INTRODUCTION

Emergency and “Crisis”

Sometimes Freetown felt to me like a forgotten or neglected city, a notion that its residents would often complain about. The city has deep cosmopolitan roots, but these are buried beneath crumbling infrastructure, crowded residential areas, and overstretched health systems. Freetown was founded by Black settlers from London in the late eighteenth century as a refuge for former slaves. Not long after it was ceded to the British Empire, becoming the capital of British West Africa. With a large natural harbor and port, Freetown attracted migrants and merchants from inland and overseas. Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961 but by the 1980s was marred by economic decline and political collapse, in part the result of international neoliberal and arguably neocolonial demands for extractive economic arrangements based around mining and the reduction of state spending and capacity. Global economic and political structures continue to ensure that only a meager percentage of Sierra Leone’s considerable wealth in natural resources benefits the country’s ordinary citizens.

Before Ebola, the last time Sierra Leone was in the global spotlight for a sustained period was during its decade-long civil war at the end of the twentieth century. This began as a youth uprising in response to exploitative local agrarian economies and a weak and corrupt national political system. The war was fueled by international sanctions and economic collapse and ended with a high-profile liberal peace-building intervention out of Freetown. Outright violence might now be mostly suppressed, but daily struggle, vast economic inequality, and an underresourced and exploitative state apparatus persist. Communities suffer from flooding, fire, and other environmental disasters on an almost annual basis. Most young people whom I know dream of overseas migration, seeing it as practically the only route for long-term social mobility and material security for their families. At the same time, they pursue piecemeal, nonlinear journeys of coming of age in town, negotiating precarious work and education, ambiguous and yet caring familial and domestic relationships, and the often messy business of intimate partnerships and raising children.

During the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic, the global spotlight shone on Sierra Leone once more. International agencies such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the UK Ministry of Defense, and the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up camp in hotels, ministries, and the vacated offices of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where twenty-three former rebel soldiers were tried for international war crimes between 2002 and 2013, as well as in more makeshift settings around town (see figure 1). The rarity of Ebola, combined with its disturbing and often deadly symptoms, dominated the way the epidemic was covered by the media and how the global response was set up. The few cases that did reach North America and Europe sparked considerable panic, despite Ebola’s relatively low risk of contagion as a nonairborne virus. The global response to the epidemic, which was initially criticized for being slow off the mark, ultimately entailed the mass mobilization of military, health, and humanitarian agencies with a highly securitized agenda.

Ironically, many of the conditions that rendered the Ebola emergency “extraordinary” were routinely familiar for residents of the countries at its epicenter (and for many people across the globe today): inadequate public health care, the overcrowding of cities, and the rapidly growing levels of exploitation and destruction of nature. In the rural borderland region of Libera, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, where the 2014 Ebola outbreak began, there are plenty of recent and historical reasons to mistrust the state and other bureaucratic and foreign entities, not least of which was the Atlantic slave trade that ravaged the region and casts a long shadow. And there are well-developed social systems to operate outside of or in negotiation with external control.⁵ On top of this, the state and international measures employed during the emergency were remarkably old-fashioned, seemingly unbeknownst to most of the actors involved. The lockdowns, quarantines, community mapping, and centralized management of burials were strikingly reminiscent of British colonial approaches to epidemic management, including during the great influenza epidemic that hit the region a century earlier.⁶

After the state of emergency was declared in August 2014, with the epidemic rolling on for several years, the term “Ebola” took on a wide range of meanings in Freetown. For example, when there was a death in the neighborhood and the body was buried by official burial teams according to the state of emergency protocols, the deceased was often described as an Ebola victim even if it was medically determined that the person had died from another cause. Although the majority of those who died in the country between 2014 and 2016 did so from routine, if preventable, causes, being buried as if they had Ebola—intended as a safety precaution—rendered them Ebola victims in many people’s eyes. There was a similar pattern for sickness. During a phone conversation with Alhassan (Foday’s older brother), who was convinced that he had a routine case of malaria and was concerned about being misdiagnosed as being positive for Ebola, he expressed it to me like this: “Ebola is the only illness in Sierra Leone right now.”

But the meaning of the term “Ebola” went beyond even death and illness. When people materially benefited from Ebola aid packages or employment in the official response, as a number of people in the neighborhood did, they were described as “eating Ebola money.” Equally, when young people complained about Ebola, they were often referring to loss of livelihood, experiencing boredom, and lack of adequate health care or, in a more amorphous way, lack of opportunity. On one level, “Ebola” referred to a wide array of aspects of life and death in the time of Ebola, many of them byproducts of an epidemiologically focused intervention and state of emergency. On another level, “Ebola” was a new way of talking about and responding to shortcomings that are an ordinary and familiar part of life in Sierra Leone. The range of interpretations and meanings given to the term “Ebola” by those living in its proximity point to something more than the singular public health crisis that Ebola was internationally understood to be.

I argue that the Ebola emergency in Sierra Leone was really the coming together of two different forms of crisis: one an unusual and temporary epidemic, the other familiar and ongoing “crisis.”⁷ The former crisis is the disruptive epidemic that dominated international attention. Its contours were determined by a biomedical metric of active Ebola cases in human populations, an easily definable and quantifiable standard, although there were challenges in testing and reporting cases. The boundaries of the Ebola epidemic were laid out by agencies such as the World Health Organization and, in turn, by national authorities. In Sierra Leone, the bylaws and political structures of the state of emergency were to be lifted forty-two days after the last detected case of Ebola, which is double the twenty-one-day incubation period of the virus. While this was a rolling horizon that was continually pushed back when new cases were identified—and there was quite a lot of speculation on the ground that the beneficiaries of the state of emergency were fudging the numbers so that it was prolonged—it was nonetheless definitionally and ultimately temporary. This version of Ebola as an epidemic fits the classic mold of crisis as an exceptional period of disorder or rupture. The epidemic’s temporariness and medical connotations are captured in the ancient Greek term krisis, meaning “the turning point in a disease.” The “emergent” in emergency speaks to Ebola’s imminent and passing qualities.⁸

In contrast to Ebola as an epidemic that in a certain respect “came out of nowhere,” and would ultimately be declared over, the term “Ebola,” as my interlocutors in Freetown rendered it, was meaningful in relation to ongoing social, economic, and political processes. The term signified the novelties of life (and death) during the emergency while also being mobilized as a new way of talking about and responding to “old normal” problems. This version of Ebola maps onto contemporary critical readings of crisis as the norm rather than the exception.⁹ Here “crisis” is multifacted, connected to the extending and deepening of capitalism in the post–Cold War era through which arrangements of work and care are restructured while community and state-based safety nets become overstretched or torn apart. Material inequalities and disparities have grown, while openings for social mobility have shrunk. Climate catastrophe looms, while political and economic institutions built around capitalist principles of competition and growth continually prove ill-equipped to reverse it. “Crisis” as a subjective experience in contemporary renderings has enduring, slow-burning qualities in which people are forced to “wait” or become “stuck.”¹⁰ In Africa, youths are the posterchildren of “crisis.” In what is often referred to as the “crisis of youth,” “lost generations” of young people find themselves without the material and symbolic resources required to achieve “social adulthood.” In one interpretation, African youths confront the immobility of “waithood,” while in another they navigate the constantly shifting terrain of “crisis as context.”¹¹

By exploring young people’s lives during the Ebola emergency in Sierra Leone, this book examines what happens when a temporary epidemic and ongoing “crisis” come together. I highlight the multifaceted outcomes of this interaction for ordinary people whose lives became entangled within their meeting. While the international agencies’ priorities were the short-term management of the epidemic, ordinary people tended to have longer-term priorities that went beyond the containment of the outbreak. The emergency had, of course, narrowing and restrictive elements to it but, paradoxically, also presented people with unusual clarity on many of the ambiguities and inequities of normal life. The novel bureaucracies of the official Ebola response were not yet fully tainted with the patterns of exclusion that the marginalized are accustomed to, while collective attention across many strata of society was unusually aligned toward a pressing and unfolding problem. This had ramifications that went well beyond the containment of an unusual disease not only in political and economic shifts within a state of emergency but also in a particularly profound way to the intimate social realities of ordinary people. For young people such as Foday who had struggled to fulfill inherited expectations to start families, find jobs, and progress through the life course in a dignified way, the Ebola emergency represented one of a multitude of obstacles and unusual pathways for living an “ordinary life” in a challenging place and time.

Youth in Africa: A Return to the Family

When people ask me what it is like to live in Freetown, I normally try to convey something of the struggle and hardship that ordinary people face there, combined with the nurturing and supportive bonds of community, friendship, and family that I have witnessed and experienced. Well before the Ebola emergency, I was struck by the ambiguities of life in and around the homes that I stayed in and frequented.¹² Family and domestic spaces were havens of care and generosity, but they were also sites of competition and danger. For the young people I was closest to, money, food, things, and work typically came to them through networks of family, friends, and neighbors. But in receiving gifts and opportunities, they risked becoming overly indebted. Becoming respected adults demanded that they become to some degree independent, setting up their own homes and supporting others “beneath” them rather than staying at home and being overly dependent on those “above” them.

To understand any emergency requires understanding the conditions of life that surround it. In this account, young people provide a through line that connects life before, during, and after Ebola. The protagonists in this book were in their late teens or their twenties and thirties during the time of my fieldwork. This suited my research process as a relatively young person myself. It made social sense for me to integrate into an age set in the neighborhood, and some of the deepest friendships I formed were with people of a similar age. This demographic also represents a large swath of Freetown’s population, with young people continuing to migrate to the capital city in search of opportunity and with life-expectancy being only fifty-five years.

I discovered that youths occupy unusually helpful subject positions to shed light on questions about the social dynamics of an emergency in Africa. African youths are widely understood by anthropologists and other social scientists as being stuck in a “crisis of social reproduction,” unable to achieve “social adulthood.”¹³ During the Ebola emergency young people played critical and high-profile roles in the official as well as unofficial responses. I argue that the home and the family are central to both of these stories of crisis in ways that have been widely overlooked. In Freetown, the domestic spheres were where Ebola transmission and dynamics of containment played out most prominently. The significance of these spaces during the epidemic was magnified by their long-standing place as the front line in young people’s struggles to come of age in socially respectable ways.

The difficulties that youths in Africa face in achieving social adulthood have become a well-documented phenomenon in recent decades. The United Nations labels Africa the “world’s youngest continent,” with 60 percent of the population under the age of twenty-five.¹⁴ In European colonial discourse, Africa and its inhabitants were imagined as “childlike” and “undeveloped,” representations that supported coercive colonization. Africa’s contemporary crisis of youth is widely connected to the legacy of structural adjustment reforms during the 1980s and 1990s, spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, during which drastic cuts were made to state budgets and capacities across the Global South in a bid to shore up free market economic growth. In most cases the results were devastating, with economic activity becoming increasingly extractive rather than trickling down to ordinary people, as neoliberalism’s advocates promised. At the same time, anticorruption initiatives actively targeted the patrimonial networks through which resources are informally distributed from “big men” to clients, many of them poor youths. In Sierra Leone, this paved the way for the civil war during the 1990s and early 2000s as disenfranchised youths formed rebel groups, allowing them to live outside of and in opposition to the neglectful and oppressive institutions of the state and rural society.¹⁵

Partly as a result of a number of high-profile youth-led armed uprisings and protest movements from the 1990s to the present across the continent, there has been a propensity in international popular culture, journalism, and scholarship to frame African youths, particularly males, as violent actors. Even sympathetic accounts that usefully highlight how violence is not an innate quality of African youth cultures but instead is a consequence of political and economic marginalization still risk inadvertently reproducing this basic framing. In scholarship, young men such as street hustlers and vigilantes are often studied in public male-dominated contexts and spaces.

Domestic spaces of the home and family are strikingly underrepresented in studies of contemporary male youth (with some notable recent exceptions) even though these spaces are of central significance in many aspects of young people’s lives. This omission is all the more striking given that earlier anthropological work on youth in Africa focused almost entirely on the sphere of family (or “kinship” as it was termed). Kinship was the defining political and economic institution in pastoral and agrarian societies, and even research in urban settings emphasized its primacy.¹⁶ The apparent assumption that family and kinship are no longer significant spheres for those incorporated into state and global political and economic structures misses the lived reality of young people in cities such as Freetown who are not simply connected to domestic and familial networks but are utterly reliant on them. While the crisis of youth is a story about a generation cutting loose and getting lost, it is also a story about coming home if indeed they left in the first place.

On a basic level, unemployed and irregularly employed young men in Freetown tend to spend a lot of time at home. Formal employment is much less available now in the aftermath of shrinking industrial production in the city and trade through the port. As noted above, the thick relationships that Freetown youths form with family, friends, and neighbors are not only important for managing the spaces of home and daily sustenance—whether this involves the sharing of food or other acts of care and mutual support—but are also central to business opportunities and the management of informal work. On one side of the coin, familial, domestic, and neighborly relationships represent possibility for young people in Freetown, encapsulated by the Krio term sababu, which translates as “beneficial relationship” and “luck.” On the other side, such relationships can easily lead to indebtedness, infantilization, and ultimately the form of stuckedness that many youths desire to escape.¹⁷ The paradox that many young people find themselves in might be best expressed this way: You need family to make it in business, and you need business to make it in family.

The significance of home and family for young people in Freetown did not diminish during the Ebola emergency. Rather, their stakes became even higher. Ebola was sometimes described as a “family disease” in Sierra Leone, as the virus commonly spread between intimate relations, typically through acts of care for the sick and dead (in preparing corpses for burial). Such activities are normally performed by family and others close by rather than health care professionals. Family gatherings, particularly burials, risked becoming so-called superspreader events, as there were often strong obligations for even distantly located relatives to attend. Ebola was described as being cruel in the ways that it punished acts of care and coming close in times of crisis.

During the state of emergency, public authorities from the state, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international agencies scrutinized and regulated many aspects of domestic and family life. New ways of performing safe burials were devised under the auspices of official burial teams, composed mostly of young men employed and managed by the state and NGOs. Neighborhoods and homes were routinely monitored by authorities during lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews. Health services could be contacted by ordinary people from home through the 117 emergency service, which was nonexistent before Ebola.

Critical accounts and sympathetic campaigns have highlighted the difficult dimensions of both the epidemic itself and the international and local responses to it. Some reports point to Ebola victims becoming stigmatized in communities after they had recovered (this is not something that I came across firsthand).¹⁸ Others highlight the intrusive characteristics of the official Ebola response, which placed severe limitations on people’s lives and in some cases was an obstacle to grassroots responses and initiatives.¹⁹ Many of these negative features of epidemiological responses were not novel to Ebola but are connected to deeply grooved historical patterns. Critical studies repeatedly point to the ways that epidemics trace existing social inequalities and fault lines, such as around sexuality, race, generation, and class.²⁰ Systems of public and global health create or extend inequalities through measures that disproportionally disadvantage some groups over others. That so many historical mistakes were repeated during the COVID-19 pandemic is a sober reminder of what work remains to be done.

In Freetown, some of the core social dynamics around Ebola were remarkably consistent with those that preceded it. The ambiguities of home during Ebola, as a space of both refuge and danger, were reminiscent of similar dynamics for youths beforehand. The overlaps were brought home to me early on in the stage of the emergency when the virus had still not spread into Freetown. A girl living next door to the family compound I was staying in suffered an attack of witchcraft, revealed by three marks that appeared on her back. In the weeks and months that followed, my neighbors hired a witchdoctor who led dramatic nightlong sessions to lure the invisible witches and protect the residents. There was a suspicion that one of the neighbors was living a double life as a witch, although there was no final agreement about who this was. This notion of witchcraft as an invisible expression of ill will or jealousy from those close by, the “enemy within,” is a common trope in Africa and its diaspora.²¹ It turned out that this established framework and the underlying social reality it referenced were quite applicable to Ebola, which similarly traveled through networks of intimacy. Both witchcraft and Ebola revealed vulnerabilities of intimacy that were already there, finding expression in many aspects of young people’s day-to-day lives. Surviving “Ebola” was a matter of not only avoiding contact with the virus but also realigning intimate and familial relationships in ways that lasted well beyond the epidemic. Acts of social realignment tied into a wider reconfiguring of hierarchy and established protocols during the state of emergency, undergirded by new bylaws, public authority structures, and material flows.

In Freetown, the form that these intimate realignments took was not the radical reimaginings or rejections of traditional ways of doing that might be expected by youths in a global emergency. Rather, they were strikingly traditional and ordinary in their orientation, albeit creative and adaptive.²² In Freetown, young people found renewed potency and possibility in life-course rituals, family formation, formal waged work, and bureaucratic workings of the state. It is no coincidence that these were all features of life that many young people valued and sought out prior to the emergency but had often found to be absent or working against them. In this book, youths provide a revealing perspective on a global health emergency, while Ebola is an illuminating case study for reexamining the crisis of youth in Africa today.

What Is Ordinary?

This book is about ordinary life in an emergency. But what does “ordinary” mean? And why is this perspective useful? Before addressing these questions, it is helpful to first consider the two most prevalent critical models for thinking about emergencies, which we can refer to as “continuity” and “break.” “Continuity” sees the emergency as a sharper and more severe version of what precedes it. Proponents of such an analysis point to the ways that the emergency reenforces or extends existing social and economic inequalities, such as through narrow and rushed responses or through intentional opportunism by elites. “Break” sees the emergency as a rupture with the status quo, as a truly exceptional period of time in which routines are disturbed and hierarchies are unsettled in fundamental ways. In this model, emergencies can have lasting, transformative, and even revolutionary potential.

Both models of emergency are plausible and historically identifiable. The problem is that they are rarely articulated in ways that are compatible with one another; whereas in all likelihood both dynamics—continuity and break—are at play simultaneously. There is a great temptation for people to apply their focus selectively, ignoring the evidence that points the other way. Quantitative data over a long time frame might identify trends that genuinely support one interpretation over the other. Ethnographic research, however, which is undertaken by the researcher over a relatively short period of time and in which the collected data is highly qualitative, tends to paint a more ambiguous picture whereby both continuities and ruptures are indeterminately there and mutually contingent. Such was my own experience of fieldwork in Freetown.

To form an analysis of emergency that accounts for both continuity and break, we need to pay much more attention to the ordinary.²³ Such an undertaking has several dimensions to it. First, it means paying attention to so-called ordinary people. In the context of an epidemic, it means looking beyond those infected with the disease or who are proximate to it in other ways, to include people whose lives are less overtly impacted by the broader emergency but who ultimately do play a large role in shaping its outcome. It means understanding how people situate the emergency within a broader ecology of concerns, needs, demands, and expectations in their lives and how they go about attending to them. This necessitates casting our attention on ordinary practices and places, in particular daily acts of care, work, and maintenance in and around the home as well as the management of progression, or movement, through the life course. In practice, many people’s direct experiences of epidemics and other emergencies are not characterized by the kind of dramatic upheavals that fuel media narratives—even though they too must contend with such narratives—but instead are largely made up of mundane time among those they live with. For those who do suffer loss and grief in emergencies, getting through it often depends on these core relationships.

Second, we must acknowledge that the term “ordinary” has multiple meanings. In any social setting, ordinary can index a valuation of a state that is normally, or ordinarily, there. This might be thought of as a sort of statistical average of reality. At the same time, ordinary is likely to index an ideal of how things should be rather than an assessment of how things typically are.²⁴ The mismatch between ordinary as a reality versus ordinary as an ideal seems to be particularly pronounced in recent periods of economic decline and political and ecological crisis, when difficulties in meeting inherited expectations and aspirations are widespread. On some level, however, such a tension between “as is” ordinary and “as if” ordinary is not peculiar to this moment but instead is foundational to ways that social groups operate and reproduce over time. The anthropological study of ritual—a long-standing preoccupation and specialty in the discipline—provides a useful model. Classic anthropological analysis, following Arnold van Gennep’s work, connects ritual’s efficacy for generating meaning among its participants and for the intergenerational transmission of social orders and values to the ways that ritual temporarily suspends or inverts normal rules and hierarchies. This is captured suggestively by the concept of liminality, the intermediate—betwixt and between—stage in ritual most famously described in Victor Turner’s study of Ndembu coming-of-age ceremonies.²⁵ The key point here is that liminality in ritual is not the absence of normal social order, even though it might look wild as in the case of the Ndembu rites of passage, which happen in the forest rather than the village. Rather, liminality is the fleshing out of a coexisting, alternative, imaginary order. Turner describes liminality as “dominantly in the ‘subjunctive mood’ of culture, the mood of maybe, might-be, as-if, hypothesis, fantasy, conjecture, desire.”²⁶ In ritual theory, these two social orders have been labeled “as is” and “as if,” the former referring to the sincerity of everyday life and the latter to the play and imaginaries of ritual time.²⁷

Third, we must question whose notion of ordinary is in play. Such interrogation is at the heart of the anthropological enterprise, and I believe it is one of the discipline’s key contributions in understanding emergency today. In cases of foreign and top-down interventions, we question whether the understanding of “ordinary” in one group, normally the dominant actors, is being imposed onto others, normally the disempowered. The epistemic and material violence associated with this pattern cannot be overstated. However, this model risks masking the enduringness and porousness of such processes. In the context of over five hundred years of colonialization and foreign intervention in West Africa, people in Freetown tend to move between multiple overlapping social orders rather than inhabiting any singular social order or cultural framework. As others have noted, the colonial encounter in Africa has led to a great deal of intermixing between social orders, but stark imaginative dualisms between social orders associated with the colonizers and the colonized have persisted.²⁸ Much contemporary anthropological scholarship undertaken in diverse field sites is concerned with the ways that people live among multiple, interconnected, and porous social orders.²⁹ Emergencies are critical times when the boundaries between social orders are reconfigured. As the relationship between the social orders is in flux, their (co)existence becomes more visible, which allows a range of actors to creatively redefine their boundaries. And yet, this process often leaves the distinctions between social orders intact.³⁰

During the Ebola emergency, residents of Freetown creatively navigated between social orders that go back to the Atlantic slave trade and centuries of colonialism and foreign intervention. The existence of different social orders was made unusually plain during the international intervention as two worlds, one “local” and “undeveloped” and the other “global” and “developed,” which are common binaries found in global health discourse.³¹ During the emergency my interlocutors would refer to these orders as “black” and “white,” recalling the historic, racialized, violence engendered within them. But more coded manifestations of these orders were already found in many domains of social life in Freetown, including in and around the home, in informal work, and in relationships between young people and the state. For many young people who were already caught up in the deep ambiguities that living among multiple orders entails with their contradictory visions of what it means to be a respected adult, Ebola represented a time of unusual clarity and creative possibility. The social clarity that the emergency presented had material implications for those we were able to broker between social orders, drawing on long-standing approaches to social mobility and social reproduction in West Africa.³² At the same time, the international intervention was understood by Freetown residents less as an alien imposition and more as dialect of their own cosmopolitan language.

Chapter Outline

The bulk of the chapters in the book center around ethnographic descriptions of events and unfolding stories in Freetown spanning a period of over seven years. In addition, each chapter develops analytically on the core themes and ideas that I have identified so far. Almost everything described in the book, excluding the historical material, involves happenings that I personally witnessed and participated in. Included are the interpretations and reflections of a variety of actors as they unfold. The central protagonists of the book are a group of young people I have gotten to know very well over the years, most of whom were resident in or otherwise connected to the Congo Town neighborhood. However, much attention and space is given to all those around them, people to whom I became in many cases just as close. This includes their parents, siblings, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles, neighbors, and colleagues. The ethnographic material presented here does not progress exclusively in linear time but instead coalesces around themes, people, and arenas, which are the focus of each individual chapter.

Chapter 1 sets the stage. I begin by describing my own sense of disconnect at the early stages of the Ebola epidemic while moving between ordinary homes in the Congo Town neighborhood to meetings with international Ebola responders at the Radisson Blu Hotel, physically proximate to one another yet, at first glance, distant in other ways. However, a closer inspection reveals that these two worlds are highly interconnected. I introduce Foday’s home, where I first stayed, and tell the story of his grandfather’s migration to the neighborhood before I delve into Freetown’s deeper history, its unusual position as a site of extraction and return in the Atlantic slave trade as well as more recent histories of British colonialism, independence, conflict, and disease management. This history is essential to understanding why an underresourced and vulnerable state with a highly depleted medical infrastructure was yet again so susceptible to heavy-handed foreign intervention and, equally, how residents of Freetown, a poor yet historically cosmopolitan city, were equipped to shape how the emergency played out in their own terms. For Freetown’s young residents, economic openings, the establishing and maintenance of families and homes, and notions of agency and dependence have long been bound up with and brokered through the global forces that course through the city.

Chapter 2 steps out onto the streets, centering on a group of motorbike taxi riders. The chapter begins with a rider known as Human Right, who experienced serious injury at the hands of police. This encapsulated the physical and legal risks that marginal workers face from a state that is both neglectful and coercive. I then turn to the Sierra Leone Commercial Bike Riders Union, which was formed around ex-rebel networks in the aftermath of the civil war in the early 2000s. The union provided “state-like” bureaucratic structures that aimed to protect workers’ interests while also being criticized as exploitative in parallel ways to the state. The chapter then turns to Peter, a bike rider who was recruited in the official Ebola response and worked with an Ebola burial team that I regularly followed, which was his first taste of formal employment. The account presented in chapter 2 complicates dominant critiques of humanitarian and emergency responses, including Ebola, that emphasize how state and other bureaucratic entities opportunistically use emergencies to extend their reach and influence at the expense of ordinary people. Here, in a notably urban context, grassroots organizing before the outbreak was itself quite bureaucratic in form, and the bureaucratized emergency response was widely welcomed by young workers as a fairer version of the state, while those incorporated into it attempted to shape the official response in their own image.

Chapter 3 centers on the home, a central yet ambiguous space for young people in Freetown. During the Ebola emergency, people were forced to decide between caring for those close by and following official guidance that emphasized distancing from others. Contrary to public health messaging at the time, however, such ambiguities were far from novel; rather, Ebola represented a new manifestation of an old problem. I describe three conflicts of care among young people in the neighborhood and those they lived with, which boiled down to the ambiguities of living with two coexisting sets of expectation associated with the overlapping social orders of family and business. The fundamental irreconcilability of the two logics is a definitive factor in the current manifestation of what has been called the crisis of youth in Africa.

Chapter 4 describes two events in the neighborhood during Ebola. The first was a three-day lockdown in which a popular yet contentious distribution of food took place at the local mosque. The second was a large-scale baby-naming ceremony performed by James and Aisha, a young unmarried couple who had their first child during the state of emergency. These events serve to illustrate what I call the “extraordinary ordinary,” referring to the unusual openings for prized notions of ordinary life to unfold during emergencies, particularly for those for whom crisis of one sort or another is more the norm rather than the exception. Although ongoing challenges and inequalities did not disappear and were in some cases exacerbated by the official Ebola response, young people discovered potential in a number of the features of the emergency, including the transformed state, the atmosphere of urgency, collective attention on the near future, and the unusual capacity for family rituals to be adapted.

Chapter 5 continues the theme of family ritual, in this case at the other end of the life course, recounting the untimely deaths of two women from the neighborhood. Marie was buried according to official Ebola protocol, while Rachel was buried in a hybrid “secret burial”. Mourners of both faced unusual challenges in enacting what anthropologists term “good death” as they encountered sizable regulations on customary mortuary ritual. Yet, both burials, while fraught, remained meaningful. To unpack this, I examine the racial categories of white and black used by mourners to describe different types of burials during the emergency. Buried beneath the normative tensions engendered in these racial categories was a conflict between, on the one hand, the new authorities and protocols of the state of emergency and, on the other hand, established public authorities and bureaucratic channels. Navigating this disjuncture was a key characteristic of living through the emergency, which came to the fore when people were confronted with the demands of pressing social obligations.

In chapter 6, I describe how I navigated an unexpected emergency in the course of a long-term ethnographic research project and outline some of the key lessons I learned along the way for researching crisis. I highlight what I consider to be three core tenets of the anthropological method, which were key in producing this book: flexibility, personal relationships, and theory from the home. During emergencies it is common for anthropological research methods to be compromised in favor of rapid policy-oriented research. This chapter makes the case for not abandoning what anthropologists—and social scientists employing ethnographic methods—can uniquely bring to the table. My aim in chapter 6 is to usefully make this case to readers who are not anthropologists while also providing practical insights from my personal experiences for anthropologists and students faced with similar questions and conditions to those that I faced during Ebola.