5 BLACK AND WHITE DEATH
On the afternoon of August 6, 2015, I received a text message from James Bangura: “Auntie Marie’s condition is bad, and she has been admitted to the hospital and is in the isolation ward.”
As described in chapter 4, James Bangura and Aisha held a naming ceremony for their newborn son during Ebola. Despite state of emergency regulations on gatherings and difficulties in securing funds during the emergency, the young couple found unusual meaning and possibility in a traditional yet adapted life-course ritual. This chapter examines ritual at the other of the life course. Only a few months before the baby naming ceremony, James’s family—who were hosting me in their family compound at the time—were in the midst of another life crisis.1 Marie, the sister of James’s stepmother Leah (whom we first met in chapter 3), had come to live in the compound after her speedy marriage to a visiting diasporic Sierra Leonean and German national. Months after his return to Europe, Marie unexpectedly died due to pregnancy complications. How were the family to honor and grieve Marie when a traditional burial and funeral were now strictly prohibited due to risks of Ebola transmission?
Funerals during the Ebola epidemic were unusually heightened occasions. Those close to the deceased faced expected emotional and logistical challenges after loss that were often intensified when confronted with the demands of the public health intervention. Regulation of burials was one of the five key pillars of the official Ebola response. This made burials almost emblematic of the emergency as a whole. At the same time, activity around death often has a heightened feel to it. In Freetown while proximity to death in close-knit and poorly serviced communities is almost a predictable part of day-to-day life, the performance of appropriate funerary practices remains perhaps the most revered of social obligations.
Such attitudes to burial can be ascribed to not only belief systems that emphasize the dynamic relationship between the world of the living and the dead but also the day-to-day practices of family life and maintenance. Abner Cohen, who did fieldwork with Freetown Krio families in the 1960s and 1970s, expressed it like this: “To put it bluntly, your ‘family’ consists of the persons who come, with presents and contributions in hand, to eat, drink, or grieve in your ceremonials.”2 Anthropologists have long attended to the ways that “good death” is enacted socially through the performance of appropriate funerary ritual. Good death is not only an act of care for the deceased but is also often understood as a key process through which social order among the living is restored in the aftermath of loss.3 Conversely, “bad death” can create crisis in its own right.4
During the Ebola epidemic, securing good death by traditional standards was particularly challenging. Since the corpses of Ebola victims are highly contagious, there is considerable risk of transmission during funerals through ritual body washing and contact between mourners. During the early stages of the outbreak, bodies were left in the street, and mortuaries overflowed. Not surprisingly, then, burial practices became highly regulated by national and international authorities within the state of emergency. Regardless of the Ebola status of the deceased—and the majority of deaths during the emergency were not caused by the disease—all burials were legally supposed to be performed by official burial teams, often in purpose-built cemeteries.
Burial teams—such as Peter’s team described in chapter 2—were staffed primarily by young men working under the auspices of the Ministry of Health and international NGOs. The teams were trained and equipped to perform all burials according to an unfamiliar biomedical paradigm featuring clinical management and strict procedures oriented toward safety and efficiency. But efforts were made to incorporate elements of traditional burial practice, such as allowing up to ten mourners and religious leaders to be present. Both priorities were encapsulated in the slogan “safe and dignified burials.” For home deaths, family members were required to call the 117 emergency service, which would coordinate with a burial team stationed in the vicinity to collect the body within twenty-four hours. If the death occurred in a medical facility, staff would coordinate with the team. Freetown was divided into four bases, with about twenty teams serving the city. The teams were initially managed by the Ministry of Health, but in October 2014 many of the responsibilities of managing, recruiting, training, and funding were handed over to NGOs. By early 2015 after more funding, training, and new management, the burial teams became proficient at performing their duties like clockwork, as an international manager once told me.
Some people tried to avoid these regulations altogether, choosing to perform illegal secret burials, in which, for example, they would bury in chosen neighborhood cemeteries and family plots rather than at new unfamiliar Ebola cemeteries. Secret burials, while technically illegal under state of emergency bylaws, were often arranged in coordination with established public authorities such as the police, the city council, and the military (as opposed to the novel burial teams) also though at the risk of a hefty punishment.
Burials therefore presented an apparent tension between established ways of dealing with death and efficient epidemic management. Below the surface was a conflict between, on one hand, the expectations of authorities and recruits within the international public health intervention and state of emergency and, on the other hand, those of established public authorities and communities on the ground. In rural settings in particular, this conflict was often insurmountable. Official burial teams sometimes encountered active resistance from village communities5 or, in less overt ways, intruded in and undermined the effectiveness of local efforts at safe burial.6 In Freetown, however, conflict around management of the dead was met with considerable amounts of negotiation and compromise. This chapter in part aims to explain how and why city dwellers caught up in the middle of this conflict understood its severity and yet were equipped to respond in such seemingly balanced ways.
The language that was used to describe different types of burials and death during the epidemic tells us a lot. The terminology in Freetown was strikingly racial. Broadly speaking, the official Ebola burials that were performed by the burial teams were unofficially dubbed “white” death. Secret burials, by contrast, were known as “black” death, being more aligned to customary practices. Yet, the differences were not, as might be expected, black and white. Rather, the boundaries between black and white death were porous and often blurry. Secret burials were more private than many normal Freetown burials and required extensive bureaucratic navigation and incorporation of new safety protocols. Official white burials were performed not by White foreigners but instead primarily young Black Sierra Leonean men who served as formally employed gatekeepers of the public health intervention.
“Black” and “white” are quotidian reference points in Freetown, representing primary yet complex overlapping social categories through which norms, values, and practices are understood. During the emergency these categories were destabilized and fraught—expressed in the notion of two worlds that often accompanies global health and humanitarian initiatives—and yet took on heightened explanatory value for ordinary people. The coding of burials in racial terms points to Sierra Leone’s long history of integration into the Atlantic world, outlined in chapter 1. Sierra Leone was the primary site of capture for slaves sent to North America. Foreign intervention in Africa, going back to the slave trade and British colonialism, has always come with violent and oppressive processes of racialization, which the international intervention during Ebola could not shake off. Yet, Freetown residents were also drawing on the city’s deep-rooted cosmopolitism, including its origin as a refuge for freed slaves, in which nonessentialized, flexible notions of race have rich historical precedence. They were thus able to assemble a genuinely meaningful framework for negotiating loss in the midst of an intervention and emergency.
Two Burials
Marie was a charismatic and worldly woman in her late thirties. She was the sister of James’s stepmother Leah and had come to live with us a few months earlier after her marriage to a German citizen of Sierra Leonean origin, with whom she had become pregnant. Marie was preparing to join her husband, referred to in the Bangura family as “the German,” in Europe, a task complicated by the Ebola emergency because Freetown’s German consulate had stopped issuing visas. For Marie, the obstacles she faced reflected not only the stretching of bureaucratic channels by the regional and global crisis of Ebola but also perceived jealousies among her extended family and neighbors in Freetown. As she put it to me once, “You know, Black people, we have Black mind.” It was because of these perceived jealousies that she had moved from the house where she had been living to stay with us in the Bangura family compound, where Leah lived. Marie had been unwell for several weeks. While her illness did not seem serious, it was persistent. Helped by Leah, Marie sought medical attention, but the efforts were fruitless. Finally, Marie collapsed and was taken to the Cottage Hospital in Freetown’s old Fourah Bay area. The city’s medical system was overstretched by Ebola; many patients were either refused admission or resisted going for fear of being (mis)diagnosed as positive for Ebola. A few hours after James sent his text message, he called to tell me that Marie had died in the hospital.
I went straight to the hospital, feeling that it was expected of me. I had often observed the importance of friends and family coming close in times of crisis. I met James, his uncle Samuel, one of his cousins, his stepbrother Kei, and a neighbor who worked as a technician in the hospital. The group was attempting to make arrangements for Marie’s burial. Their efforts centered on gaining access to the body so they could perform the burial themselves; this was illegal under the state of emergency bylaws. Regardless of the deceased’s Ebola status, all burials during the state of emergency were to be performed by official teams at the new NGO-managed Waterloo Cemetery in eastern Freetown. Consultations with the mortuary staff made it clear that illegal access to the body in order to perform a secret burial—still common for families with the right connections and the ability to make sufficient payments—was out of the question. The body was still in the isolation ward and therefore difficult to access, especially after a recent dispute between the medical and mortuary staff over the distribution of payments.
FIGURE 4. Ebola burial team members and mourners at the Waterloo Cemetery.
We returned to the hospital the next morning. The test results were negative for both Ebola and malaria. There were further negotiations with hospital staff over whether Marie’s body could be dressed and perfumed before the burial team took her. A family friend and former nurse at the hospital had volunteered to perform this duty dressed in personal protective equipment. The request was refused on the grounds that the “White doctors would not allow it.” Instead, the body was put into a standardized body bag, carried to the white van used by the burial team to transport corpses, and taken to the Waterloo Cemetery on the outskirts of town (figure 4).
We arrived at the cemetery before the team, which had to collect other bodies on the way. Hundreds of mourners were waiting to witness burials. When our team came, we were called into the cemetery by a young man wearing tinted-blue sunglasses and a tight matching vest and shorts made of Africana fabric. He looked as though he had stepped out of a Nigerian afrobeat music video but was in fact responsible for the challenging task of coordinating the mourners, the burial teams, and cemetery staff. The young men in the team, some of whom I recognized from my research, lowered the body into the pre-dug plot assigned to Marie. Francis, Marie’s elder brother, had bought a wooden mesh that was placed over the body bag (there had been no time to make a coffin) so that dirt was not cast disrespectfully directly onto the naked body. After a short negotiation with the burial team supervisor, the body bag was opened so that the family could take one last look at Marie’s face. Marie’s twin brother, a filmmaker by trade, was recording the proceedings closely, partly for Marie’s husband in Germany. The eight or so mourners huddled together, taking photos on their smartphones. With no pastor available and uncertain how to proceed in this unfamiliar and unusually institutionalized environment, James spontaneously took the lead. He recited the Lord’s Prayer, stoically declaring, in the manner of a cleric at the graveside, that “God marks our time to die for a purpose that we don’t know or understand.” A metal sign was erected with Marie’s personal details, including the plot number, to make it easier for the family to locate the grave in the future.
When we got back to the compound, Leah served us large plates of groundnut soup with fish and rice, which she had prepared for those who would come to tel osh (share their sympathies). The people who had been at the cemetery reported what they had witnessed. They spoke of the horror and cruelty of Ebola: long rows of freshly dug graves, the arrival of the burial team with thirteen bodies (a figure regularly quoted in the compound in the coming weeks), all children apart from Marie, and, perhaps most powerfully, the grave of a young woman that was being filled in with no mourners present. James admitted that this was what finally brought him to tears. At the same time, their reports sounded notes of admiration. The orderly running of the cemetery, involving independent coordination between gravediggers and the burial team (without family involvement), and the measured neatness in the arrangement of plots were by turn unfamiliar and impressive. Francis, Marie and Leah’s older brother, presented Leah with a bag containing the white shawl and perfume he had bought in the hope of being able to dress Marie. This served as the necessary evidence that he had tried his hardest to bury their sister according to established norms.
Leah reflected later that “Ebola means that you don’t feel it when somebody dies. They do it [the burial] so quickly, but then you will sit down and remember them, imagine about them.” This profound comment seemed to crystallize the cruelty of Ebola when the pressing and emotionally charged obligations surrounding death became entangled with the imposing presence of a novel public health intervention. The immediacy of the Ebola emergency and present-oriented pressures to fight it were difficult to square with the enduring feeling of obligations surrounding good death in Sierra Leone, in which the deceased’s eternal fate lay in the balance.
Soon after hearing that Marie had died, James’s cousin asked fearfully whether she might have had Ebola and was sharply criticized by other family members for expressing self-concern at an inappropriate time. It was not that the risk of catching Ebola was not taken seriously—many of those in the compound were taking precautions against it and were critical of those who did not—but that fear of infection, at least on paper, was considered temporary and individual compared to the obligations that arose from the death of a close family member or friend. As Peter, the motorbike taxi rider and burial team worker, once put it to me, “In Sierra Leone we care about the person more once they have died than when they are alive.”
There was a powerful atmosphere of unresolved anxiety in the compound in the weeks after Marie’s death reflecting the incompleteness of her life—her pregnancy and planned migration to Europe—and the uncertainty about the cause of her death. This was compounded by the incompleteness of the funerary rites. Burial teams were tasked with performing burials on the same day that the body was collected, which created significant time pressures for mourners. Muslim burials in Freetown are typically performed soon after the death; following the ritual washing and wrapping of the body in a lapa (sheet), there is a procession from the local mosque or house of the deceased to the cemetery. Christian burials often take place weeks after a death, leaving time to prepare a coffin, kasanka (special clothes for the corpse), badges with pictures of the deceased, personalized service booklets, and food and drink. A wekin (vigil) is usually held the night before the burial, followed by a church service in the morning and a procession to the cemetery, often involving uniformed bands. At times, bodies are transported from Freetown to natal villages for burial in family plots alongside prominent ancestors. Restrictions on gatherings made Muslim memorial services—typically on the first, third, fourth, and fortieth days after the death—challenging to perform. The handling of corpses was prohibited for risk of infection, and this precluded the ritual washing of bodies, performed at home or in mortuaries, as well as the ceremonies conducted by secret societies after their members pass away.
In Sierra Leone, the treatment of the dead—including those responsible for performing key tasks and the manner and locations in which burials are performed—are closely connected to the status of the deceased. Burials are key means through which claims to land are made, especially in rural contexts, and it is through respectable burial in the presence of elders that the link between the ancestors and the living is maintained and that blessings for the community secured. Funerals and memorial services are also important opportunities for family meetings, at which disputes are voiced and settled in the presence of elders and stakeholders. Negotiations often included the care of dependents of the deceased and distribution of the deceased’s property.7 Burial teams, however, were trained to be blind to the status of the deceased and their families, ensuring the use of the same type of body bags, the same cemetery, and the same treatment for all. Thus, Ebola was seen as presenting a greater challenge in some cases than in others.
This did not, however, preclude adaptation, often improvised on the ground. Marie’s mourners’ attempted to negotiate certain allowances at the Waterloo cemetery and afterward in the arrangements for memorialization. Immediately after her burial, Marie’s family started planning a memorial service—adapted from the Muslim forty days ceremony—that would be less hampered by regulation than the burial, allowing the family to mark Marie’s death in a more fitting manner. For several weeks after the death, her German husband had been uncommunicative and did not readily contribute to expenses that the family was incurring. During this period rumors, albeit hotly debated and contested, circulated in the neighborhood and beyond that the German had visited Freetown every few years, each time becoming attached to women who died soon after. In these narratives he was symbolically transformed from a well-meaning “white” European citizen who could help the family to a “black” ritualist (someone who uses witchcraft to sacrifice others for personal profit).8
Ultimately, Marie’s burial was performed not according to traditional standards but instead according to the protocols of an all-encompassing bureaucratic system, which dictated that every person who died, regardless of whether they were among the close to the recorded four thousand Sierra Leoneans who died from Ebola, was buried as if they had contracted the disease. Although Marie tested negative, she was nevertheless buried as if she had Ebola and thus became a victim so to speak of mass death. Instead of a family plot or a local cemetery, where her body would have been interred alongside family or community members of previous generations, Marie was buried among people who had in common only that they had died during the time of Ebola. The number assigned by the burial team indicated statistically and spatially, in the neat rows of the recently established Waterloo cemetery, where Marie fell in this mass death. The community in which she was buried did not mirror the one in which she had lived but rather the time and circumstances of her death.
Since Marie died in hospital, her family had no choice but to work with the Ebola authorities. In many other cases families simply failed to report a death to the burial teams, preferring to perform burials themselves. Although referred to as secret burials, prohibited under the state of emergency and punishable by heavy fines and arrest, these funerals were not inevitably deemed illegal; they resulted from negotiations with established bureaucratic and legal structures that were often perceived to carry more weight than new Ebola authorities. The secret burials too were highly structured, with built-in—though far from watertight—safety measures. By means of permission, assistance, and documentation from authorities such as the Freetown City Council (who issued Ebola-free death certificates), the police and their postmortem teams (who often administered their own Ebola tests), mortuary workers, ambulance drivers, and the military, it was possible for mourners to perform burials themselves at places and times of their own choosing. Negotiating with these gatekeepers typically required large payments (roughly US$400) or high-level connections, so they were undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, when people of high status died. In my neighborhood, local representatives of the city council became experts in managing secret burials; they were already responsible for managing the local cemetery. Their most prominent project, conceived before but executed during and after the emergency, was erecting a wall around the cemetery, in part to prevent street youths from congregating there. Their authority and their connections to the city’s existing bureaucratic institutions, the local community, and the cemetery meant that council members were well positioned to broker secret burials.
While the burial teams were criticized for performing burials too hastily, the secret alternatives could be too slow. In June 2015 I attended the burial of Rachel, a nurse and a prominent member of a local Pentecostal church a few minutes’ walk from where I lived, who had reportedly tested negative for Ebola. Her body was being kept in the mortuary of a military hospital not too far away. Her husband, a teacher in a local school, had planned to perform the burial the previous day, when a large number of mourners had gathered at the hospital for a service, but he was unable to secure all the necessary documentation in time. The next day after permission was received and arrangements were made with council representatives for the grave to be dug in the local cemetery, Rachel’s body was transported, effectively in disguise, from the mortuary to the cemetery gates in an ambulance, with military personnel accompanying as an extra security measure. The Christian practice of a wekin (vigil) the night before the burial at the house of the deceased was abandoned, and—inverting the usual practice—a church service was performed after the burial without the body present. Some local young men volunteered to carry the coffin to the grave after purposefully donning the disposable blue medical gloves that were handed out as an Ebola-inspired safety precaution. The ambulance hurriedly left the scene. As the body was lowered into the ground, uniformed girls from Rachel’s husband’s school sang a hymn. Before they had finished, the volunteers had already begun helping the regular cemetery gravediggers to fill in the grave, hoping to speed up the job. As the crowd—mostly dressed in black and white—was dispersing, a local fixer collected money to tip the gravediggers and the cemetery staff. The remaining mourners stood by, carefully observing the filling in of the grave and the collecting and counting of the money. In the heat of the midday sun, it occurred to me that the gravediggers, volunteers, and witnesses were performing two stressful tasks: burying a loved one and burying the evidence. The burial was improvised and hybrid, informed by enduring obligations of customary funerary obligations yet adapted with respectful reference to the biomedical norms introduced by burial teams as well as genuine acknowledgment of the risks of infection and punishment for illegal burial.
“Black” and “White” Social Orders
Marie’s and Rachel’s families and mourners encountered unusual obstacles along the established pathways for transforming unexpected and premature loss into good death. In the case of Marie, only a handful of mourners attended the burial, contributing to a feeling of incompleteness in the grieving process, articulated with such clarity by Leah, Marie’s sister. Rachel’s burial entailed unusual degrees of adaptation and caution in circumventing state of emergency bylaws. Difficulties in achieving good death are commonplace in emergencies, particularly in wartime.9 But during Ebola, the centralized regulation and management of mortuary practices were not collateral challenges but instead were the principle aims of the internationally led public health intervention. Around death, mourners came into direct contact with a defining social conflict of the emergency: “local” beliefs and practices versus those of the international response.
Yet, in Freetown and almost certainly beyond, this conflict was far from clear-cut. The simultaneous expressions of praise and horror that I heard from my fellow mourners at the Waterloo cemetery point to such ambiguity. They suggested that Marie’s Ebola burial did not render it meaningless, even if a good death, as customarily measured, was not achieved. Equally, while Rachel’s burial was technically illegal under state of emergency bylaws, it nonetheless took on new safety features and a claim to legality by virtue of having navigated an alternative yet arguably more established bureaucratic process involving a number of public authorities. While burials during Ebola were occasions of heightened tension, conflict, and pain, they contained within them a great deal of compromise and flexibility.10
How can we account for these apparently contradictory dynamics? How did Freetown residents account for them? The coding of burials in a racial language of black and white is a major clue. These categories are used in Freetown to refer to different social orders and sets of cultural norms and values that coexist in the city and were thus a ready-made framework for making sense of death and burial during Ebola. “Black” and “white” are Sierra Leonean and in particular Freetown-centric terms for describing the types of contradictory yet porous social orders that we have encountered in previous chapters: for example, the two worlds of international intervention in chapter 1, the competing expectations around involvement in the official Ebola response in chapter 2, the relational order of kinship versus the transactional order of business in the chapter 3, and tradition versus adaptation in coming-of-age ceremonies in chapter 4.
“Black,” also sometimes called “African,” typically refers to local culture, while “white” refers to foreign Western culture. In the white system, as it is sometimes described, people are seen to act according to fixed principles and cannot be convinced to alter their professional responsibilities. The burial teams were formally trained to adhere to this ideal, which included treating all dead bodies and mourning families the same regardless of age, status, or personal connections. In the black system, by contrast, people are viewed as showing bias toward some over others, particularly their own people (family, friends, community) and sometimes those more senior or willing to compensate appropriately.
The white and black categories are for most people both positive and negative in their valence, often depending on the circumstances. The white system might be admired as principled, fair, and necessary for development, while the black system is derided as backward, selfish, and, in a Fanon-esque way, self-destructive.11 Yet, at other times the alternative evaluations are made, with the black system indexing enduring values such as tradition, care, and respectability as well as adaptability and resilience, while the white system is viewed as having only material and temporary value, and as oppressive and cruel. During Ebola, these opposing moral evaluations became starker than usual. The black system was represented in a dominant discourse in the official Ebola response as an obstacle to containing the outbreak. As a Sierra Leonean burial team supervisor once told me, “Black culture is the problem here.” Yet, for many the positives were just as strongly felt particularly in terms of traditional commitments to care and support, which were crucial during the hard times of the emergency.
The categories of black and white are also used in Freetown to index contrasting temporal orientations, a recurring reference point throughout my fieldwork there. “White time” referenced an abstract ideal of events occurring in a predetermined and predictable manner that was often at odds with the reality of life (and death) in Freetown, which necessitates operating in “black time.” Through the white lens this might be seen as being late, but through the black lens it signaled adherence to an implicit sense of the “right” time, which factored in the juggling of social obligations as well as the endless practical obstacles—broken-down cars, unavailable funds, sudden illness or death—that Freetown residents routinely navigate. Burials are a heightened case of this, where the temporal consequences include the eternal fate of the deceased and the most enduring of social and ritual obligations, yet volatile circumstances require flexibility and adaptability in the moment. As death in the time of Ebola made plain, the clockwork of white time—while exemplifying a Weberian ideal of bureaucratic order—presented a form of cruel impersonal disorder, a metronomic punctuality opposed to the comforting rhythm of activity typically associated with good death.
Alongside the discursive mobilization of the categories of black and white by my interlocutors, the categories also took on embodied forms. Anthropologists of Sierra Leone have pointed to the body as a primary site where the country’s traumatic history of slavery holds enduring meaning in day-to-day movements through historically embedded landscapes and in ritual.12 The body is also widely regarded by anthropologists as a primary locus of racialization.13 Yet, bodily performance and embodied memory escape the limits of discourse. Not only are they particularly prone to holding violent and traumatic histories, but they also allow for flexibility and ambiguity beyond what is discursively possible. The centrality of the body in funerary ritual of both the dead and the living may explain why burials were key sites for the resurfacing of the black and the white during the emergency.14
In black death, the body was recognized as a member of a family and a community and would both gain safe passage to the world by coming through religiously informed ritual and receive a final claim to status among the living. Secret burials aimed to achieve this by adhering as much as possible to existing norms and to work through established, though marginalized, bureaucratic and authoritative channels. In white death the body was hazardous material, requiring specialist training to handle and dispose of safely in order to protect the corporeal world from the further spread of Ebola. Burials performed by the burial teams constituted the dead as part of a cruel mass death, in large measure because of the teams’ strict adherence to uniform, biomedically informed procedures that treated all the dead as Ebola victims regardless of their cause of death.
While the black and white categories reference cultural norms and practices as well as individual and collective identities, the boundaries between each are in practice blurred and shifting in part because of their embodied as well as discursive character. As we have seen throughout this book, including in this chapter, people regularly transformed and mediated between them, seemingly taking on features of both. The gatekeeper of the Waterloo cemetery and, by extension, the white system of the official Ebola response, dressed not in the uniform of a recognizable official but instead in the black style of a raray boy (street youth). The permanent hospital staff would not allow access to Marie’s body because of the White doctors, thus aligning themselves with institutional professionalism over influence through personal connections. The local representatives of the city council brokered secret burials, similar to pre-Ebola burials but adapted for the emergency. The German, the gatekeeper of the connection to Europe of Marie and her family, was transformed from a “white” European to a “black” representative of Freetown’s illicit underworld. And perhaps my own journey as an anthropologist who was socialized by my hosts from “white” to “black,” although not in any linear or stable way. In other words, the balancing of the white and black systems is required to varying degrees of all Freetown residents on a daily basis. During the emergency and the large-scale humanitarian and public health intervention that came with it, however, the black and white social orders were more in evidence and more volatile than usual.15
In Sierra Leone these racial categories recall a long history of violent integration into the Atlantic world, outlined in greater detail in chapter 1. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, Sierra Leone became a major site of extraction for slaves who were mostly sent to North America. Freetown was established in 1792 by immigrant free persons of color and Black Londoners after the British ban on the international slave trade, what is sometimes considered the first humanitarian project. The descendants of these founders, who were joined by waves of recaptives (Black Africans illegally held on slave ships and rescued by the Royal Navy) and migrating Black British colonial subjects, became known as the Krio, also the name of Sierra Leone’s dominant spoken language, an English Creole. The Krio as an ethnic group came to be seen as simultaneously and alternately “black,” through their historic link to slavery, diaspora, and colonial racism, and “white,” through their sometimes elite status in Freetown, secured through identification with British imperial institutions and culture: Christian practice, small family sizes, English-sounding names, European dress, property ownership, and architectural styles that retain a distinctive presence in Freetown. The Krio thus positioned themselves as “interpreters of Western culture to other Africans,”16 through which their elite status in the colonial administration was at times secured, although such positions equally led to racist resentment by White authorities who labeled them “savvy niggers” and “trousered Africans.” While the Krio are now a minority in Freetown, their history is key to the formation of nonessentialized understandings of race in the city—within a general context of often severe racism—and in providing an enduring model of brokerage, mediation, and transformation between “black” and “white,” which became starkly evident during the Ebola emergency among actors from a wide range of backgrounds.
Freetown has continued to serve as an unstable global hub in the postcolonial period, where the balancing of black and white systems is of continued significance. The civil war saw the rise of NGOs, humanitarian interventions, and internationally led liberal peace-building initiatives, along with the proliferation of human rights and development discourses. Yet, rather than eliminating distinctions between those of the black and white systems, as universalist discourses might be expected to do, these categories have in some senses been pitted against each other.17 Critical analyses of the Ebola emergency have similarly highlighted the conflict between local culture and foreign norms or have shown how local culture was largely neglected by the international response, thus reinforcing rather than blurring the fault line between the two and forcing the marginalized to come up with creative solutions.18
But black and white death adds another layer to this story in which disruption to and the continuity of meaningful social processes were not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, these categories reveal violence structurally embedded within systems of global health and humanitarianism. Humanitarians might consider themselves as being blind to race by their alignment to (notably Western) notions of universal needs. But humanitarianism is in practice, of course, historically and culturally contingent. As an overtly foreign intervention, the official Ebola response was meaningful in relation to a specific regional history of coercive intervention that has been accompanied by imported notions of race. Yet, on the other hand, racial categories have become thoroughly incorporated and reworked into meaningful conceptual frameworks and ways of getting by and through the life course in Freetown. In this process, they have taken on a degree of fluidity that differs from the more fixed, essentialized understandings of race that are commonplace in the West. While they do connote what is distinct—and opposed—between different social orders, they also contain within them the possibility for creative brokerage.
Marie’s and Rachel’s unexpected deaths, like that of many others during the epidemic, tore at the fabric of the family and the community. Mourners’ attempts to deal with their losses were complicated by a public health intervention in which regulation and management of death and burial was a priority. Challenges in enacting good death—a principle means of maintaining and reproducing social order in the face of disorder—redefined not only responses to death during Ebola but also experiences of the emergency more broadly. Official Ebola burials were a key component of the epidemiological response, yet it was those same burial practices that constituted those who received them—a far greater number than those who died from the disease—as part of the mass death of Ebola in mourner’s eyes. Understandably, if you were buried like an Ebola victim, then you were an Ebola victim.
Freetown residents, however, were not working with a singular notion of order in their approaches to good death and burial but instead were drawing on two social “orders”: black and white. It was not simply that white order represented disorder, although the conflict was acknowledged in this language. Rather, both simultaneously represented order and disorder for residents. Buried beneath these normative tensions 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, connections, and bureaucratic channels. Navigating this disjuncture was a key characteristic of living through the emergency, which came to the fore when confronted with the demands of pressing obligations, such as those surrounding death. The continuity of social life through the performance of ongoing practices in negotiation with familiar authorities, social networks, and temporal expectations had to be reconciled with the dangers of the Ebola virus and the novel regulations and structures of the state of emergency.
However, the challenges that were faced by Marie’s and Rachel’s mourners were not entirely unfamiliar. Securing good death is never straightforward in Freetown’s unpredictable environment, where flexibility in the performance of ritual is often a necessity. By virtue of the close-knit nature of family and community life, not to mention widespread material scarcity and lack of adequate medical facilities, death is always close at hand regardless of whether an unusual epidemic such as Ebola is at large. Tensions, conflict, and controversy are often present at funerals, along with the recognition that things might not go according to plan.
This chapter, building on earlier chapters, has emphasized how deep histories of crisis are prone to coming to the fore when an emergency hits. But it has also emphasized that the texture and character of day-to-day life and death immediately preceding an emergency must also be taken into serious account. This is particularly important, because without this perspective there is the temptation to impose crude models and narratives onto emergencies, such as seeing emergencies as complete ruptures from the dynamics of “ordinary” life or simply as more extreme versions of it. While some frameworks tend to emphasize the ways that preexisting inequalities are extended, others point to the ways that normal power relations are upended, at least temporarily. While both of these models are valid and often well-meaning, they can unintentionally deny the agency of people caught up in emergencies to make sense of it in their own terms. Such a perspective, by contrast, reveals how ruptures and continuities coexist during emergencies. This perspective does not take away from the hardships that people face in emergencies that are well beyond their control—or imposed on them from outside or above—but does acknowledge their active role in determining how to understand and negotiate the challenges that emergencies present. These themes are the springboard for the discussion in chapter 6 about how long-standing anthropological methods and theory can best attend to emergencies today.