Stigmatisation - Ebola and being West African
The news that some American citizens have intensified pressure on the Obama-led administration to ban all flights from West Africa to the United States as part of measures to stop the spread of the deadly Ebola disease in the US is most unfortunate.
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According to a story filed by the Daily Graphic’s Charles Benoni Okine and published in the October 15 issue of the paper, Americans shared their views during the call-in segments of some US-based radio and television programmes. The callers argued that their government needed to ensure that there were no new cases brought in from West Africa to worsen what they described as an already bad situation.
Per the story, at the immigration point at the JFK International Airport in New York, some Ghanaian passengers who arrived on a Delta Airline flight from Ghana were almost denied service as female immigration officers in particular felt reluctant to attend to the Ghanaians for fear of being infected with the Ebola virus.
In the meantime, some US airports, as well as Heathrow Airport in the UK have started screening passengers from the three most affected West African countries, namely: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Much as the West would want to protect their citizens from what has been described as the world’s most deadly outbreak, using Ebola to perpetuate stigmatisation of West Africans or Africans in general, would be another unfortunate form of discrimination. Already, as people from the continent, going through the visa acquisitions processes and even when one has a visa, the immigration processes, at some of the world’s airports can be described as endless hassles.
Assuming the Ebola outbreak had happened elsewhere in Europe, would the views expressed by the phone-in callers have been the same? Yes, Ebola is devastating and the most the phone-in callers could have pressed for was perhaps relentless screening at the ports of entry rather than a total ban of flights. The world has moved on from that kind of posturing.
We have had our fair share of stigmatisation and discrimination as Africans. Western stories about our continent are consistently riddled with doomsday happenings. Since the first outbreak of the disease was reported last March, we seem to have seen more colouration in the stories and pictures being shown.
There are 17 countries in West Africa including Cape Verde. Out of that number, only three have been severely hit, with a handful in Nigeria and one case in Senegal. Yet, the West has portrayed a picture of doom for the entire West African sub-region. They have made it look as if the whole of the sub-region has been affected and every West African is a carrier of the virus.
It is true that Ebola is fearsome due to its deadly nature. It is also true that within the short spell of time, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported that there have been 5,335 confirmed cases with 2,622 dead, mostly from the three most afflicted countries. But the reported cases of Ebola in the US, UK, Spain and Germany have made Ebola no longer a West African issue but a global one.
We have come to a point where the world would do well to bring its resources and wealth of experience in the area of public health to bear on the crisis and assist where assistance is most needed. The resources of the affected countries are woefully inadequate to meet the extreme challenges posed.
Thankfully, countries, organisations and individuals continue to sacrifice, contributing in varied ways towards managing the outbreak. Countries hit by the disease are traumatised beyond imagination because Ebola is not just wiping out their citizens; it has and will deeply dent their economies as well. In a letter to the BBC, the Liberian President, Mrs Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, said Ebola had managed to bring Liberia to a standstill, killing more than 2,000 people in just over six months.
Families and individuals who have fallen victims will have their nightmarish experiences haunting them for the rest of their lives. Stigmatisation or discrimination would only perpetrate the spread. People are going to hide information or go underground and continue to infect others in the process rather than open up.
There have been some viral outbreaks in the West and elsewhere in recent past. I cannot remember if any one country was stigmatised for the outbreak of the avian flu. Neither can I remember if there was any singling out of a group of people from a geographical region tagged with the mad cow disease outbreak.
We are now in a world of rapid integration and tolerance. The worse-hit West African countries need urgent assistance in whatever form to curb the spread of Ebola. The stigmatisation is uncalled for.
