By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Eight years ago, on 28 October 2016, I was invited to Evanston, Illinois, as a guest speaker by Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies (PAS). A few months earlier, my book on the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak had just been published and I was on a self-funded book tour in the United States to promote and sell my book. I held events at universities, bookstores, and community centers across several cities in the US: speaking about the book, the conditions in Sierra Leone and West Africa, the need for global attention to the deathly threat of the EVD epidemic, and its implications for other epidemics.
So, I was invited to Northwestern University to talk about the book and my investigation into West Africa’s Ebola outbreak. It was my first visit to Evanston and to Northwestern University’s campus. Little did I know that this event was going to be the beginning of my PhD journey in America.
Two months after this 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 later learned that fellowships to top doctoral programs in the US are highly competitive and only go to top scholars. My offer letter stated that I was selected among a pool of 250 applicants for a doctoral program that admitted a cohort of about 10 doctoral students yearly.
“On behalf of my colleagues here at Northwestern University, I am delighted to inform you that you have been admitted to the Ph.D Program in History and that, on our recommendation, the Graduate School has awarded you a Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Studies. This enhanced offer further attests to the outstanding quality of your academic record and accomplishments, and we sincerely hope you will join our new graduate class in September,” the offer letter stated, adding that, “in addition to the five-year fellowship offer described below, you have also been awarded a Mellon Cluster Fellowship through Northwestern’s African Studies Cluster. As a cluster fellow, you will have the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary events unique to African Studies.”
The rest of the letter went on to describe my funding arrangement, and the scholarly opportunities and academic activities available at Northwestern University to support research. It was great news to me; and my family and friends were equally happy. I was prepared and excited to embark on a new journey.
The news was the direct opposite of my experience as a student at Fourah Bay College (FBC) where I received my undergraduate degree. When I started my undergraduate education at FBC, I had to balance between my studies and work as a newspaper reporter. I had to save some money to pay my college fees. As an independent journalist in Sierra Leone, I earned a monthly income that was less than $100 a month, which was hardly enough to support my needs. In fact, in 2005, I dropped out of college for a year because I could not raise enough money to pay my college fees in time to register for the academic year. This was after my second year into college education: I waited another year and saved enough and then re-enrolled the following year and continued my studies. That was how my graduation, which would have happened in 2007, got delayed until 2008.
This time, the opposite was the case: Northwestern University fully funded my doctoral research for six years. After completing my doctoral studies, Northwestern offered me a postdoctoral research fellowship to support my continuing research work at the University’s Chabraja Center for Historical Studies (CCHS).
Thus, I came to Evanston for a book event as a humble journalist and a writer; I left with a PhD from one of the top history programs in the world and a top African studies center. When I came to Northwestern, I had only a bachelor’s degree that I had completed just eight years earlier in 2008; eight years later, I emerged as a trained historian. In addition to my academic success, the journalism that brought me to Evanston and Northwestern has blossomed to the level that it is now the subject of a multinational corporate crisis and diplomatic dilemma for Sierra Leonean politicians and their foreign allies.
But how did my book journey start and what triggered my decision to investigate West Africa’s Ebola outbreak?
In 2014, I was out of the country when the Ebola outbreak began in West Africa. I had just published my book of essays, Neocolonialism in West Africa, in 2014, and had embarked on an international book tour across the US and Europe a few months before the virus was reported in Sierra Leone.
Reports of the horrific disease and deaths caused by the emerging outbreak quickly appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the world. They showed the world the alarming, bloody images of people dead and dying from EVD. Alongside these reports, important questions were raised about the health system capacity in the region, not just to the unfolding epidemic, but to other everyday health concerns: malaria, pregnancy, and nutrition. If clinics cannot treat Ebola patients, how can they possibly respond to ordinary patients?
The Sierra Leonean press reported increasing deaths among healthcare workers besieged by an unprecedented outbreak of a grim disease. In the midst of crisis, they could not possibly report on mortality rates, case-mortality, or compare treatments. Nearly all the public health facilities in Sierra Leone lacked basic personal protective equipment (PPE) and essential facilities to respond to an outbreak: there were no extra gloves, masks, stretchers, gowns, protective suits, or syringes. Needles and other PPEs were rinsed, reused, or entirely unavailable.
West African media raised alarms about the weak health systems and the need for medical supplies. A nightline radio discussion in Freetown gave chilling accounts of how outbreak responders in some parts of Kailahun district, for example, used a single stretcher to transport both the dead and the newly infected. In Kenema, nurses said the number of sick people coming to the Kenema Government Hospital overwhelmed the capacity of their Ebola Treatment Center.
Despite increasingly the catastrophic reports, political leaders did nothing and denied the severity of the outbreak. By this time, both deaths and incidence of infections were rising rapidly in the Kailahun and Kenema districts, in the eastern part of the country.
In July 2014, I returned to Sierra Leone to assist in the national effort to fight the EVD epidemic. Two weeks after my arrival, the country’s leading virologist, Dr. Sheikh Umarr Khan, who was heading the EVD response, died; the outbreak having claimed its first high profile victim in Sierra Leone. That month, President Earnest Koroma declared a state of emergency.
Within just a few weeks, Sierra Leone, the rest of West Africa, and the EVD epidemic dominated world headlines. Khan’s death marked a change in the Sierra Leonean government’s response to the outbreak. The morning of Khan’s death, international airlines announced cancellations of flights into Sierra Leone. The government of Sierra Leone announced a public health emergency along with a string of regulations: soldiers and police officers were now empowered to support health workers in the search for newly infected Ebola patients. By August 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The Sierra Leonean government erected checkpoints and roadblocks across the country and at borders, followed by quarantine measures and restrictions on freedom of movement. The moment of Khan’s death changed the country; the Ebola outbreak was now a very real threat. Reports and rumors of deaths and infections caused widespread panic.
The deadly reality of the epidemic came very close to my eyes on October 21, 2014. That morning, I received a phone call from a colleague in the diamond-mining district of Kono in eastern Sierra Leone, reporting an Ebola-related protest in the area. Medical staff at the poorly equipped public hospital in the township were chased by frightened youth and fleeing for their lives. Local residents witnessed devastation, death, and violence due to the rising death toll. Although the precise number of casualties could not be confirmed that morning, local authorities called in the police and imposed a daytime curfew followed by arrests. Among the people arrested was a friend whose family had called me, crying for help. They reported that random and brutal police raids on communities accused of resisting Ebola health workers sparked the protests, which led to the arrests of scores of youths in the township. I now understood this is what a public health emergency looks like.
Minutes after this disturbing phone call from Kono, news came to me that a total of five health workers (two doctors and three nurses) had died overnight at a private clinic in Allentown; the community in Freetown where I lived. The United Council of Imams, an Islamic group that provided community health care in Allentown, ran the clinic. Families of the deceased health workers reportedly went into hiding to avoid arrests and quarantine after reports emerged that the health workers died from exposure to Ebola. Reports indicated that the deceased healthcare workers had treated an Ebola patient just a few days earlier. After a doctor died at the clinic’s holding ward, several other patients who were receiving treatment at the clinic for other illnesses went into hiding that same night.
The entire Allentown community was engulfed in a state of panic. Nobody knew how many residents had come into contact with the dead healthcare workers, their surviving relatives, or other patients in the clinics. The deadly EVD had now come too close to everyone in our neighborhood.
At this point, healthcare workers still did not have adequate PPE or other resources. There had been no contact tracing or follow-up that are usual components of outbreak investigations.
The following morning, October 22, 2014, more devastating news unfolded. A friend phoned me announcing the sudden death of two of her younger brothers in the neighboring Kosso Town community of east Freetown, a five-minute drive from Allentown. The woman reported that the two deaths, which occurred an hour apart from each other, were confirmed as Ebola positive.
The news was agonizing: a sense of despair, of pain, and of grief rang in her voice. It was more than a tragic loss. Over 15 years prior, rebels killed her parents during the war. Two years before the Ebola outbreak, she lost a son who died of malaria before his third birthday. Later, when the obituary of her two brothers was announced in succession, she cried, “I am finished.” Because she cared for her two brothers when they first complained of symptoms of malaria (which has many of the same signs and symptoms as Ebola, and is sometimes misdiagnosed), she was alone in her grief as sympathetic neighbors stood at a distance, afraid to get too near to her for risk of infection.
The communities of Jui and Allentown, where she and her brothers lived, were now the hottest spots for Ebola in western Sierra Leone, possibly in the world. These deaths occurred just 48 hours after the first deaths at the Islamic community clinic in Allentown. In the next 24 hours, ten additional deaths were reported in Allentown.
Residents of the Jui and Allentown communities also reported swelling numbers of new inhabitants who had come fleeing Ebola hotspots in Waterloo, a rural district of Freetown and the second largest settlement in the western area of Sierra Leone. They were escaping a planned lockdown of the Waterloo area by state authorities following scores of deaths. The scenario was all too familiar to the residents who experienced deadly chaos during the events of January 6, 1999, when rebels invaded Freetown. For them, this meant that they would be left isolated and at the mercy of infection and violence.
Before my return to Sierra Leone in July 2014, I, along with a colleague based in Maryland who heads Patriotic Care Sierra Leone, a charitable organization, launched an appeal for support to assist Ebola frontline workers in Sierra Leone. We asked for the needed basic protective equipment to help fight Ebola. Through our contacts in the US, we were able to mobilize a total of four 40-foot containers of medical supplies, including face masks, hospital linens, stretchers, gloves, mattresses, and wheelchairs – taken together, an approximate value of half a million US dollars.
I contacted Sierra Leonean officials in Freetown through Oswald Hanciles, one of the President’s advisers at the State House. I notified them of the equipment we had mobilized and requested that, based on the emergency situation in the country, we wanted the government of Sierra Leone to assume responsibility for the shipping, clearing, and delivery of the equipment to the affected areas. I attached, with the originating correspondence, a list of all the equipment that had been loaded in the four 40-foot containers that awaited shipment to Freetown from Pennsylvania. The total cost for clearance would be relatively small: about $6,000 per container. For a modest investment, the government could have prevented infections and deaths.
Hanciles forwarded the matter for action to all relevant authorities in government: senior officials at the State House, the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health, those at the Central Medical Stores, the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone, the Finance Ministry, and others in the President’s office. Dozens of e-mails were exchanged among government officials, with the discussion focusing on the payment of US$6,183 shipping fees by the government of Sierra Leone to receive a single 40-foot container of medical equipment (valued at over US$141,000), which could have been quickly cleared and distributed once it arrived on August 9, 2014.
After over 50 meetings and dozens of other e-mails between myself, Oswald Hanciles, and many other officials followed for the next two months. The Sierra Leonean government refused to pay the $6,183 in shipping fees that would clear the container of supplies into Freetown. By now, it was early October 2014 and hundreds, perhaps thousands, had already died. Health workers and ordinary people continued to die en masse, and hundreds of new patients were infected everyday. On October 4, 2014, alone, the country reported a total of 140 EVD deaths. A New York Times article published October 1, 2014, contained detailed images of the gruesome deaths in a hospital in Makeni, the home of President Ernest Koroma.
The Times reported how healthcare workers in the township, overwhelmed by the volume of sick people and those who had died, were easily infected because they had no PPE. The graphic images in the New York Times’ article alarmed the world. Despite this, Koroma and his staff continued to look the other way.
At this time, all our efforts to get the government to clear and deliver the consignment of medical supplies had failed. Then, on October 5, 2014, the story of the container of medical supplies became the centerpiece of global media discussion: Adam Nossiter, the New York Times West Africa correspondent, reported how government officials were blocking the delivery of the container through their refusal to pay the modest cost of shipping and clearance fees. Nossiter’s report revealed that the delay was exacerbated by the government’s effort to prevent an opposition political contender and critic of the President from scoring “political points” with the shipment.
Nossiter’s assessment was correct: President Koroma and myself had no love lost between us since he assumed power in 2007. Between 2010 and 2012, I constantly opposed his handling of state affairs and the environment of pervasive corruption in his government. In 2012, I contested his party in a constituency in Makeni for a parliamentary seat. The questionable results placed me second among seven other political contenders, including a candidate of Koroma’s own party. Since the 2012 elections, I had openly stated that the election results that gave Koroma a second presidential term did not reflect the actual votes of the people.
When my correspondence on the container of medical supplies reached the State House, senior government officials in the president’s office in Freetown reportedly debated the possible political implications of the donation. In private, personal communications, they argued about the potential “political capital” that news of the shipment of medical supplies would generate for me. Hanciles, who had negotiated much of the discussion, attempted unsuccessfully to impress upon his colleagues in the president’s office the need to clear the container. His efforts were rebuffed.
Eventually, however, the container story became the subject of international media discussion: the New York Times story was picked up by the BBC, Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, and other international outlets. The government propaganda machinery represented by its chain of local newspapers, some owned by ruling party politicians with cabinet seats, deliberately launched an unsuccessful campaign to slur me and to cover up the government’s failure to clear the container. Together with health ministry officials, the pro-government mediafalsely claimed that the container carried expired drugs. This claim was a blatant lie.
For 11 days in October 2014, the controversy over the container and its equipment dominated news headlines in Freetown. The container story, especially the government’s failure to get the materials out of the ports, became a critical reference in the national outbreak response: an indicator of the government’s lack of genuine commitment and non-prioritization of its response to the epidemic.
By mid-October 2014, however, the epidemic was nearing its peak. Daily EVD deaths and new infections soared into the hundreds and were occurring across the country. It became obvious that months after President Koroma issued the state of emergency, the population’s chances of survival grew bleaker by the day. Government officials in Freetown continuously blamed the high death rate and infection numbers on peoples’ cultural habits, particularly around burials and lack of proper hygiene. In effect, the government blamed the dead and dying victims. The whole world watched as Ebola devastated entire communities in Sierra Leone, just as they had been consumed by war about a decade before.
In the midst of the daily stories about the epidemic, competing narratives about the origin of the disaster also emerged. On March 22, 2014, French scientists determined that the causative agent of the epidemic was Zaire Ebola virus based on diagnostic testing at a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in Lyon, France. The WHO publicly announced the outbreak the following day, by which time 49 cases and 29 deaths had been officially reported in the region.
But the dominating narrative around the origin of the outbreak came from Dr. Fabian Leendertz, a veterinary medicine scientist and microbiologist from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, and a team of researchers who were commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate the origin of the outbreak in the southern region of Guinea. Dr. Leendertz and his team spent eight days interviewing people and observing community behavioral patterns in Meliandou and several other surrounding villages. They also captured around 189 bats, which they subsequently tested for the presence of the Ebola virus or antibodies against the virus.
After eight days of their investigation in Meliandou, the team stated that they “found no evidence for a concurrent outbreak in larger wildlife” but that “exposure to fruit bats is common in the region” and that “the index case may have been infected by playing in a hollow tree housing a colony of insectivorous free-tailed bats.” So, they concluded that “the severe Ebola virus disease epidemic occurring in West Africa stems from a single zoonotic transmission event to a two-year-old boy in Meliandou, Guinea.”
But the Leendertz investigation has since been termed “circumstantial.” It was apparent from their published report that the bat transmission story was advanced as part of the team’s effort to resolve its own lack of real evidence to establish actual causative factors relative to its zoonotic assumptions. They found no evidence of Ebola infections stemming from the consumption of bats in Meliandou. They had based their conclusions solely on the extant oral tradition in the area – that children in Meliandou are said to have regularly caught and played with bats from a particular tree housing a colony of fruit bats known as lolibello. The team latched on to this simplistic assumption as evidence that the virus likely emerged out of the insectivorous free-tailed bats. The tree itself was located some 50 meters from the home of the index case, and was reportedly burnt down a month ahead of the team’s arrival in the village. The teams’ assertion was not supported by any tangible scientific data, but the scientists implanted an origin narrative that quickly took root in the scientific community., offering an easy answer to many questions about how the epidemic began.
Their report, “Investigating the Zoonotic Origin of the West African Ebola Epidemic,” was first published online in the Molecular Medicine Journal by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in December 2014. This report, heavily publicized by scientists and journalists, essentially claimed that people’s appetite for hunting and eating wild animals and birds, what they called “bush meat,” caused the virus to jump species and spread to humans. Western media grabbed onto this narrative.
Government officials in the Mano River countries of West Africa imposed sanctions against the consumption of so-called bushmeat. But people across these communities questioned the validity of this mainstream narrative. They wondered why they had lived with wild animals and birds for centuries and had even hunted them occasionally for food, but they had not previously been exposed to any similar zoonotic diseases. They doubted the accuracy of the claim that the outbreak was the result of animal or bird consumption. Many also did not believe the claim that the virus was transmitted through bodily fluids, the touching of the sick and the washing of the dead.
By December 2014, when the West African epidemic dominated world headlines, people began to think that EVD could be sexually transmitted. Many of the male survivors, discharged from treatment centers, reportedly infected their wives or girlfriends through sexual intercourse. Medical experts in Europe reported that the virus had been found to survive in the scrotum of the male sexual organ for a period of between six and nine months after a surviving male patient had been discharged from a treatment center. Government officials warned against sexual intercourse with Ebola survivors. Some newspapers reported cases of court magistrates convicting male Ebola survivors who allegedly infected their partners through sexual intercourse. (Although the virus can survive in semen for up to 82 days after the first disease symptoms appear and viral RNA has been found in semen after 101 days, there has only been one proven case of EVD contracted by a female partner through sexual contact with a male EVD survivor. Female-to-male transmission is less probable.)
These developments raised a number of problematic questions: was Ebola a sexually transmitted disease? What was its precise origin? How was it transmitted? How true was the bat story from Guinea? Can answering these questions truly help us understand the human catastrophe that took place in West Africa between 2013 and 2016?
Is there a different narrative on the origin of the Ebola epidemic outside of the Leendertz analysis that has dominated global understanding of the origin of the virus and its mode of transmission? What were the objective conditions in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea before the outbreak? Why has the Ebola outbreak occurred within the same geographical space where some of West Africa’s most brutal civil wars of the 1990s were fought?
How do we understand the huge presence of large-scale multinational corporations like Firestone (Liberia), Rio Tinto (Guinea), and African Minerals (Sierra Leone) and their relationship to the persistent territorial underdevelopment of West Africa and the growing instability in the region? And most importantly, why was the international “humanitarian response” very slow and mainly backed by military deployments? To what extent did the existing politics of state repression and corruption hinder national responses to crises – both war and disease?
The desire to seek answers to these and many other questions generated my interest in the outbreak. I wanted to find out its actual place of origin and its transmission.
I was in Sierra Leone throughout the outbreak. Apart from the container of medical supplies, I organized a number of community assistance programs to help quarantined families and children who had lost parents due to the outbreak. Beginning in July 2014, when I returned to the country, I kept a daily journal of updates, recording daily events and community stories related to the outbreak. I distributed these updates to tens of thousands of people around the world through Africanist Press and various social media platforms. These correspondences mainly contained daily reports of new infections, new deaths, and the responses of family members and friends to these tragic events. Affected families and community organizers sent me updates. These updates were filled with heart-wrenching accounts of death and loss: As I read the stories and counted cases, I realized that the outbreak had claimed more lives in the region than was actually reported by health authorities.
Towards the end of December 2014, I embarked on a journey across the Mano River countries to investigate what western reporters, scientists, and local politicians called “the transmission chain of the outbreak” via its “original infections route.” I investigated from Miliandou in the southern region of Guinea to Koindu in the eastern part of Sierra Leone. I wanted to find out how the virus, which scientists and journalists claimed had originated in Meliandou (a tiny village) had actually started and evolved into an international disaster. In particular, I was eager to find out about the conditions in Meliandou and, most importantly, how the family of the alleged index case had fared 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 eight 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 eight 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, where I eventually stayed for seven additional years.
In the eight 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 eight 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 far-right movements across Europe, the US, and Brazil 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, on scientific inquiry, free speech and freedom of information.
In Sierra Leone, two 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’s regime in the elections.
I was in the early stage of my doctoral studies at Northwestern 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.
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 60 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.
You can order Chernoh Alpha M. Bah’s Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians on Amazon or Barnes & Nobles.