Africans have the ability to adapt and survive even most the cataclysmic events, writes Adrian Ephraim.
Donald Trump is eating the news, he is eating journalism and common decency, and I just can’t take it anymore. The office of the White House is no stranger to dereliction of duty and prejudice, but at least it pretended. Trump is difficult to ignore. We’re watching the great unravelling in super slow motion and in HD. The Trumpster truck has moved in and evicted civil society’s agenda on his way to bulldozing the rights of global citizens and changing the course of history.
But today I want to tell a different story, and I will try as much as possible to refrain from trolling the most trolled person in the universe right now. Some may choose to stop reading at this point.
I want to talk about Ebola and how Africans took on a virus and won. I want to celebrate the heroes of that fight today, because we can and we must.
Ebola took hold in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in March 2014, killing dozens. But even as the epidemic spread across borders and vast areas, the number of patients infected had already started dropping, according to reports from the treatment centres.
This phenomenon puzzled medics and observers. It appeared the virus arrived, and without warning, spontaneously declined.
At one stage a treatment centre on the border between Liberia and Guinea was treating nearly 70 patients in September 2014, but by October the centre was virtually empty.
Paul Richards, a British anthropologist, took note of this and concludes the reason behind it is what is called “People’s Science” – people’s ability to react to disease and unhygienic conditions by applying common sense and changing their behaviour.
Richards told a recent meeting at London’s Chatham House: “One of the pieces of evidence which makes me think that local response was significant is that the decline first occurred where the epidemic began, so that the longer the experience you had of the disease, the more likely you are to see tumbling numbers. So, someone was learning. People ask me: ‘How long does it take to learn?’ And we don’t know, but on the basis of this case study, it’s about six weeks.”
It’s a fascinating example of humankind’s adaptability to deadly situations, and a kind of learned behaviour. Survival is hard-coded in us, and it was palpably demonstrated in 2014 as the world panicked about the spread of Ebola to other parts of the world.
"'We know our own people,’ they told me,” Richards said. “'So, we know it’s socially obligatory to wash the bodies of dead people and to attend their funerals. We monitor very closely who’s not doing that, who’s not paying attention to their social duties.
“'So, it very quickly dawned on us the people who were attending funerals were the ones who were dying, the good people, the ones who do their social duty,'” Richards recounted. “'So, from that we knew it was something to do with funerals and we started modifying our behaviour.'”
In Liberia a small village called Nyewolihun put itself into quarantine.
Matthew Ndorleh, the headmaster of the local school, told IRIN: “We didn’t allow anyone to go and sleep in any other place, and we didn’t allow anyone to come in. We set up a force of young men to man checkpoints at all the entrances.”
The ability of the human race to adapt and find ways to survive is instructive. In times of crisis we rely on an external saviour to set the rules by which we live, when in fact nature has already given us the ability to survive even the most cataclysmic events.
* Adrian Ephraim is the editor of African Independent. For the best news and analysis from the continent go to www.africanindy.com