By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
It has been ten years since the end of West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, a monumental health tragedy that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people in the region. However, a decade later, questions surrounding the outbreak’s origin and the institutions and individuals who failed to mitigate its devastating impact remain unanswered.
In late December 2014, when the outbreak was at its peak, I embarked on a journey across the Mano River countries to investigate what journalists, scientists, and local politicians referred to as “the transmission chain of the outbreak” through its “original infection route.” My investigation took me from Meliandou, a small village in the southern region of Guinea, to Koindu in the eastern part of Sierra Leone. I wanted to understand how the virus, which was believed to have originated in Meliandou, developed into an international crisis. I was particularly eager to learn about the conditions in Meliandou and, most importantly, how the family of the alleged index case had been affected since the outbreak.
I left Freetown on December 23, 2014, to travel across the most affected countries in search of the origin and transmission of the outbreak. First, I travelled from Freetown to Guinea, passing through the provinces of Sierra Leone on my way to Conakry, and I came face-to-face with familiar scenes I had known and witnessed over ten years before: military checkpoints, police officers, armed soldiers, and long queues of people waiting to being screened by youths who held temperature checking machines.
Had the war years returned? I constantly asked myself. The only apparent difference was that the security officers were not looking for insurgents, they were looking for sick people; people who showed signs of a fever or anything remotely associated with the symptoms of Ebola were arrested. There were over ten military checkpoints from Waterloo, in rural Freetown, to the Guinean border, a distance of about 150 miles. At all of these checkpoints, those who operated the temperature checks were youths who volunteered to be part of the fight against the outbreak. The scenes reminded me of the thousands of youths who were an active force in the insurgency that wrecked Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Many of whom were conscripted into fighting factions and thrown into combat with no conventional military training.
The Ebola epidemic reinvented the same scenario – many of the young people involved in the screening of travelers at checkpoints never received any basic healthcare training. They operated like healthcare vigilantes involved in the fight against an outbreak they had no knowledge of. In many ways they looked like the war vigilantes, like the child soldiers and armed teenagers during the rebel years who were forced into service and given Kalashnikov rifles to fight in a war whose objectives they did not know nor understand.
Along the highway from Freetown to Conakry, countless ambulances swerved in both directions; they drove past us with supersonic speed, with fumigated windows and blazing sirens that sounded like death bells. Makeshift structures, all newly built with tarpaulin and roundly fenced, were erected along all major checkpoints on the highway. They were boldly marked “Ebola Holding Centers” with huge signposts erected by NGOs and aid agencies. Spread almost everywhere on the highway, they depicted the presence and wreckage of the epidemic on the rural scenery. The atmosphere of the countryside smelled of chlorine, a testament to the overwhelming nature of the epidemic and its vicious onslaught.
I travelled with two other companions as my research assistants: one journalist and one photographer from Freetown. When we arrived at a checkpoint near Portloko in the northwest of Sierra Leone, a soldier said he needed verification that we actually came from Freetown. He told us that people in the surrounding communities were banned from traveling outside of their localities. The surrounding communities of Portloko were declared “red zones” and considered “Ebola hotspots.” Anyone coming from those areas was regarded as a potentially infected Ebola patient.
President Koroma had imposed travel restrictions across districts two days before we left Freetown. In Freetown itself, health officials conducted a house-to-house search for potential Ebola patients, part of the government’s New Year and Christmas lockdown of the country. The soldier we met said he was enforcing the president’s order, but our driver insisted that he was finding an opportunity to ask for a bribe. How could we know the difference?
Stories of bribery and other corruption are common in cross-border travels in West Africa; the Guinea-Sierra Leone border was not an exception. Nearly everyone who travelled on that road testifies to paying a bribe to security officers on both sides of the border. Cross-border extortion remains a major problem to regional integration in Africa.
Upon reaching Guinea, we witnessed every traveler crossing into the country being charged 10,000 Guinean francs. But surprisingly, no temperature checks were administered, and we went straight into Conakry without coming across a single ambulance. Guinean officers in charge of checkpoints on the road to Conakry were more interested in their bribe collection than in controlling the outbreak. They had no concerns about potential Ebola patients. They were apparently not worried that travelers, including Sierra Leoneans like ourselves who had come from communities considered “Ebola hot spots,” might be carrying the virus.
In Conakry, everyone went about business as usual. Taxis plied the city of Conakry with seven passengers – four in the back seat and three in the front along with the driver. This was the direct opposite of Freetown. Crowd-control measures that reduced the number of persons in taxis and other commercial vehicles were enforced by police and armed officers in all parts of Sierra Leone. In Guinea, nothing had changed with the outbreak; mosques performed burial rituals and relatives buried their dead in Conakry without the involvement of health workers. On Christmas Eve (December 24, 2014), I went around Conakry and visited several offices and public spaces. I found only two temperature machines in only two public places. At one location, the guard who operated the temperature machine seemed tired with the routine screening exercise and allowed people free passage into the building. All international flights: Air France, Brussels Airlines, and Air Maroc, continued flight operations into Guinea’s international airport unhindered. Public offices, hairdressing salons, barbershops, boutiques, market centers, hotels, restaurants, shops, banks, and Internet cafes; all operated normal work schedules. One day I witnessed three separate funeral processions all without the involvement of health workers.
I noticed that the government’s response to the Ebola crisis in Guinea had not affected everyday life in the country. There was obviously no panic over the dead, no restrictions on public gatherings; people’s movement across the country was not limited. There was no control over market hours. Yet the statistics on Ebola deaths and infections in Guinea was far below the other two countries in the Mano River region: Sierra Leone and Liberia.
I then wondered why the stringent military measures and population containment policies of the government of Sierra Leone, for example, had not succeeded in halting the spread and casualties of the outbreak. I was also puzzled why Guinea, a country that scientists and journalists claimed recorded the first case of Ebola in West Africa and apparently lacked all of the precautionary measures applied in Sierra Leone, had minimal reported deaths and infections. Had the government of Sierra Leone deliberately exaggerated the size of the outbreak? Or had scientists and journalists missed the actual origin of the outbreak and its modes of transmission?
My journey to trace the origin of Ebola’s transmission chain in West Africa led me from Conakry to Meliandou in the southern region of Guinea, and then into the Kailahun and Kenema districts in the eastern parts of Sierra Leone. I travelled through the same route that the so-called index case of the virus in Sierra Leone (a traditional healer who was identified by reporters as the first Ebola patient in Sierra Leone) had travelled after reportedly visiting Ebola-infected relatives in Guinea where she was allegedly infected before returning to eastern Sierra Leone. I interviewed outbreak victims: those who lost relatives and others who were reportedly infected, taken to treatment centers, and eventually survived. I spoke to many professionals involved in the outbreak response in the Mano River countries: journalists, politicians, doctors, nurses, aid workers, ambulance drivers, burial workers, and community leaders. Each of these individuals offered a distinct, though oftentimes similar, experience dealing with the outbreak, whether as victims, responders, or frontline workers.
The stories of victims (those who lost family members to the outbreak) and so-called survivors of the virus were so heart-wrenching that they left an indelible scar on my memory. I still recall the story of a two-month-old baby named Aminata Lamin at the Hastings Ebola Treatment Center in Freetown on January 9, 2015. On that day, the Center’s coordinator, Dr. Santigie Sesay, presided over the discharge of 12 Ebola survivors. He announced to a group of journalists that among the group was a two-month-old baby who had initially been brought to the treatment facility along with her mother. The doctor explained to the journalists that the child had to be discharged without her mother who was still reportedly responding to treatment at the center.
“Due to the current state of the mother, the baby will be handed over to the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs,” Dr. Sesay announced to the journalists. A few days later, however, investigations revealed that the child’s mother had actually died a week before the baby was discharged.
Aminata’s story was not unique. On December 31, 2014, British aid workers at the Kerry Town Ebola Treatment Center in the outskirts of Freetown also announced they could not find a home for a five-month-old baby named Fatmata Fornah. Fatmata’s parents had both died of Ebola, and her aunt, in whose care the mother had left her before she died four days earlier, was kicked out of her home by a landlord who feared that the child was Ebola positive and would potentially spread the virus in the household.
Fatmata’s story depicted the predicament of thousands of other children whose parents died during the outbreak. On December 25, 2014, the WHO announced that about 30,000 children were orphaned by Ebola in Sierra Leone alone and that five million children in the Mano River countries were out of school due to the outbreak.
“Some of these kids may never go back to school due to lack of support. The Ebola epidemic has increased the number of teenage pregnancies in Sierra Leone; the victims are all girls of school going age,” WHO officials reported. This outbreak, then, was more than a disaster.
The stories I collected, and my assessment of the outbreak, were published in November 2015 by Africanist Press. It has been ten years since the publication of my book, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians. The book is a record of my observations and interpretations of the many episodes and events that took place in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea during the entire period of the outbreak in West Africa. It is the direct result of a theoretical and empirical investigation of the deadly episodes, together with the individual and institutional forces that characterized and helped define one of the most recent human tragedies in modern history.
The evidence came from records of NGOs, official papers written by national and international policy makers, private correspondences of government officials and international aid workers, and archival documents. I deliberately omitted or refused to include in this current text the direct personal testimonies of victims’ families, Ebola survivors, and the eyewitness accounts of the many frontline responders (ambulance drivers, burial workers, and local nurses) whom I interviewed across West Africa.
In writing the book, I hoped to correct a narrative that was put forward by the team of European scientists and journalists about the origin of the outbreak; a narrative that had dominated global understanding of the West African outbreak within global academia. I wanted the book to serve as a starting point in our efforts to understand the real origin and causes of the tragedy that claimed the lives of thousands of our friends, neighbors, and family members. My goal was to give voice to the victims of the outbreak; to foreground the submerged and suppressed experiences and stories of oppressed communities of West Africa, and most importantly, to bring to the attention of the world how the tragedy of capitalist development affect millions of lives in West Africa.
The book was published in Philadelphia ten years ago in mid-November 2015 and was launched in Sierra Leone on 6 January 2016; a date that coincided with the 16th anniversary of the rebel invasion of Freetown in 1999. The book was enthusiastically received by ordinary citizens in Sierra Leone. We held several discussions on radio and television across many communities in Freetown and in rural Sierra Leone. I also travelled to Guinea, Senegal, and Gambia; holding press conferences and book signing events, and granting interviews to journalists in the region. In 12 weeks, between January and March 2016, we circulated more than 6,000 copies of the book in the region.
Following the West Africa events, I returned to the United States toward the end of March 2016, passing through Dakar to Madrid and then New York to continue the conversation. I wanted the media and the academy to re-examine their reporting and understanding of the epidemic. I wanted people to hear the many stories that were not reported during the outbreak. I spoke at Wellesley College, at the University of Pennsylvania, the City University of New York, the Bronx Community College, and John Jay College in New York. We also held two discussions panels at the 2016 Left Forum Conference in New York, in addition to book signing events in Virginia, Washington, Philadelphia, California, Chicago, and Maryland. One of these speaking events brought me to Evanston for the first time to speak at Northwestern University. Little did I know that this event was going to be the beginning of my PhD journey in America.
Two months after that event, I was offered a fully funded five-year fellowship to pursue doctoral research at Northwestern. The fellowship covered all my tuition costs, my health insurance, research, and a monthly stipend that covered my housing and basic needs. I eventually stayed in Evanston for seven additional years.
In the ten years since the book’s publications, I have spoken to too many individuals, groups, and more institutions across the world that I am able to list. Thousands of copies of the book have also been distributed globally, and more copies are being printed daily on demand for different audiences, including university classrooms in Europe, the US, Australia, and Canada.
Looking back ten years later, so much has changed, and we have witnessed defining global events including the ascendancy to power of reactionary political groups in Africa, the resurgence of authoritarian and military regimes in West Africa who are overtly averse to upholding democracy, respect human rights, multiculturalism, and academic freedom. Since the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a global democratic recession and the ongoing assault on knowledge production, independent journalism, free speech and freedom of information.
In Sierra Leone, almost three years after my book was published in 2018, President Koroma and his All Peoples Congress (APC), lost power to Julius Maada Bio and the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) during the general elections of that year. My writing, including my investigation on Ebola and corruption, became an integral part of the electoral debate. Opposition party newspapers and their journalists republished all my investigation and reports on corruption of the Koroma regime. In some ways, my work incidentally helped defeat the Koroma regime in the elections.
I was in the early stage of my doctoral studies at Northwestern University in Illinois when Koroma’s APC was defeated in 2018. But even before coming to graduate school, it was evident that my work, both as a journalist and public intellectual, was threatening to the preconceived status of Sierra Leone’s political elite. While pursuing my doctoral studies at Northwestern, I eventually became the overt target of death threats and other attacks by known supporters of Sierra Leonean President, Julius Maada Bio, after I published financial and other public records showing how President Bio, the First Lady, and other senior officials in the Bio administration were looting and diverting public funds for their own private uses. Today, the APC politicians, many of them Koroma’s former ministers, have also joined the SLPP’s campaign of harassment against me, which has escalated since April 2021 to include calls for my extradition from the United States for prosecution in Sierra Leone.
Starting in March 2020, I have been constantly receiving death threats related to my work as a journalist investigating and reporting on corruption and misuse of public funds in Sierra Leone. This intense harassment against me has been carried out through text messages, phone calls, and cyber-attacks on my social media platforms, and most recently censorship of my emails correspondences and publications. One chilling instance happened while I was a guest speaker at the University of Louisville in Kentucky in late 2022. During a lunch break, a clergyman sent me a WhatsApp message. He threatened I would soon be killed and buried. He described how my bones would then be exhumed and ground into powder. This powder, he claimed, would be turned into Kush—a synthetic drug in West Africa allegedly made from human remains. Shockingly, this threat came from a Catholic priest, and was posted in a public discussion forum of Sierra Leonean writers and academics; none of whom condemned this threatening act of violence.
For almost a year now – at least since November 2024 – my book on the Ebola outbreak itself, and most of my anti-corruption work, has been increasingly suppressed on Google search engines and other online platforms. This is being done as part of an effort to bury my more than two decades of journalism and other investigative work on good governance and accountability in West Africa.
In the process of investigating Sierra Leonean society, I came to realize that a full understanding of the rise of the current political structure in Sierra Leone requires a complete knowledge of the past and its many contexts and actors. Through the Africanist Press, my journalism, which has often been based in my fundamental understanding of African history, has exposed corruption at the highest levels of the Sierra Leonean government. My reporting affected the selfish, greed-driven economic and political interests of the ruling social and political elites – academics, lawyers, bankers, teachers, and other professionals – who have held Sierra Leone hostage for the past sixty-five years.
My insistence on seeking transparency and accountability in the way government officials have operated in the country has earned me more enemies today among the elites in Sierra Leone. Despite these challenges, however, my commitment to Sierra Leone and its democratic future remains unshaken.