The tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place

tumblr_nc4md0PIuO1r6lxzlo1_1280Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne
A Newsweek magazine cover in August features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bush-meat Could Spark a US Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bush-meat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America. (The term is a catch-all for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bush-meat without calling it that.) While eating bush-meat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bush-meat consumption.

Far from presenting a legitimate public health concern, the authors of the piece and the editorial decision to use chimpanzee imagery on the cover have placed Newsweek squarely in the centre of a long and ugly tradition of treating Africans as savage animals and the African continent as a dirty, diseased place to be feared. What can social science tell us about why Newsweek’s cover story is so problematic?

Categorizing peoples in the colonial period The Europeans who colonized Africa in the late 19th century were members of a culture obsessed with classifying and categorising the natural world. This quest built much of modern biology (think Darwin and his beetle collection), but it also led to some rather unscientific justifications for the colonial project.

One of these was an idea developed by Frederick Coombs, author of Coombs’s Popular Phrenology. In the book, Coombs expounded a then-popular (and completely wrong) idea that the size, shape and other physical characteristics of a person’s skull determine that individual’s intelligence. Coombs and his fellow phrenologists started with the assumption that non-northern and western Europeans — namely, southern Europeans (who were not considered to be racially “white” at the time) and people of colour — were inherently less intelligent than northern Europeans with light-coloured skin.

Not surprisingly, this flawed premise led these Victorian gentlemen to reach a flawed conclusion: that people with heads that were supposedly more “ape-like” in shape were less intelligent than northern Europeans and therefore in need of the “civilising mission” that colonization was supposed to bring. The Victorian phrenologists developed elaborate typologies supposedly showing that Africans had the most apelike — and therefore most “savage” — skull types, thus justifying their subjugation under colonial rule.

While Coombs’s book may be the best-known of the works of Victorian phrenology, the racism that his conjectures embodied was deeply embedded in the culture of most colonizing states. Most Westerners of the time believed that people of colour were “savages,” desperately in need of the benefits of modernity, Christianity and intelligence the colonists believed they were well-suited to bring to Africa.

As historian Sarah Steinbock-Pratt notes, imagery of Africans as hyper-sexualised savages — cannibals, even — persisted in cinematic representations of Africa throughout the 20th century. This long history of white people associating Africans with primates — both savage, running wild in the jungle (never mind that most Africans live nowhere near a jungle or any of the great apes) and threatening any white people who approach — has not evolved as much as we might hope in the last century.

Othering
Coombs, the Victorians and the people who created appalling 20th century popular culture relating to Africa were engaging in a practice scholars call “othering.” Othering happens when an in-group (in this case, white northern Europeans) treat other groups of people (the out-group, here, Africans and other people of colour) as though there is something wrong with them by identifying perceived “flaws” in the out-group’s appearance, practice or norms.

Othering has real consequences; for example, international media othering of Somalia in the early 1990s led to the misidentification and oversimplification of the conflict’s dynamics by global policy actors. Rather than understanding the complex nature of Somali society, the violence there was portrayed as clan warfare involving savage peoples who had hated one another since time immemorial. This misrepresentation led to two decades of misguided and ineffective policy responses to the Somalia crisis. Newsweek’s use of a chimpanzee to represent a scientifically invalid story about an African disease is a classic case of othering. It suggests that African immigrants are to be feared, and that apes — and African immigrants who eat them — could bring a deadly disease to the pristine shores of the United States of America. Othering is particularly harmful in the context of a health epidemic, as one scholar notes, because it “hampers the containment of contagion during an infectious epidemic by compelling people to reject public health instructions.”

Newsweek’s piece is in the worst tradition of what journalist Howard French calls “Ooga-Booga” journalism, the practice of writing in exoticising and dehumanising ways about Africa.

How threatening is illegal fruit bat importation as a potential pathway for an Ebola outbreak in the United States? The study cited in the Newsweek story on illegally imported wildlife does not make any mention of fruit bats being smuggled into the country. There were also no fruit bats among specimens confiscated as part of a crackdown on (and study of) illegal importation of meats from African countries via Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport.

The study’s authors also characterise Paris as being at “the extreme end of a spectrum” — meaning it would not be representative of other international cities to which people from African countries may travel.

Ebola’s jump from its animal reservoir to humans is an incredibly rare event — even in those locations where the likely animal reservoirs are much more prevalent. Extrapolating the likelihood of an animal-to-human jump for Ebola in the United States — a context where there are likely no fruit bats for sale — is not only misleading, it’s irresponsible.

Newsweek is not alone in scare-mongering about the Ebola outbreak. Newsweek is not even original in its approach — pointing the finger at African immigrants smuggling bush-meat — as British and Swedish newspapers have previously published similar stories.

Long history
There is a persistent association of immigrants and disease in American society. The Immigration Act of 1891 explicitly excluded from entry to America all “persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Fast-forward one hundred years and we see Haitian refugees who tested positive for HIV “confined like prisoners” at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay — despite knowledge at least five years earlier that HIV was not casually communicated. In the 2003 SARS epidemic, New York City’s Chinatown was identified as a site of contagion and risk despite never having a single case of SARS.

Fear-mongering narratives about Ebola circulating in the popular media can also have a serious effect on knowledge and attitudes about Ebola. Though there are no cases of person-to-person infection in the United States, a recent poll conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health reports 39 percent of Americans think there will be a large Ebola outbreak in the United States and more than a quarter of Americans are concerned that they or someone in their immediate family may get sick with Ebola in the next year. A similar poll conducted for Reason-Rupe had four in 10 Americans saying an Ebola outbreak in the United States was likely, and conservative Americans were more likely to say an outbreak was likely. These two national surveys show Americans are grossly overestimating their risk of infection.

The long history of associating immigrants and disease in America and the problematic impact that has on attitudes toward immigrants should make us sensitive to the impact of “othering” African immigrants to the United States in the midst of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Scare-mongering about infinitesimally small risks in one context serves no purpose to the greater good of trying to curb disease transmission and relieve people’s suffering in another context. — Washington Post.

 

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