‘Black’ and ‘white’ death: burials in a time of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Abstract

The article examines experiences of the 2014‐15 Ebola crisis in Freetown, Sierra Leone, through an analysis of the performance of burials. While most of the city's residents had no contact with the virus, ‘Ebola’ was inescapable, owing to the onerous state of emergency regulations imposed by national and international authorities. All burials, regardless of the cause of death, were to be performed by newly established official teams operating according to unfamiliar biomedical and bureaucratic protocols. Burials became emblematic of the crisis through presenting a conflict between local practices and novel procedures, which was coded locally in a complex racial language of ‘black’ and ‘white’, recalling a long regional history of violent integration into the Atlantic World. Building on long‐standing anthropological discussion on the relationship between ‘good’ death and social order, the article explores how burials became sites around which opposing ‘orders’ were experienced, negotiated, and reconciled in locally meaningful ways.

The Ebola Crisis in Sierra Leone: Mediating Containment and Engagement in Humanitarian Emergencies

“…Funerals were identified early on in the epidemic as ‘super‐spreader events’ given the region's burial practices involving the washing of the dead (Richards, ). Because of the risks associated with funerals, as Lipton (: 804) notes, ‘the regulation and transformation of mortuary practices were not collateral challenges but principal aims of the international response’. The response was to put in place procedures for ‘Safe and Dignified Burials’ to be carried out for any death, and not only those confirmed to have been caused by the virus, by a burial team dressed in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).…”

“…In the early months of the state of emergency he volunteered for a job nobody wanted to do: he joined the burial team, tasked with burying the dead according to Infection Prevention and Control protocols as well as following the ‘safe and dignified burials’ guidelines. Burials, as noted above, were at the centre of the response and like traditional healing, they brought to the fore ‘the core social conflict of the Ebola crisis: local beliefs and practices versus those of the international response’ (Lipton, : 804). The new regulations prohibiting the washing and dressing of dead bodies and the use of body bags by PPE‐clad burial teams caused significant tensions between the Ebola response agents and the communities where they intervened.…”

“…This kind of epistemic navigation, in other words, echoes the fluid nature of identity and social order inscribed in the region's history, as individual efforts to survive insecurity have long required rapid responses to shifting terrains (Enria, n.d. ; Lipton, ; McGovern, ).…”

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Jonah Lipton's () essay “‘Black’ and ‘White’ Death: Burials in a Time of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone” can be productively read alongside this series of essays for a sense of proximate and distant differences in writing about the same topic. His discussions of the time of Ebola as a disordered time during which all death was mass death from Ebola, regardless of actual cause, resonates with a series of essays that I will discuss below that also theorize experientially disordered time.…”

Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations: social anthropology in 2017

“…Precarious living conditions are matched on a global scale by the ongoing effects of neoliberal reforms (Kar ), labour exploitation (Campbell ; Prentice ) and financialisation (Bear ). Add to this the global environmental crisis (Bhan and Trisal ; Pia ), earthquakes (Bock ; LaHatte ; Newberry ), ever‐increasing waste production (Harvey ; Hylland Erikson and Schober ) and health epidemics, like Ebola (Lipton ) and HIV/AIDS (Powers ; Wardlow ), and you end up with a picture of multiple crises.…”