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Brand Africa’s Ebola problem: It’s not cannibalism, stupid, it’s just fruit bats

Saturday October 25 2014

No question about it: Brand Africa is taking a heavy beating right now thanks to infectious disease. Again. Here are two Ebola-derived phenomena to consider.

The first has to do with tracking American reactions to the developing epidemic, which has served to highlight a general ignorance about geography that never ceases to amaze. I just don’t get it. Google exists, it’s not like they are forced to line up like Gulag workers to check out a precious gold-plated atlas from the state-controlled library.

The other is the killing of health workers in Guinea who had travelled to a village to educate the residents about the disease, only to find that suspicious villagers believed they were involved in spreading it. So, they killed them.

What?! Superstition is terrible business when it comes to illnesses, but superstition is just a terrible business altogether. Take my word for it: I live in a country where albinos get killed and nobody has ever lacked a consumer for the products of their murder.

The relationship between these two is becoming clearer. It may be that there is a level of ignorance, willful or otherwise, that is only affordable to the despicably rich, and the woefully marginalised.

A couple of weeks ago at the beginning of the latest Ebola outbreak, a reader was so kind as to send me an article. It seriously purported to show evidence that Ebola, like HIV, was a designer virus unleashed upon the African continent so as to destroy its population and make it easier to exploit its resources.

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It came complete with lovely drawings of the virus that go into impressive detail about the engineering of these weapons of mass destruction. Naturally, the information ended up in the same folder where I keep other topics of interest, like, say, footage of alien visitations, Robert Mugabe’s real age, and evidence that Barack Obama is a practising Muslim.

But it did address a topic that we Tanzanians avoid like a visit to local government institutions because both can be counter-productive: Talking about the contribution of race to this mess.

Bird flu, swine fever, mad-cow disease, tuberculosis, piranha attacks — none of these managed to conjure up the swamp-water dark fears of savagery like the fear that Africans eating “bush meat” are behind this current plague. Why lie, evoking the eating of bush meat is one little step away from intimations of sinister practices like, say, cannibalism.

What’s wrong with just blaming the fruit-bats? No, not the ones that end up in a rural pot so much as the ones flying around leaving magnificent trails of reddish-brown droppings on urban walls wherever they can. They are pretty creatures to be sure, but someone has to take the fall.

When Africa started rising like a ball of dough left out in a humid Dar summer kitchen, the race-relations conversation was quietly set aside for diplomatic and marketing reasons. Except, a little bit, in South Africa.

At the time I remember wondering if this was going to be one of those things, like when Francis Fukuyama declared that history was basically over since capitalists had won the Cold War. In other words, a bad case of not letting complicated realities get in the way of a profitable... sorry, I mean “prosperous” future.

There was a time when it was okay to problematise race, which is social science speak for saying that hey, identities are part of the power matrix that determines essential things such who gets defined as the fittest and therefore survives. The recently departed Ali Mazrui is a case in point — an intellectual who belonged to that time before neoclassical economists became our modern version of social engineers.

Three-heritage apologists for Islamfrica, Classical and Evangelist Christian occupiers with a yen to go forth and save somebody, Rastas with a crush on the descendants of Solomon’s House, Franz Fanon fanboys, Nyerereist soft-power dreamers, Sankaran social liberals, Maathai eco-feminists, Neo-Ghaddafians with a yen for the “good old days,” Kitenge-wearing sapeurs and their descendant Afrihipsters who knew about wooden combs before they were cool.

What can I say, it is a big basket. But it offered a wonderfully localised philosophy of a complex idea: What’s the truth and what do we do about it?

There are issues that defy easy conclusions and this is one of them. So let me end with this: Fruit bats. And no, killing them isn’t the solution either.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com.
E-mail: [email protected]

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