1In December 2013, a two-year-old boy fell ill and died in a remote region of southern Guinea, near the Liberian and Sierra Leone borders. His death was the first in what would become the largest recorded outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (evd)—one of the worst public health crises in modern history. International efforts were eventually mobilized to stem the spread of the disease, and national and international relief teams were sent into affected areas. However, as during earlier outbreaks in Central and East Africa and the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc), there was a widespread feeling of distrust towards health workers, resulting in resistance, and sometimes violent attacks. This distrust and resistance presented a major challenge to the evd eradication initiative and likely contributed to the speed with which the epidemic spread. The present paper focuses particularly on the resistance towards evd relief teams in Guinea, arguing that it was fueled by conspiracy theories, often merged with local notions of witchcraft and malevolent magic (sorcery). These conspiracy theories, reportedly originating from the capital cities and urban centers in the region, associated the epidemic and the relief effort with an imagined sinister plot involving powerful local politicians as well as Western agents and agencies.
2Why this blending of seemingly outlandish conspiracy theories and sorcery allegations leading to resistance and occasional violence? And how did this explosive concoction come about? These are the main questions addressed in this paper. The paper draws on anthropological fieldwork in Guinea, primarily in the administrative area of Nzérékoré (Guinée forestière), regarded as the source area of the entire outbreak. It is based primarily on a series of interviews with Guinean health workers who participated in the relief effort during the outbreak, bearing in mind that the frontline health workers—who were those by far most exposed to risk—were mostly national staff. We also conducted interviews with a number of Ebola survivors (many of whom had been severely stigmatized) including villagers in the village of Méliandou—considered the “ground zero” of the epidemic—and health staff in Womey, the site of a tragic attack on a relief team resulting in the gruesome killing of eight members of the team (see below).
3By documenting and analyzing the perceptions and experiences motivating the local resistance, the paper aims at deepening our understanding of the popular resistance in the context of the West African Ebola epidemic, not only in Guinée forestière but also more generally. Significantly, a similar pattern of resistance has also been reported from the more recent evd outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ouattara 2018).
4The Ebola virus causes high fevers and bleedings that often prove fatal. The death rate has varied from one outbreak to the next, fluctuating between 30 % and 90 %. The virus was first discovered in 1976 following outbreaks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (drc). Since then, the virus has emerged periodically and infected people in several African countries. It is generally thought that certain species of fruit bats are the most likely and common natural Ebola virus hosts and it is assumed that it is primarily through bats that the Ebola virus is introduced into the human population (through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected animals). After being transferred into a human population, the Ebola virus then spreads rapidly through human-to-human transmission via blood, secretions and other bodily fluids of infected people. The virus is highly contagious, and even contact with surfaces and materials contaminated with bodily fluids may spread the infection. People remain infectious as long as their blood and other body fluids, including semen and breast milk, contain the virus. Men who have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to seven weeks after recovery (cdc 2018; who 2019).
5On 26 December 2013, a two-year-old boy in the remote Guinean village of Méliandou (in the Nzérékoré region) fell ill with symptoms of fever, black stools, and vomiting. He died two days later. Retrospective who case-finding teams later identified this child as Case Zero of the West African Ebola epidemic (who 2014a). It would, however, take several more months—until March 2014—before this disease would be confirmed as evd in a properly equipped laboratory in Lyon, France (Baize et al. 2014; who 2014b, 2015b). In fact, the disease spreading from Méliandou was initially believed to be cholera.
6As such, the assertion that this child was Case Zero was based on an attempt to backtrack the spread of the disease and establish the most plausible line of transmission. Virtually all ngos and other relief organizations, and subsequently all large media outlets, would come to describe this two-year-old as the origin of the evd outbreak in West Africa.
7Irrespective of whether the child was Case Zero or not, evidence indicates that the disease spread from Méliandou, the village of Case Zero, to other parts of Guinea. The chain of disease transmission that (presumably) began in Méliandou village was to become the source of the largest outbreak of the evd ever recorded—one of the worst public health crises in modern history. Unlike past outbreaks, the West African case lasted for more than two years. By March 2016, there had been more than 28,646 cases of evd and over 11,323 deaths worldwide, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, making the outbreak significantly larger and deadlier than all previous Ebola outbreaks combined (Keita et al. 2017).
8Cases also occurred in Senegal, Nigeria, and Mali. However, in these countries, the introduction of the evd resulted only in short chains of person-to-person transmission that were quickly terminated. On June 1, 2016, the World Health Organization (who) declared the end of Ebola virus transmission in Guinea. Forty-two days had then passed since the last person confirmed to have Ebola virus disease tested negative (who 2016). In Guinea, where the outbreak originated, there were a total of 3,355 confirmed and 456 probable cases, including 2,544 deaths (Keita et al. 2017).
9As in the earlier evd epidemics in Central and East Africa, the West African outbreak (2013-2016) and the recent Ebola epidemic in North Kivu and Ituri Provinces, drc, there has been a consistent pattern of local distrust towards health workers, whether from the State health sector or from international organizations. This pattern of resistance, which includes a broad spectrum of reactions spanning from passive resistance (such as attempts to avoid monitoring by the health agents) to violent attacks, has not been sufficiently understood and still constitutes a critical impediment to the efforts to stem the evd spread in the drc. This resistance was early on identified as one of the major barriers to efficient disease control in the West African case, and was one of the reasons why who quickly put together a socio-anthropological ground team in Guinea (of which one of the authors of this article was a member [Ouattara 2015]).
10In this paper, we examine various issues which, separately and in combination, contributed to the resistance. One of the issues identified is that the official explanation of the origin of the disease was, at least initially, not considered plausible by local people. The early message sent out to communities was almost entirely focused on getting people to stop eating bush meat. This became clear during our interviews in 2018 with local villagers in Guéckédou as well as through a review of the communication materials (signs, pamphlets and the like) used by the government health officers and the ngos. Such emphasis was placed on this message that instructions about how to avoid the transmission between people was all but ignored. In hindsight, this was unfortunate; the priority from the outset should probably have been to focus on how to eliminate human-to-human transmission.
11In any case, villagers in the Nzérékoré region considered it unlikely that the epidemic originated from wild animals—let alone from a single contact between a bat and a child—since they had been eating and handling bush meat for generations without falling ill. Instead, they initially tended to assume that the source of the epidemic was sorcery or witchcraft stemming from within the community itself. However, as the epidemic continued and the national and international relief effort intensified, villagers in Guinée forestière increasingly came to associate the spread of the disease with the evd eradication teams and to believe that the epidemic was the result of occult activities by sinister foreign agents in collusion with their own national government—which they strongly distrusted (this was the case also in Sierra Leone [Fairhead 2016]).
- 1 Égalité et Réconciliation is a political association created in June 2007 by Alain Soral (...)
12These observations lead to a further finding of our study: interviews in Guéckédou revealed that the conspiracy theories that contributed to the local resistance in rural areas generally originated from urban centers, primarily the capital cities in the region, and rapidly spread from there via phone calls, newspapers and social media to the countryside. The resistance was thus not only—perhaps not even principally—a local phenomenon; it was fueled just as much by rumors and popular ideas emanating from cities and towns and then diffusing to the rural peripheries. Our study thus suggests that modern media, including phone communication and social media, were important transmission paths of the conspiracy theories which fueled the resistance. Accordingly, we draw on both local and international media (i.e. printed press, television and radio) as well as social media. It is clear that social media contributed very significantly to the spread of rumors and unfounded conjectures about the epidemic, not just in Africa but also in other parts of the world (Clark 2014; cvu Togo diaspora 2014; Daily Observer 2014; Égalité et Réconciliation 2014)1.
13The paper explores similarities and differences in the narratives and interpretations of the epidemic disseminated by various actors, including what our interlocutors call “intellectuals” (a broad category including government officials, local health workers and individuals with varying degrees of formal education), the international aid establishment and ordinary African villagers or urban dwellers with little or no formal education. Our data suggest that the initial understanding of the disease among rural villagers, formulated in terms of witchcraft or sorcery, gradually changed under the influence of conspiracy theories that were spread by relatives living in the capital or other urban centers (who, for this reason, were regarded as knowledgeable, regardless of their level of formal education).
14As the plethora of conspiratorial rumors eventually stabilized and resistance grew at the local level, these stories morphed into authoritative conspiracy theories—a kind of hybrid narratives fusing urban-derived rumors with elements of local witchcraft and sorcery beliefs. In this regard, the paper supports Rödlach’s findings from his study of aids-perceptions in Zimbabwe (Rödlach 2006) in which he argues that conspiracy theories often remain the preferred models of explanation, taking precedence over official, scientific explanation about the origin and spread of aids. From the local people’s point of view, he contends, it is of supreme importance to understand why precisely their particular community, their region, their country is afflicted by the illness. Here they resort to what Rödlach terms “the sorcery paradigm”: afflictions tend to be attributed to sorcery, and the only way to escape evil spells is to know who is culpable of them.
15Likewise, in the case of the Ebola epidemic, we argue, conspiracy theories and sorcery allegations rapidly filled the epistemic void created by the discrepancy between the official medical origin narrative and the local understanding of the evd outbreak. Hence the explosive merger of sorcery allegations, grand conspiracy theories and a mounting distrust of the evd eradication teams.
16“Conspiracy” comes from the latin root conspire, meaning literally “to breathe together, to co-ordinate, to organize” (Parker 2001: 196). Scholars from various disciplines define conspiracy theories as attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, deceptive plot by a covert alliance of powerful agents. Conspiracy theories, broadly defined, are omnipresent in “modern” and “non-modern” settings (Parish & Parker 2001; West & Sanders 2003; Douglas et al. 2017; van Prooijen 2018). Typically, conspiracy theories flourish during times of hardship or when perceived threats loom. The onslaught of an epidemic is virtually always accompanied by conspiracy theories, regardless of the time and place where they appear—and the theories emerge when communities feel that official or conventional explanations are insufficient or unsatisfying (Rödlach 2006: 109). In this light, conspiracy theories can be defined as an explanatory idiom that involves a number of actors who join together in secret agreement, and try to achieve a hidden goal that is perceived as unlawful or malevolent (van Prooijen & Jostmann 2013; Douglas et al. 2017; Uscinski 2018).
- 2 It should be noted, however, that the term “conspiracy theory” lacks a precise (...)
17A conspiracy theory creates and ties together a series of events in relations of cause and effect. In actuality, a conspiracy theory often builds upon already prevalent ideas, and then ties together various facts, thereby actually providing considerable explanatory power within the ideational universe in which they flourish. They also provide moral answers, placing guilt on a specific agent rather than viewing a particular affliction simply as a random event. As Parker (2001: 193), puts it: “Once we inhabit the elevated universe of conspiracy there can be no unexplained residues, everything has a cause, everything has meaning and nothing can be left out”.2
18Noting that many of the evd stricken communities in West Africa simultaneously believed in conspiracy theories and associated Ebola with harmful sorcery—in the same manner as aids victims in Zimbabwe associated aids with sorcery while also believing in a plethora of conspiracies—we want to emphasize in this paper that there are certain structural similarities between Rödlach’s “sorcery paradigm,” which—as he documents—is prevalent in Africa, and the conspiracy theories that circulated in the case of the West African evd epidemic. We will expand on this point below; suffice here to note that, in broad terms, the concept of “sorcery paradigm” implies an ontologically predicated and deeply rooted propensity to interpret any type of serious misfortune as the result of sorcery or witchcraft—i.e., malign occult agency.
19Conspiracy theories generally identify potential enemies through an interpretation of the forces that negatively impact the life of the blamer. According to Rödlach, conspiracy theories are typically more prevalent in groups that have endured harmful assaults by outsiders (he notes, for instance, the many theories that emerged during the bloody struggle for independence in Zimbabwe). However, this is hardly a comprehensive explanation, since conspiracy theories of very similar form can emerge in any given time period or type of society. Thus, as Ginzburg (2004) shows in his study about the witch craze of Early Modern Europe, conspiracy theories are more likely to surge when societies feel threatened by both internal calamities (e.g., the plague) and external enemies (Islam in the case of medieval Europe), or when, as shown by Behringer (2004), there is increased general hardship due to devastating environmental or dramatic economic changes.
20Experiencing discrimination, disempowerment, and other demeaning conditions helps to explain the formulation and acceptance of conspiracy theories. According to Rödlach, conspiracy theories, just as sorcery beliefs and allegations, largely stem from a sense of diminished human agency, a feeling on the part of individuals and groups that they are not able to control their own lives or fates, and therefore suspect that some alien agency is controlling or determining their fortunes (Rödlach 2006: 114). Often, in the case of Africa, conspiracy theories can hardly be distinguished from, and sometimes totally merge with, various forms of traditional beliefs in the harmful agency of sorcerers or witches. Thus, Rödlach notes the similarity between, on the one hand, the sinister protagonists in the conspiracy theories he encountered in Zimbabwe and, on the other hand, the classical Zimbabwean witch-character. The same case can be made for the stories which surrounded the evd outbreak in West Africa and their relation to more traditional ideas about sorcery and witchcraft.
21Rödlach contends that conspiracy theories essentially are defense mechanisms that help people cope with insecurity, alleviate anxiety, and give hope—since there is often (in theory, at least) a way to redress the situation caused by the evil conspiracy-cum-sorcery. According to him, the question that conspiracy suspicions and sorcery allegations try to answer is: “Why has this happened to me (basically a good person) or to my society (which is virtuous)?” This contention strongly echoes Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) classical explanation of the “functional” role of witchcraft accusations among the Azande: they explain—and allow responses to— inexplicable incidents of misfortune. However, an important difference between the sorcery paradigm and conspiracy thinking is the fact that the culprit of conspiracies are typically “outsiders,” whereas the typical Central African “witch character” is actually an “insider” (Geschiere 2013). Contra this traditional African witch type, Bonhomme (2016) shows that what he labels the “new witches” in (mostly urban) West and Central Africa tend to be “outsiders.” In this light, it is perhaps significant that the witchcraft/sorcery allegations in connection with the West African Ebola epidemic were generally and, over time, increasingly directed towards outsiders. As noted, however, both explanatory paradigms—conspiracy theories and witchcraft/sorcery explanations—share the tendency to personalize the cause of misfortune by blaming malevolent agents rather than assuming “natural” causes.
- 3 For example, alleged conspiracy theorists (who were formerly prominent members of the sc (...)
22To summarize: conspiracy theories are easy to propagate but often difficult to entirely refute. Although they cannot be empirically proven, they string together various elements in such a manner that they are perceived as more credible than “naturalistic” theories, and provide the answers to questions which the scientific theories fail to answer. Generally speaking, the scientific community tends to have a unanimous explanation for a given natural phenomenon while those who propose radically different explanations become defined as “conspiracy theorists”—adherents of alternative or occult theories. In recent years, however, the fact that established theories are sometimes questioned by insiders within the scientific community has provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories even within the scientific camp of modern society. This is particularly true with respect to conjectures about the origin of diseases such as Ebola and aids.3 That is why the story of the precise origin of the West African Ebola is important. Although the mainstream, official outbreak narrative seemed, to most outsiders, coherent, plausible and, indeed, as an established truth, to many of the villagers in the “ground zero” village, it was simply not convincing.
23A number of studies have investigated the possible origins of the evd outbreak in West Africa. Most of these studies argue that the original evd case (Case Zero) was the child in the village of Méliandou who died in December 2013 (who 2014b, 2015a; Perry & Sayndee 2017). Case Zero, also known as the “index case,” was identified through retrospective studies conducted by who staff and Guinean health officials. According to interviews with villagers in Méliandou, the boy developed an illness characterized by fever, black stools and vomiting on December 26, 2013 and died two days later. However, the source of the boy’s infection, and whether he was infected by Ebola or not, has never been firmly established since the boy was never scientifically tested for Ebola. By implication, the source of the entire West African evd outbreak has not been proven beyond doubt but, it is argued, most likely involved contact between this boy and a wild animal (who 2015a).
24Virology studies have confirmed that the West African Ebola virus is of the Zaire strain, almost identical with earlier strains from drc and Gabon. But how did this strain “suddenly” appear in West Africa (Bausch & Schwarz 2014)? There is still no definitive answer to this question. Prior to this evd outbreak, the only recorded case of human evd in West Africa was a single case identified in Côte d’Ivoire in 1994, but this was Ebola of an entirely different strain—the Tai Forest strain (Spengler et al. 2016; cdc 2018).
25The possibility of a human, asymptomatic carrier introducing the Zaire strain from central Africa to a remote rural area of Guinea was considered unlikely since the distance between the regions is more than 2,000 km and land communication is difficult, and there is little regular travel or trade between the two areas. Another scenario is fruit bat migration from central Africa to the site of the West African outbreak. However, no evidence has been provided that supports this hypothesis. Hence, it is possible that this strain has been circulating zoonotically in Guinea for some considerable time before the transmission to humans caused the disease to eventually show up among humans (Shears & O’Dempsey 2015).
26Having established a single source, that of the infant in Méliandou, scientists researching the origin of the evd outbreak eventually reached the conclusion that the epidemic originated from a single “zoonotic transmission,” and that the zoonotic source was a bat of unknown species. This, in any case, became the accepted version of the scientific community and the ngos (Bah 2015; Nana 2016; Spengler et al. 2016). The theory, however, appears to hinge largely on a story, collected through interviews in Méliandou (a few months after the event), that the Case Zero infant may have been infected by playing in a hollow tree housing a colony of insectivorous free-tailed bats shortly before showing symptoms. However, the role of bats in virus maintenance and initiation of human disease outbreaks remains unclear. Despite a concerted effort by a scientific team in the vicinity of Méliandou in the wake of the Ebola outbreak and the capture of large number of bats of eleven different species from the area surrounding Méliandou, no definitive evidence of a bat carrying the virus was found (Baize et al. 2014; Leendertz et al. 2016).
27Nonetheless, due to the fact that a child had been infected first, large game animals were excluded as the origin species (based on the presumption that a large game animal would have infected adult hunters first). Furthermore, according to interviews carried out in the village by Dr Leendertz from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany and his colleagues, the Case Zero child had been seen playing near a bat-infected tree stump (Baize et al. 2014; Roberts 2014; Leendertz et al. 2016). Together, these interviews and observations formed the basis for the theory that became the “official” narrative of the origin of the 2013-2016 outbreak.
28The official explanation for the West African evd outbreak is thus based on anecdotal reports; no epidemiologic or genetic data associates a putative reservoir species with the outbreak (Bah 2015; Nana 2016; Spengler et al. 2016). Nevertheless, few scholars have questioned the bat theory, and it is generally regarded as an established fact (Richards et al. 2015). However, our own data—based on interviews and observations in the “ground zero” village of Méliandou—does not fully corroborate this official narrative. When, at a group meeting in January 2018, we asked the villagers about the series of events which had produced the infections in the village, many of them disputed the idea that the two-year old child (Case Zero) was the source of the disease; instead, they believed that the source was a woman from Sierra Leone:
We do not really know the origin of the Ebola virus in our village. A woman came here from neighboring Sierra Leone, seeking a cure for an illness. She didn’t stay in the same house as the deceased two-year old boy. However, she was the friend of the boy’s grandmother and the two regularly met.
Maybe this is where everything started, because when the woman left the village and returned to Sierra Leone, many deaths followed [in our village]. Strangely enough, in the family in which the woman lived, there were no reports of Ebola.
There was [also] a sheep that died at the watering point [of our village]. Its flesh was decomposed, and polluted our drinking water. For a while, we thought that was the source, but a [scientist] analyzed the water and came to the conclusion that it was not the water [that caused the disease].
- 4 Interview in Conakry, 2017.
29Not only did the villagers mention the “woman from Sierra Leone,” but she was also well known to many of the Guinean relief workers who had participated in the aid effort during the outbreak, even if they were not stationed in the same district (ie. in Guéckédou). One medical doctor from Université Général Lansana Conté de Sonfonia-Conakry (Guinea), whom we interviewed in Conakry, told us that “there was talk about an elderly sick woman who came with the disease from Sierra Leone to our country. She passed away and some of the people who attended her funeral also got sick and died”.4 A Guinean sociologist—who worked during the outbreak as a community engagement consultant with unicef and who in Guinea—reported a similar story:
The first most obvious case is that of Méliandou in the prefecture of Guékédou. The first cases recognized were those of a child, his sister and his mother in this village [Méliandou]. It is said that it was a sick elderly woman who came with the disease from Sierra Leone. She died and those who participated in the washing of her corpse developed the disease and died. (Interview in Conakry, 2017.)
30Some villagers noted that the mysterious visitor, although arriving from Sierra Leone, was originally from Liberia. It should be pointed out that although Méliandou, the ground-zero village of the epidemic, was depicted in media as a remote place, it is in fact located near a tri-border frontier passage with considerable cross-border traffic. The borders to both Sierra Leone and Liberia are located only kilometers away from Méliandou, and the village is located close to the main road and the district center.
31Notwithstanding the fact that there was widespread talk of this mysterious woman, not a single official document or report mentions her, nor does any peer-reviewed article or book, as far as we know. The only exception appears to be the brief mention of this woman that appears in a Le Monde article dating from August 1, 2014, in which Rémi Barroux (2014: 6)—the special correspondent for the region—quotes Dr Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist at Médecins Sans Frontières (msf), who explains to the journalist that:
[…] Initially, a two-year old child died around Christmas, followed by another child, aged four, the day after New Year’s Day [2014]. They were presumably infected during a stay with their grandmother, in the small village of Méliandou, near Guéckédou, […]. [In the village] people hunt and eat bats [the animal which is identified as the source of the virus]. That may be the origin. But the grandmother also accommodated a woman who had come to the village seeking treatment for an illness, who allegedly slept next to the children.
- 5 Interview in Nzérékoré, 2018. This explanation resonates with Wald’s (2008) analysis of (...)
32Curiously, however, Van Herp (or Barroux) omits mentioning the fact that the “woman seeking treatment” came from Sierra Leone (or Liberia), even though the fact that she was not from Guinea was consistently stressed in the villagers’ account about her. Thus, not only were the villagers of Méliandou themselves inclined to regard a sick woman from Sierra Leone/Liberia as the origin of the disease, but so were also medical doctors, researchers and university professors from different parts of Guinea, who were involved in the disease outbreak response. When we discussed the matter with a Guinean medical doctor who had been working with the relief effort in Guéckédou, he found this omission odd—“the woman should at least have been mentioned,” he said, and added that the relief organizations probably felt that they “had to have a single coherent narrative, to show a united front,” thus implying that somewhere along the line, the controversial female figure was simply deleted from the narrative in favor of a more clear-cut story confirming a specific zoonotic transmission as the origin. He also added the speculation that the omission of the mysterious woman might have served the purpose of avoiding a political quarrel with neighboring Sierra Leone/Liberia.5
33We later asked this very doctor to return to Méliandou and conduct yet another interview with the villagers there and give an assessment of whether the symptoms shown (as described by the villagers) by the woman from Sierra Leone/Liberia could have been evd symptoms. He did so, and his conclusions were that:
[…] although the villagers did not describe the symptoms of the woman in a manner entirely consistent with an Ebola diagnosis, it nonetheless seems to me that the symptoms they described were indeed indications that the foreign woman was infected with Ebola [our italics].
34Furthermore, according to the villagers that we interviewed, the children who had played near the notorious “bat-infested tree” (reported in several of the peer-reviewed articles and official reports) had done so weeks after the disease had already hit the village. In other words: the group of children who had played near the tree stump did not include the two-year old boy (Case Zero), and they had been observed playing near the “bat tree” only weeks after several Ebola victims had already died in the village. They were thus unwilling to corroborate the chronology that underpinned the idea that evd had broken out in the village as a result of children playing with dead bats (or near an active bat colony). That does not, of course, exclude the possibility that Ebola did indeed emerge in the village as a result of children playing with bats, but it goes to show that the village narrative that we collected does not corroborate the official origin narrative of the West African Ebola tragedy. We should also stress here the difficulty in reading the symptoms of the epidemic correctly, as should be evident when one considers that the virus was actually first assumed, both by msf and the local health authorities, to be cholera (an assumption that was held for several weeks as the virus continued to spread).
- 6 Again, this does not mean that we question the plausibility of that theory.
35In any case, it is worthwhile to emphasize that the mainstream narrative of the Ebola outbreak corresponds very closely to what is by now a well-established “media script” of epidemic outbreaks (Wald 2008). The “ground zero” of the epidemic was depicted as a remote “jungle” region, even though it was, in fact, close to an important transport hub in a tri-border area. The initial epidemic transmission was imagined to be due to “primitive” (sic) eating habits (despite no conclusive evidence confirming the accepted hypothesis as true).6 Great emphasis was then placed on this hypothetical Case Zero individual, and the entire region surrounding the “ground zero” village emerged in the media as an archetypical “hot zone.” In almost every way, this narrative followed the same pattern as the aids outbreak narrative several decades earlier. Eventually, so the story goes, heroic Western aid-workers arrive and take the centre stage in the narrative as saviour figures who, through a concerted effort, stem the tide of the disease (ibid.).
36When analyzing the popular discourses in Zimbabwe circulating in the 1990s, which associated the aids epidemic with sorcery and witchcraft, Rödlach (2006) emphasizes that the putative origin of the disease was regarded as of utmost importance, and he contrasts this popular notion to medical discourse where, according to him, the focus tends to be on how the disease spreads and how to stop its transmission. However, what we find in both scientific reporting and popular media narratives about the outbreak of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa suggests the opposite; just as in sorcery and witchcraft discourse, the medical (and media) outbreak narratives tend to follow a standardized pattern—a generic script.
37As highlighted by Smallman (2015), every epidemic is a fertile ground for conspiracy theories; from the outbreak of the Black Death during the Middle Ages to the more recent hiv/aids, the h1n1 influenza and the Zika outbreaks (Rödlach 2006; Kalichman 2009; Goertzel 2010; Nguyen 2010; Nattrass 2012). The relation between uncertainty in the wake of a traumatic event—such as the spread of a lethal epidemic—and conspiracy beliefs is a topic that has been investigated by several scholars (Rödlach 2006; Nguyen 2010). Rödlach (2006: 109) also highlights how conspiracy theories flourish when satisfying explanations for the outbreak of a calamitous event seem—in the local view—to be absent. The West African evd outbreak certainly fulfilled these conditions and conspiracy theories were rampant during the outbreak. As noted, these theories took root not only among villagers lacking formal education, but also (albeit in different forms) among members of the educated elite, and even among doctors and officials who were themselves involved in the relief effort.
38From the point of view of the local communities, both rural and urban, the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic were characterized by widespread uncertainty, anxiety, and mistrust towards all public health workers and ngo personnel. In the case of Guinea, there was also a strong distrust towards the government itself, and the presidents of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia were all given leading roles as accomplices in the most widely circulated conspiracy theories.
39In Méliandou, we found that perceptions of the epidemic gradually changed over time. From an initial conviction that the illness and deaths in the village were caused by sorcery, villagers came to accept the biomedical explanation promulgated by the evd relief teams. In January 2018, when we visited the village, villagers essentially acknowledged the virologic nature and human-to-human transmission of the epidemic but still disagreed about the details of its origin. In this conversion to a naturalistic perception of the epidemic, Méliandou was different from many of the surrounding villages.
40The following is an outline of the sequence of events following the first evd victims in the village based on interviews with the villagers. As the number of deaths grew and the early efforts (starting in December 2013) by public health officers to halt the epidemic failed, the villagers began to doubt the initial diagnosis of the authorities (cholera). They came to believe that the disease was caused by sorcery or, possibly, angered ancestral spirits. Both of these alternatives required the attention of a traditional healer (wulumo). The traditional healers who were residents in the village were not considered powerful enough to deal with a calamity of this magnitude, so the villagers pooled their resources to call in a renowned traditional healer from outside. This external healer immediately started organizing a large feast which demanded costly sacrifices, but he also charged the villagers an exorbitant fee for his services. As it turned out, these public rituals, including the funerals, only caused more people to become infected; the funerary rituals, in particular, proved to be significant vectors of the initial rapid spread of the epidemic (Fairhead 2016).
41Finally, after the village’s resources had been exhausted, and with the death toll still rising, the villagers began resenting this healer and chased him from the village. In Méliandou, the health authorities were never blamed for the illness, perhaps because at this point the illness had not even been classified as evd and none of the containment procedures characteristic of evd relief teams (including the ubiquitous appearance of Red Cross crews wearing strange suits and masks while disinfecting villages) were initially employed in Méliandou. As a result, villagers did not initially associate the deaths in the village with any outside agency. On the other hand, the villages surrounding Méliandou began to fear Méliandou and its inhabitants, and even cut off the bridge to the village in an effort to isolate it; they believed that the people in Méliandou were suffering from a powerful and potentially contagious curse.
42In many of the other communities in the province, villagers began to experience the growing death toll from the epidemic more or less simultaneously with the sudden arrival of Ebola response teams. This led them to associate the mysterious deaths in their communities with the arrival of these conspicuous teams of outsiders with their strange attires and ominous masks, their incomprehensible disinfection procedures and, particularly, their routines of placing the dead bodies in black body bags. Villagers came to believe that the evd response teams were actually themselves spreading the disease—interpreting the disinfecting procedures as efforts to diffuse rather than contain the disease. More than anything else, villagers were appalled by the relief workers’ practice of carrying away the bodies of their deceased relatives in black plastic bags to an unknown destination and by the rumors about the routine extraction of blood from patients in the Ebola Treatment Centers (etcs).
43At this point in time, it became extremely risky for the evd response teams to enter communities, even in district centers and urban hubs. In rural villages, the health teams always parked their cars facing towards an escape route and with the drivers constantly waiting inside or near the cars. Despite many precautions, several response teams suffered violent attacks, and some relief workers were even killed. Virtually, all the health personnel we interviewed in Guéckédou could narrate stories about only narrowly escaping from agitated crowds, sometimes armed with machetes. It should be emphasized, however, that, with time, communities became more accepting towards the evd response teams.
44To summarize: during the first three months of the evd epidemic, a growing number of patients were treated by local healers and Guinean medical staff who were unaware that their patients were infected by Ebola. As a result, they too became infected with Ebola and turned into powerful “super-spreaders” acting as the vectors of the epidemic. These initial infections and deaths, which were regarded as “mysterious” even by the health authorities, produced a general and growing fear in villages and towns—a fear reinforced by concerns about sorcery and curses laid on afflicted families. With time, and as the exceptional nature of the epidemic became evident, communities began to abandon these more or less standardized occult explanations, and increasingly shifted the blame to the mysterious outsiders—the conspicuous evd eradication teams that began to turn up in the villages. In Guinea, the Red Cross was the most feared of the various evd response agencies as they were both in charge of village disinfection procedures and the extraction of the bodies of deceased Ebola victims.
45The passing from one “phase of fear” (of “inside” witches and sorcerers) to another (the fear of mysterious “outsiders”) happened relatively quickly. Within a week of the official declaration that the deaths in Méliandou were caused by Ebola, staff from Médecins Sans Frontières (msf) had helped Guinea’s Ministry of Health to establish an Ebola Treatment Center (etc) in Macenta to where those showing symptoms were transported. The Government also quickly imposed restrictions on funerary rites and hunting (Fairhead 2016). Violent resistance followed almost immediately. The relief teams suddenly faced two enemies: the epidemic they combatted, and the fear and hostility they themselves produced in the afflicted communities. This hostility made the evd response work considerably more difficult. Within ten days of the ban on funerary rites, youth in Macenta town demonstrated en masse and attempted to destroy the msf installations and attack the fifty expatriates stationed there, arguing that Ebola was “false” or spread by the outsiders themselves (L’Obs 2014).
- 7 Faced with a highly volatile situation, various organizations (WHO, UNICEF, MSF) decided (...)
46In June and July 2014, several villages in Guinée forestière isolated themselves from the Ebola response teams, cutting off bridges and felling trees to prevent vehicle access, and by throwing stones at the vehicles of the health teams. Some villagers accused other villagers—those who wanted to cooperate with the health workers—of being “traitors” and of having “sold” their disease-stricken fellow villagers to outsiders; this was a new variant of the age-old witchcraft paradigm: a witch being a person who “sells” (i.e., kills through witchcraft) a relative to gain personal success. Those in the community assisting the health workers were beaten up by other members of the community, and, on a few occasions, even killed. As the epidemic—and the relief responses to it—spread to new communities, so did also the resistance. In August 2014, villagers in Macenta Prefecture took hostages and burnt down vehicles and a health center (Fairhead 2016). Violent attacks against health workers became commonplace, and fatal outcomes were in many cases only narrowly averted (but see below). Some health workers were so traumatized by these experiences that they suffered long-term consequences (and some died in the aftermath of the epidemic).7
47On 29 August 2014, residents of Nzérékoré, the capital of Guinée forestière, rioted after the market was sprayed with a disinfectant in a bid to halt the spread of the virus. Health workers and the hospital in Nzérékoré were attacked by people reportedly shouting: “Ebola is a lie” (bbc 2014). In mid-September, health workers in several parts of the country were viciously attacked by angry mobs, forcing some medical teams to flee for their lives. One team hid in the bush for more than a day and a night, trying to escape a mob of angry villagers armed with machetes. Others saw their vehicles vandalized and their medicines and equipment collected and publicly burned (who 2014a).
48On 16 September 2014, eight members of a high-level delegation of doctors, politicians and journalists were murdered in the administrative sous-Préfecture of Womey in Guinée forestière, their bodies disposed of in a latrine, and the survivors pursued (Bizot 2014). Before the attack, people reportedly started shouting “Go! There is no Ebola here!” (ibid.). Resistance also escalated in the capital Conakry and the nearby prefecture of Forécariah and Kindia. Two members of Ebola response teams were killed in Conakry in January 2015, and two policemen were accused of spreading Ebola in Forécariah. In February 2015, rumors that the Red Cross was infecting schools across the country led to chaos with violent attacks against Red Cross workers (Buchanan 2015).
49How, then, did the initial fear and distrust of outsiders turn into violent attacks on the evd relief teams such as those described above? What was the source of these seemingly bizarre conspiracy theories that implicated foreign agencies and powerful local politicians in sinister schemes to harm the local population, and how did they take root so quickly in both rural and urban communities?
50From our interviews and interactions with both villagers and regional and local health staff, it is apparent that at least some of the conspiracy theories circulating in the region, particularly among intellectuals in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, originated from media sources in the West, particularly the us. Global and local media were certainly aware of the local distrust towards the intervention effort, but could never satisfactorily explain it. A Washington Post article dated July 18, 2014 presents the words of a Sierra Leonean driver to his passenger (i.e. the journalist): “I do not believe in Ebola.” In Monrovia, Liberia, after the attack on an isolation center by armed men, a youth in the neighborhood told an afp reporter: “This case of Ebola, we do not believe it.” Concerning Guinea, a bbc report from November 2014 also relays popular rumors about evd: “We do not have Ebola here, I do not know what kills all these people—but Ebola is not real” (Feuer 2014; Buchanan 2015).
51The flourishing of conspiracy theories about the origin of Ebola in the West led several international newspapers (New York Times, L’Obs, Telegraph, Washington Post) to publish a number of articles on the subject (Audley 2014; Brendan 2014; Feuer 2014; Jason 2014; Storr 2014). On October 18, 2014, for instance, a New York Times reporter noted: “The spread of Ebola from western Africa to suburban Texas has brought with it another strain of contagion: conspiracy theories” (Feuer 2014). Feuer also reported that the hip-hop artist Chris Brown took to Twitter, announcing to his 13 million followers: “I don’t know... but I think this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.” Chris Brown’s Ebola tweet was retweeted more than 36,000 times and more than 28,000 people liked it (Clark 2014). Another example from the United States was a tweet by Louis Farrakhan (leader of the Nation of Islam), in which he states: “Methods of Depopulation: disease infection through bio-weapons such as Ebola & aids, which are race targeting weapons” (Gillespie 2014).
52In Guinea, the ruling party at the time of the epidemic was equally distrusted by several rural villagers in the region, most of whom staunchly backed opposition parties. This distrust of the authorities also existed within local governments in the region, and even within the health system—notwithstanding that many of the government workers and health staff were themselves actively involved in the evd response. Among the medical doctors and other staff that had joined the relief effort, many confided in private that they thought that the epidemic was a “creation by the West” in collusion with their own government.
53Some believed that the epidemic was simply “invented” as a way for the national government to receive foreign aid funds. Among rural villagers, there was even a widespread notion that the government had “poisoned” people to make “the fake disease appear genuine” (Anoko 2014; Niang 2014; Tatu 2014). Some of the rumors circulating among affected communities in Guinea are listed below:
Ebola was introduced by White People who have mineral resource interests [in the region] with the complicity of the government.
- 8 Interview in Conakry, 2017.
Other [people said] that multinational drug companies created a new variant of Ebola virus to earn money from [selling drugs] they have produced themselves.8
- 9 Interview with an Ebola survivor in Guékédou, 2018.
People said that it was Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who brought the disease into my country, because they wanted to extend their contracts.9
- 10 Interview in Coyah, 2017.
People accused doctors of introducing Ebola to kill them. Stories were circulating that doctors were removing limbs of Ebola victims before burying them.10
- 11 Interview in Guékédou, 2018.
In a village near Macenta, people accused a person who came from Liberia to Guinea for having a fetish that [caused] all persons who saw it to pass away.11
- 12 Interview in Coyah, 2017.
People were saying that the Red Cross had received money to spray and contaminate them with the Ebola virus.12
- 13 Interview in Nzérékoré, 2018.
Victims had not died of the Ebola virus but had been murdered in Ebola Treatment Centers to harvest their blood and organs.13
- 14 Interview in Nzérékoré, 2018, and in Lola, 2018.
The three presidents of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia had struck a deal with foreign governments to sell them the human blood and organs from their peoples (in one version the deal was to provide these outsiders with “three truck tank canisters” of human blood). This was why they were, allegedly, spreading the disease and then collecting the bodies of the dead in black bags.14
54Clearly, conspiracy theories played a very important role in fueling the resistance and violence against the Ebola response teams. During interviews with villagers in Guinée forestière, we could often pinpoint a relative living in Conakry as the immediate source of these conspiracy theories. These individuals were generally considered as knowledgeable and reliable sources simply due to the fact that they were living in the capital—or another urban center. As such, they were consulted via cell phone for information about the origin of the Ebola epidemic and how to deal with the relief workers suddenly appearing in their villages.
55One common conspiracy theory circulating in Guinea described the Ebola virus as a bioweapon created by the West to depopulate Africa. This idea was most likely based on articles that were published in some of the major daily newspapers in Liberia but which were later removed from the internet (Audley 2014; Feuer 2014; Jason 2014; Terrence 2014). In September 2014, for example, the Daily Observer, a Liberian newspaper, published an article alleging that the virus was not what it seemed, but rather a bioweapon designed by the United States military. Not long after, accusations appeared online contending that the Federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the us had patented the virus and was poised to make a fortune from a new vaccine it had created with the pharmaceutical industry. This also highlights the ease with which rumors could traverse the national border between Liberia and Guinea, which is actually not surprising given that the source region of the epidemic was located in Guinea, very close to the borders of both Liberia and Sierra Leone.
56There were, of course, also “reports,” mainly from American websites, that the agents of the New World Order, that classic conspiracy bugbear involving global elites, had engineered Ebola in order to impose quarantines, travel bans and eventually martial law (Feuer 2014). For a conspiracy theory to become popular it has to contain at least grains of truth, and there were, in fact, a number of such “grains” of disconcerting truth in several of these reports. Questions picked up by the theories included the “cui bono” (“who benefits?”) from the epidemic and the issue of what role the pharmaceutical industry and the us military played in it.
57For instance, blood was collected from many Ebola victims without their consent. The Ebola vaccine which is presently being developed by Western scientists is developed from blood collected from evd survivors in treatment centers (Kreil 2015; ecdpc 2018), generally without patients having been asked for consent. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,
Blood transfusions from survivors were […] explored in the 2014 to 2016 outbreak in West Africa as possible treatment of infected individuals and who interim guidelines were developed […]. The use of whole blood or plasma from evd survivors does not require authorization from a regulatory agency and is rather the responsibility of national competent authorities for blood and blood components (ecdc 2018: 2).
58In The Telegraph of February 6, 2019, in an article entitled “Ebola’s lost blood: row over samples flown out of Africa as ‘big pharma’ set to cash in,” the author reports that:
A row is simmering over the ownership of thousands of Ebola blood samples taken from patients during the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa and now held in secretive laboratories around the world. The samples have enormous value to researchers involved in creating new vaccines and medicines but also to defense facilities such as Porton Down in the UK where research on bio-chemical agents and their antidotes is conducted. While the outbreak was taking place, several African scientists and Ebola survivors accused the laboratories of biological asset stripping. Despite the samples having been taken from thousands of Africans, scientists from these patients’ home countries—Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia—are unable to access them for their own research (Freudenthal 2019: 2; Hecketsweiler & Freudenthal 2019a, b).
59Whether or not one believes “big pharma” companies or other Western agencies are or have been engaged in “biological asset stripping” in Africa, or that the existence of epidemiological laboratories and research centers in the region which are funded specifically by the us military (such as the Kenema laboratory in Sierra Leone, funded by the us Navy) are suspicious, it is probably correct to regard the reaction to the evd intervention by many African intellectuals as a result of a colonial and post-colonial stigma—a reaction to very real injustices (Geissler & Pool 2006). This explains how “White People” rapidly came to the fore in many of the conspiracy theories as they “hit the ground” in more peripheral areas of the affected countries (Bah 2015). Indeed, as emphasized by anthropologist James Fairhead (2016), these rumors and suspicions are not something new; there has long been worries in the region that Western medical interventions and facilities are designed to steal African blood and body parts to send to Europe or America in order to produce medicines and thus generate profits in the West (Geissler & Pool 2006).
60As in many parts of the world, blood is a symbolically highly charged fluid in West African societies and cosmologies. Thus, it is intimately associated with ideas of life and death, and conspicuously articulated in life-cycle ceremonies and fertility rituals in these societies—particularly in connection with death and burial. The collection of blood samples in local communities therefore had a particularly great impact on people and contributed to link medical relief personnel with the spread of the epidemic and the multiple deaths it entailed—just as it also contributed to the emergence and circulation of conspiracy theories implicating various other supposedly sinister agents and agencies in the disaster.
61Conspiracy theories about foreigners collecting blood from Africans for economic or political gain are common in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, Luisa White (2000) reports similar stories about fire brigades in colonial East Africa harvesting blood from local people (blood supposedly intended to be consumed later both by African members of the fire brigades, but also by their White colonial masters). She refers to these stories as “vampire stories”. Rödlach, on the other hand, who notes similar stories from Zimbabwe in connection with the hiv epidemic in that country, labels these narratives “witch stories” (Rödlach 2006). Interestingly, White (2000) explicitly asserts that the persons/figures she calls “vampires” are not traditional witches (or sorcerers); according to her, “vampire stories” are an altogether different and new genre of popular narratives that emerged in the context of the colonial experience in East Africa. Didier Fassin (2006) makes somewhat similar assertions regarding the same type of popular ideas in South Africa, also flourishing in connection with the spread of aids, claiming that they are reactions to the longstanding apartheid system and its oppression of the native African population in the country (cf. also Dozon 2017).
- 15 Whether the ”vampires” were locally identified as witches/sorcerers or not, or (...)
- 16 See de Rosny (2006), Boa Thiémélé (2010), Gadou (2011), Fancello (2011, 2015) and Ceriana Mayneri (...)
62However, White’s argument that the vampire stories are a colonial phenomenon is questionable for at least two reasons: firstly, given the fact that blood extraction from human victims is well documented as a historical and, indeed, contemporary phenomenon, amply reported in African media and—increasingly—also in academic articles (de Jong 2015). It would thus seem rather more likely that the vampire stories and rumors about blood extractions are elaborations based on this old and rare but persistent practice of certain individuals extracting blood from human victims for ritual and political purposes—a practice usually reported in contemporary news media as “ritual murder”.15 Secondly, the sheer similarity between the blood extraction theme as it appears in East Africa (White 2000), Zimbabwe (Rödlach 2006) and Guinea, thousands of kilometers away, begs some form of explanation. The explanation could either be ontological (structural, morphological) or historical—i.e., due to rapid diffusion of ideas across vast distances in post-colonial Africa—or, more likely, a combination of both. In any case, so far, no compelling explanation of these remarkable similarities has been proposed. Following the claims of our West African interlocutors, and in line with the reasoning of Bonhomme (2016) and Rödlach (2006), we are inclined to associate the rumors of blood extraction with the local idioms of witchcraft and sorcery as analyzed by Evans-Pritchard (1937), Geschiere (1997, 2013) and others.16
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63This article has explored how, during the West African Ebola outbreak, cosmopolitan and urban West African conspiracy theories merged with traditional beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft and sorcery, creating a plethora of “hybrid narratives” which led to violent resistance to the evd eradication effort (mainly funded and managed by the West).
64The rumors and conspiracy theories which surrounded the West African Ebola outbreak may seem outlandish, but the resistance by local populations against the relief workers—with local health personnel always being most at risk—was a very real threat that seriously hampered the relief efforts and, on several occasions, actually led to local personnel being killed. Although Western health workers were often in danger, not a single non-African was killed during the relief effort. (This is probably the explanation why the strong local resistance against the relief workers never really came to the fore in the international news reporting on the evd outbreak.)
65The uncertainties surrounding the origin of the epidemic, and the rapid spread of sinister conspiracy theories played an important role in fueling this resistance in Guinea. An unexpected finding of our research was that the conspiracy theories that triggered the hostility and violence against the evd relief teams in the rural hinterland generally originated from the capital city, Conakry, or other large urban centers. Villagers were initially hesitant and uncertain about how to react when evd response teams first arrived in their villages: should they welcome them or should they keep them out? According to our informants, on many occasions the tipping point was a call from a relative living in Conakry or some other city or town, urging the villagers to resist the evd teams at all cost.
66One widely circulated conspiracy theory about the origin of the epidemic was that the Ebola victims did not die of the virus but were in fact murdered in the Ebola Treatment Centers so that their blood and organs could be harvested. Those who provided medical care and treatment measures were thus themselves perceived to cause the deaths, not by inadvertently spreading the disease but by actively and intentionally causing the deaths on behalf of sinister alien agents. Perhaps the most common rumors circulating at the local level were those which described African high-level politicians—typically the president and his entourage—as “selling” the blood and body parts of the Ebola victims (collected in the opaque body bags used by evd response personnel) to a shadowy Western cabal in order to ensure their own financial and political success (Tonda 2005; Caremel et al. 2017: 68). This imagery is strikingly similar to the local stereotype of the witch as someone who “sells”—i.e., by occult means hurts or kills—a person of his or her own kind (family, clan or village) to gain personal wealth and power.
67Very similar rumors and sinister conspiracy theories appear to yet again surface as Ebola now —at the time of writing—strikes the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Indeed, there are indications that the controversial collection of blood samples, and the samples already kept in Western laboratories, are creating rumors and sorcery suspicions on the ground in Ebola-afflicted territories in North Kivu and the Ituri Provinces of drc (Ouattara 2018; Freudenthal 2019). And again, as Bonhomme (2015) points out, the press and social media play an important role in transmitting these rumors and conspiracy theories, many of them implying that Western agents are trying to get their hands-on African riches—even if it requires contaminating African people with lethal diseases (Dozon 2017).
68Having finished the paper, and as we are responding to the editors’ comments, a global pandemic is ravaging the world. We cannot but note the numerous similarities between the conspiracy theories that flourished in the context of the Ebola epidemic discussed above and those presently circulating around the ongoing (2020-2021) Covid-19 pandemic. Not least striking are the parallels between the popular narratives surrounding the two calamities when it comes to their origin and political connotations—particularly the tension, in the former case, between the alien Whites/Westerners and the native Africans and, in the latter case, between the West and the East. A follow-up review of the surge of conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, and a closer examination of their political and ideological dimensions would surely be of interest.