Timing, they say, is everything. Tamba M'bayo, a professor in the Department of History at the University of West Virginia, Morgan Town, WV, United States arrived in Freetown in the fall of 2019 to research, of all things, the history of epidemics in Sierra Leone. The visit incidentally provided him with the opportunity for a bird’s-eye observation on how the Covid-19 pandemic would unfold in the country, as well as how the government would respond to the looming challenge. It was also an opportunity to compare and contrast Covid-19’s progression with that of previous epidemics which were, in the first place, the object of the professor’s intended year as a Fulbright Scholar.
The slow advance of Covid, and its apparent reduced lethality in Sierra Leone has been a surprise to many, as it was in the case for most of the Continent in general. Potential explanations include innate and/or acquired immunity, and/or minimal exposure of the community to the virus. The latter explanation is probably not sustainable because, where antibody studies have been done elsewhere in Africa, for example in Kenya and Malawi, there was evidence of Covid-19 infection in those communities, communities that are not dissimilar in the dynamics of life that obtain in Sierra Leone’s impoverished places.
So, how to explain the protective circumstances of being African and living in Africa? I do make the point of being African and living in Africa because we can contrast the lethality of Covid on individuals of African ancestry living in America, New York, say, with that of Africans living on their own continent. The high death rates among African Americans was one of the starker images, as the pandemic cut its way across the world, and which evoked tropes that, to some, confirmed that, in America, Black lives did not matter. But that is another story.
Anyway, America’s Covid experience leads us to the colonial designation of Sierra Leone as the ‘White Man’s Grave’. We have come a long way since White men, and women too, embarked, in their hundreds, and even thousands, on their civilizing enterprise in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Before that, of course, Africa was just the source of unpaid human sweat and sinew, as well as the victim of theft of its intellectual property of rice- and cotton-growing skills). Today, looking through the long glass of decades of clinical insights and research, we now have some idea of how these European adventurers met their untimely deaths: They were just not biologically prepared for living in those places. In the case of malaria, for example, we now know that there are numerous ways in which, being African, born and bred in those climes, means that one may be partially protected against the lethality of the parasitic infection through a network of inherited biological devices. Among these, the best known is the sickle gene which, when inherited from one parent only, provides protection against one of the more deadly malaria species. There are, as well, several other genes that shore up protection against this infection, but these as are not as well-known among the general public. In any event, once the individual has survived infancy, parasite infestation results in a low-grade illness that does not usually result in death.
In the case of yellow fever on the other hand, this infection, also mosquito-borne, comes in epidemic waves that either kills within a few days or a week, or if the victim survives, confers lifelong immunity against future waves of the virus.
But, for the missionary, or colonial official, walking off the boat, totally biologically naive, never mind culturally unprepared, and armed with defences no more robust than biblical text or that in his orders from the Colonial Office, it was almost a certainty that things would not end well. They and the colleagues that replaced them did not stand a chance, as the old burial grounds around Freetown attest. Many died within weeks of landing, whilst others struggled on for a few months and then gave up, dying on the voyage back home, with a sea burial to mark their passing.
Smallpox’s is another story, that of a virus with an altogether different level of virulence but which, in the end, turned out to be central to an understanding of the phenomenon of vaccination that became a model of how to prevent many infectious diseases. The term, ‘vaccination’ itself, has its roots in the observation that individuals who milked cows infected with cowpox enjoyed protection when an epidemic erupted.
Back to Covid-19. Age, genetics, prior exposure, all play a part in an individual’s response to any infective agent. According to the online Worldometer statistics site, Covid cases in Sierra Leone during the entire course of the pandemic, so far, number just 7766. Seven thousand, seven hundred! And just 126 deaths!! Some speculate that resistance to Covid and its lethality may be dependent on the country’s population age structure, in which case, Sierra Leone, a country with one of the youngest populations (median age of 19.1 years), is likely to be a beneficiary of this age-dependent protection. The jury is still out on that.
The other side of this equation is that this young, robust, and vibrant Sierra Leone population should be up to any challenge. Pity is that the governing class has not seen it fit to mobilize this raw energy that is just waiting to burst forth and flourish all over the place. Instead, they use/manipulate it to achieve their notoriously venal purposes. And, alas, they succeed. Cycle after cycle. A pox on them, I say, not to coin a phrase.
Anyway, pandemics, and epidemics, have their own logic. They come and they go, starting somewhere, from something, from someone. Tamba M’bayo referenced the 1918-22 influenza epidemic that was brought to Sierra Leone on board a British Navy vessel, the HMS Mantua, and Covid-19 has become a textbook case of how pandemics spread, in its case, using modern transportation systems.
Although, in the end, Covid has been tamed by modern science, it is still a wild beast out there, full of tricks and devices, and ever ready to up its game. Scientists are happy to engage.
‘Nuff said.
Tell Fren Tru
