In May, the WHO confirmed a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As of 5th July, 1582 cases and 508 deaths have been confirmed in the DRC and Uganda. A lone case was confirmed in France
The spread is almost identical to the devastating 2018–19 outbreak that killed thousands and traumatised communities that still live with its memory. In light of this outbreak, a return to Véronique Tadjo’s eco-fiction, In the Company of Men, is in order.
Published in French in 2017 and translated into English in 2021, the novel was written in the aftermath of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014–16, which killed more than 11,000 people across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. In the novel, Tadjo asks: Why does it keep happening? And in the case of the DRC, for the 17th time!
The book has no single protagonist and no conventional plot. Instead, it features multiple characters who bear witness to different stages of the outbreak.
A doctor describes having to work forty-minute shifts in a suffocating protective suit and trying to find a vein in a dying patient whose skin has become as fragile as paper.
A nurse remembers treating the first patients bare-handed, long before anyone knew what they were dealing with.
A burial worker is haunted by the ghost of a girl whose body he lowered into the earth.
A young survivor is refused re-entry to her aunt’s house after recovering from Ebola and so chooses to walk through her neighbourhood holding hands with other survivors to show she is safe.
A poet on one side of a quarantine fence sends love poems to his fiancée on the other until a nurse brings him tragic news.
These human voices are joined by non-human ones. An ancient baobab tree remembers when the forest was intact and provides a link to the provenance of the outbreak.
The Ebola virus itself speaks, and without irony or malice. It explains that it would prefer to stay in the forest, in its natural host, the bat and far away from human beings.
The bat itself speaks too and laments that it has been demonised over an injustice that was actually done to it.
This is where the book becomes something more than a moving account of human suffering. Tadjo’s deepest argument is ecological with the baobab explaining what caused the epidemic: men came with machines and cleared the forest for a gold rush. They poisoned rivers with mercury, killed fish and felled trees with medicinal properties. The bats lost their habitat and food sources and were forced to migrate toward human settlements. There, they brought the virus along with them.
The chain of events that runs from deforestation to habitat loss and then to displaced wildlife to eventual epidemic is not fiction. Called ‘zoonotic spillover’, it is precisely how scientists understand the emergence of zoonotic diseases. Illnesses jump from animals to humans when the ecological boundaries between them collapse. It is estimated that around 60% of all emerging human infectious diseases are the products of such spillovers.
This brings us back to eastern DRC. The provinces of Ituri and North Kivu are among the most bio-diverse regions on earth and among the most ecologically pressured. They are home to over two million displaced people, to active conflict, to weakened health systems and forests under pressure from mining, logging and subsistence clearing.
Tadjo’s novel makes this fragile connection legible and human. She gives the baobab a voice and lets it remember. She gives the virus a voice and lets it explain that it is not the aggressor. She gives the survivors, the nurses, the burial workers, their voices. In doing so, she insists that no single perspective, scientific, governmental, or journalistic, can contain the full truth of what an outbreak is and why it happens.
The WHO is right to rush testing kits to Bunia, to convene technical advisory groups, and to talk about candidate vaccines. All of that matters urgently. But Tadjo’s book reminds us that containment is not the same as prevention, and that prevention requires listening and understanding what the forest is trying to tell us. And doing so soon, before the next outbreak begins.
In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo is published by Other Press.