Safe House E-Book
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- Herausgeber: CASSAVA REPUBLIC
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
In a collection of creative essays that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey brings together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. A Ghanaian explores the increasing influence of China across the region, a Kenyan student activist writes of exile in Kampala, a Liberian scientist shares her diary of the Ebola crisis, a Nigerian writer travels to the north to meet a community at risk, a Kenyan travels to Senegal to interview a gay rights activist and a South African writer recounts a tale of family discord and murder in a remote seaside town.
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A promising tradition of creative nonfiction is nascent in Africa. Fresh ways of writing African experiences are afoot. This publication signals the gestation of something enormously exciting and genuinely new.
— Jonny Steinberg, author of A Man of Good Hope
Not so much timely as long overdue, this collection of essays and short memoirs directs the focus inward, leaping from blade-sharp observations of contemporary life around the African continent to a striking consideration of the continent’s cultural and political future. Safe House transports the reader beyond the tired narrative of news reports through individual stories and into worlds of hidden complexities. Stimulating reading.
— Aminatta Forna
The stories in this anthology provide a form of connective tissue to contemporary life on the African continent in Cape Town, Nairobi, Dakar, and Kano. As a whole, it is both microscopic and panoramic, and strongly argues for an annual take of the same. As an Editor who regularly commissions nonfiction I am full of envy.
— Billy Kahora, Editor of Kwani?
CONTENTS
COMMONWEALTH WRITERS
Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, develops and connects writers across the world. It believes that well-told stories can help people make sense of events, engage with others, and take action to bring about change. Responsive and proactive, it is committed to tackling the challenges faced by writers in different regions and working with local and international partners to identify and deliver projects. Its activities take place in Commonwealth countries, but its community is global.
The Commonwealth Foundation is an intergovernmental development organisation with an international remit and reach, uniquely situated at the interface between government and civil society.
Commonwealth Writers thanks the Miles Morland Foundation for additional support, which helped to make this anthology possible.
www.commonwealthwriters.org
ABOUT THE EDITORS
ELLAH WAKATAMA ALLFREY is a Zimbabwean-born editor and critic. Based in London, she is the former deputy editor of Granta magazine and has also held positions as senior editor at Jonathan Cape and assistant editor at Penguin. In 2015 she served as a judge for the Man Booker Prize. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of Africa39 (Bloomsbury, 2014), Let’s Tell this Story Properly (Commonwealth Writers/Dundurn Press, 2015), and Flamingoland and Other Stories (Spread the Word, 2015). She sits on the boards of Art for Amnesty, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the Writers Centre Norwich and is a patron of the Etisalat Literature Prize. Her introduction to Woman of the Aeroplanes by Kojo Laing was published by Pearson in 2012. In 2011 she was awarded an OBE for services to the publishing industry.
OTIENO OWINO lives in Nairobi, Kenya. He was selected for the 2014 African Writers Trust’s Editorial Skills Training Workshop, organised in collaboration with Commonwealth Writers. Since 2015, he has worked as an assistant editor at Kwani Trust, East Africa’s leading literary network and publisher, where he has been part of the editorial teams on the Kwani? Manuscript Project, and Kwani?, a journal of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
INTRODUCTION
Nineteen seventy-seven was life-changing. That year, my parents bought a house in the suburb of Tynwald, in what was then still Rhodesia. The Second Chimurenga1 was at its zenith, and independence was only three years away. Tynwald was zoned for white residents only, but, in an act of wilful defiance carried out with affected but determined nonchalance, my parents declared their own UDI2 and integrated into the neighbourhood, aided and abetted by their estate agent, Peggy Healy.
My family had returned from the United States two years previously, and we had been living first with relatives and then in rented accommodation. The house at Tynwald, a sprawling L-shape with five acres of grounds, a long driveway and a guava orchard, seemed like paradise. Of course, the move attracted attention. There must have been legal wrangling to which we children were oblivious, but I do remember a camera crew arriving to take pictures of us all (my parents, my brothers, my little sister, Mavhu, and me) in our new home for a magazine feature on examples of the country’s gradual shift towards racial equality.
Despite all this, the real event of the year, at least for me and my brothers, was the release of the first Star Wars movie. My father dropped us off at the Kine 1 in town, and for the next two hours, along with audiences across the globe, we journeyed to a galaxy far, far away… It was the first time I had been to the cinema, and though my father was late picking us up, we hardly noticed. As we waited, my younger brother, Nhamu, and I re-enacted scenes from the film (leaping from the pavement with imaginary lightsabers, summoning the Force) while first-born Richard tried, with little success, to contain our exuberance.
In December 2015 I was back in Harare for a holiday visit, and, along with my husband, daughter, and Richard’s two children, Farai and Tariro, I watched the latest instalment in the Star Wars saga, whooping with joy as John Boyega made his appearance as Finn, the black Stormtrooper. By then, both my brothers were deceased. Every moment of the film (from the reunion between Han Solo and Princess Leia to C3PO’s familiar wittering in indignation) had me consumed with longing for their company. Afterwards, we went home to the new house in Marlborough where my parents had moved after selling the property in Tynwald, our family home for thirty-seven years. What had been a bucolic semi-rural suburb (complete with a fishing stream and anthills heaving with ishkwa, the flying ants that are a rainy-season delicacy) was now surrounded by high-density townships and cut through by a major highway. When a neighbour, a Chinese expatriate who sold light-industrial equipment from the yard of his own property, made an offer, my parents were finally persuaded to move.
In the years between, Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe. A lot has changed. While my country remains blessed with temperate weather and a people whose dignity and forbearance inspire me every day, the political aspirations of 1977 seem as distant a possibility as the hope Nhamu and I had then of Han Solo turning up at our doorstep with an invitation to join the crew of the Millennium Falcon. For most of the population, it is a struggle to meet basic needs, and my parents’ generation, whose defiance and determination won the nation’s freedom, find their pensions worthless as a result of economic collapse. Many endure the loneliness that is a result of the massive exodus of the young to seek fortune elsewhere, as I have done.
In his memoir, Black Gold of the Sun, the Ghanaian writer Ekow Eshun writes of his love of comic books, speculating that African children of the diaspora especially have a unique affinity with superheroes. It is a sense of belonging elsewhere, a longing for a special power that will both set them apart from the society they live in and ensure them admiration and acceptance. His memoir evokes a particular African childhood that inspired me to think of my own – as preoccupied and influenced by a fictional Empire as it was by the political turmoil of those formative years. I devoured it, along with Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write about this Place and Aminatta Forna’s The Devil that Danced on the Water. Yet I found I wanted more: more stories about the events – big and small – that form my continent’s recent past and present.
My thirst has been slaked, somewhat, by the extraordinary publishing that has emerged out of Africa in the past decade, such as that which has appeared in the journals Kwani? and Chimurenga. But as a reader and publisher, I still find myself longing for a wider range of choices. Perhaps because of our turbulent struggle against colonialism, the polemic is well wrought in Africa and, from Achebe to Adichie, our fiction has achieved renown for decades. But African creative nonfiction, from the personal essay to the travelogue to the forensic investigation, seems, to me, to be in a germinal phase. This must have, in part, to do with resources. You have to leave your study to write compelling nonfiction. It takes time and money.
Safe House is an expression of my confidence that we are long past the time when readers – both in Africa and across the world – will respond only to African stories told by Western ‘experts’. We know, from the critical and commercial successes of Africa’s contemporary literary greats, that there is a huge appetite for our stories. But this confidence has to be tempered by the acknowledgement that without the creation of a marketplace to sustain the writers and the practical support (an editorial team and a publisher) to ensure that the work finds an audience, there is a limit to any such explorations in creative nonfiction.
When the team at Commonwealth Writers approached me with the idea of an anthology of nonfiction from African countries, I wanted to invite writers to tell me what these stories would be and how they wanted to write them. Rather than focusing on a theme inspired by news or current affairs, I was curious to find out which subjects would come up if writers were given the freedom of choice, the incentive of payment and publication, and the security of editorial support. We sent out a public call for submissions and selected the proposals that stood out most in terms of subject matter and approach.
I also directly commissioned several pieces on subjects I felt merited exploration from an African perspective, most particularly an account of the Ebola crisis and several pieces on the lives of gay Africans. While the former was reported extensively in Western media, I wondered about the experience of those who had had to live in the midst of the epidemic. The latter has become a bellwether, in that expression of sexuality seems to articulate a particular tension between tradition and modernity on the African continent. But for the most part, the ‘gay debate’ is dismissed, in Africa, as a Western issue imposed on us. On this topic, and indeed others, I wanted to hear from voices that could bring a different perspective: writers interrogating subjects with the advantage of a shared culture and geographic space; writers journeying internationally within Africa, bringing home the news from elsewhere on the continent and relating it to their own experience.
Too often, writing about Africa has been at a distance, a view to a place far away. What I hoped to encourage, as we developed the pieces in this collection, was, in each instance, a personal voice that allowed the writer to become a part of the story. The expression of such subjectivity requires a particular combination of confidence and vulnerability. In their individual expressions of this combination, the contributors begin to define a specifically African genre of creative nonfiction, one inflected by the geography and politics, the cultures and histories, of this continent.
The writers selected here represent as wide a range of experience as they do of subject and form. There are seasoned nonfiction practitioners, writers who are beginning to make their mark in their home countries, and those established in other genres who are trying nonfiction for the first time.
Some have chosen to explore themes through the prism of their own life experiences: Kofi Akpabli’s family history of an Accra neighbourhood; Isaac Otidi Amuke and his memoir of student activism and exile; Chike Frankie Edozien writing of a lost love and the burden of silence; novelist Hawa Jande Golakai’s diary written during the Ebola crisis in Liberia; Beatrice Lamwaka’s memoir of conflict in northern Uganda; and activist Sarita Ranchod’s episodic account of growing up in Cape Town’s Indian community.
There are reports of the lives of others: Kevin Eze on Chinese migrants living in Senegal’s capital; Mark Gevisser as he chronicles the travails of a young gay Ugandan man living as a refugee in Kenya; Simone Haysom on the life of a Cape Town petty criminal; Elnathan John’s visits to a community facing social exile in northern Nigeria; and Bongani Kona’s account of a South African murder.
And there are the travellers: poet Neema Komba visits an ancestral landmark in Tanzania; photographer Msingi Sasis traverses Nairobi at night; while Barbara Wanjala journeys from Kenya to Senegal to meet with LGBT activists in Dakar.
In 2014, Commonwealth Writers facilitated two workshops that I ran in Kampala, Uganda. The first was an Editorial Training and Skills Development workshop in partnership with African Writers’ Trust, the second a Creative Nonfiction workshop that I taught with Mark Gevisser. Both laid the groundwork for this collection, and I am deeply grateful to the team at Commonwealth Writers for that early support and for providing the impetus and the resources that have made this collection possible. I am also grateful to Mark Gevisser for his continued support and advice.
Finally, I want to express thanks and admiration to my assistant editor, Otieno Owino, a participant in that Kampala editors’ workshop, for his hard work, insight, and general brilliance.
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey January 2016
1 (also known as the Zimbabwe War of Liberation)
2 Unilateral Declaration of Independence
Part I
AT HOME AND AWAY
FUGEE
Hawa Jande Golakai
There’s a saying that goes, ‘You can’t go home again’. It offers no direction on where you’re supposed to go. It’s meant to be poignant: some manner of existential examination of how things once lost can’t be retrieved, re-lived – at least, not from the same perspective. I think. I’ve always been a little too literal for deep sayings.
16–22 MARCH 2014 DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA
‘Ja, but where are you from originally?’ the journalist presses me.
Ah. This again. I’m one of the featured authors at Durban’s seventeenth Time of the Writer arts festival and, at these events, being grilled about ‘otherness’ is a train that’s never late. ‘You can’t be unoriginally from somewhere. I don’t think that’s a thing.’
She waves her hand. ‘But you know what I mean. You’re quite accomplished, considering.’ She catches herself and flinches at ‘considering’. I let it slide. ‘You’ve lived in South Africa for years, right? You’ve had most of your education here?’
I smile. She’s doing that cherry-picking thing people feel obliged to do with foreigners, timelining the best of your attributes so their country can take credit for them. ‘Postgrad education,’ I correct. But I’m tired and cranky, not exactly shipshape for interviews. It’s not going to matter anyway. No one reads articles about writers, and we don’t much care – just buy the book.
‘So. West Africa. There’s that virus scare starting up at the moment.’
I sit up. ‘It’s across the border. In Guinea.’ Is she putting this in the piece? Why do I keep clarifying where the reported cases are from whenever I’m asked? It’s not like viruses need visas to travel.
‘You mentioned you moved home two years ago. Why’d you decide to go back?’
I want to say it was less a deliberate decision and more a quest for closure, a need to tie up a loose end that had dangled, frayed and fraught, for too long. But I’ve stopped saying this. I morph into a mumbling cretin when I do, as if afraid that the real-real reasons will seem ridiculous. People then feel the need to tilt their heads and nod, like it’s noble and they get it, or they don’t but won’t be rude enough to admit it.
Instead, I beauty-queen my reply: it was time to move on, to help my recovering country. To fully revert to my native state, which, aside from the odd visit, I haven’t done in over two decades. To see how much it’s changed, the land in which small me took for granted she’d grow up, get a job, marry, have piccaninnies, likely grow old and die. Life has taken me down brighter, more meandering lanes, for which I’m very grateful. The journalist nods to my words, scribbling away.
When the article comes out, it says I went home because it’s where I’d always wanted to get married and have children, as if finally I can stop being a loser and make it happen. My best friend calls me to laugh; she’s just learnt something new about me. I sigh. No one reads articles about writers anyway.
23 MARCH – 12 APRIL JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
My friend Fran laughs like a bawdy barmaid in a Chaucer tale, a comforting sound. I’ve decided to round my stay up to a month, so I’m staying at her flat, plotting insidious ways of never leaving. Our mouths run all day, about shoes and sex, politics and career changes, original versus fusion curry recipes, TV content – the meaningful mindlessness that any red-blooded woman who lives in a male-dominated household doesn’t know she is missing until the tap is turned back on. Her spare bedroom is a cloud of amenities. Superspar is five minutes away, full of strawberries, peaches and other edible exotica that I never see or can’t afford in Monrovia. The guy behind the counter at the Clicks pharmacy is so delicious he’s practically a food group. I trawl the malls, stoked to be back in Jozi, home of posh cars and cinched-waist lovelies with awesome hair. Feeling uncouth, I get a Zimbabwean hairdresser to braid me; her price is a blip on my radar. I’m balling in dollars.
On rare occasions, Fran gets serious. ‘Ebola’s making the news online. You know it’s getting serious when it makes the news.’ She glances at me. I stay quiet. ‘Are you considering going back to your job?’
‘I’m at my job,’ I answer tersely. ‘National health coordinator at Ministry of Health’ is a title I’ve buried, along with career dissatisfaction. After all those years studying to be, then working as, a medical immunologist, I’m now an author, a career switcher, trying to fade out the former as I find my feet in the latter. The irony is that I left a tough profession involving assays and articles that few understood to do ‘what anyone who knows the alphabet could manage’, my critics say. Writing isn’t respectable – not in Africa, anyway. I’m considered a sufferer of Me Disease, an unrepentant member of the selfish generation, we who shirk duty to follow pipe dreams. There’s little consideration for how hard it’s been to let go – which I still haven’t done fully – for how much I question myself.
‘Do you think they’ll be able to contain it?’ Fran asks.
‘No.’ Snip. Snarl. I cringe at my tone. She means well. We drop it, switch back to safe terrain. A guy back home has thrown his hat into the ring for my affection. I don’t know. Men are dicks … but then again, men have dicks. So. I’m vacillating between uncertainty and blushes. We’ve spent more time talking and texting now that I’m on the other side of the continent than we did when I was home; social media makes Bravehearts out of us all. Fran does her laugh: please give Contender a whirl. Hmm.
At night, though, on my laptop, I’m stealth-surfing the web. Numbers are climbing in Guinea, and now Sierra Leone, but I know the true figures are understated. Through the grapevine at my old job, I hear they’re not really doing anything or mobilising forces to stop it leaking through the borders. Immobile. Do we even have forces? The Neglected Tropical Diseases Unit – they contend with elephantiasis and yellow fever, last of the unicorn afflictions. Is Ebola contemporary enough and, if not, will it get an upgrade quickly enough to make us take it seriously? Because haemorrhagic viruses are the last word in seriousness. And we don’t have testing centres. We won’t know which measures to take. We don’t have anywhere near enough doctors. On a normal day, our one major hospital, John F. Kennedy Medical, is heaving with humanity, all waiting for hours on end for treatment.
‘But it’s across the border mostly,’ says my ex-colleague. ‘And we weren’t really infectious-infectious. You were one of the few real disease scientists we had. And you left.’ Pause. ‘Anyway, you know our government. These old guys move slow. Let’s see.’
Guilt bites a chunk out of me. I kick it in the teeth. It goes away. Well, retreats. Into a dark corner, where it squats, eyeing me, gnawing on something I didn’t give it permission to eat. I don’t lock it up or put it on a leash. I want it to come back and harass me. We have a weird relationship.
13 APRIL 10:00 P.M. O.R. TAMBO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
The airport is cold. Winter should be winding down, but Joburg tends to be clingy when it comes to its seasons. I’m double-layered, jacket in carry-on just in case. I don’t mind airports; they’re like hospitals – you do your time and get out. Mostly. I do hate this particular red-eye, though. Departure: one-frickin’-thirty in the morning. The airline assured me the flight would leave an hour earlier than usual, but it seems they didn’t take into account that the plane needed things like cleaning and refuelling before they made their wayward promises, so it looks like we’re taking off at the same time. I can’t wait to leave. Airports get seriously wrong, creepy, after all the shops close. Like abandoned warehouses. Unlucky stragglers huddle by the gates, bleary-eyed, giving each other grim stares. And there are always a few gratingly cheerful chipmunks who want to story-of-my-life you until the boarding call sounds. I walk around to avoid them, Viber-flirting with Contender as I pace.
14 APRIL 12:00 A.M. O.R. TAMBO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT: LAST ROUND OF IMMIGRATION
The official asks me why I don’t have a national ID book since I’m a permanent resident. I explain: I applied, and it took over a year for it to be processed, by which time, when I went to collect it, Home Affairs told me the ID had been misplaced and I needed to reapply. They assured me it would be no problem, and in the three years I’ve travelled on my permit stamp it’s never been one. The official and I snicker over a Home Affairs joke. He raises his hand to stamp the exit permit, pauses for too long. (Stamp it!) He doesn’t. He calls over a colleague; they confer at length out of earshot.
‘Are you from Zimbabwe?’ Official Two asks.
‘No!’ Immediately I twinge at my vehemence. I had good times in Zim. Jacaranda days.
They take my passport and other papers and disappear. On the other side of the glass partition passengers get on their feet, many throwing me worried glances. Boarding has begun. My skin prickles and my temper blooms; I suck the storm back in. I’m going home, dammit. They can throw me out if I want to stay; they can’t hold me if I’m trying to leave. I’m going home.
The two officials in grey return and escort me upstairs, neither of them answering my questions. They leave me in an office with a new lot in navy uniforms. Ambient IQ drops fifty points. Office navies look more jaded, less equable. No, actually they just look shittier. Their job is to clear out the filth, and once you’re dragged upstairs you’ve qualified, no negotiation. They begin filling out forms and throwing instructions at each other in isiZulu, or Sesotho, or isiXhosa. Shaking, I remind them they’re supposed to speak in a language I understand and explain what’s going on. They shout that this doesn’t concern me (How the hell do you figure that?!); what’s concerning is a passport stating I’m Nigerian (Liberian! Oh my God, can you read?!), yet their system has me down as Zimbabwean. I shout back. Behind the desk, Navy Bitch, the most abusive and least helpful, decides to settle it. After a short phone call to their boss, who’s clearly too big of a shot to be here fielding crises of this kind, she informs me at her leisure, ‘We’re arresting you.’ (Later I realise they meant ‘detaining’, but at that point, nuance).
‘For what?!’
Impersonating a resident. Carrying fake documents. Maybe they’ll think of more infractions, but that’s enough to be getting on with for now. One of the flight attendants, who followed me upstairs and is miraculously still outside, is deeply apologetic as she says my baggage will be offloaded from the plane and put in holding. They have to go.
‘I get to make calls,’ I quail, already dialling. I wake Contender in Monrovia. He’s a lawyer; he’ll know what to do. He immediately realises this is not a practical joke and switches to disaster response mode. He’ll call my mother and the ambassador in Pretoria. I hang up, thinking if ever I’ve owed a man my firstborn, this is it. Drinks. We’ll start with drinks.
Nothing else can be done. It’s well past one in the morning. I didn’t even hear the plane take off.
14 APRIL 2:00 A.M. – 3:00 A.M. JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: THE STATIONS
At the first station they put me in a cell alone, the sole insurgent of the evening. It’s unbelievably cold. I’m totally blank on how so many greats have produced good pieces of literature from lock-up. The place is a buzzkill, even for a crime writer. I wait for stirrings of productive angst and all I get are claws of hunger raking up and down my stomach; I haven’t eaten in about five hours.
The next station is Kempton Park. This is lock-up, proper. The cops fill out paperwork, not asking for my story. I don’t bother giving it to them. I expect monstrously vile mistreatment, shouts in my face, and the contents of my carry-on emptied onto the floor and lit into a pyre to warm their hands. They all look bored; this isn’t Robben Island. This time around the cells are appalling, and I’ve seen a lot. Filthy, freezing and cramped, the walls practically marinated in human effluent. I perch on an outcrop of the wall and try to sleep.
14 APRIL 5:00 A.M. – 7:00 P.M. JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: KEMPTON PARK STATION … STILL
The situation moves, in the wrong direction at first. I wake up in a cloud of my own stench. The officer in charge has updates: I’m to be deported, my permit revoked. For the first time I feel real fear, and rage. I earned that permit through hard work, mounds of application documents, and countless bile-inducing visits to Home Affairs. Now I am to be hustled onto a flight, a disgraced imposter.
The threats fizzle to nothing at dusk. An official from Airport Immigration swoops in, barks orders at the cops, who gather me and my belongings together, and drives me to the airport. He tells me he assisted the Liberian ambassador in proving my permit’s validity. At head office I receive profuse apologies and pleas for forgiveness, from none other than the dickhead boss who couldn’t have been bothered to leave his bed put a stop to my arrest. In the interest of security, they have to make certain assumptions, and sometimes innocent people get caught in the crossfire. They are incredibly sorry … oh, and by the way, they cannot foot the cost of the forfeited air ticket. Collateral damage, unfortunately … again, so sorry. I shout and cuss and deflate, tearful and exhausted. The ambassador squeezes my hand – let it go, the embassy will carry the cost.
15 APRIL 10:30 P.M. O.R. TAMBO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
I’m finally going home.
MID-MAY TO MID-JUNE MONROVIA, LIBERIA
Ebola is here. It’s been at our back door since March, waiting like a wolf, the big bad wolf. The atmosphere I met when I touched down in April didn’t indicate that there was a huge threat looming, which is reckless for a country that can’t withstand its straw house being blown down. I wanted to look around the airport and be pleasantly surprised, see some hand-washing stations and men in protective gear checking for ailing passengers, see signs screaming about what to look for, see something. I was disappointed at my disappointment; I know better. Monrovia is the Liberia that matters most, and this has always been so, shamefully elitist as that is; until something unsettles our tiny capital, it will never cause a stir.
Now Ebola has crept out of the deeply forested villages and truly permeated the psyche of Monrovia. ‘Real’ is the buzzword for its takeover – the huge reality, the horrifying realness! – as if when it was across the border it was an underfed, coquettish slip of a thing, and now it’s gorging itself to a respectable maturity within our borders. Hipco songs on the radio make light of it; others tell the populace to pull up their socks or die. For every believer that the threat is real, there’s a naysayer guffawing at a mystery virus that skulks out of the jungle, riding bush meat as a host. Officials argue on the radio: the offensive strikers want the borders closed immediately; the more mercenary counter that it’s already through the gates, what would isolation solve? Debate rages about ‘the responsibility of the international community’ – how many aid agencies have come, will there be more, which measures would they advise us to put in place in the meantime? It’s the usual distress code of all African countries to the West to bring the fury, the Bat-Signal in the sky to summon the superhero, the underhanded ‘we’re not asking but … okay, we’re asking for your help.’ Things have got out of hand. In truth, there had never really been a hand for it to be in in the first place.
‘We’ve never had a health crisis like this before,’ shrills every radio and TV announcer.
LATE JUNE
News comes thick and fast from different communities about the steadily climbing death toll. It sounds movie-script-bizarre and melodramatic – bodies piling up! – but unless there’s an undercover and seriously twisted Hollywood crew micromanaging the debacle for ratings, it really is happening. Facebook is electric with commentary. Liberians in the diaspora flare up, playing crisis managers: corruption has once again let us down in the worst way, how could the citizenry allow this to happen? Liberians at home fire back with righteous outrage: people are dying! We on ground and y’all don’t know what’s going on, step up or shut up! My own posts start off level-headed and descend into flatulent rants. Everyone on the outside feels they know what those of us in the mix should be doing, and it enrages me. Friends on social media aim and fire only two questions at me now: Are you okay? and Are you doing something to help? I lash out, but underneath the anger, my guilt creature taunts me. I’m trained to handle every substance that can ooze or squirt out of a human being and, in doing so, have rarely felt afraid. Now, fear taints everything. Ebola kills heroes, too. Helplessness is unfamiliar and, in typical me style, that which I can’t solve or soothe makes me livid.
We are all on edge. Our tiny country has been through enough.
Every day, every newspaper, everybody adds a new tale to the fray. There’s the one about the household that lost both parents (or the aunt, or uncle, or grandparents), leaving the kids to fend for themselves. There’s the household where everyone died saved one, and the neighbourhood barricaded the lone survivor inside to stop the spread to other homes. There’s the pregnant woman who ruptures like an overripe mango at a community clinic, her dead body dragged into a corner of the ward for the emergency response team to pick up because the nurses were too afraid to treat her.
Driving alone, I often stop to give lifts to hopefuls at the roadside, waiting for public transport. We drive to town in silence, everyone but me drenched, thanks to rainy season. I put the radio on – prevention ads and songs abound now, warning us that the crisis is no joke, listing symptoms to watch out for. A young nurse breaks the lull at last. She intimates in a leaden voice that she’s stopped going to work and found a desk job doing data entry with an NGO (non-governmental organisation). She’s trained to help the sick, but this isn’t what she signed up for, the possibility of bleeding out and liquefying to death. She looks like she’ll never forgive herself. I want to tell her how much I get it, feeling like a coward, a deserter. I want to, but I don’t. Something about this particular emotional tumult feels like it should be borne alone, unalleviated by sharing and understanding. When the car empties out I drive on, realising I ought to stop giving rides to strangers, because you never know. Another dick move added to my list.
EARLY TO LATE JULY
The life we know is fractured. By month-end the border will be closed, for God knows how long. We are advised of our civic duty to report via hotline anyone who looks vaguely zombie-like, or neighbours who are harbouring Anne Frankensteins in the back room. Physical friendliness is over. All unnecessary touching must stop: handshaking, kissing, hugging, humping, all of it. The embargo on frivolous sex seems to hit the hardest. Men across the spectrum of virility laugh uproariously: ‘Dah whetin you say — no eatin’ sumtin’ because of Ebola?!’ Women crow and flash superior smirks. Mother Nature is a girl after their own heart, cracking the whip so they don’t have to. Now their significant others are forced, in theory at least, to come home to them and only them. Significantly othered myself, I am unfussed — Contender and I are now in a relationship, though it’s more a polite passing of time, the only cool, composed thing going on in a frenzied hot zone.
Buckets filled with bleached water for sanitising hands and in-ear thermometers have become du jour outside places of business. Conspiracy theories flow thick and fast. The United States designed Ebola and released it on us as a form of population control. Pharmaceutical companies wanted to run a massive trial of a new vaccine, but they needed to create an epidemic to test its legs. The cure-all remedies are not far behind. Bathing in hot water mixed with raw pepper or bouillon cubes will stop the virus from infecting you. Churches hold prayer vigils for the infected and pronounce them cured after all-night hallelujahs. Calamity breeds a tragic form of hilarity.
The three little ruffians from the house next door no longer run to anyone for hugs. They scamper away and peep from behind the mango tree in their yard, giggling and slow-waving at me whenever I pass. Their mother’s face is grave as she shoots me an apologetic smile: Don’t take it personally. They’ve been warned. We all have.
The inevitable media pile-on is in full swing. The worst has happened, in the worst way possible. After a sluggish debut, the outbreak is now headlining internationally. It has also acquired its first poster boy in the form of Patrick Sawyer. The government official travelled on business and singlehandedly turned Lagos International Airport into a biohazardous area, becoming the patient who drew Nigeria into the epidemic. His case leaves nineteen infected and eight dead in total. Online, the Naijas spew pure vitriol: how could the Liberian government allow their people to travel willy-nilly, without getting tested for exposure? Where was the regard for protocol, for citizens of other nations, for international security?! All flights from affected countries must be monitored or stopped!
Clubbing and partying has petered out. Gatherings are furtive and sombre, and we can’t help but pontificate and piss-contest. Everyone is an expert now; the situation demands it. It makes us feel useful somehow, especially since the international health agencies have taken over, rendering the natives superfluous. We smelt questions into fiery debates: Was it ever a serious consideration to ground flights to and from affected countries when SARS broke out, or was the medical community simply put on high alert? In fact, didn’t SARS spread even faster because air traffic to Asia was so busy? Come to think of it, this virus has never been known to spread this fast over so short a period – what’s changed all of a sudden?
A friend drops by one afternoon. My father has banned all casual visitors, so she drops in for only a couple of hours while he’s at work. Patrick Sawyer was employed at the Finance Ministry where she works, she says, partly horrified, partly amused, partly thrilled. Of course, she only had dealings with him in a very peripheral way, and only saw him once from afar before he travelled (oh, he really didn’t look sick … you’re only infectious when you look sick), but still. My sister and I are wild-eyed, practically levitating in disbelief. A possible contact of a celebrity index case is in our house. We all make light of it, scooching away and forcing her to sit at the far end of the living room and not touch anything, ha ha ha this is so hilarious, right! But she stays long enough for …
Three days later I have a headache that morphs into a mild fever. Our jolliness rises to screeching hysterics. ‘HA HA HA, SLEEP IN THE OTHER ROOM!!’ my sister says, face clenched in a rictus smile that she thinks is reassuring. I know it’s malaria. My pulse has always been a siren song to mosquitoes, my blood their elixir. Of course it’s malaria. No one goes full-blown in thirty-six hours. I start the three-day treatment course.
