Facely Camara, a young radio journalist, was eager to fight Ebola in his native Guinea. In mid-September, Camara joined a convoy of health workers and government officials heading to Womé, a village in Guinea’s densely forested southeast, where he intended to cover an Ebola-centered education and disinfection campaign for Zaly FM, a popular station. Before he left, his friends and relatives applauded him on Facebook: “A super Mr. Journalist,” they called him. “The future of the family.”
By the time the group returned, many of its original participants, including Camara and two other radio reporters, were corpses in the back of a rescue truck. They were killed not by Ebola but by a hostile mob reportedly suspicious of the government’s public-health interventions in Womé, and of its actions in the region generally. All three murdered journalists were trainees at Search for Common Ground, a conflict-resolution nonprofit that has worked in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia for more than fifteen years. Aly Badara, who helps to coördinate S.C.G.’s Guinea efforts from the city of Nzerekore, told me by phone that “when the group arrived and started talking about Ebola, they were hit with sticks and stones.” Several of the victims—there were at least eight—had their throats slit with machetes, and were then stuffed into the village school’s septic tank. As Badara explained, the attacks were borne of distrust rooted in years of conflict and exclusion, both real and perceived: “In that part of Guinea, there is no faith between those people and their government.”
The mass killing in Womé presaged a concern that the Ebola outbreak is evolving from a public-health crisis into “a crisis for international peace and security,” as the World Health Organization’s director general, Margaret Chan, called it last month, from Geneva. This past spring, as Ebola spread across the region, S.C.G., which operates on four continents, began generating its own inventive community-by-community responses to the virus, to better tailor communications to local fears, strengths, and histories. The core of their approach has been to recruit not only standard public-health actors but also small-town preachers and soap-opera stars, taxi-drivers and town criers, local reporters and cameramen. What would it look like, they’ve asked, to fight Ebola with culture makers?
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Back in September, I met up with Mike Jobbins, who runs S.C.G.’s Africa programming, to talk about the challenge. In Liberia, Jobbins told me, his local colleagues faced an initial wave of government sloganeering that amounted to “Ebola is real—if you get it, you’ll die!” The campaign, he said, sent “a terrible message, especially in a war-affected population where there is already so much fatalism.” The group offered up an alternative, as Jobbins remembers it: “How about, ‘Ebola is real, and if you seek treatment you have a fifty-per-cent chance of recovery?’ ” He added, “You have to hit that sweet spot of treating it seriously enough that people listen and act, but not so seriously that people become fatalistic.”
There was already some evidence that memorable Ebola lines would stick. Back in May, a song called “Ebola in Town,” by the Liberian musicians Shadow and D-12, took over Monrovia’s night clubs with a catchy dance beat. Pedagogically, the song had its imperfections—one line went, “Don’t touch your friend / I say it will kill you!” But the lyrics sought to prompt a more open discussion about daily life in an Ebola epidemic, by way of simple advice: “If you like the monkey / Don’t eat the meat / If you like the baboon / I said don’t eat the meat / If you like the bat-o / Don’t eat the meat!” (The hunting and handling of bush meat is thought to have provided the virus with a bridge from the animal to the human world, although person-to-person transmission is the more relevant focus of prevention work; NPR has an interview with the artists.) Since then, musicians across the region have been débuting their own Ebola tracks. “Ebola is Real,” an oddly reassuring song created with help from UNICEF’s communications team, became a hit on Liberian radio. “Protect your family,” urges the chorus, before a voice rattles off useful tips: “The only way you can get Ebola is to get in direct contact with the blood, saliva, urine, stool, sweat, semen of an infected person or infected animal.”
S.C.G. is working closely with regional governments and global groups, but much of its staff is comprised of men and women in affected communities. The organization convenes groups in towns and neighborhoods for sessions structured like the conflict-resolution talks they’ve hosted for years. They start with questions, Jobbins said: “What are the top four or five reasons people here aren’t taking certain steps? What are the barriers? What are the blockages?” From there, a second round of work—what might be called Ebola-prevention craftsmanship—begins.
Since well before the outbreak, S.C.G.’s medium of choice has been radio soap operas. The group wrote the virus into their existing soaps, which deal with themes like natural-resource exploitation and government corruption. Now, months later, they’re designing a “This American Life”-style program with UNICEF in Sierra Leone to help people process the crisis and its aftermath—the psychological and communal Act II that’s still to come. “Personally, I think radio is the most important element, because many people don’t have electricity for Internet or TV,” Badara told me when we spoke. The medium also gets into kitchens and bedrooms, without the intrusion or risks posed by visits from foreign health workers. And the distinction between real life and the soap operas has sometimes broken down. Earlier this fall, Kebbeh Zawu, an actor who performed on the Liberian S.C.G. radio show “Blay-tahnla” (“At the Crossroads”), came down with the virus. Zawu had a day job as a nurse in Monrovia, but she apparently contracted Ebola as countless others have: while caring for a sick relative in his home. Zawu died on September 13th.
Working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Search for Common Ground is also recruiting more than a hundred and fifty town criers, or “traditional communicators,” from eighty rural and urban areas across Guinea. The communicators will come together for health training and message-brainstorming sessions, then head home stocked with microphones, megaphones, batteries, and money for kola nuts—a welcoming gift—to talk about Ebola prevention in areas where they’ve already won trust. “Rather than sending out teams to go from one village to another to another, we want to work within the villages to support the guy who’s always coming around, door to door, to talk about key issues,” Jobbins said.
Facely Camara, in contrast, was riding along with a government convoy; he’d been planning to cover the government’s efforts to spray disinfectant in areas like Womé—an approach that some officials have reportedly used in southern Guinea without sufficient explanation or communication, further stoking distrust. (Who wouldn’t have questions about the mass spraying of chemicals?) By the time the delegation arrived in Womé, kola nuts were far from enough; a meeting that traditional chiefs arranged with government officials and health workers broke down when a local group showed up with stones and machetes.
Tensions around Ebola had already triggered violence in southeastern Guinea: the previous month, Red Cross officials sprayed a marketplace in Nzerekore, the largest nearby city, with disinfectant; some merchants thought it was a contaminant, sparking armed protests that escalated when security forces used tear gas. And the distrust long predated Ebola, with political divisions and feuds over resources. “There’s been a lot of migration coming into the region because of the mining boom,” Jobbins said. Many young people feel excluded from the economic opportunities that have resulted, and steep inequalities have been compounded by ethnic tensions. In July, 2013, at least ninety-eight people died and a hundred and sixty were wounded around Nzerekore, after members of one community allegedly lynched a young man from another over a purported theft at a gas station.
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Given the varied challenges facing the region affected by the Ebola outbreak, community groups, artists, and social-media users across West Africa have also tried their best to experiment. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, groups are circulating informational YouTube videos via cell phones. In Lagos, Nigeria—a notable success story, as Michael Specter writes—Nollywood Workshops has recruited celebrities to make short video dramas about the virus. The episodes suggest how a new language of intimacy between romantic partners might help thwart the virus, and end with simple advice: “Stay calm, stay healthy.” S.C.G. is also recruiting motorcycle-taxi-drivers to distribute health information in hard-to-reach towns. Many of these men are ex-combatants. Jobbins said, “Nobody pays attention to them, nobody listens to them, but they have deep access to all these different communities,” including towns where government officials are too distrusted to enter safely or be heard.
The public-health crisis in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone remains vast and urgent: hospitals are ill-equipped, medical staffs are overtaxed, and health systems are near collapse. But the challenge ahead isn’t solely medical. Groups like Search for Common Ground remind us that community efforts can account for the deeply social dimensions of Ebola—and other matters of sickness and health, conflict and stability. It’s in our nature to worry about disease, but also to transform it.
