Japanese researchers. This led the US government and the League of Nations to press the Liberian government to address the 'unsanitary conditions' deemed 'a menace' to 'the lives of the citizens and subjects of foreign nations who reside in Liberia'. An expedition undertaken on behalf of Firestone to investigate yellow fever, collecting blood samples, tissue and urine, met with fierce resistance by people who saw the project as witchcraft; which it was, since its objective was the extraction of wealth from the people.

The government of Liberia was dominated by American-Liberians until 1980, when Samuel Doe's People's Redemption Council took power after the 'rice riots'. Charles Taylor and supporters from the National Patriotic Front of Liberia entered Monrovia in 1990 from Cote d'Ivoire, and Doe was executed. Communal conflict between warring ethnic factions broke out, and led to a terrorising and mutilation of civilians; while child soldiers toting heavy weaponry, ammunition belts weighing down their skinny torsos, became a characteristic image.

In 1997, weary of war, and with military assistance of West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG, the people elected Taylor president. He ran the country as a private fiefdom, as conflict spilled into Guinea and Sierra Leone, which Taylor accused of harbouring rebels. He sold diamonds and supplied weapons to fighters of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front. The recurrent war cost a quarter of a million lives. In 2003 Taylor stepped down under international pressure and a United Nations force. Brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he was sentenced to 50 years in jail in 2012, the first head of state convicted since Nuremburg. The UN maintains 7,000 soldiers in Liberia.

Liberia's bloody past was apparently 'cleansed' by the presidency of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2006 (narrowly re-elected in 2011). As a former official of the World Bank, her qualification to lead a country of such misery was not doubted; she was awarded the increasingly inauspicious Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Of her sons, Robert, chair of the National Oil Corporation of Liberia and his mother's chief adviser, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for assets of $2.5 billion; his brother was dismissed as deputy governor of the central bank in 2012 for failing to report his assets; another heads the National Security Agency.

Sierra Leone was disputed between the Portuguese, Dutch and French, until Britain established a 'factory' (trading post) in 1628; this, in the 18th century, served as an embarkation point for slaves. In 1787 the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in London planned to settle slaves who had sought refuge with the British after the American Revolution there, together with other non-white inhabitants of London. Freetown, established in 1792, was wiped out by disease and the hostility of the existing population.

With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, British naval authorities intercepted slave ships, releasing their human cargo into a Freetown which belied its name: the British 'negotiated' with local rulers and, where these were not compliant - as they rarely were - took land by force. Wider still and wider were its bounds set, until, during the 'scramble for Africa' in the 1880s, agreement between London and Paris set frontiers between French Guinea and Sierra Leone. Britain imposed a 'Protectorate', although no one had requested protection, transforming kings into 'paramount chiefs', who became agents for British taxation, policing and providers of corvee labour.

Negotiations for independence were concluded in 1961. A period of relative stability gave way to a series of coups and counter-coups. Liberia's Taylor sent weapons to the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh, which controlled eastern Sierra Leone's diamond-mining areas. Sankoh's atrocities against civilians matched those of Taylor. Further coups failed to dislodge his RUF, despite UN sanctions against Sierra Leone and the presence of ECOMOG forces. The Lome accord of 1999 gave Sankoh vice-presidency of the country and control over the alluvial diamonds in the East. The RUF advanced again and UN peacekeepers clashed with its forces. Britain intervened with Operation Palliser; an action which earned Tony Blair, warmonger of Iraq, a local status as bringer of peace. Over 50,000 people had died by the time the war concluded in 2002. Promises to a pacified Sierra Leone included a pledge to turn its golden beaches into a tourist destination to rival Gambia; by then, it had become an entrepot for Colombian drug cartels and narcotics en route for Europe.

Eastern Sierra Leone has diamonds, titanium, gold and chromite. African Minerals Limited has prospecting licences one thousand times greater than the average of all others, including for nickel, cobalt, uranium, gold and iron ore. Titanium Reserves Group mines rutile (titanium dioxide), and Sierra Minerals Holdings, bauxite. There have been forcible relocations of villages. The only infrastructure is to facilitate removal of wealth. Mining operations pollute water courses with cyanide and caustic soda.

Sierra Leone comes 183rd out of 187 countries on the UN's Human Development Index. Literacy is 41%, youth unemployment exceeds 70%. There are less than six million people: that such a small population should live in such wretchedness with the riches beneath, is a reproach to a 'development' in which the Ebola crisis occurred. In 2013 the African Development Bank reported, 'The outlook for the Sierra Leone economy remains positive in the current and medium terms with sustained economic growth, falling inflation and improved fiscal and external conditions.'

Guinea - where the first Ebola case was reported in March 2014 - contiguous with Sierra Leone and Liberia, suffers the same scourge of extreme wealth, to which mining entities of gold, diamonds, aluminium and bauxite have prior claim over its 10 million people.

The great-grandfather of Sekou Toure, the first president of independent Guinea (1958), died in resistance to French occupation in 1898. Sekou Toure famously said to de Gaulle, 'We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery.' That poverty under a form of modernised slavery might be his country's destiny, did not, perhaps, occur to him. He remained president until his death in 1984.

A coup brought Laurent Conte to power, his leadership confirmed with elections in 1993. Conte accused his neighbours of destabilising the country.  In 2001 a referendum confirmed Conte's lengthening of his presidential term; but Guinea was torn by continual strikes by trade unions, the opposition and the military. Conte died in 2008, replaced by a military junta.  In 2009 soldiers fired on an opposition rally at a stadium in Conakry, where 150 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded.  The EU, the African Union and the US imposed sanctions, and the UN set up a tribunal to investigate the deaths. In 2010, the International Criminal Court declared the massacre 'a crime against humanity'.

Alpha Conde became the new president in 2010, and despite the violence of what are described as 'ethnoregional tensions', his Rally of the Guinean People won parliamentary elections. Conde promised to review mining contracts, since in 2008 the Beny Steinmetz Group had secured the rights to mine the Simandou mountains. Steinmetz was accused of having links to former president Conte: his investment of $165 million was subsequently sold to the Brazilian mining corporation Vale for $2.5 billion. Steinmetz, an Israeli citizen, is said to have a fortune of $6-7 billion. The slopes of the Simandou mountains are streaked with the red iron-ore wounds of mining activity, while those who live there lack electricity, water and sanitation. An African Economic Outlook report offered this judgment on the economy of Guinea: 'Successful macroeconomic stabilisation and the start of reforms to boost the productive sector and the business climate have not been enough to register clear economic and social gains. Poverty still affects 55.2% of the population more than half a century after independence.'

Enter Ebola

In this setting Ebola, with its partners of corruption, poverty, exploitation and indifference to humanity, found propitious circumstances for its own grisly rule in 2014. 

Since 1976, when Ebola was identified (named after the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo where it first appeared), there have been 26 outbreaks, the current visitation by far the most extensive. The over 14,000  Ebola cases recorded in the current outbreak (certainly an underestimate) up to mid-November have resulted in a death rate of around 36%; how far malnutrition and weakened immune systems contribute to this figure cannot be known. There has in the past 40 years been no concentrated effort to find a cure, since Ebola has, until now, been 'confined' to Central and West Africa, perceived as no threat to populations in the US or Europe.

The virus has its habitation in an animal host (believed to be a species of fruit bat).  It is communicated by contact with bodily fluids of those affected. It is no accident that animal infections which can transfer themselves to human beings are becoming more common: AIDS, SARS, Lyme disease, swine flu and bird flu have created global health scares. As the natural world of West Africa has been laid waste, ransacked to nourish a global economy, viruses that were contained within animal populations have surmounted habitats, now destroyed or contaminated, and invaded human communities; another baleful consequence of a 'development' which has still not reckoned its true costs as it scythes, like Death itself, through the planet.

In the early stages of the Ebola outbreak bodies lay unburied on the streets of Freetown in Sierra Leone and Monrovia in Liberia; scenes of people drawing their last breath outside barred, ramshackle medical centres were broadcast by global media. The suffering were ostracised and people fled the source of the outbreak, contributing further to the spread of the virus. If the world (that is, governments and international bureaucracies) was slow to respond in the initial stages, this was not the case with volunteers from the affected communities, who picked up and buried the dead in improvised graveyards, even under insults and attacks from frightened neighbours.  Later, more than 800 workers from Britain's National Health Service offered to help the effort of Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Red Cross, which provided vital personnel to treat those stricken by what was described as 'a medieval pestilence' since it convulsed countries in ways similar to those that wracked Europe in the 14th century.

It is impossible to overestimate the disturbance to traditional cultures - already tormented by poverty and war - inflicted by such events. It is expected that the relatives will remain close to the body of the dying, and the deceased must be given a last touch of love by their kinsfolk, must be washed and clothed in garments fit for the afterlife. It is the custom for the sister of the father of the dead person to bathe, cleanse and dress her or him. To impose isolation on the dead and dying is not to suppress superstition - it is to violate the most elementary decencies that can be accorded to human beings in extremis; and it was understandable if people refused to withhold what they regarded as the necessary honour and dignity to the dying, and fled to traditional healers and practitioners in their despair.

Amid great fanfare, the United States despatched 4,000 troops to construct treatment centres, while Britain sent its military troops to set up seven, each with 100 beds. These were to treat medical personnel who become affected, but are not in the business of tending the sick. Cuba, the outcast, stigmatised, 'pariah', reject of a figment known as the 'international community', already has over 50,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics in 66 countries worldwide, and sent 461 medical workers - more than any other country - to tend patients directly.

The self-congratulation of colonial powers has a semi-redemptive purpose, since they have benefited not only from the riches of West Africa but also from a steady drain of qualified medical practitioners from the area; there were only a hundred doctors and a thousand nurses in Liberia at the start of the outbreak. How many medical staff from that country now practise in the US or Europe is unknown, but the urgency of the US and Britain to act may be read as an obscure compensatory calculus, since their own health services have been beneficiaries of the continuing loss and impoverishment of West Africa.

The IMF and World Bank pledged $530 million to help the three West African countries. The IMF is to allow an increase in budget deficits in order to rebuild healthcare systems which had scarcely ever existed. This is another act of penitence by institutions which have superintended loans conditional upon reduced public expenditure, which have indirectly dismantled already rudimentary healthcare. We are still living under the triumphal hegemony of a neoliberalism governed by belief in low inflation and small budget deficits - i.e., dwindling public expenditure, even on the basic elements that sustain life. The shrouds holding the remains of Ebola victims, borne by volunteers, should be seen for what they are - human sacrifice to the savage god of an ideology that is ready to deplete the earth of its inhabitants with the same insolence with which it scoops out its treasures.

Panic and hysteria

The word 'Ebola' has become a kind of curse, reawakening folk memories of West Africa associated perhaps with the vengeful heritage of slavery, that earlier haemorrhagic fever built into the foundations of Western wealth. Is this why, thousands of miles from the centre of the epidemic, panic and hysteria seized the suggestible mind of America? All it required was the death in Dallas of one man, who had recently travelled from Liberia, to create an infection of fear that spread like wildfire in the safest of places, a country which spends almost one-fifth of its GDP on health and medical care. Schools were closed, a cruise ship sequestered; politicians called for the sealing of borders and suspension of visas, while billionaire Donald Trump urged that all flights from Ebola-affected countries be stopped 'or the plague will spread inside our borders'.

If West Africa is a producer of primary raw materials, America is shown to be a producer of primary raw emotions: paranoia, anxiety, panic, hysteria and feelings of impotence are among the major industrial outputs of rich societies. Ebola, in this context, serves as yet another source of terror, inspiring fear among those whose well-being and prosperity must always be maintained in a state of high insecurity: along with ISIS, immigration, invasive exotic species, as well as sicknesses yet to appear in an Africa ravaged by epic disturbances to its ecology and society, Ebola is part of an armoury that maintains social discipline, conformity and a determination to protect the pirated gains of privilege. Perhaps this is why Australia and Canada, whose health systems are said to be among the best in the world, hastened to impose bans on entry to people from the affected countries, following the example set by such shining examples of care for its people as North Korea.

Pity the people of West Africa, who, as well as undergoing the afflictions of Ebola, have been assigned an unchosen role in the didactic global immorality play that drains it of wealth, brains, resources and power, and then expects its people to bless as saviours those who lend their aid to restore the merest fraction of the natural treasures, vitality and life which have been, and continue to be, spirited away from them.              

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana).

*Third World Resurgence No. 290/291, October/November 2014, pp 14-17