2 HAZARD PAY
One morning I received a disturbing phone call from a young man known as Human Right. The previous night he was involved in a serious accident on his motorbike and was in desperate need of medical attention. A traffic policeman standing by the side of the road had gestured for him to pull over. Human Right swerved out the way, and the policeman grabbed onto him. Human Right came flying off his bike and landed on an exposed iron rod, which penetrated his groin, narrowly missing his testicles. Human Right spent the night in a crowded cell while his injury went untreated.
Human Right was the self-given nickname of a taxi driver in his late twenties. He worked for Foday and a number of other taxi operators in the neighborhood, which had become like a second home to him. Human Right would normally crash with friends or sleep in the car, but recently he had been staying at his apprentice’s place. The apprentice, known by his own nickname, Balloon Burst, had a small room near his family compound. I was friendly with both, and they would regularly invite me to ride along with them.
Human Right had a reputation for being something of a free agent. He was a technically gifted and confident driver who knew every backroad in town. He would find miraculous gaps in traffic jams, maneuver around impossibly tight corners, and traverse streets that, in the rainy season, were more river than road. While driving passengers, he loved to give informal lecturers, full of street slang, on topics such as Rastafarian spirituality, national politics, entrepreneurialism, and Christian morality. Human Right’s family lived in the East End (or “East Coast,” as he liked to call it), and he would visit them most days that he was working, along with friends dotted around town. Although he relied on the “fast money” he earned on the road, the actual job of taxi driving never really felt like Human Right’s primary motivation; it was more a vehicle for self-expression and maintaining social relationships strung across the city.
Human Right began working on the streets at age fourteen, when he dropped out of school because of financial hardship faced by his parents. His father, who once enjoyed a regular salary working for a shipping company, had suffered debilitating physical injuries; he now needed a crutch to walk. He had not been able to find regular work after the economy had reopened in the early 2000s after the civil war. Human Right was initially an apprentice on a poda poda (minibus taxi), gathering passengers and collecting money. This was a common route to becoming a driver; it was expected that drivers would teach apprentices to drive on the side. For many years now, Human Right had worked on commission for taxi operators and owners while also teaching many apprentices to drive.
Balloon Burst was Human Right’s apprentice, but they had become distanced in the months preceding the accident. Balloon Burst, who shared his small room with his partner and their baby daughter, was not happy with his boss regularly staying over. So, Human Right, somewhat dejected, moved back to the East End. Things were not looking much better on the business front. It had been almost a year since he bought a taxi, a proud symbol of self-reliance. But the car was old and banged up, requiring too much maintenance for the investment to pay off. He sold the car for a small fee and bought two old motorbikes with additional money borrowed from his mother, who ran a rotating credit association with women from their church. The bikes were to be operated commercially as okada (motorbike taxis). But Human Right was struggling to earn enough to pay back the debt. Regulations on travel and commercial transport during the Ebola state of emergency as well as lockdowns and curfews had slowed business. “The streets are dry,” Human Right told me one evening when we were driving around together.
Okada are a popular means of commercial transport in Freetown. They have the advantage of being able to climb steep unpaved roads, which are plentiful in the mountainous and rapidly growing city. Motorbikes can also weave through traffic jams in the old narrow streets downtown. Working as an okada rider is one of few options for uneducated young men to earn an income. But it is not an easy job. Accidents are not uncommon, and victimization by aggressive policing is routine.
Human Right’s accident had not come out of nowhere. In fact, he had several minor mishaps on the bike in a matter of weeks. Only a few days before the accident I had received a call from Human Right’s mother, who was worried about the bind that her son was in. She recalled a recent dream in which an intimidating gang of boys had come to the family home asking for Human Right. She fended them off but feared that they would find him elsewhere.
The dream was alarming on several levels. Psychologically, it spoke to a son’s vulnerability and a mother’s helplessness to protect him and perhaps to a mother’s feelings of guilt. But the dream was also prophetic, preempting a crisis that was to come while containing echoes of traumatic history. When the rebel soldiers entered Freetown during the civil war, Human Right’s family had fled from their home, taking refuge in the abandoned the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (nicknamed “Cottage Hospital”) downtown.
When I got the call the day after the accident, Balloon Burst and I traveled across town, where we met Human Right along with his distraught mother, father, and sister outside a small local pharmacy. I had often witnessed and felt the strong obligations for family and friends to come close during such moments of crisis. It was this very impulse that made Ebola at times doubly difficult. Attempts to care for friends of family in need, including in cases that had nothing directly to do with the disease, could be met with additional challenges.
It was not only Human Right’s family and friends who rallied around him. Human Right also received the support from his fellow okada riders by way of the Sierra Leone Commercial Bike Riders Union (BRU). A sizable group had gathered to protest Human Right’s abuse at the hands of the police, led by a union official. The case gained traction in part because it demonstrated so overtly the kind of abuse of police power that okada riders routinely experience. The group entered the police station to negotiate Human Right’s release from custody and to demand that the officer who had forcibly pulled him from his bike be brought to justice. The authorities at the station, undoubtedly feeling under pressure, issued a report that entitled Human Right to medical compensation. But Human Right’s family deemed the bureaucratic procedures too long-winded to enact. The family, knowing that an immediate full payment would not be necessary, decided to go to the local pharmacy to have the wound stitched up. Human Right was stoic, not showing signs of pain. We discussed making arrangements for him to come back and stay in our neighborhood again, given that his return to the East End had been so ill-fated.
Human Right’s accident revealed with unusual visibility—not least through the different parties that showed up—the conflation of social, economic, and political forces that structure everyday life and work for ordinary young people in Freetown. Challenges in intimate relationships, such as between Human Right and his family and apprentice, are inseparable from financial pressures and physical dangers. In Freetown’s tough informal economy, the risk of injury or death is the price demanded for sourcing an income. There is, of course, a broader and underlying political reality that the BRU protest pointed to, namely that the underresourced state apparatus is simultaneously coercive and neglectful toward ordinary workers.
Both of these characteristics—coerciveness and neglect—are embodied by Freetown’s police force. Police officers are a visible presence at major junctions and roundabouts. In a crowded city with close to no traffic lights, they serve a welcome function in moving traffic along. But as I learned from my own experience of driving in Freetown (and being taught to drive there in a taxi), it does not take long to grow resentful of the traffic police. They are notorious for opportunistically extracting fines and bribes from okada riders and taxi drivers, who are both likely to have cash on hand (collected from fares) while being typically low enough in status that they pose little threat to the officers. For commercial drivers to avoid roadside abuse normally requires paying bora, a term used to describe traditional gifts given by youths to elders in rural settings. The ultimate casualties of coercive policing are the hundreds and more probably thousands of youths currently in Pademba Road, the city’s overcrowded colonial-era prison. With most of these young inmates unable to pay bribes, fines, and (especially) lawyer’s fees, they await trials that are recurringly suspended.
The police and the legal system are not, however, singularly to blame. The state does not have the available funds to maintain these institutions. Corruption by political and economic elites makes things worse, of course. But decades of international pressure by organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to “liberalize” the economy by cutting trade tariffs and reducing state expenditure and regulation gets more to the root of the problem. As a consequence, the police force creatively funds its operations from the bottom up rather than the top down. State neglect extends beyond the legal system. Roads are poorly maintained, and major infrastructure projects are outsourced to international companies, increasingly Chinese, thus limiting internal economic stimulus. There is no operational public transport system, despite various failed attempts to create one. Adequate health care is not readily available for informal workers. And decades of dwindling industry forces youths such as Human Right onto the streets in search of fast money.
This chapter follows commercial bike riders before and during the Ebola emergency, which provides a revealing perspective on the relationship between work, emergency, and the state. Ambivalent relationships with the state have long characterized commercial bike riding in Sierra Leone. The industry was developed by former rebel soldiers in the early 2000s but has become increasingly hierarchical and bureaucratic in its operations, despite continued conflict with the police. The Ebola state of emergency entailed new obstacles for informal workers, as described above, but also new opportunities for formal employment and recognition as tens of thousands of young people were recruited into the official Ebola response through the hazard pay scheme. The combination of coerciveness and neglect that has characterized marginal workers’ experience of the contemporary state shifted during the epidemic for these employees and others as the state took on a temporarily more bureaucratic and well-resourced form.
In this chapter, I describe the ways that marginal workers reconfigured their relationships with the state during the emergency by drawing on their experiences of work and associational life before the epidemic. The account presented here complicates dominant critiques of humanitarian and emergency responses, including Ebola, that emphasize how state and other bureaucratic entities opportunistically use crises to extend their reach and influence at the expense of ordinary people. Here in a notably urban context, grassroots organizing before Ebola was itself quite bureaucratic in form. The bureaucratized emergency response was widely welcomed by normally marginalized informal workers, while those incorporated into it were well equipped to shape the official response in their own image.
Fighting the State?
I regularly spotted an unusual character riding around the streets of Freetown on a motorbike. He looked as if he had stepped out of an old photo of the Black Panthers. He dressed from head to toe in elaborate outfits with military-style caps, shoes or boots so shiny you could see your reflection in them, black sunglasses, shiny silver buttons, an ID card holder around his neck, and a badge that read “Chief Inspector of Okada.” He looked subversive, cool, and rebellious while at the same time resembling a military official–cum–civil servant. I eventually began talking to this man and discovered that he was famous among the city’s commercial bike riders. He was known as Councilor.
Councilor was campaigning for the upcoming biannual bike park elections. Bike parks are administrative units of the BRU as well as physical locations where okada riders meet. There are about thirty bike parks in Freetown, and Councilor was running to become chairman of one of the largest. During his campaign he had managed to register with the union a large number of bike riders from across town, enabling them to vote for him. On the day of the election, thousands of riders gathered at a repurposed football pitch to cast their vote while Councilor rode up and down the length of the field rallying the crowd. As the hot afternoon drew on, the crowd grew restless and excited. Police, fearing a riot, arrived to disperse the gathering. Their arrival almost looked like a scripted scene in a play or movie. For one, the guns that they were purposively wielding were clearly not loaded. The votes were finally counted, and Councilor won by a landslide. Hundreds of bikes proceeded through the streets in celebration accompanied by a cacophony of honking horns, screams, and a blasting portable sound system.
FIGURE 3. Confiscated commercial motorbikes at a police station.
Councilor’s arresting appearance—a cocktail of conformity and nonconformity—matched the way he went about his business. He rode with a briefcase sandwiched between the handlebars as he weaved through traffic, whizzing into narrow back alleys to avoid police and checkpoints. His briefcase held certificates, paperwork, pens, stamps, tape, tickets, and shoe polish. He held impromptu meetings with members of his committee in shabby roadside tea joints and bars, where he would set up a makeshift office, carefully unpacking and placing the contents of the briefcase on a table or bench.
Councilor appealed to his supporters in the union by being both “one of them,” a street-savvy former rebel turned bike rider, and also an official able to use his charisma and personal (albeit unstable) relationships with police officers and politicians to bail riders and their confiscated bikes out of police custody (figure 3). Councilor was criticized, however, when the balance looked out of whack. Some labeled him “too civilian” and therefore lacking influence and also criticized his erratic behavior, while others condemned him for forgetting his “brothers” at the bike park as he advanced his personal interests.
Councilor’s paradoxes were shared by the BRU as a whole. The union’s discourse was steeped in the language of resistance and nonhierarchical brotherhood.1 Rather than uniting workers against exploitation from bosses, as labor unions in the Global North typically function, the BRU saw the state as its main oppressor. And yet, the BRU itself had become a rather state-like national bureaucratic entity. Some riders saw this as inevitable and in fact as desirable. They wanted something substantial to show for their daily and annual registration fees. The union could give them legitimacy by looking like the state and forming partnerships with it, which would in practical ways alleviate the marginalization they experienced at the hands of the police and the legal system. The union had recently established its own internal police force, known as a task force, that wore a uniform of blue one shade lighter than that of the police.2 The union also promised to hire its own lawyers and health care workers to serve its members.
Other state-like qualities of the BRU included the opportunity it gave its members to participate in a democratic, bureaucratic, political process. By contrast, as many young people in Sierra Leone do not hold national ID cards, they are unable to vote in national elections. Nor do they tend to see the state and elected governments as genuinely serving their own interests. But the union could easily fall short of its billing. The question that was always hovering over it was whether the union really served its members or instead had become an equally exploitative version or even an arm of the state. This question felt particularly pressing to me when I saw the BRU’s uniformed task force physically manhandling riders who were not respecting traffic regulations.
Ambivalence to the state has characterized commercial bike riding in Sierra Leone since its inception. Motorbikes have been used as a means of rural transport for a number of decades. They are well suited for traversing dirt roads and bush paths that connect towns and villages. The availability of affordable bikes, typically imported from India via neighboring Guinea, allowed the okada industry to grow in towns and cities in the aftermath of the civil war. Commercial bike riding initially took off in former rebel strongholds, such as the regional urban centers of Makeni and Bo. Funding came indirectly from the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program that was enacted between 1999 and 2004 by the government of Sierra Leone with the support of the World Bank and a variety of NGOs. The program, which reached seventy-two thousand combatants, involved the exchange of weapons for money as well as skills training in such areas as carpentry and engineering. By far the most popular profession to emerge from the program, however, was informal commercial bike riding, as many ex-combatants traded their packages in motorbikes.3 As the industry spread, so too did riding associations. Okada riding took off in Freetown in the mid-2000s, growing significantly over the decade to come. Initially major towns and urban districts were represented by their own associations; three formed in Freetown itself. In 2006, these were amalgamated to form a Freetown-wide association named One Brother. In late 2007 after meetings in Makeni, an interim national-level association was established in which bylaws and a constitution were drafted. In the same year the national Traffic Regulation Act was signed, which included sections on safety standards for bikes and protocols for formally licensing bikes as commercial vehicles with their own distinctive number plates. In 2010, the BRU became an officially recognized association by the government. Union officials described this to me as the apex in their fluctuating relationship with the state.
In 2013 relations between the BRU and the state once again became tense, as I witnessed firsthand. The government initiated a high-profile, image-conscious program to clear bike riders from Freetown’s central business district altogether. This was problematic for bike riders, as it not only restricted their market but also effectively severed the eastern and western parts of town from one another. The state used increasingly stringent measures, such as the deployment of military police, armed with large batons, at major junctions. The fines and bribes that police routinely imposed on riders—to either avoid arrest or facilitate the release of a rider or a bike—increased by about tenfold. Bike riders, such as those who rallied around Human Right after his accident, grew resentful.
And then in 2014, Ebola hit. A state of emergency was declared, and international agencies linked up with national political structures in constituting the official Ebola response. The state of emergency was, on one level, bad news for bike riders. Lockdowns, curfews, and regulations on travel all contributed to a shrinking transport market. The state in some departments was more empowered to act in an executive manner. After the Ebola state of emergency was lifted in 2016, the former minister of defense turned head of the National Ebola Response Centre was tasked with overseeing the regulation of commercial transport in Freetown.
But decline and conflict do not tell whole story. For many bike riders—and young Freetown residents in general—the Ebola state of emergency, in perhaps surprising ways, represented a less predatory and more fair manifestation of the state, particularly in comparison to what they had become used to in recent years. It was not that the deeply grooved patterns of marginalization and exploitation disappeared overnight, but rather that the novel emergency bureaucratic structures were not yet fully tainted with the patterns of exclusion that those at the bottom were accustomed to. New financial flows in the form of humanitarian assistance and aid created rare openings for salaried work and formal employment. Tens of thousands of young people joined the state payroll as Ebola responders in the hazard pay scheme. This was a far cry from what most bike riders had thought possible, and yet such an ideal of formality had persisted through decades of economic decline and informalization.
The layered history of commercial bike riding and the BRU helps us understand how an international bureaucratic emergency response came to be welcomed by many of those who were incorporated into it. It was not simply that opportunities came out of nowhere, although the multibillion-dollar international intervention is partly what made them possible. Rather, there was a latent potential for formality in long-standing associational structures that informal workers were actively engaged with. This tendency became realized in new configurations of work during the emergency alongside a tendency for improvisation and adaptation, in particular due to the fact that new jobs would last only as long as the epidemic was recognized as a global threat.
Ebola Money
Peter, an okada rider who worked closely with Councilor, held the official title of “public relations officer” on the bike park committee that Councilor chaired. Fittingly, I found Peter easy to talk with, and we would meet up regularly. He was much more educated than most okada riders, although he did not come from a particularly privileged background. When he was not working as a bike rider and engaged in BRU matters, he was studying for an undergraduate degree at Fourah Bay College, Freetown’s historic university. As with a large number of bike riders and other informal workers, Peter was recruited into the official Ebola response through the government hazard pay scheme.
Peter was first posted to transport medical staff into communities that were difficult for four-wheeled vehicles to access. After a few months, he was then recruited to work alongside an official Ebola burial team. These teams were established to collect the bodies of all those who died during the epidemic—regardless of the cause of death—and to perform burials safely so as to alleviate one of the primary causes of community Ebola transmission. Each burial team consisted of twelve members: stretcher-bearers, drivers, chlorine sprayers, and navigators. They operated two pristine white vans, one for the team members and the other for the deceased.
Peter’s job, which he performed with another bike rider, Alimamy, was to transport two team members who would follow behind the burial team. One of the team members was responsible for taking saliva samples from deceased individuals who were being collected for burial. These samples would later be transported to a lab for processing, which would normally take forty-eight hours. The other staff member a documenter who would fill out a two-page form with information on the deceased and their household. This information was used for contact-tracing purposes and to arrange a quarantine if deemed necessary.
The head of Peter’s burial team was an older man, Mr. Kamara, who had previously worked in the Ministry of Health. The rest of the team were young men. Most had sourced livelihoods prior to the crisis in Freetown’s informal economy, working, like Peter, in the transport sector or in small-scale market trading. They by and large welcomed the salaries they were now receiving. The burial team was paid by an international NGO that had assumed management responsibilities from the Ministry of Health for many of the Freetown teams. All team members, including Mr. Kamara, received the equivalent of $100 every Friday morning in an envelope. In addition, the team members were provided with breakfast every morning and with training programs geared toward psychosocial support, which normally included lunch. Peter and his three colleagues, like most responders employed during the epidemic, were paid under the centralized state-operated hazard pay scheme, popularly known as “Ebola money.” This entailed a monthly transfer through a phone payment system.
Of course, it was not all rosy. The team was enacting often unpopular new burial regimes that could be both degrading and dangerous (although I was told that no burial team workers in Freetown contracted the disease). Managers sometimes withheld payment to workers, particularly in the hazard pay scheme, or developed informal arrangements in which they would take a percentage of payment in return for the offer of employment.
Peter and his colleagues were, like most people, preoccupied with the shifting horizon that separated Ebola from post-Ebola. They would regularly discuss the latest figures and would speculate, somewhat anxiously, as to what if any benefits they might receive once their rolling contracts were terminated. Many hoped that Ebola jobs would continue after the outbreak. At one point the informal WhatsApp group set up by the team changed its name from “Safe and Dignified Burials” to “Await Post-Ebola Jobs.”
I observed the burial team employees rhythmically moving back and forth between pre-Ebola and Ebola positionalities throughout the working day, reflecting the evolving blend of novelties and continuities in their lives and work during the epidemic. In the morning the team members would arrive at their makeshift base on the beach. After breakfast—often rice and beans—the young men would kill time by exercising on the beach, kicking a ball around, comparing updates on phones, texting with friends and sexual partners, and conducting protracted debates on a range of topics. Much of this socialization was typified by a flashy and playful mode of youth masculinity known locally as “bluffing.” It was noticeable that as the months of their employment rolled on, team members became better dressed, with new sneakers, leather jackets, large watches, and upgraded phones and electronics. Referring to one of the newly recruited NGO managers who was making money for the first time, Mr. Kamara, the older team manager, who wore the same flat cap and loose brown suit to work every day, once joked to me that “we are existing, even you are existing, but he is living. He has two new cars now including a van, and others of them [the administrators] have bought cars too.”
After breakfast and time hanging out on the beach, the team would get a call from 117—the service to which all deaths and illnesses, regardless of their Ebola status, were reported—announcing the number of bodies to be collected that day and their location, usually in households or hospital mortuaries. Casual conversations continued in the white vans that the burial teams operated but halted abruptly on arrival at one of the locations for collection. Mr. Kamara or sometimes another team member would communicate with a representative from the mourning family, usually a young man or woman with a smartphone, outlining the arrangements for the burial. Burials took place later the same day before an Ebola test could be processed at a cemetery built for Ebola in the Waterloo district, on the other side of town; this was despite the fact that the majority of deaths were not Ebola-related. Mourners were encouraged to head there as soon as the documenters on the burial team had completed paperwork recording details about the death and the deceased and demographic and contact information for their household. The formal source of this information was the next of kin, but it was typically collected from an educated family member or neighbor. Meanwhile, the stretcher-bearers and chlorine sprayers would be donning the personal protective equipment. This involved adhering to carefully learned safety protocol as well as negotiating with mourning families who were sometimes fazed by these unfamiliar procedures or were resistant to handing over the bodies of their family members.
Weaving between activities was the ongoing evolution and adaptation of working arrangements that emerged around official duties and infrastructures. The work of driving, documenting cases, and taking Ebola swab tests was officially designated for four people, but it could in principle be carried out by one person. Peter and his co–bike rider Alimamy therefore devised ways of covering each other’s shifts. Through close observation and informal instruction from the official swab conductor, both learned how to put on and take off the personal protective equipment and conduct the tests safely and efficiently. Peter, an educated university student, could do all the documentation required, while Alimamy, not formally educated, needed assistance. The official documenter had recently taken up secondary employment as a schoolteacher—a job that would probably last longer than this one—and sometimes his cousin came to fill in. The physical resemblance between the two meant that the stand-in could use his cousin’s ID card and pass for him. Originally, Peter and Alimamy agreed to trade off, each working one week on and one off. Both owned their own bikes, allowing them to make some money on the side to supplement their formal monthly wages. As a bonus, the person who had worked during the day would collect the daily fuel allowance that was provided for both. This gave Peter and Alimamy additional income; they struck an agreement with the manager at the officially assigned petrol station, according to which they received cash in place of their fuel allocation. The petrol station manager could then resell the petrol, and they fueled their bikes at a cheaper station in the East End.
The universities were reopening, and Peter needed to prepare for exams. He also had additional family commitments; his young daughter, who normally lived with her mother’s family in their village upcountry, was staying in town with Peter now. In this and other ways, he was playing a more prominent role in family affairs, made possible by his employment and no doubt necessary by the loss of income among other family members during the crisis. For example, Peter bought a motorbike for his cousin to ride commercially and supported other family members in smaller quotidian ways. Then, without explanation, his pay was cut, probably by a corrupt official at the central hazard pay office. At this point, Alimamy was doing almost all the driving and asked Peter for a weekly payment of 30,000 Le (roughly $5), in addition to Peter’s fuel money, reflecting his longer hours. But Peter felt that he was asking for too much and, as a negotiating tool, threatened to use the “legal route.” This would entail paying the official documenter—in practice the official documenter’s cousin—to cover for him. Meanwhile, Alimamy was still contractually obliged to continue his own job and would be fired if he did not comply. After long and heated negotiations, they settled on an extra payment of 21,000 Le per day, and the working relationship continued.
Underlying the dispute and negotiation between Peter and Alimamy were their attempts to reconcile pre-Ebola commitment, obligations, and aspirations with the conditions in the state of emergency. For Peter, this meant balancing his ongoing studies and commitments to family with the obligations in the Ebola response, solidarities to colleagues, and novel possibilities to benefit from temporary financial flows. When Peter thought that he had finally gained some secure employment and was thinking about his post-Ebola future, his payment was suspended by exploitative officials, undoubtedly aware that many young employees lacked connections or status to reclaim it. Yet, he in turn aimed to use his superior pre-Ebola status as an educated university student over Alimamy who was not educated, by threatening to use the legal route to negotiate a better informal working arrangement between them. This, revealingly, relied on some legally dubious activity. Such acts of reconciling or balancing permeated throughout the activities of the whole team. On a day-to-day basis they were in one moment typical youths, hanging out and playfully bluffing in their fashionable clothes, and in the next moment they were state employees, putting on personal protective equipment and carefully enacting safety procedures that they had been formally trained in.4
States of Emergency
Epidemics might be thought of as litmus tests for assessing the capacity of states. National and international responses to emergencies typically entail the (re)-insertion of the state apparatus, or that of other bureaucratic entities, into the lives of ordinary people. Restoring order (at least on paper) requires making legible that which is unknown to the authorities, such as case numbers, the locations of cases, causes of transmission, and economic impact. Legibility and visibilty are key concepts in the analysis of state power. The authority of the state is predicated on its ability to “see” its territory and its subjects and, in a Foucauldian twist, for those subjects to know that they are “seen.” In the contemporary world, the state has extended its reach into new domains of knowledge and intervention. This includes, at least in some places, the increasingly centralized management of health and reproductive processes, known as biopolitics. Such knowledge production is put to the test during epidemics when rapid data collection and modeling constitute key aspects of public health responses. The state’s ability to know, communicate to, and control its citizens allows for effective regulatory measures to be put in place.
States in the Global South are routinely deemed ill-equipped to respond effectively to emergencies by themselves; international intervention typically goes unquestioned. In a policy document published in August 2014, the World Health Organization wrote that Ebola posed “increasingly serious global health challenges and risks.… Clearly a massively scaled and coordinated international response is needed to support affected and at-risk countries in intensifying response activities and strengthening national capacities.”5 The approach that this intervention took was highly bureaucratic, working within, and extending beyond, existing state structures. Populations were made legible in unprecedented ways. Peter and the burial team’s work exemplified many aspects of this: the emphasis on Ebola testing and documentation, the state and NGOs taking responsibility for management of the dead, and the centralization of the hazard pay scheme for employing workers.
Massive foreign intervention in Africa should, of course, not go unquestioned. Nor should any state’s declaration of a state of emergency. There are questions we should ask. Are inequalities reinforced under the guise of assistance? Are colonial dynamics reproduced? Which people and aspects of their lives are made bureaucratically legible? How are governments and other agencies using emergency powers and do they intend to give them up after the crisis? Critical studies point to the ways that emergencies and interventions are used opportunistically by states, international agencies, and corporations to extend their reach.6 In the philosopher Georgio Agamben’s influential formulation, inspired by Walter Benjamin, the “state of exception” has become the rule in the contemporary world, as state sovereignty is predicated on the ability to override the law rather than enforce it.7 Some argue that emergencies are themselves artificially constructed in order to further elite interests. This argument is made famous in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, in which she makes direct connections between “disasters” and the “liberalizing” of new markets, such as after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the Iraq War.8 Paul Farmer has elaborated on how global inequalities are reproduced around health emergencies in particular, drawing on his own experience as a doctor on the front lines.9
Anthropological research of the Ebola response, particularly in rural settings, reveals how state, military, and international efforts were in large part counterproductive. By the same token, villagers’ impressive capacity for adaptation, honed over generations, was routinely disregarded.10 In some villages in Sierra Leone, customary chiefs initiated and administered their own quarantines. In other villages, secret societies morphed into safe burial teams.11 And intervening agencies often did not receive reliable information due to villagers’ suspicion of the state. It is tempting to apply a similar analysis across the board: communities are always better off by themselves and thus do not want to be made legible by centralized authorities. Acts of resistance during the Ebola emergency have been well documented, representing admirable expressions of agency in the confines of vast inequality.12
In Freetown, however, and I suspect in other settings, the story is more layered. Over the decades residents have witnessed a state that is gradually retreating, with economic and political informalization the byproduct of neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies intended to reduce the state’s hold on the market. This has had disastrous effects on health systems, which are highly underequipped and underfunded. Experiences of neglect are coupled with experiences of coercion especially for young and marginal workers who routinely face police abuse.13 Rather than hoping for less “state” in their lives, however, they actually tend to hope for more of it, albeit in a less predatory and more bureaucratic and fair form.14 While the politics of rebellion from the 1990s have not been forgotten in Sierra Leone, they have seemingly given way to a more conformist ideal in recent times.
The case of commercial bike riders tells this story. The industry took off in the wake of the postwar peace-building intervention, in which young ex-combatants received the capital necessary to buy motorbikes. But the industry has become dogged by exploitative and marginalizing practices, with the BRU featuring ambiguously in the mix. Ebola entailed another major intervention, with new job prospects for young workers. But this time the jobs were actually on the state payroll, with employees becoming official Ebola responders. The newness and temporariness of the emergency meant that many of the old marginalizing practices featured in state and state-like bureaucracies in Sierra Leone had not yet fully kicked in, which gave it an unusual fairness. Peter and his colleagues welcomed being incorporated into the state bureaucracy. This was novel, but it was not alien. Before the outbreak, Peter and Councilor already saw themselves as quasi bureaucrats, riding between meetings in suits while holding briefcases. But unlike a career in the civil service of old, it was never clear how long these Ebola jobs would last. Peter and many others responded by striking informal arrangements in order to reconcile their long- and short-term objectives and responsibilities.
In the end, the success of the official Ebola response was predicated on the abilities of the ordinary workers incorporated into it to make it work. In Freetown, young employees found much in the response that was in line with their own ideals, particularly its fairer bureaucratic character and the opportunities it presented for formal employment and official recognition. Being made legible was not perceived as threatening, as might be expected when considering the critical literature on the topic, but instead was widely welcomed. This makes sense when considering the coercion and neglect that have characterized informal workers’ experiences of the state in recent decades, which had not yet fully tainted the novel Ebola bureaucracies, as well as the ways that associations and labor unions such as the BRU have taken on state-like bureaucratic characteristics together with, somewhat paradoxically, the continuation of rebellious and nonhierarchical discourses and practices.
Work in the Ebola response was not straightforward, however, and adaptations were often deemed necessary. Workers’ capacity to operate in both formal and informal ways was honed through years of experience in operating at the frontier between the state and the informal economy, in which serious bodily, legal, and economic risks are ever present, tangled up with the obligations of family, business, and the law. The Ebola emergency neither introduced nor alleviated these problems, but it did allow for new configurations of work and relationships with the state to develop, albeit temporarily.
Human Right did receive the necessary attention and care for his injury to heal. He stayed close to his family for several months, with Balloon Burst and other friends visiting him from time to time. The time he spent away from the streets was somewhat restorative but ultimately unsustainable. He grew restless being away from the fast life and felt increasingly stuck at home. With his father unable to earn money due to physical disabilities and his mother’s income already overstretched, the pressure for Human Right to find work mounted once again. A few months after his injury Human Right was riding again. After Ebola, the dangers of commercial bike riding and the tensions between taxi drivers and the state remained, much as they had been before Ebola. Human Right continued to face harassment by the police and suffered other injuries on the road. Balloon Burst found work as a private driver for a well-off family and some years later had his second daughter. While his salary was small, he welcomed the relative security of not needing to hustle on the streets.