To this day, I continue my never-ending struggle against the disease at a research institute in Kinshasa.
We must provide ourselves with the tools to fight Ebola effectively; we have to block its progress and learn to react quickly if it comes back. A first-generation vaccine against Ebola is already being tested. Others are in the development phase. But further research is definitely required. In collaboration with international health organizations and local governments, a group of scientists has been working on certain experimental serums that seem very promising. However, the pharmaceutical companies want to be sure that there’s an actual market, in other words that there’s money to be made through the research and development of all these scientific methods. We continually have various epidemics breaking out in one part of the world or another. Which areas of research are the most promising? For financial reasons, certain vaccines that have been developed have never made it to the crucial trial phase. We have the ability to prevent Ebola from resurfacing, but does humanity truly have the will to make this happen?
Be that as it may, other scientists reply, at least we’re better prepared for the possibility of another outbreak as we wait for the vaccines. There’s better surveillance, the laboratories are showing improved performance, and the population is better informed. Right now, we have medical teams traveling all over the country, on the lookout for the slightest sign of a recurrence, ready to intervene. Governments have learned to collaborate more efficiently and to share information. Should any new cases of Ebola be diagnosed, they can be brought under control quickly. There will be a handful of deaths, but no more.
That’s what we’ve learned and what we want to retain. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the disease has claimed a large number of health workers, and that as a consequence, there continues to be a lack of them. We should train more, and we should take special care of them. How else can they really do their job? They need to be taught to detect cases of infection extremely rapidly, to screen them and to deal with them without putting themselves in danger. Without their involvement, the system is bound to collapse.
And now the zoologists have joined in. They claim to have discovered a phenomenon that greatly increases Ebola’s catastrophic impact. When an outbreak is about to happen in a forest region, the virus will leave gruesome traces in the natural environment. It attacks antelopes, deer, and rodents, but especially big apes such as chimpanzees, which it strikes with devastating effect. The remains of hundreds of animals are scattered on the ground among the trees, right where they collapsed, overcome by the illness. Whenever the villagers notice an unusual number of wild animal carcasses, they’ve learned to alert the local authorities at once, since the carcasses signify that an Ebola outbreak among humans is about to happen.
People call me a scholar, a man for whom science equals truth and nothing but the truth. But I’ve understood one thing: scientific reason can’t satisfy every human need. In the fight against Ebola, human beings have always been more important than everything else. They are the agents of their own recovery, their own safety.
And in this race against the clock, the ancestors too are making their voices heard. They are the true protectors, the great allies of the living. The hospital is a failure. An ugly, anonymous death sentence, devoid of compassion, without a soul. A place where the poor end their lives miserably, inside dilapidated buildings.
In the villages and in certain parts of the city, the traditional healer is still in possession of some ancestral knowledge. His calming words and solemn gestures come from a past resolved to hold its ground. He’s a formidable rival. Those who look upon his authority with disdain have allowed themselves to be deluded. For people versed in traditional medicine, there’s more at stake than just plants and vegetation. It’s an expression of a complete worldview, a way of living in synergy with fauna and flora. To those who come to him for a consultation, the traditional healer will say one of the following four sentences:
It’s a disease I know and am able to heal.
It’s a disease I know but can’t heal.
It’s a disease I don’t know, but I can heal it.
It’s a disease I don’t know and can’t heal.
Right there and then, everything can change. History may be rewritten, and mentalities may evolve. Cooperation can begin. At the outset in the fight against Ebola, no one paid any attention to the traditional healers. Government bodies ignored them just as much as the NGOs and the health professionals. Considered ignorant and incompetent at dealing with the illness, they were accused of only making things worse. But despite all the efforts the scientists were making, the illness continued its rampage. What could be done? The specialists knew they had to rethink their strategy and get much closer to the people. Traditional healers share the population’s daily lives, their environment, their interests. They’re prepared to cover great distances on foot to visit a patient, and when they arrive, they’re not content just to treat the body; they care for the whole person.
So yes, we had to make an appeal to them!
Their medicine is something familiar to the majority of the population.
It’s readily accessible.
It doesn’t cost much.
It forms part of our culture.
It inspires confidence and reassures people.
It has, in other words, all the qualities that Western medicine in Africa has either lost or never managed to acquire.
The traditional healers were told all the relevant facts about Ebola, so they could pass on these explanations to their patients, thus helping to educate them. And that’s how they ended up persuading their patients to go and be treated by those “who know about the disease.”
Please understand that as a scientist, I want to seek out what’s effective in every realm of knowledge. We have only one life, and it takes place on earth. No other option is available to us. Through our thoughts, our words, and our actions, we have the capacity to reconstruct the world. This is my conviction, my religion, my raison d’être. I believe in the existence of pure energy.
Every single human being is a universe.
Man is made up of water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, iron, magnesium, zinc, manganese, copper, iodine, cobalt, nickel, aluminum, lead, tin, titanium, fluoride, bromine, arsenic, and more.
The atoms making up our body come from deep inside the stars.
Yes, really, from deep inside the stars!
Almost all the atoms of the universe are formed in the center of these celestial bodies. Furnace. Fusion. Astronomers say that stars shine for billions of years, their bubbling bellies giving birth to billions of atoms. Then, one day, the star dies. The atoms composing it expand in space, turning into metals, minerals, water, and living beings.
In order to reconstitute itself, our organism has to produce organic matter on a daily basis. But the human body does not know how to do this. Only plants have the ability to make oxygen and compose organic molecules from inorganic matter. Animals are equally unable to produce organic matter. So they eat plants, or, if they are carnivores, they devour animals that feed on plants. We are the same. We cannot survive without plants. We eat animals.
The stars, the oceans, plants, and animals are the building blocks of our bodies.
The universe doesn’t exist outside of us. It’s in us.
We are the universe.
But of all this immeasurable beauty, this unfathomable mystery, what do we have left?
XIV
The chilling voice of Ebola rings out in the early morning.
All right, all well and good, but it’s not me humans ought to fear the most. They should rather be scared of themselves!
I’m a virus thousands of years old. I belong to the large family of the Filoviridae. People have known about me for only forty years or so. Nevertheless, I’v
e been around for a very long time in this extraordinary forest, referred to as “primeval,” where everything has remained pristine since the beginning of time.
I have five brothers: Ebola Zaire, the most virulent among us; Ebola Sudan, which follows hard on its heels; Ebola Ivory Coast, so discreet that humans became acquainted with it only in 1994, thanks to a single patient, who incidentally didn’t die, but recovered; Ebola Bundibugyo, which lives in Uganda; and, finally, Ebola Reston, which has settled in Asia, where it has yet to show its full potential.
I don’t like to travel. I prefer to stay put right here, deep in the primordial jungle, which is where I’m happiest. Except when someone comes and disturbs me. Except when someone comes and disturbs my host. Because when I’m abruptly awakened from my sleep, I move from one animal to the next. I often choose great apes—gorillas or chimpanzees—but also the antelopes humans are so fond of. The animals in the jungle all know each other. They have their habitual meeting places, for example around watering holes, or under fruit trees colonized by bats. It’s no secret what happens next. A man violates nature by pulling the trigger and killing an animal. He cuts up the carcass. Blood on his hands. Fresh blood on his hands. Red blood on his hands. He lays the animal across his shoulders and takes it to the village. He doesn’t know that I’ve already entered his body. Or that very shortly I’ll be in his family. In his entire community. I move quietly and slowly in the beginning, but soon comes the grand finale, the fire, the flames.
It’s not me that has changed. It’s humankind, which has changed direction. The lives men lead today are no longer the lives the Old Ones led. They’ve become more demanding, greedier, more predatory. Their appetites are limitless.
I know nothing about their beliefs. I’m not governed by any law. I’m here purely for the sake of existing. I am me, period. An organism that needs to reproduce itself. No compromise. No negotiation. I’m alive, and I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to stay that way. My only needs are to feed and to defend myself. A pile of flesh will do. Any kind of receptacle, animal or human, it’s all the same to me. I’m neither good nor bad. Such judgments are useless. I’m like a plant that grows, like a spider that devours its prey.
What humans don’t seem to understand is that I have no predilection for them. They die too fast, too awfully. They’re not useful to my goals. If our paths happen to cross, why not, but if they don’t, I won’t seek them out. It’s they who come to me.
We, the viruses, have succeeded in conquering the planet. We’re in the sea, we’re in the air. We’re everywhere. We reinvent ourselves by mutating and multiplying with increasing speed. Man can’t figure us out. The antibiotics he’s so proud of have absolutely no effect on us. We can cross borders and continents at will. To our credit, we kill germs and bacteria by the thousands. And yet no one would dream of thanking us for our assistance, so what’s the point?
Given the choice, I would clip humanity’s wings to prevent them from flying. Then they’d have to crawl in the dust, and they’d get a better understanding of life. No one can defeat me. No one can wipe me out. If I withdraw, it’s just a strategic retreat. As soon as a new opportunity presents itself, I’ll be back. The greatest scientists on earth have tried, but so far, they still haven’t managed to crack my genetic code. I’m an equation they can’t solve. When I enter a body, I go through the blood vessels in order to invade the vital organs: liver, spleen, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, thyroid gland, skin, brain. A few days is all I need to overcome the pathetic little obstacles I encounter along the way!
Humans lament their fate, but they’re no better than I am. They have no lessons to teach to anyone. They should instead take a hard look at the evil they have inflicted and continue to inflict on themselves, deliberately, ever since they first walked the earth.
They are destructive by nature, much more so than I am. And yet, although they are perfectly aware of that fact, they refuse to acknowledge it. They prefer to delude themselves, to believe themselves superior to the other creatures in this world. Rulers, tyrants of this planet, that’s what they are, and their power is absolute. Their arrogance has made them forget every limit. Worse, they slaughter one another without mercy, and they come up with crueler ways of tormenting and killing every single day. They always find new reasons for starting wars.
Do you know what my favorite song is, Baobab? It’s Zao’s “Ancien combattant”—“War Veteran.” Better than any lecture, it illustrates what’s so grotesque about Man and his incurable, pathological destructiveness. The musician uses the absurd to show that he’s understood everything. I can recite the words for you—I know them well:
Cadence count, one, two
War veteran Mundasukiri
Cadence count, one, two
War veteran Mundasukiri
The world wars
Aren’t pretty, they’re not nice
The world wars
Aren’t pretty, they’re not nice
When the world war comes
Everyone’s cadavered
When the world war comes
Everyone’s cadavered
When the bullet’s whistling, no
time left to choose
If you don’t dance the changui
fast, my dear, oh! you’re
Cadavered
Whacked with a club
All of a sudden, wham, cadavered
Your wife cadavered
Your mother cadavered
Your grandfather cadavered
Your kids cadavered
The kings cadavered
The queens cadavered
The emperors cadavered
All the presidents cadavered
The ministers cadavered
The bodyguards cadavered
The bikers cadavered
The soldiers cadavered
The civilians cadavered
The cops cadavered
The gendarmes cadavered
The workers cadavered
The jobless cadavered
Your sweetheart cadavered
Your first mistress cadavered
Your second mistress cadavered
Beer cadavered
Whiskey cadavered
Red wine cadavered
Palm wine cadavered
Music lovers cadavered
Everybody cadavered
Me myself cadavered
Cadence count, a-one, a-two
War veteran Mundasukiri
Cadence count, a-one, a-two
War veteran Mundasukiri*
It’s time for people to realize something: they aren’t good, they’ve never been good. Never, at any time! Let them get that straight, once and for all. They’re imperfect and incomplete. They’re mortal. Everything rots. Everything disintegrates. Everything merges with the ground. Sometimes, their God sprinkles a handful of hopes onto the world and then goes back to His bed in the glowing darkness. The reddish wound of the firmament, the tumultuous waters, the scorching wind, the devouring floods—their God watches all that from afar. He makes them suffer within Him. Without Him.
You don’t believe me, Baobab? You shake the crest of your foliage?
You surely know that horror follows barbarism with them. Even when they declare themselves to be righters of wrongs, warriors in a good cause, they still have dirty hands. The truth is they’re not fighting for an ideal. They don’t kill in the service of the common good, no; they kill because the inhumanity of one group quite simply justifies the savagery of another. Whether they engage in mutual massacre with clubs, knives, spears, arrows and hatchets, like our ancestors, or use machine guns, grenades, shells, bombs, and chemical weapons, it comes down to the same things: atrocities, massacres, genocides. Where and when is it all going to stop? How much longe
r do we have to wait until humanity comes to its senses?
Do you want me to shut up, Baobab?
No, I haven’t finished. I have to add that human self-hatred is a generalized thing, to which racial or gender differences are as irrelevant as differences of religion or belief, of education or socioeconomic status. None of this matters; one of these days, they’ll start their mutual killings again. They themselves cannot perceive that the barbarism they abhor lives in their own souls and sows terror in all four corners of the world. It takes them by surprise every single time.
I can see your leaves quivering, Baobab, your trunk’s losing its sheen. I beg you, don’t take refuge in denial!
I don’t try to figure out who’s right or wrong in humankind’s innumerable wars; I simply observe the extent of their capacity for self-destruction.
I could go on, but I prefer to stop now, I’ve said enough.
Believe me, Baobab, if Man could only acknowledge his dark side as an intrinsic part of his being, he’d surely get better at keeping his destructive instincts under control, instead of letting himself be controlled by them. Humans should just step back, examine themselves dispassionately, and look for effective ways of ending the carnage. They should forget their absurd ideas about brotherhood and solidarity, which they shamelessly flout anyway, and become more realistic.
It distresses me to see how intent the human race is on its own destruction. Very soon, there will be nothing left for me to do. Human beings should be given as little power as possible. No kings, no princes, no heads of state, no politicians, just mere individuals facing their destiny. Because all forms of government, which are supposed to establish order, actually create chaos. They’re veritable mafias, run by the rich, who monopolize assets and resources.
To tell the truth, I fear only one thing: seeing human beings go against their nefarious nature and start to help each other. For it was neither science nor money that made me retreat when I was already so close to my goal. No, it was ordinary people, who gradually came to understand that their impact would be greater if they put their immediate interests and personal troubles aside in order to think, work, and fight collectively. They surprised me. That was the moment when I was obliged to withdraw and accept my defeat. I understood that their true power showed itself when they presented a united front.
In the Company of Men Page 8