Africa, Hit by Media and Ebola

From Africa, the Romans were used to saying, there is always something new. From Africa, perhaps they might have thought, we can learn. To Africa, I assume their explorers must have deduced, we must go. Things today have evidently changed. For better or for worse? Well, I am afraid I don't have a straight answer to that- on prodding, I would say the latter, but only if sheer insistence forces me to jump to this unfortunate conclusion.

The image of Africa, as the Romans would have been seeing it when they made that statement, has changed. Today, most would liken the continent to a darkness that has been filled with void and the abyss of diseases and civil wars. The image, unfortunate as it is, has been created so by the constant barrage of reportage and stories that spill out of the continent, related to us sitting in our cosy living rooms by journalists and reporters that work to make us directly aware and indirectly uncomfortable and guilty.

J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, has made the African image, so to speak, and our perspective towards it clearer for us to in his essay on Ali Mazrui's The Africans. “One year,” he writes right at the start of his essay, “the image of Africa is of herds of giraffe sailing across boundless sunlit plains. The next year,” he continues, “it is of stick-like starving children with ballooning bellies and great sad dark eyes.” And then another year, he further speculates, it would most probably be of “soldiers in tattered figures lobbing mortar shells into the bush in yet another incomprehensible war.” Discouraging as the statements seem to be, they are perhaps true all the same, for what we see among these sentences are acute observations that somehow transcend any racial or regional discriminatory and stereotypical view to present to us the real situation that seems to be persisting within the continent. Things are not going well, and that is obvious to anyone who cares to read the newspapers. The real question is, why do they continuously insist on being bad? Doesn't change seem to be a brighter possibility than the wreckage of yet another war based within the ideas of illusory ideologies?

Its not easy to answer these questions, part of the reason is because several theorists and intellectuals that base their treatises on the idea of Africa, its history, its social order and, of course, its future, have, in past and present both, tried coming at a conclusion or at least presenting what seems to be a probable solution to what is wrong with Africa and how that wrong can be converted into a meaningful right. How does a continent, they ask, which had everything going for it- minerals, oil, sprawling forests, animal life- turn into a landmass of chaos and destruction?

Part of that answer is Africa's politics and, more precisely, the dictators that dictated such politics. Under the umbrellas of social revolution and change, these tyrants sought to create a state that functioned- without any exception- on their whims and fancies alone. Society be damned. And then the damned came to revolt, lifting on its shoulders another autocratic individual who seemed to be the hero of the masses but who turned out to be just like his predecessor- sometimes even worst.

This cyclic turn of events in almost every nation of Africa, and the horrific, nightmarish events that garnish its histories and the wars that form most of that history has what spelled an eventual doom for the continent. At the cost of making what may seem like a purposefully made naive statement, it has to be agreed upon that the African conception of democracy has hardly ever been participatory and has always leaned towards a more classical- albeit less likely liberal- form of democratic model.

This has cost the people of Africa a lot many years, and a lot of wealth that could have gone into the region’s development but instead, was wasted in the wars that resulted in nothing but another cycle of bloodshed and endemic killings.

African society, throughout years, has been moulded by a sense of chaos and madness; it has failed to evolve fully into a mature civilization that might understand, contemplate and then act. The problem within the African social structure is that they jump, directly, to the third stage- and in a manner that is worst than just violence. Mindless violence becomes the order of the day. It has been observed through decades that the continent faced many riots, civil wars and coups and counter-coups only to repeat the process- nothing conclusive seemed to have been achieved. Every time something like an epidemic hit a nation, collapse of order was anticipated. But, as an article in The Economist rightly pointed out in January, things seemed to be the exact opposite this time around, when Ebola thundered through Africa, but especially the vulnerable societies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, which have seen bloodshed that can only grace mankind's worst nightmares.

It seemed, to many scholars studying the region, that things might fall apart again, that the majority elements within the society would take advantage to engineer anarchy, and then the history, and those images of Coetzee's speculations would repeat again in front of the world. These were legitimate fears, and they were expressed by many a journalists, writers, intellectuals and politicians the world around. These fears- if not in their entirety then at least partially- were soon realized, as the void between the political class within the affected countries and the society in general began to widen, with the former taking quasi-dictatorial measures to curb people's protests under the pretext of curbing the spread of the disease that had already begun claiming substantial amount of lives.

Apart from food shortages and mass migrations, the epidemic seemed to have triggered a political crisis as well. The cross border trade had ceased, tourism had reached the point of no existence and within all this whirled the fears of a crumbling economy.

These problems are still poking their heads out- some would say more than in the past, and they are probably true in saying so, for the real implications of an action are felt after it has already been done. So it is with Ebola and the aftershocks that it has created, continues to create and will keep on creating within the African society. Perhaps, the only difference this time around is the fact that African society, by and large, has handled, to a certain extent, the situation pretty well in that it has restrained from violence and in cases where violence did spurt out, it has been successful in limiting it.

As far as the society- both within Western Africa and the diaspora that cultivates elsewhere in the world- is concerned, it has been enthusiastically engaged with tackling Ebola in any way that they possibly can. This has been significant, especially in societies that form the social structures of Liberia and Sierra Leone. After having decided to stop the unrest and start, in a meaningful way, the rebuilding of their destroyed and distraught societies, the two nations seemed to have been moving towards what can be called an acceptable civil society and a legitimate state. But with Ebola hitting the nations, most factors that form a welfare state broke down, including schools. This prompted the theorists to speculate that Ebola can, indeed, lead to a generation of students never being engaged into formal education, which is as bad as it can get in a democracy that is still young and raw.

These, and other factors- such as the economic decline, large-scale migration, pitiable health care system and drop in the household income- have brought several Africa observers to the conclusion that as much as Ebola spelled doom for the health life of an African individual, it can also begin to have severe effects on his social, economic and political life. The decay of democracy in Africa has always been an issue to be concerned about, but this time around is the added burden of the wreckage that a disease has caused in the newly homogeneous societies of Africa.

One can do nothing but to wait it out, and hope that the threads that have been binding the unity within Africa do not snap.