Deadly secret: situating the unknowing and knowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda

Abstract

This article critically examines the unknowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda, in 2000/1, by asking how this unknowing has been achieved and has shaped the disease situation. Specifically, this article follows my informants’ explanation that soldiers of the Uganda People's Defence Force had brought the disease from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda. This account is widely rejected as a rumour by scientists, who insist that the source of the epidemic remains unknown. By contrast, I suggest that following these stories, as embodied experiences of the multiple connections between war and epidemics, human and nonhuman lives, provides crucial insights into the political ecology of Ebola in the wider region – a region where, even today, conflict and Ebola outbreaks are intricately interwoven. Understanding how unknowing is achieved and shapes a disease situation directs attention to forms of silent knowing, which illuminate what preparedness means in the political ecology of Ebola.

Reality, Realism and the Future

“…Th e drive to epistemic certainty is further challenged by the exploration ofrealist, but not necessarily pessimist -themes of unknowing, forgetting and silences. Th e political ecologies of Ebola in Uganda are aff ected by the fact that Ugandan epidemiologists, while refusing to ascertain the sources of the epi-demic, also display some 'forms of silent knowing' about it (Park 2021). Meanwhile, History and Anthropology curators collected a whole issue on 'silences' (Dragojlovic and Samuels 2021) as a particular heuristic to explore the ambiguity of human relationships with certainty, truth and communication.…”

Crosscurrents of Contagion: Snakes, Rumours, Rivers, and Ebola in Sierra Leone's Borderlands

“…Attention to medical and political misinformation has largely focused on motivated reasoning and partisan polarisation (Jerit and Zhao 2020), often underplaying the role of actual lived experience. For most Ebola responders, rumours appeared as obstacles-irrational misinformation causing confusion, resistance, and in the worst cases, violence (Park 2021). To be sure, many rumours emerged through desperate and chaotic efforts to make sense of a desperate and chaotic situation.…”

“…2 2 Moreover, the moment of zoonotic spillover is unobservable and the origins of most Ebola outbreaks are “unknown”, at least by the standards of scientistic evidence (Park 2021:228). When an epidemiological team proposed that the index case, a two‐year‐old boy from Meliandou, caught Ebola from playing in a bat‐filled tree, international observers and media trumpeted the explanation as a remarkable example of contact tracing.…”