The Subalterns Sing Music, Agency, and the Politics of Life During the Ebola Epidemic in West Africa

THE SUBALTERNS SING MUSIC, AGENCY, AND THE POLITICS OF LIFE DURING THE EBOLA EPIDEMIC IN WEST AFRICA

Author: Amat Jeng Supervisor: Dr. Cristiano Lanzano, Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute.

This thesis is submitted for obtaining the Master’s Degree in International Humanitarian Action and Conflict. By submitting the thesis, the author certifies that the text is from his/her hand, does not include the work of someone else unless clearly indicated, and that the thesis has been produced in accordance with proper academic practices. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………i

Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………………ii

A Map of West Africa ………………………………………………………………………..iii

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………...1

1.1. Background …………………………………………………………………………..1

1.2. Aims and Objectives …………………………………………………………………3

1.3. Research Questions …………………………………………………………………..3

1.4. Thesis Statement ...…………………………………………………………………...3

1.5. Structures of Chapters ………………………………………………………………..4

1.6. Justifications ………………………………………………………………………….4

1.7. Methodology …………………………………………………………………………4

1.8. Delimitation ………………………………………………………………………….5

1.9. Previous Academic Research ………………………………………………………...6

1.9.1. Selected Works on Ebola Music ………………………………………...6

1.9.2. Selected Literature on Agency and the Politics of life …………………..8

Chapter 2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ………………………………………….....10

2.1. Defining the Subaltern ……………………………………………………10

2.2. Defining Agency ………………………………………………………….11

Chapter 3. EMPIRICAL DATA ………………………………………………………….....14

3.1. The Rumors ……………………………………………………………….14

3.2. The Sensitization/Education Songs ……….………………………………15

3.3. The Protest Songs ………..……………………………………………….17

Chapter 4. DISCUSSIONS ………………………………………………………………….19

4.1. Chapter’s Summary …………………………………………………………….26

Chapter 5. CONCLUSIONS ………………………………………………………………...28

5.1. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….....28

5.2. Future Research ………………………………………………………….....29

5.3. References ……………………………………………………………...... 31

5.4. Appendix ……………………………………………………………………34

I. Abstract

The Ebola epidemic in 2014 was framed as the most serious humanitarian crisis that West Africa has faced since the beginning of this millennium. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, two countries that had just come out of civil wars less than twelve years ago, were the most affected.

As Ebola spread in these countries, skepticisms, rumors, and distrust spread along, making it difficult for frontline workers and humanitarian actors to tackle the epidemic. To control the narratives and build trust, INGOs and national authorities had to turn to the music industry to produce sensitization/education songs. But they were not alone in this contested space: Along came the protest songs to expose structural violence and the hierarchy of humanities. What explains the emergence of the latter in Liberia and Sierra Leone? What role(s) did music play during the epidemic?

This is a qualitative case-study of music as an expressive art for the subalterns. This thesis is grounded in anthropology, humanitarian studies, and postcolonial studies. Six songs that emerged during the Ebola epidemic have been analyzed within the cultural and contextual matrixes they were produced. The emergence of protest songs can be explained by the deep- rooted distrust of outsiders and the fact that postwar reconstruction efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone have not managed to fundamentally alter the perceptions of a remote state.

Keywords: Subaltern, agency, Sierra Leone, Liberia, music, protests, politics, rumors, Ebola.

II. Acknowledgements

The idea to write this thesis came about during some sessions in Anthropology at the Uppsala University, where I met Dr. Cristiano Lanzano and his colleague Anna Baral. The sessions challenged me to start thinking around the politics of life and the voice of those affected during humanitarian crises. The week I finished working on this thesis, one of Sweden’s leading newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, featured an article about the Mozambique Palma attack, where seven people were killed as they tried to escape a siege on a hotel, while “white people and dogs were evacuated first.”1 This has triggered more thoughts about the politics of life. I must say that the thinking is still going on because the insights I have provided in this work are not enough. However, without the help of Dr. Lanzano, there would not have been any insights coming from me at all. His guidance, patience, and unwavering commitments have made it possible for me to complete this work. Thank you, Cristiano!

To everyone who cares about me, loves me for what I am, and believes in me, thank you! To the friends I made in Falun, Oxford, Paris, and Uppsala, you know yourselves, thank you for your moral and intellectual supports. To my girl, Sophi Binta Jeng-Jonskog, I love you and will always do. This journey is for you.

1 Andersen, Svenska Dagbladet, 2021, Vita och hundar evakuerades först.

III. A Map of West Africa

Source: Updated from map courtesy of University of Texas Libraries: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa/txu-oclc-238859671-africa_pol_2008.jpg.

iii

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Background

In 2014, the Ebola epidemic hit West Africa, claiming about 11, 000 lives. Liberia and Sierra Leone were the most affected. Sierra Leone, a former colony of the British crown with a population of about 7 million (2014 estimates) has a sketchy history since it gained Independence in 1961: a civil war (1991-2002), a protracted postwar reconstruction caused by years of economic mismanagement and institutional inertia, and recently, the Ebola epidemic which claimed about 4, 000 lives. Liberia and Sierra Leone have many things in common, except that the former was never colonized; rather, it was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as a settlement for freed slaves. Two civil wars (1989-1997 &1999- 2003) ravaged Liberia, killing more than a half a million people. Conservative estimates have it that 5, 000 people died from the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, whose population was 4.3 million in 2014.2

During the Ebola epidemic, social protests erupted in both Liberia and Sierra Leone as frontline workers entered villages where rumors that the virus was created by the political elites in close collaboration with some outsiders had already taken a firm hold. Consequently, the interventions to control the epidemic were made much difficult by the poor health care systems as they were by the misinformation, level of mistrust of the governments, and the rumors.

The governments in both countries, after many years of postwar reconstructions that had disproportionately focused on building institutions at the expense of state-society relations, were caught off-guard. Therefore, an appeal was made to the international community. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC), for example, said that its response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, was the “largest in the agency’s history:” 3, 000 of its staff were involved, including the 1, 200 deployed to the region to conduct incident management, surveillance, contact tracing, rapid isolation and treatment, training of health care workers, etc.3 Quarantine centers were built, Ebola hotline opened, ECOWAS trained and deployed 114 volunteers to the affected countries, and 1, 000 health personnel were sent by the African Union from other African countries.4

2 CDC, CDC Releases Detailed History of the 2014-2016 Ebola Response in MMWR. 3 Ibid. Note: This was before the ongoing global pandemic, Covid19. 4 AU, 2014, African Union Support to Ebola in West Africa 1

By December 2014, a staggering US$2.89 billion, more than the combined national budgets of both Sierra Leone and Liberia, had been on its way to the region.5 Despite all these efforts, containing the epidemic proved difficult for many reasons: The status of the public health system in both country was in shamble; health officials and public workers were not familiar with the epidemic; and more alarmingly, there was ubiquitous distrust of the governments, health workers, and aid agencies on the ground.

West Africa is rich in oral narrative, so the society thrives on word of mouth passed by one person to another, rather than on official narratives. Also, in West Africa, music plays a symbolic cultural, social, and political roles, making it an instrument for expressing the myriads of problems the society faces.6 Therefore, when Ebola erupted, different songs saturated the airspace and social media. On the one hand, there were those songs I herein categorized as educational/sensitization songs, such as Africa Stop Ebola, Ebola is Real, and Ebola in town. These educational/sensitization songs were supported and written with the help of humanitarian actors. On the other hand, there were the protest songs such as White Ebola, Good Morning Salone, and Ebola, produced by independent and influential artists with no support from the government or NGOs.

As has been widely observed, response to humanitarian crises in non-Western societies usually involve Western media and humanitarian communicators speaking for or on behalf of the victims. This was the case of Band Aid and the Western media in Ethiopia in the 1980s. This, as some scholars have observed, infantilizes the victims, turns them into ‘speechless emissaries’, takes away their agency, and fails in recognizing how political oppression, class oppression, and economic and social injustices have played in creating the humanitarian crisis, in the first place.7 Therefore, through analyzing the lyrics of these songs, this thesis examines the constitutive relationship between music, agency, and the politics of life during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

This thesis has a multidisciplinary approach grounded in anthropology, humanitarian studies, and postcolonial studies.8 It is anthropological in the sense that it seeks to understand how music as an expressive cultural element has been used in articulating agency, expressing

5 United Nations, 2015, Socio-Economic Impact of Ebola Virus Disease in West African Countries, p. 28. 6 Nieuwoudt & Fayoyin, 2017, The Power of Song in the Struggle for Health and Development. 7 Malkki, 1996, Speechless Emissaries; Fassin, 2007, Humanitarian as a Politics of Life; Abramowitz et al., 2015, Medical Humanitarianism. 8 The term postcolonial may refer to the period immediately after European colonialism, but here it is used to explore the “postcolonial discourses and their subject positions in relation to the themes of race, nation, subjectivity, power, subalterns, hybridity and creolization.” For more on this, see Baker, 2004, The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, p. 148. 2 societal challenges, and reinventing what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘Other’, during the worst humanitarian crisis in recent decades in West Africa.9 One of the many reasons for bringing anthropological analyses into the humanitarian field is to understand how artistic works such as music, produced for and during humanitarian crises, can be analyzed and understood within the cultural and contextual matrixes they are produced. In other words, to borrow Alan P. Merriam’s words, since “music is human behavior,”10 it is paramount to understand not only the sound, but its total production. And finally, this thesis contributes to postcolonial studies by examining how the subalterns were able to use their agency in a contested space to interrogate power relations and express their victimhood without being victimized or ‘speechless’ – to borrow from Malkki.11

1.2. Aims and Objectives It is common knowledge that the type of information people receive during humanitarian crises can affect their perceptions of not only the crises, but also all other actors on the ground. When people rather listen to a song than read the newspaper, music becomes an omnipotent instrument for disseminating information and articulating agency. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the constitutive role of music, politics, and agency, and how these elements shaped the Ebola humanitarian crisis. The paper, while complementing social sciences research on the humanitarian field, also intends to contribute to the understanding of how music can be utilized during humanitarian crises. It is hoped, therefore, that humanitarian architects, scholars, and policy-makers can benefit from this thesis as they embark on rethinking the humanitarian paradigm.

1.3. Research Questions What role(s) did music play during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa? What explains the emergence of protest songs in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic?

1.4. Thesis Statement I argue that the emergence of the protest songs during the Ebola epidemic can be seen as a microcosm of a society divided between, on the one hand, a disfranchised segment which is attempting to cope with unacceptable social conditions and frustrations, and on the other hand, a distrusted mobile elites with a web of opportunities and social capital.

9 Bhabha, 1994, The Location of Culture. 10 Merriam, 1980, The Anthropology of Music. 11 Malkki, 1996, Speechless Emissaries, p. 390

1.5. Structure of Work Chapter 1 deals with the Introduction to this thesis. Chapter 2 deals with the Conceptual Framework and is divided into two subsections: 2.1 defines the Subaltern, and 2.2 looks at Agency. Chapter 3 is the Empirical Data. I began this chapter by first discussing the Rumors in Subsection 3.1, then in Subsection 3.2 and 3.3, I brought forth the sensitization/education and protest songs, respectively. These songs are analyzed and discussed in detail in Chapter 4 under Discussion. There, I have attempted to relate the conceptual framework to the empirical data. Chapter 5 deals with the Conclusion and it offers some directions for future research.

1.6. Justifications

Lack of trust and the spread of rumors were major hurdles to bringing Ebola under control. Aid agencies and the affected governments were faced with challenges of building trust and educating the affected communities about preventive measures. Consequently, songs were produced by aid agencies and the states in collaboration with different artists. This became effective, yet the role of music in the Ebola-epidemic remained under-researched.

In the few academic works out there about Ebola, no attempts are made to understand the emergence of the protest songs. Understanding the role of music, especially the voice of the protesting artists, will inform academicians and development architects about the relevance of state-society relations, and the essence of expressive art in crises and epidemics. This understanding will help shape future interventions and can pave the way for rapid response. For scholars, this will also provide insights into analyzing societal reactions to epidemic, especially in a society where the state legitimacy is weak.

1.7. Method for Data Collection & Analyses

Here I have discussed the methods used in obtaining as well as analyzing my data.

This thesis is a case-study of Sierra Leone and Liberia. My data collection takes a qualitative approach. I have primarily analyzed three education/sensitization songs and three protest songs released during the worst epidemic outbreak in recent history in West Africa. The lyrics of the songs are already available on YouTube and SoundCloud, and they have been analyzed and contextualized. My knowledge of the Krio language and English – the two languages that made up the lyrics – has helped me to do textual and contextual analysis of the songs. I have also used scientific journals and Internet articles as secondary sources in analyzing and understanding the contexts from which the songs emerged.

In terms of analyzing the data, I let the songs speak for the contexts. I have analyzed the context in which the songs emerged by looking at how social, economic, and political structures have played into the emergence of the songs. This qualitative case-study approach has given me deeper insights and understanding of the world of the subjects I studied as well as their attempts at meaning-making. One criticism with the case-study method is that it cannot be used for the purpose of generalization. However, as an interpretive epistemologist, I do not aim at generalizing in this case; rather my aim has been to understand the phenomena and how the artists have created meanings through intersubjectivity.

1.8. Delimitation One might find that both postcolonial and anthropological concepts have been parsimoniously applied in this thesis. For example, the concept rumor has been understood along the concepts fake news and gossip. How these concepts are used and their purpose might differ from one context to another, and from one study to another. However, it is important to note that all of these concepts have something in common: They are a part of the “practices of discursive engineering that intervene in publics in pursuit of instrumental ends.”12 In this thesis, I chose to apply the concept rumors to substitute for both fakes news and gossips, because the term rumor has broader application and allows us to differentiate the personal from the public.

The way the term subaltern is operationalized in this thesis might seem to stretch the concept beyond its original term by lumping together renowned artists and the marginalized masses. Some postcolonial scholars such as Spivak, might argue that these artists’ positions in society have rendered them unqualified to be called the Subalterns. I must say that I am not, by any means, attempting at conceptual stretching; rather, I see these artists as members of the subalterns, especially when analyzed in relations to the ruling and mobile global elites. Therefore, their subalternity status can be explained two closely related elements: By the fact that they seem closer to the masses than they are to the ruling elites, and by their exclusion from the hegemonic political class.

The lyrics of the songs could have been given a deeper analysis; instead, I put too much focus on contextual analysis at the expense of textual analysis. This can be seen as a weakness, but I see it as the result of my attempt to blend three disciplines – anthropology, postcolonial studies, and humanitarian studies – each of which carries equal importance in this work.

12 Meg Stalcup in an interview with the Journal of Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Feb., 2020. For more, see Stalcup, Graan and Hodges 2020, in the reference.

1.9. Previous Academic Research This section is divided into two subsections. Subsection one discusses the literature on ‘agency’ and the ‘politics of life’ as applied in humanitarian studies. The last subsection deals with some selected scholarly work on the use of music during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

1.9.1. Selected Literature on Agency and the Politics of life Liisa H. Malkki, one of the leading anthropologists, argues that delivering relief and long- term assistance often leads to practices and processes that are “dehistoricizing” to those who need this help.13 Malkki works is centered on the conditions and agency of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. She observes that certain humanitarian actions turn refugees into “mute victims” and this, she argues, “strip from them the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums.”14

In analyzing one such practices, she asks: How often have we seen the media image of a (usually white) U.N. official standing in a dusty landscape, perhaps in Africa, surrounded by milling crowds of black people peering into the camera, and benevolently, efficiently, giving a rundown on their numbers, their diseases, their nutritional needs, their crops, and their birth?”15

For Malkki, these processes and practices do not only preclude the voice of the victim and take away their agency, but they also create a condition where the “refugees suffer from a peculiar kind of speechlessness in the face of the national and international organizations whose object of care and control they are.”16 Consequently, issues like photographs and other visual representations of crises have come to replace the voice of the victim – an act of dehistoricizing. The voice of the victim is important during crisis, because it can help the victim interrogate and question his/her victimhood, while trying to regain agency.

Malkki’s work is therefore, important for this thesis. And in relation to the conceptual framework, the agency problem that Malkki takes up also speaks volume about the Foucauldian understanding of the agent-structure debate, which will be discussed in the next section.

13 Malkki, 1996, Speechless Emissaries, p. 378. 14 Ibid 15 Ibid, p. 390 16 Ibid, p. 386. 6

Didier Fassin is one of the leading scholars known to have examined the dilemma of saving lives during humanitarian interventions. He calls it the Politics of life in that “it takes as its object the saving of individuals, which presupposes not only risking others but also making a selection of which existences it is possible or legitimate to save.”17 For Fassin, the humanitarian arena therefore, sometimes produces some sort of public representation that infantilizes the victims – this reminds of Malkki’s ‘speechless emissaries’. Fassin argues that this also creates a situation where “there are those who can tell stories and those whose stories can be told only by others.”18

Drawing on empirical analyses such as MSF’s works in Iraq, Fassin argues that the differential treatment of “expatriates” and “nationals”, victims and combatants, and suffering and geopolitics, has consequences regarding social and political protections. Fassin argues that in some instances in the humanitarian field, when a white expatriate was kidnapped, the NGO’s mission had to be suspended and the goal shifted to rescuing the expatriate. This differential treatment is also evident in the material advantages that expatriates enjoy especially when it “concern[s] their very survival, whether they are endangered by illness or war.”19 Fassin’s analyses are relevant for this thesis because they have helped me to understand why various artists interrogated the different treatments shown to the white doctors, vis-à-vis the Sierra Leonean and Liberian doctors who died in the field.

In their work, Abramowitz et al. talked to more than thirteen experts in both anthropology and medical humanitarianism who argued that the humanitarian arena, sometimes, shows “political naiveté by failing to recognize the ‘real’ drivers of humanitarian crises: political oppression, class oppression, and economic and social injustice.”20 These scholars lamented how the humanitarian field has come to involve political actions that have led to social and political effects. Among these effects is the “lack of understanding about social and political factors linked to suffering and distress.”21 In the case of Sierra Leone and Liberia, these social factors also include the ubiquitous distrust of the mobile elites and foreigners who are deeply viewed with suspicions – something that the education/sensitization songs deliberately failed to recognize. Abramowitz et al.’s work has therefore, helped me to look at how structural

17 Fassin, 2007, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life, p. 501. 18 Ibid, p. 518 19 Ibid, p. 516. 20 Abramowitz et al., 2015, Medical Humanitarianism, p.8. 21 Ibid, p.14. 7 oppressions, for example, economic and political marginalization, have contributed to the emergence of the protest songs.

Finally, to understand the dialectical relationship between education/sensitization songs and the protest songs, we need not only understand the lyrics, but the intricacies that went into their total production. Thus the importance of the selected literature on agency and the politics of life.

1.9.2. Selected Works on Ebola Music Drawing on songs funded and composed by NGOs and some produced by independent artists during the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Michael Rivera argues that the dialectical relationship among these songs is a demonstration of the “larger power relations between aid and development culture and that of the local music industry.”22

Rivera observes that the major differences between the songs sponsored by foreign organizations and those produced by independent artists, are in the methods and viewpoints of the artists: In the NGO-sponsored songs, the rhymes and sounds are slow and they target the elderly because of the high rate of illiteracy among this category; the independent songs on the other hand, contain elements of hip-hop and electronic genres and these elements appeal to a younger audience.

Rivera’s work is an important starting point for me to understand how the Ebola music reflected the generational identity and experience of the various artists. The protest songs, for example, are more appealing to the younger and travelled generation, most of whom have been exposed to various forms of discriminations outside Africa.

Analyzing the role of music during the Ebola outbreak, Ruth Stone who conducted an ethnographic fieldwork in Liberia, argues that “music performance and other sonic sources provided warning, ameliorated suffering, and promoted the mental health of people during the outbreak.”23 For Stone, music is not only an expressive art for articulating experience and feelings, but in Liberia, for example, “communities live and breathe through music and dance, which channel the joys they seek to express or help dissipate the pain of suffering and loss.”24 Stone’s work is important because it helps me to understand how the education/sensitization songs became pivotal during the Ebola epidemic.

22 Rivera, 2017, Music, Media, and the Ethnopoetics of Two Ebola Songs in Liberia 23 Stone, 2017, Ebola in Town. 24 Ibid. 8

One of the most important analyses on the constitutive roles of music, agency and the politics of life during the Ebola epidemic is that of Boima Tucker. Although his is not a classical academic work; it nevertheless, gives better understanding of the Ebola music. In his short article, he categorizes the Ebola music into three types: the sensitization/education, the memorial/dedication, and the protest songs. For Tucker, “If there was ever a barometer for the mood of the people towards a specific event, outbreak, or crisis in West Africa, it would have to be popular music.”25 In categorizing the songs into three themes, he argues that social factors have lent themselves “to the need for the young and marginalized populations to express themselves.”26 He observes:

In the age of the mp3, broadband, YouTube, and SoundCloud, any outside observer can see the mood and opinions of local communities reflected in real time. In the case of Ebola, such real time transfer of information in the form of popular media is able to give outsiders a more in-depth perspective on the general population’s sensitization to and feelings about the disease, as well as giving locals an important platform to be heard from.27

For Tucker, the general feelings aroused by some of the political songs, made it difficult for the scientific community to contain the disease in the first place. Looking at the mechanisms that triggered the political songs, Tucker argues that a ubiquitous distrust of a globally mobile class that shuttles out of town whenever crisis hits, reached its pinnacle after many years of civil wars and class, political, and social marginalization. He observes that “[t]he same phenomenon continues during the Ebola outbreak.”28

Tucker’s analyses laid the foundation for my thesis, and unlike Rivera who only analyses education/sensitization songs, Tucker looks into the intricacies that led to the production of the protest songs. Although his is short and lacks academic stringency, it nevertheless, is an important starting point for me to be able to categorize the protest songs as well as the education/sensitization songs.

25 Tucker, 2014, Beats, Rhymes and Ebola. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 9

Chapter 2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

Here I have discussed the two concepts – agency and the subaltern – that have been the foundations of this paper.

2.1. Defining the Subaltern The term subaltern was originally conceived by the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) to interchangeably refer to the masses of people “whom the dominant power exerts its hegemonic influence” in the “historical formation of the Italian state in 1870.”29 In the 1980s, scholars, under the leadership of Ranajit Guha, founded the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) which comprised of South Asian scholars.

When it was founded, SSG’s main goal was to deviate from the over-reliance on ‘dependency theory’, and “‘provincialise European history […] push history to its limits, and rewrite history from the grounds of ambivalence and contradictions. […] In all these efforts, they claim, the subaltern remains the vantage point of their critiques.”30 In SSG’s own understanding, the subaltern came to entail “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.”31 The concept subaltern came to be viewed, understood, and analyzed as a binary attribute to the ruling hegemonic class in a society.

Drawing on Marxism, Deconstructionism, and Feminism, Gayatri Spivak wrestled with the term in her work on peasant uprisings in India, asking ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak wrote from the vantage point of the British colonial administrator in India, and therefore, referred to the subalterns as those at the very bottom of the periphery whose agency to speak and be understood and gain access to state apparatuses, had been denied by the dominant power in society. Spivak came to the conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak, not just because the subaltern lacked the voice, but also because “the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous” and cannot invoke a unified voice.32

29 Ludden, 2001, Reading Subaltern Studies, pp.306-307 30 Ibid. 31 Ranajit & Spivak, 1988, Selected Subaltern Studies, p.35. 32 Spivak, 2010, Can the Subaltern Speak, p. 38. 10

Explaining Spivak’s position, Barker notes that Spivak’s definition of the subaltern is based on the conviction, at the time, that “there are no subject positions in English or Indian discourse that would allow the subaltern to know or speak itself.”33 Writing at a time when only a few women had access to the structure of power or could read and write in the language of the colonizer, Spivak’s work was aimed at understanding the Subject position of a Bengali woman whose failed attempt at Self-representation led her to commit suicide.

In this thesis, I have opted to used Gramsci’s definition of the subaltern as a member of the masses upon “whom the dominant power exerts its hegemonic influence.”34 I have not asked if the subaltern can speak, because for my case study, not only that the subaltern can speak, but the subaltern can also sing and did indeed sing in the language of the colonizer – this reminds about Ashcroft et al.'s The Empire Writes Back. The subalterns in Liberia and Sierra Leone had been able to use their voice – no matter how irretrievably heterogeneous they are – not only to interrogate the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, but they had also been able to construct and reconstruct the Self and Other.35

2.2. Defining Agency

The term agency is understood as the capacity of a person to act. Chris Barker argues that “At the very least, agency is a matter not of premeditated and rational intentionality but of the socially constituted capacity to act.”36 Michael Foucault and Anthony Giddens have become the main central figures in the debate over agency, leading to the agent-structure tension.

In his earlier writings, Foucault held a structuralist view about agency, seeing the individual as ‘docile’ and therefore, lacks the “agency that would be required for political action.”37 The central point of his argument is that the individual is not a free agent; rather, what he or she does or is capable of doing is determined by social structures.38

Giddens, who criticizes this view, does not give primacy to either structures or agents; rather, he is of the view that agents and structures are constitutive elements:39 The individual makes society, just as society makes the individual. Giddens, unlike Foucault, does not see the

33 Barker, 2004, The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, p. 193 34 Ibid. 35 Bhabha, 1994, The Location of Culture, p.33. 36 Barker, 2002, Making Sense Of Cultural Studies, p. 91. 37 Ibid. 38 Foucault, 1975, Discipline and Punish. 39 Giddens, 1984, The Constitution of Society. 11 individual as powerless.40 In this thesis, I have chosen to follow Giddens’ understanding of agency. NGOs’ songs were produced to dispel rumors and sensitize; independent songs became protest songs, spreading distrust and exposing structural problems and what Fassin calls the politics of life.41 Therefore, structures put together by NGOs and governments have both enabled and influenced the emergence of the education and protests songs.

All structuralists are of the view that social structures limit the choices and opportunities available for the individual to exercise their agency, thus, their focus on social structures. Over the years, the agent-structure debate has resurfaced in many scholarly works, but most shared the view that our social positions largely determine what we do. Both Giddens and Foucault have been criticized for their positions. Foucault for “not provid[ing] us with an understanding of the emotional investments by which subjects are attached to discourse” and for denying the individual the agency “that would be required for political action;”42 and Giddens for ignoring political dynamics and conditions that make the individual behaves the way he does.43 However, both Giddens and Foucault are important in understanding agency as they both see power and structures as “productive and enabling as well as limiting.”44

However, it is not the aim of this paper to join the agent-structure debate. And as Barker has argued, instead of belaboring the ontological nature of agent-structure, we can “ask instead about how we might best talk about them and for what purposes.”45 Since this paper is about representation and agency during the Ebola humanitarian crisis, it is important to focus on how the concept agency is discussed within the humanitarian field.

Writing about anthropological perspectives on conflict, Henrik Vigh argues that people will continue to actively “seek new bearings and continue to have the ability to act even in situations of ‘disorder and ruin,”’ and that the question of agency in such situations is not about whether people can act, but what possibilities they have.46 According to him,

40 In the later years of his life, Foucault changed his stance on the agent-structure debate; his idea of governmentality and control of the Self leaves room for individual agency. 41 Fassin, 2007, Humanitarian as Politics of Life 42 Barker, 2002, Making Sense Of Cultural Studies, p. 89. 43 Kort and Gharbi, 2013, Structuration theory amid negative and positive criticism. 44 Ibid 37, p. 60 45 Ibid, p. 86. 46 Vigh, 2008, Crisis And Chronicity, pp. 10-11. 12

“Researching agency as possibility rather than capacity gives us a direct point of departure in an anthropological analysis of crisis as context.”47

In this paper, I have tried to follow this line of reasoning: Instead of asking whether the subalterns can sing – as Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ – I have looked at how the possibility the subalterns have, had enabled them to be heard during one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent years. This means that even people affected by disaster do have agency; but looking at the possibility of how their agency can be used or have been used would inform our understandings of future responses to humanitarian crises.

47 Ibid.

Chapter 3. EMPIRICAL DATA

3.1. The Rumors

Before I proceed to the next sections where I have dealt with the two types of themes that emerged from the Ebola music, I have discussed here a few of the most common rumors. Understanding the context in which these rumors emerged, will inform our understanding of the emergence of the protest songs.

One common rumor was that the organs of those who died in the Ebola epidemic were harvested for use in the West. As the anthropologists Barry S. Hewlett and Bonnie L. Hewlett have argued, several factors accounted for the lack of trust for health workers, especially the international teams. For example, corpses were disposed of without relatives being informed, and health officials did not allow relatives to view corpses because of safety reasons. According to Hewlett and Hewlett, “These unquestioned clinical practices amplified existing rumors common to many parts of East and Central Africa that Euro-Americans visit Africa to harvest body parts for profit.”48 Looking at other cases, such as the DRC and Sudan, the authors observed that this particular rumor is a recurring problem in many Ebola outbreaks in Africa.49

Another rumor in Sierra Leone, for example, was that the virus was created by the ruling All People Congress (APC) because the party wanted to get financial assistance from donors. Fodei J. Batty, a Sierra Leonean Political Science professor at Quinnipiac University, argues that this particular rumor drew upon the history of the APC party, which in the 1980s, allowed foreign firms to “dump toxic industrial waste into the territorial waters of Sierra Leone.” This rumor gained moment as people were convinced that there were “several clinical trials of Ebola involving foreign interests had all taken place suspiciously close to the timing of the current outbreak.”50

Another observation on the factors that are said to amplify the rumors was the fact that all the responders who died during the epidemic were nationals. Foreign doctors were flown back abroad for treatment, while national doctors were not afforded the opportunity for a world- class medical attention. This differential treatment is what Fassin calls ‘hierarchy of humanity’.51 Accordingly, this differential treatment reminded the populations of the war

48 Hewlett & Bonnie, 2015, Ebola, Culture, And Politics, p. 57. 49 Ibid, p. 109. 50 Batty, 2014, Reinventing ‘Others’. 51 Fassin, 2007, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life, p. 516.

14 years when their own wealthy elites and foreign aid workers shuttled out of town as soon as trouble set in.52

3.2. The Sensitization/Education Song

The first category of Ebola songs identified is the sensitization or education songs. Here I have brought three of the most prominent of these songs.

In October 2014, USAID launched the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge for Development project. This led to a partnership with West Africa’s most popular musicians, and this resulted to the famous song, Africa Stop Ebola. The goal was to sensitize the people and counter public perceptions and rumors about the Ebola epidemic.53 USAID sees music as one of the most effective strategies that could help it control the outbreak, while it takes other measures to “mitigate economic, social and political impacts of the crisis, ensure adequate domestic preparedness, and develop safe and effective treatments and vaccines or advance the Global Health Security Agenda.”54

The lyrics of Africa Stop Ebola were produced by the artists themselves in collaboration with Carlos Chirinos, an academic and development practitioner who understands the powerful dynamics of music in West Africa. The Malian musicians Amadou and Mariam, Salif Keita, Oumou Sangaré, and Kandia Kouyaté; the Guinean singers Mory Kante and Sia Tolno; the Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly; the Congolese vocalist Barbara Kanam; and the Senegalese rapper Didier Awadi, are all big names in Africa, and they all have been featured in the song. The lyrics are sung in Soussou, Malinké, Kissi, Lingala, Bambara, English, and French. These languages are widely spoken across Africa, making the lyrics understandable to everyone in the affected communities.55

From one chorus to another, the lyrics move from portraying Ebola as an “Invisible enemy” to imploring communities and “Dear parents” to “Follow the advice of medical authorities” because “Ebola came to hurt us” – all the more reason why everyone should “Respect their [the doctors’] advice.”56

This initiative was prompted by the need to counter spreading rumors that the disease was created, and by widespread distrust of health officials who were seen as the extended arm of the ruling political elites. As Chirinos observes, “There’s been a total lack of trust because of

52 Tucker, 2014, Beats, Rhymes and Ebola. 53 Relief Web, 2015, United States Announces Additional Results In Grand Challenge. 54 Department of States, 2014, Emergency Request Justification. 55 For access to the songs and their lyrics, see the Appendix. 56 Fakoly et al, Africa Stop Ebola. For more on all the songs, see the Appendix

15 all the misinformation and a lot of cases of people going to churches and local healers to try to get Ebola medicine.”57 Therefore, Africa Stop Ebola was aimed at sensitizing, building trust, and breathing some air of hope into the communities.

In Liberia, UNICEF, in partnership with the Health Ministry, Hott FM – Liberia’s most popular hip-hop radio station – and others, also developed some Ebola songs to counter public perceptions of the virus. One such songs is Ebola is Real, which features F.A., Soul Fresh, and DenG who are very popular among Liberian youths. Sung in the colloquial English widely spoken in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, the song was aimed at warning, informing, and advising the population about the virus.

Speaking about this particular song, Hott FM Managing Director, nicknamed DJ Blue, was quoted as saying: “It’s played on every last media outlet in the country.”58 According to Uri Friedman of the The Atlantic, this song made a strong headway when it appeared in the airwaves, arguing that by measure of its visibility, the song fulfilled its function as it appeared “daily on Liberian television and around 20 radio stations” during the height of the epidemic.59

Another Hott FM and UNICEF’s production is Ebola is Real, which saturated the airwaves and was considered by many as one of the most influential Ebola songs. It could relate to all popular genres in the region’s music industry by blending hipco, hip-hop, ballad, and reggae.

This made it successful and appealing to all generations. Ebola in town, featuring Liberia’s Shadow, D12, and Kuzzy also became influential and gained strong public receptions. From “don’t touch your friend” to “Ebola is worse than HIV AIDS,” the song aim was to dispel rumors that the virus was created. Their ability to appeal to a wide range of listeners led to “everyone in Liberia talking about the songs.”60

Commenting on the importance of expressive art during humanitarian interventions, UNICEF’s spokesperson, Christophe Boulierac, said music is "an integral part of life" in Africa, and from “elections to polio campaigns,” music has always been instrumental. "We used songs as a medium of getting out the information to a wide segment of the population, through the best medium available,"61 he explains.

57 Jones, 2014, African Musicians Band Together. 58 Blair, 2014, Liberia's Hottest Hip-Hop Station Has All The Latest Ebola Music And 59 Friedman, 2014, How To Make A Hit Song About Ebola. 60 Beaubien, 2014, Liberian Singers Use The Power Of Music To Raise Ebola Awareness 61 Cullinane, 2014, Using Music To Fight Ebola In Liberia.

In a span of a few months, these education/sensitization songs had become the most formidable sources of information about the epidemic. When the songs were played over the radios, DJs used the occasion to provide news about quarantine centers, newly discovered cases as well preventive measures. According to Chirinos, “Thirty-six Ebola- themed songs and music videos produced since the outbreak began in 2014 have generated over 66 million views and listeners on social media and music websites, and many of these songs also aired on local radios and TVs in West Africa.”62 In relation to the population of both Liberia (4.3 million) and Sierra Leone (7 million) at the time, this can be seen as a remarkable achievement.

3.3. The Protest Songs

The second category of songs identified during the Ebola epidemic is the protest songs. They aimed at exposing structural injustices and the politics of life.

One of the famous protest songs that saturated the West African music space is the one by the Liberian artists, Mr. Monrovia, Dyddy Kool, and AG da Profit. The song, titled White Ebola, is sung in colloquial English and brings listeners and viewers closer to Fassin’s politics of life, in that it was set to expose the unequal treatment of Ebola victims, and to question the degree of the international intervention.

“When the wettman catch Ebola, he get a plane-ride. When ma brother catch Ebola, he end up in Central Street graveyard.”63 This part of the lyrics makes implicit reference to the American doctors, Dr. Martin Salia and Dr. Craig Spencer, who were flown back to the US for treatment after having contracted the virus. For Boima Tucker, the fact that some members of the group behind White Ebola live in the West, this availed them “a privileged distance to reflect on the injustice inherent in the unequal treatment of Africans during this crisis.”64 Boima argues that White Ebola “sums up a general feeling of distrust that made the disease difficult to contain in the first place.”

Another famous protest song is Good Morning Salone by Sierra Leone’s Kao Denero. Salone stands for the name Sierra Leone, inferring some sort of a wakeup call to the perceived structural injustices that Sierra Leoneans have been facing in the hands of the ruling political elites since independence. Sung in Krio, Denero’s choruses have many similarities to that of White Ebola in that they give impetus to the rumor that the Ebola epidemic was created in a “lab” in order to “reduce the population” and “crucify the earth.”65

62 Chirinos, 2017, Ebola Songs Exploring The Role Of Music In Public Health. 63 Mr Monrovia, Dyddy Kool. AG da Profit, White Ebola. See Appendix. 64 Ibid. 65 Denero, Ebola, see Appendix. 17

This song became very popular with the youth in Sierra Leone, a cohort which made up more than 60% of the population.

The internationally renowned Liberian reggae artist, Black Diamond, was also among the artists who, through their voices, interrogated and questioned the Ebola outbreak in the region, reinforcing deep-rooted general skepticisms that the virus was an attempt for “population control.”66 In the song Ebola, he too shifted the focus from the national structural inequalities to the macro structural inequalities, drawing attention to widespread perceptions that Africa has always been badly treatment by outside forces. Diamond, like many of the protesting artists, is of the view that the African continent has continuously been victimized and undermined by outsiders.

The introduction to the Ebola song video starts with some texts that remind the viewer how Ebola started in 1976 near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The introductory part continues by showing how HIV-1 was first detected in a blood sample taken from a man in the DRC in 1959. The introductory text says that how this man “became infected is not known;” and the text ends with triple question marks, asking whether all these diseases, including Ebola, are “man-made???”67

Good Morning Salone, White Ebola, and Ebola, therefore, became protest songs, giving the artists the opportunity to reinvent ‘Other’ by playing into general skepticism that Ebola was invented by a bigger enemy. Where the education/sensitization songs were produced to fill a knowledge gap about the epidemic and counter swirling rumors that were adding to the plethora of deep distrust that the governments, frontline workers and international NGOs were facing, the protest songs aimed to remind the society that Ebola was not the only enemy. What caused the emergence of this dialectical relationship is discussed in the next chapter.

66 Black Diamond, Ebola. See Appendix 67 Ibid. 18

Chapter 4. DISCUSSION

In this chapter, I have discussed my empirical data in relation to my conceptual framework. I have analyzed the contexts which gave rise to the Ebola music, by looking at how expressive art, as a tool for articulating agency, has both been enabled and limited by the socio- political structures of Liberia and Sierra Leone. As I stated in the introduction, understanding the Ebola music, especially the protest songs, would require understanding the intricacies that led to their total production.

When famine hit Ethiopia in the 1980s, Band Aid, a UK-based charity supergroup, took to the stage to sing ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’, despite the fact that Ethiopia, the most Orthodox country in Africa, is also one of the oldest Christian countries in the world. In as much as the song was instrumental to bringing aid to Ethiopia, it also played its part in perpetuating stereotypes about Africa, especially as it describes Africa as the continent “where nothing grow, No rain nor rivers flow” or “chimes of doom” and a world of “dread and fear/Where a kiss of love can kill you.”68 Since its release, there has been widespread criticism about Band Aid both at the policy and academic level.

When Ebola hit West Africa, cognizant of the lingering legacy of Band Aid, influential West African artists took it upon themselves to own the narratives about the disease. Thirty-six songs related to the Ebola epidemic saturated the airwaves, generating more than 66 million views and listeners.69 Africa Stop Ebola was one of them, and the song consequently became the binary Other of Band Aid. Tiken Jah Fakoly, whose voice can be heard at the beginning of the song, told journalists that he did not want the international response to the Ebola epidemic to contribute to perpetuating stereotypes about Africa, as was the case in Ethiopia. Therefore, upon seeing the “terrible images,” Fakoly “called the other musicians and said that we have to do something to sensitize the people about this disease.”70

The terrible images that Fakoly referred to were not only those showing the bodies of their loved ones wrapped in white linen shrouds, but also the images of cordoned off areas and civilian-security confrontations in places like Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, Guinea’s Forécariah Prefecture, and Sierra Leone’s Kenema.71 For many people in the region, these images reminisced of the civil wars in these countries that ended barely twelve years ago. This explains the urgency of Africa Stop Ebola to refer to the Ebola virus as the “invisible

68 Band Aid, see Appendix 69 Chirinos, 2017, Ebola Songs Exploring The Role Of Music In Public Health. 70 Voice of America, 2014, West Africa Musicians Launch Own Ebola Song 71 Wilkinson & Fairhead, 2016, Comparison Of Social Resistance To Ebola Response. 19 enemy” in order to shift the blame away from the failing social structures in these countries in order to de-escalate the ensuing social instabilities during the epidemic.

From “trust the doctor” to “see the doctor” Africa Stop Ebola is not devoid of messages aimed at dispelling rumors and building trust for frontline workers and for international responders. The song itself was a result of collaboration between the artists and USAID and partners who realized that rumors were making it difficult to contain the epidemic. State structures such as public media and access to publicity helped in turning Africa Stop Ebola into a household song, giving these artists such a powerful influence that only reminisced of Band Aid in 1984.

This power of internal agency has contributed to building some trust and restoring hope as the people saw their own influential artists, who had been singing critically about social injustices, now urging people to believe in the ontology of Ebola – a disease many people initially thought was invented by the Wettman72 and the ruling elites. But for these artists, Africa Stop Ebola was more than a song to educate and build trust: It was an attempt to avoid another Band Aid as well as an attempt to “avoid stigmatizing Africa as a continent that needs pity.”73 This provided the opportunity for the subalterns to speak about their victimhood without being victimized as was the case in the Band Aid’s song about Ethiopia.

In Liberia, UNICEF and the Health Ministry strategized a way of countering the level of misinformation that was responsible for spreading rumors about the disease. Of the 36-Ebola related songs, a majority were produced in Liberia. This can be explained by the fact that social protests were more prevalent in Liberia than Sierra Leone.74 Therefore, Liberia’s Hott FM became an incredibly powerful medium. As some observers have noted, one could hear Ebola songs “playing from simple shacks and tidy stucco homes” to “every last media outlet in the country.”75 Some of these NGOs-government-songs were aired on national and community radios as well as TVs across the affected countries. In justifying its music-initiative, Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa, notes that breaking the transmission required countering the fear and rumors and earning trust of the communities.76 This explains why the UNICEF-sponsored Ebola songs were not only aimed at warning, informing, but also pleading with the population to trust the doctor.

72 In Sierra Leone’s Krio language, widely spoken by the population, the word wettman means a white man. A similar connotation exists in Swahili-speaking countries in East Africa, where it becomes Mzungu, and in Senegal, Guinea, Mali, and The Gambia, where it becomes Toubab, Toubabo, Tou-baco. 73 Voice of America, 2014, West Africa Musicians Launch Own Ebola Song. 74 Wilkinson & Fairhead, 2016, Comparison of Social Resistance to Ebola Response. 75 Blair, 2014, Liberia's Hottest Hip-Hop Station Has All The Latest Ebola Music And News; see also: Beaubien, 2014, Liberian Singers Use The Power Of Music To Raise Ebola Awareness. 76 UNICEF, 2014, Misconceptions Fuel Ebola Outbreak In West Africa 20

But although these educational songs represented, to a certain degree, unlike Band Aid, the voices of the people affected by the epidemic, they obscured other elements. The political and social complexities and challenges faced by many Liberians and Sierra Leoneans – the subalterns – are hardly reflected in these songs. Therefore, these NGOs-sponsored songs erased and put into oblivion the plights of the ordinary masses. This act of deliberate oblivion was what gave rise to the protests songs that I have discussed in the rest of this chapter.

To understand the ontological nature of the protest songs as well as the lack of trust that the education songs attempted to cement, it is important to also look at how national and international structures such as the global social, political, and economic factors have created a rift between a global mobile elites and the rest of society in Liberia and Sierra Leone both before and after their civil wars.

For example, the protests songs never made it to the public radios or national TVs. The government feared this would render their efforts useless; thus, sanctioning their visibility. During the colonial era in West Africa, music was a form of political, social, and historical expression, used in opposing injustices of the colonial state. To counter this hegemonic force, the colonial government had to repress and ban songs from broadcasting. This method was consequently inherited by the small elitist group which stepped in to fill the vacuum left behind by the colonial state.77

For many disenfranchised people in the postcolonial state, therefore, the legacy of colonialism and slavery still lingers on, thus resulting to the emergence of a binary force within the postcolonial state itself, and the distrust of outsiders.78 Because of this, two fundamentally understandable skepticisms have gained ground in the region: First is the skepticism of the political elites, which owes much of its bearings to the rift created by the fundamental perceptions of a remote state that is run by a handful of elites whose wives give birth in Europe or American, and children sent to European or North American universities. The second is the skepticism about humanitarian workers – a field dominated by white people – which is based on recurring themes in stories “of body-snatchers and vampirism rooted in kidnapping, once a major means of acquiring slaves.” Therefore, the postcolonial structures have both influenced and limited the emergence of the protest songs.

79 As Giddens has argued, people’s ability to act are both a cause and consequence of the structures within their environment. For the anthropologist, Chris Barker, power and

77 Drewett & Cloonan, 2016, Popular Music Censorship In Africa. 78 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject 79 Richards, 2020, Ebola And COVID-19 In Sierra Leone.

21 structures are as productive and enabling as they are limiting.80 Therefore, when the structures put around by the colonial state and the postcolonial state made it difficult for some people to express themselves, they sought other available means to express their agency.

As Henrik Vigh argues, people will continue to actively “seek new bearings and continue to have the ability to act even in situations of ‘disorder and ruin.’”81 Consequently, the protesting artists, during the Ebola epidemic, were able to use YouTube and SoundCloud to get their messages across, generating thousands, if not millions of listeners and views. The availability of these contested space, which can be used by anyone to convey their message, gave the protest songs some visibility.

However, there are more to the protest songs than the possibility of the subalterns to exercise their agency. One can therefore, ask: ‘What explains the emergency of protest songs during the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone?” Protest songs like White Ebola, Good Morning Salone, and Ebola did not just spring from the air to seek to counter the paternalistic stance towards Africa, but they are a product of an ongoing negotiation between a global mobile elites and those whom the dominant power exerts its hegemonic influence – the subalterns. The songs equally sought to expose what Fassin calls the politics of life – the selection of lives to safe during crises, and the framing and problematizing of humanitarian interventions.

Talking of framing and problematizing, Abramowitz et al. have argued that “[sometimes] humanitarians showed political naiveté by failing to recognize the ‘real’ drivers of humanitarian crises: political oppression, class oppression, and economic and social injustice.”82 Both Abramowitz et al. and Fassin see framing and problematizing humanitarian intervention as having much bigger consequences than understood. Fassin goes on to argue that problematizing in the humanitarian field involves describing and interpreting “the world in a certain way, bringing problems into existence and giving them [a] specific form,” and this can lead to “discarding other ways of describing and interpreting reality, of determining and constituting what exactly makes a problem.”83

An example of framing and problematizing during the Ebola epidemic is how USAID described Sierra Leone as ‘highly illiterate’,84 without any explanation of how international and national structures have contributed to this level of illiteracy. This problematizing

80 Barker, 2002, Making Sense Of Cultural Studies, p. 60 81 Vigh, 2008, Crisis And Chronicity, pp. 10-11. 82 Abramowitz et al., 2015, Medical Humanitarianism, p.8 83 Fassin, 2011, Humanitarian Reason, p.8 84 Department of States, 2015, Emergency Request Justification. 22 discarded the legacy of colonialism, the civil war, and the fact that both Sierra Leone’s and Liberia’s post-war reconstruction efforts, largely supported by the Western liberal world and its subordinate institutions, have failed to “altered the perceptions of a remote state.”85 As Lind and Ndebe have observed:

The dynamics of warfare tied into and accentuated the state’s remoteness from many people. Ebola has simply unmasked persisting deep public suspicion and mistrust of the state, laying bare the limits of post-conflict reconstruction to transform state-society relations. The reconstruction emphasis on rehabilitating pre- existing governance structures – such as the paramount chieftancy in Sierra Leone – did not redress deeply rooted social inequalities, with the result that many people have been marginalized.86

The framing also put into oblivion how colonial administrators deliberately instituted a system that kept many people away from the school door, despite the fact that, for example, Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College was the first western-type university in British sub- Saharan Africa.87 Scholarly works have argued that the education system in Sierra Leone is a “bi-product of British imperialism” and therefore, “its structure and ethos were shaped in the context of the needs and prejudices of the colonial power.”88

For years, Fourah Bay had been accessible only to people in Freetown, the capital city, and exclusively to ex-slaves. This legacy has had profound effects in the current literacy rate in the country. As recent as 2001 when the civil war ended, more than 1200 primary schools were destroyed. However, the framing and problematizing by USAID and other NGOs did not take these problems into consideration, and neither the gains made over the years in terms of education.89 Sierra Leon’s postwar reconstructions also suffered a dismal mood: For example, the Community Education Investment Program (CEIP) and the Complimentary Rapid Education Primary School (CREPS) which were aimed at bringing the state closer to society by catering for the education need of different classes of demobilized young people, was defunded by international partners. This led to the shortage of teaching materials, youth demotivation, and consequently, pushing the state farther away from the broader society.90

Now, in terms of the international structures, one can point to the trajectories that the region went through. Since the 1980s, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) launched the Structural Adjustment Program (SAPs) in West Africa, many

85 Lind & Ndebe, 2015. Return of the Rebel, p. 3. 86 Ibid, p. 1. 87 Banya, 1993, Illiteracy, Colonial Legacy and Education. 88 Ibid; also see Reeck & Fyle1983, The History Of Sierra Leone. 89 Borgen Project, 2015, Education in Sierra Leone. 90 Olawale, 2008, The Dynamics of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peace Building in West Africa. 23 countries in the region became affected. In Sierra Leone, the economy declined drastically, leading to the emergence of a shadow market which served the interests of “powerful and articulate groups” with transnational connections and the means to “smuggle export commodities (especially diamonds).”91 Consequently, in the 1980s, officials of the ruling All People's Congress (APC) signed deals with foreign firms, allowing the latter to dump toxic waste into Sierra Leone’s territorial waters.92

In Liberia, like Sierra Leone, its health and education sector were also affected. After Liberia’s civil war, the “Liberian state and the Liberian healthcare sector fell to a loose consortium of international institutions led by the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), international NGOs, and bilateral donors.”93 Post-war reconstructions in both countries have largely disproportionately been concentrated on security reforms and running presidential palaces, leading to a weak health and education sectors.

As Cornell University’s scholar, Jackie Sayegh, observes, only $42.96 million of the 2012- 2013 Liberian budget was earmarked for the education sector, while the Office of the President and the Legislature – the two most elitist offices in the country – were allocated $31 million and $34 million respectively.94 Over time, the post-war reconstruction took a life of its own: Citizens’ political participation was limited, and this, Sayegh argues, “made most Liberians deeply distrustful of the messenger (the government), and if the messenger cannot be trusted, the message cannot be believed.” Eventually, many Liberians saw the Ebola epidemic as a strategic scheme by the government to “receive more donor aid, to be shared amongst those high up in the government.”95

The protest songs that emerged during the Ebola epidemic are therefore, a consequence of the structural inequalities that had been in the making for decades. This is why even when governments, NGOs and other international partners had been busy framing, problematizing, and building trust, many people were still protesting, listening to and watching protest songs, and speaking and writing openly about the structural conditions that brought about the epidemic.

This form of protest was exacerbated by what some artists perceived as hierarchical discrimination – and Fassin calls ‘hierarchies of humanity’. For Fassin, in the humanitarian

91 Longhurst et al., 1988, Structural Adjustment and Vulnerable Groups in Sierra Leone, p. 25. 92 Batty, 2014, Reinventing “Others”. 93 Abramowitz, 2014, How the Liberian Health Sector Became a Vector for Ebola. 94 Sayegh, 2014, Ebola and the Health Care Crisis in Liberia. 95 Ibid. 24 field, “hierarchies of humanity are passively established but rarely identified for what they are—politics of life that at moments of crises, result in the formation of two groups, those whose status protects their sacred character and those whom the institutions may sacrifice against their will.”96

In White Ebola, this was clearly captured by the artists in the lyrics: “When the wettman catch Ebola, he get a plane ride//when ma brother catch Ebola, he get a ride to Central Street graveyard.”97 The lyrics refer to the two American doctors, Dr. Martin Salia and Dr. Craig Spencer, who contracted the virus in West Africa. A number of Sierra Leonean and Liberians health workers died in the Ebola crisis; and for White Ebola¸ this adds more suspicion to the speculations about the origin of the epidemic and reminisced of the war years when the affected countries saw a mass exodus by the elites.

In the song Ebola, Black Diamond, the internationally renowned Liberian reggae artist, also joined the protesting artists, using his fame to interrogate and question the Ebola outbreak in the region, asking why there is no Ebola in the other continents. Some of the lyrics go:

Every day in the news Ebola kill my sister in Guinea [chorus] Every day on TV Ebola kill my brothers in Sierra Leone [chorus] Every day in the news Ebola kill my mother in Liberia [chorus] Every day in the news

In America, Asia, Europe Ebola is silence [chorus] Condescending the African [Chorus] Them say it comes from Africa Them say Ebola is from Africa Population control is what am thinking Because every bad thing comes from Africa Yet still they won’t leave my people alone They start civil wars Undermining African governments Them charge our leaders for war crimes

Both White Ebola and Ebola address a similar theme: them vs. us – a form of a binary which pits the underprivileged in the society against the ruling elites who are seen as an extended arm of powerful global interests. While the songs White Ebola and Ebola put more blame on

96 Fassin, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life, p. 516. 97 White Ebola, see Appendix 25 outsiders for the Ebola epidemic and for the trajectories of the region, Good Morning Salone by Kao Denero took a swipe on national corruption while also interrogating other broader societal phenomena. Denero’s lyrics take the form of protest against the site of power as well as the indifference of society toward itself and its individual members.

The protest songs therefore, can be seen as a binary Other whose emergence speaks volume about the wide rift that post-conflict reconstruction efforts in both Liberia and Sierra Leone have not been able to eliminate. The protesting artists, therefore, turned to their voices to articulate their anger at the perceived structural hierarchies that left the subaltern disproportionately marginalized. These artists might not have made much money from their voice compared to the other artists because they did not intervene in the musical space in pursuit of commerce or fame. However, through their music, they have been able to interrogate state-society relations and question not only the outbreak of the Ebola epidemic, but also the different treatment of Ebola victims.

The type of production and circulation of rumors during the Ebola epidemic, therefore, is a part of a larger discursive engineering that is endemic in many societies, especially in societies were the state has not managed to build trust between itself and the broader society. A similar trend, albeit with a different fashion, has also been observed recently in Brazil. In a study of the Zika rumors in Brazil, the anthropologist Meg Stalcup argues that rumors “represented the voice of the people or symbolic substitution for a range of injustices.”98 The same can be said about the rumors that were abound during the Ebola epidemic.

Writing in the 1980s, the postcolonial scholar Alessandro Triulzi argued that a binary force has emerged within the postcolonial state where “the free comment of the street replaces what the government releases. Pavement radio, ‘radio trottoir’ or sometimes télé-guele, is the self-defence system found in every authoritarian régime. Its function is to gather and transmit the voices, gossip and rumor of the street and to challenge, sometimes complete or even replace, the information released by the notoriously reticent or silent government media.”99

4.1. Chapter’s summary

In this Chapter, I have discussed how both national structures and international structures such as the configuration of the global political economy and the perceived hierarchies of the humanitarian field have contributed in different ways in shaping the types of music

98 Meg Stalcup in an interview with the Journal of Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Feb., 2020. For more, see Stalcup, Graan and Hodges 2020, in the reference. 99 Triulzi, African Cities, Historical Memory and Street Buzz, 1996 26 produced during the Ebola epidemic. On the one hand, the state and humanitarian organizations supported the education songs, thereby framing Ebola as an ‘invisible enemy’; on the other hand, protesting artists saw this ‘invisible enemy’ as something created by a bigger enemy – the foreign actors and the national elites. This view is a reflection of the deeper societal distrust of the state and outsiders. This distrust is deep-rooted, dating as far back as the Tran-Atlantic slave trade, and became prevalent during the war years when a global mobile elites shuttled out of the region as soon as the situation became unbearable.

Chapter 5. CONCLUSION & FUTURE RESEARCH

5.1. Conclusion

The 2014-Ebola epidemic became the worst humanitarian crisis that West African has seen since the beginning of this millennium. Conservative estimates have it that 11, 000 people died, of which Sierra Leone and Liberia alone accounted for about 4, 000 and 5, 000 respectively. When state authorities and humanitarian organizations stepped in to bring the epidemic under control, they were met with hostilities and mistrust.

As the epidemic spread, rumors spread along, making it hard for people to trust the government and aid workers. Those infected initially refused to be quarantined and families were refused any access to their deceased family members. The former added fuel to the ongoing rumors that the epidemic was created by the political elites, reminiscing of the 1980s when, for example, some members of the Sierra Leone’s ruling party, the All People Congress, signed deals allowing foreign firms to dump toxic industrial waste into its waters.

As the epidemic raged, humanitarian agencies such as WHO, UNICEF, and USAID turned to music in order to build trust and sensitize the people about the virus. In West Africa, music is an important communication tool, and it has successfully been used in political, social, education campaigns before. Therefore, some of West Africa’s famous musicians, cognizant of the legacy of Band Aid in Africa, responded and collaborated with aid agencies to shape the narratives.

Thirty-six Ebola-themed songs emerged, generating over 66 million views – a figure that superseded the combined population of both Liberia and Sierra Leone. Out of these songs, two important themes emerged: the education/sensitization songs and the protest songs. The former was an attempt by influential artists from many countries in the region and beyond, to sensitize, dispel rumors, educate, inform, and build trust between aid agencies/government health-workers and the affected communities. The latter was an attempt by independent individual artists to expose national and international structural discriminations that they believed have been responsible for the structural conditions that led to the disease in the first place.

The deep distrust of the state can be explained by the fact that postwar reconstructions in both countries have taken a life of its own: In Liberia, the health sector has fallen into the hands of a few international NGOs and bilateral donors; in the 2012-2013 national budget, only $42.96 million went to education, while $31 million and $34 million went into running the Office of the President and the Legislature respectively. In Sierra Leone, efforts to bring education to the demobilized young people failed because funding was cut by donors. Consequently, postwar reconstructions in both countries have not managed to fundamentally alter the general perceptions of a remote state run by a small number of distrusted elites with ties to transnational networks and interests.

All this resulted to a fertile ground for the protest songs to emerge. However, because of the structures of the postcolonial state – structures that both affect and enable the musician’s ability to be heard and seen - some artists found other ways to speak and be heard. In West Africa, the important position music occupies in the society tells a lot about how the society expresses itself through the self-expression of the musician: Themes therefore, become a mirror, reflecting how the society thinks during a particular given time.

Therefore, when Ebola hit West Africa and international efforts mounted to combat the disease, music became a site for contesting power to both control the narrative and reinvent the imaginary ‘Other’. While the state and humanitarian NGOs tried so hard to reinvent ‘Other’ by referring to Ebola as the ‘invisible enemy’, the protesting artists joined this contested space to remind the society about the structural discriminations that have emerged as a result of the remote state and perceived international hierarchies.

The protest songs therefore, can be seen as a microcosm of a society divided between, on the one hand, a disfranchised segment which is attempting to cope with unacceptable social conditions and frustrations, and on the other hand, a distrusted mobile elites with a web of opportunities and social capital.

5.2. Future research

The roles of music in humanitarian interventions requires much research. Future research can look at how music can actually improve funding accountability, which itself can help build trust between aid agencies and communities – a lack of which can make future interventions difficult. Research can also look deeper into the nuances and the background of the various artists in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and how these shaped their songs during the Ebola crisis. Understandably, some of the artists grew up in refugee camps, others grew up in more stable 29 environments and nurtured the potential to sing, while others have lived in the West and have been seeing the plights of minority groups. This nuanced largely impact on the types of stance they have towards humanitarian interventions.

Future research can also look at the limit of the Liberal post-war reconstruction order which is largely concerned with building institutions without taking much consideration into state- society relations. The failure to build broader legitimacy in the postcolonial state will continue to fuel distrust not only of outsiders but also of national elites who are seen as remotely situated from the broader society.

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5.4. APPENDIX

A. Education songs

A.1. Africa Stop Ebola by Salif Keita, Oumou Sangaré, Kandia Kouyaté, Mory Kante, Sia Tolno, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Barbara Kanam, and Didier Awadi. Available at SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/africastopebola. Released October 2014. Last accessed 10 May 2021 at 18.00.

A.2. Ebola is Real by F.A., Soul Fresh, and Deng F.A. Available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC8fLOZthR4. Released 14 April 2015.Last accessed 11 May 2021 at 16.40.

A.3. Ebola in town by Shadow. Available both at Youtube and SoundCloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGltVAJ4JCk. Released 11 November 2014. Last accessed 11 May 2021 at 11.16.

B. Protest songs:

B.1. White Ebola by Mr. Monrovia, Dyddy Kool & AG da Profit Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2wMFc078OU&list=RDE2wMFc078OU&start_radio= 1. Released: 23 June 2015. Last accessed 11 May 2021 at 14.02.

B.2. Ebola by Black Diamond. Available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLan7OZnT_w. Released 14 May 2014. Last accessed 15 April 2021 at 14.00.

B.3. Good morning Salone by Kao Denero. Available at: https://soundcloud.com/sierra-network/good- morning-salone-kao-denero. Released 2014. Last accessed 28 April 2021 at 13.15.

C. Band-Aid:

C.1. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3fSknbR7Y4. Released 1980. Last accessed 10 Maj, 2021 at 11.00.