How Ebola Lockdowns Failed a Liberian Community
On Jan. 29, 2025, the Ministry of Health of Uganda officially declared an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, with 10 confirmed cases reported as of March. This marks the eighth Ebola outbreak in Uganda since 2000. The hemorrhagic virus is highly infectious and fatal, prompting public health officials to seek containment. During the 2022 Ebola outbreak, the country received $34 million in aid to implement infection surveillance and prevention protocols. This time, cuts to U.S. foreign aid have strained the country’s health budget, leaving medical professionals worried about whether the government can effectively combat this epidemic. The pandemic has permanently shaped and transformed humanity. However, our ability to address such challenges during the initial and painful moments of uncertainty relies on a global response that ensures everyone receives free treatment and care.
My new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-1s, out March 11, examines how human rights diminish in service to capital, leaving people to suffer the consequences of pandemic disease. When we ignore the negative impacts of outbreaks, we miss opportunities to heal our wounds and prepare ourselves for the next pandemic. Bird flu, measles, Ebola, or even something we have yet to confront could present our next crisis due to a detrimental mix of bad luck and poor governance. In just a few days, we will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the U.S. acknowledgment of the Covid-19 pandemic, and we must remember the importance of preparing for epidemics both in the United States and abroad. In this excerpt, I look at the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the intense lockdowns that came with it. As always, what has happened serves as a prologue.
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After a lull in Ebola cases in West Africa in the early summer of 2014, the virus began to spread in the Liberian capital of Monrovia in July, which meant that public health measures came to a stand-still. But that did not come with political stability. On August 7, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, then-president of Liberia, declared a state of emergency, proclaiming “extraordinary measures for the very survival of our state and the protection of the lives of our people.” In practice, this meant that she rescinded civil liberties, saying that “ignorance and poverty, as well as entrenched religious and cultural practices, continue to exacerbate the spread of the disease.” She closed the borders and asked the Liberian army to monitor and occupy parts of the country. President Sirleaf surmised, at the time, that the health of the nation would come at a cost. Instead of increasing the number of doctors, which she believed was impossible, or giving out more protective medical gear, which the Ministry of Health did not have, she believed in circumscribing a subclass of people in the capital city.
The way a leader responds to a health crisis has a lot to do with how much that person trusts their population. There is something profound about how a ruler responds, as it holds a mirror up to society. “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer,” contended Karl Marx, “unless under the compulsion of society.” When he wrote this, Marx reflected on the state of industrial workers who churned through ten-hour workdays, occasionally slipping into states of bodily fatigue and occupational injury. Yet his introspection about the fragile condition of health under capitalism emphasizes something relevant about people, whether in Liberia or elsewhere, if society could be gentler to the worker — and the poor. There are things that public health measures afford, the ability to address mass infection and death through a simple fix, given that the field is constantly changing. In the face of technological and medical innovation, and social pressures, politicians have to work through ways to heal the nation from the microbes that invade a population. Nevertheless, the delicate balance between health and civil liberties shows how intractable health problems can be. President Sirleaf’s plans to lock down a country rested on a belief that Liberians had to be contained, given the material failures of the state. The contagion cut through the fault lines of Liberian society.
Brimming with an uptick of cases, the Ministry of Health built more clinics during the middle of the outbreak, which to their surprise were challenging to sustain, given the death toll of health workers. Medical centers were hastily constructed to compensate for the lack of space available at the three leading hospitals in Monrovia. Nevertheless, there were fearless healthcare workers within the health system, notably Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Liberian infectious dis- ease researcher, who worked to mobilize contact tracers in Monrovia. As a public health expert, he took a holistic approach to work with low-income communities, not only attending to the sick — without infecting the healthy — but also finding ways to bury the dead with less risk. But this work took a toll on Dr. Fallah and others. Slowly, they built Ebola treatment centers that became an anchor for isolation, yet scarcity, he told TIME magazine in 2014, caused a real strain:
August and July were quite tough for us. People would die, and we would be helpless. We just couldn’t do anything. I would have a contact tracer follow a family. The mother died. The sister died. The maid died. The wife died. The father died. And she [the contact tracer] would go there every day to do contact tracing on the symptomatic people.
His account brings the horror close to home that, even with intervention, people could lose everything.
Throughout West Africa, Ebola isolation centers were established early during the outbreak in 2014. Doctors Without Borders — which had long-standing ties to the communities in the region — used their connections to establish Ebola isolation centers near Monrovia. As public health officials tried to close the gap between resources and facilities in the ensuing months, they drew plans to construct more ad hoc centers. Without informing the residents, the Liberian Ministry of Health converted a primary school into a holding center for Ebola patients in West Point, a working poor community in Monrovia. Initially, this was meant to supplement the well-worn establishments that could not isolate every Ebola patient. Still, the center’s presence led to a deep divide between health authorities and the community. Bewildered, the residents were distraught that they had little input into these decisions or knowledge about who was being put into the facility and were upset that the government was importing Ebola into their community. One resident, Christiana Williams, then fifty-two, recalled hearing cries from Ebola patients at the makeshift clinic. Other residents were frustrated about this novel disease — because they did not understand the potential threat. Instead of harboring trust, the policy cradled skepticism in West Point.
When I spoke to Tolbert Nyenswah, who was then the Assistant Minister of Health in Liberia, he reflected on the positive aspects of their work.
We had a unit for psychosocial support, media engagement, and laboratory work. Our somewhat decentralized to Ebola response was initially a top-down approach. This meant we had a team that was working with community based organizations and civil society organizations before the international support started coming to Liberia.
Nevertheless, the quarantine of West Point did not bode well. The community was agitated by the Ebola treatment center being placed near their homes. Some protesters targeted the Ebola isolation station and others believed the Ebola virus was a fabrication.
The word “lockdown,” in all of its variations, has been laden with heavy meaning since 2020 — still, the essence of the term is to be bludgeoned with captivity. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, containment became a central theme of how Liberians referenced Ebola abroad. Successful public health measures rely on cooperation. Though for those who can move, remaining still can be unbearable. When one is forced to quarantine, one has to believe that confinement will aid them and that they can survive persistent immobility, especially when they haven’t been infected with a microbe. When Ebola became an international concern, President Barack Obama insisted that the illness “can be controlled and contained very effectively if we use the right protocols.” With over six hundred confirmed Ebola-related deaths in Liberia by August 2014, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were trying to work through how to prevent a surge in cases and mortality.
On August 20, 2014, President Sirleaf imposed a twenty-one-day quarantine on West Point, which left many people unable to work or leave the community. Residents, objecting to the president’s measures, believed they were in an open-air prison. This decision to quarantine a neighborhood and create a state of emergency was particularly unsettling, leaving some humanitarian workers to refer to the cordon sanitaire as a “plague village.” While the politics of health and care do not always map onto war and its metaphors, public health is messy when new and virulent diseases take over a country in bereavement.
Lockdown City
At a cursory look, videos of West Point during the lockdown were damning. In one clip, my eyes fixated on the weather: the gray sky and heavy rain. Except for armed police, the streets were mostly empty. Some fruit stands were overturned. In another film, a young man stood behind green bars with several people near him. Solemn, he stared straight at the camera remarking: “We expect the government to come out with awareness; that’s what we expected. But at four o’clock in the morning, they deployed police, army, and immigration. They beat people, and that’s not right.” Disillusionment arises when the state turns against its citizens.
As West Point residents were pottering about their errands, their lives were halted by a public health system that wanted to contain the disease. For some, the lockdown was sprinkled with physical terror as questions arose about where to place Ebola victims. The Liberian government’s blockade began when the military prevented people from the western regions of Grand Cape Mount from entering the capital city. For many, the military siege meant street vendors could not sell their produce at the markets or provide people with staple goods. An alternative to this approach, one that would have greatly benefited this community, would have been a nuanced public health response that financially supported the people who were unable to work because of lockdown measures. Alternatively, providing free mental health services would have eliminated the isolation that some citizens felt.
Bordering the Atlantic Ocean, the West Point neighborhood is home to over seventy thousand people. During an epidemic that otherwise made life hectic and clamorous, the militarized languor of the residents was glaring precisely because Liberians who were already displaced from the recent Civil War felt abandoned by the government. They were reminded, once again, how little control they had.
The quarantine was not based on an honor system; instead, the Ebola Task Force was responsible for enforcing a quarantine as well as a curfew. The forced lockdown, for which the police constructed roadblocks and barricades, briefly tempered the population but as time went on they grew agitated. Soldiers and police officers in riot gear blocked the roads, and the waterfront was cordoned off, with the coast guard stopping residents from setting out in canoes.
For a fruit seller, the twenty-one-day incubation period would mean twenty-one days without wages and without government financial support. Loss of income poses a danger to a family’s survival. By late 2014, Ebola had wreaked havoc on all sectors of society, according to the World Bank, leaving half of the Liberian workers without a job. The effect was ubiquitous — impacting food, dignity, and mobility.
Residents of West Point were shrouded with an active military occupation; they spoke of the ways they were made vulnerable, by being made subject to physical violence and food shortages. In the days that followed, some inhabitants were cut off from food and other essential subsistence. Davidette Wilson, a twenty-seven-year-old man, remarked, “There is nowhere to go for our daily bread.” He pointed to his exasperation about the lack of sustenance. Bread, a basic necessity for life, was scant. Wilson’s account showed the atrocious side of a lockdown, the close-ordered approach that left some residents in a situation where food was sacrificed for the possibility of spreading contagion. Beyond that, he also contended with the cruelty and inherent violence of being unable to subsist in a state of militarized quarantine.
Another chilling report revealed people’s severed connections with their networks who lived outside of West Point. Patrick Wesseh, another West Point resident, asserted in a critique of the forced lockdown: “It is inhumane. They can’t suddenly lock us up without any warning. How are our children going to eat?” For people, including Wilson and Wesseh, the quarantine was an unsettling experience that not only set up a physical barrier between the neighborhood and the rest of the city but outlined how they could easily be cut from essential services — the military could circumscribe the poor.
Among the people living in this neighborhood was David Anan. Then thirty-four, he asked gun-carrying Liberian soldiers, “You fight Ebola with arms?” For many Africans, living in a postcolonial con- text, militarization has been prioritized over care or harm reduction methods. Liberians, like Anan, were profoundly disturbed by the deluge of arms.
Knowing the physical and mental cost of confinement, the consensus was that the quarantine caused more harm than good. When the Liberian army met residents, the West Point community navigated in the best way they could — they revolted. Some people hurled rocks and stormed barbed-wire barricades, trying to break out, and others shouted as much as they could. For days, they filled the streets, which felt worthwhile given that very little autonomy or community discussion had been organized by the government. Unable or unwilling to address their concerns in a humane way, the government decided to take action.
On August 20, 2014, a barrage of military men, mainly from the Liberian army, entered West Point and shot live ammunition at a crowd protesting the lockdown. In the carnage, there were grim images, clearly indicating the explicit hostility of state repression. These snapshots confront the viewer with a fiery if not existential crisis. The armed men invaded the neighborhood, expecting coercion.
They intuited that punishment — through ordnance and terror — would calm the populace. What they witnessed was tumult.
Author Edna Bonhomme
Carleen Coulter
After ten days of violence, a teenager was killed, leading community members to mourn. Grotesque as it was, the quarantine cast a shadow on how West Point residents were seen. Among the most powerless in the country, they were confined to this space, while white and non-African people who contracted Ebola were evacuated from Liberia. This was an indication that the public health assessment and the response were predicated not only on science but on what scholar Adia Benton has described as an “assessment about the value of life.” That government’s response is an indication of how little working poor Africans are valued.
Lockdowns, such as the one at West Point, are not evidence-based. They are an institutional means of controlling a group that has little dominion. When the quarantine ended, it was not merely about this neighborhood, or Liberia, or West Africa — but the fiction that poor African lives can be confined and disrupted without fair compensation. This wasn’t unique to Liberia; the lockdown was ap- plied to other nations in the region. Eventually, several Global North countries restricted travelers from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, which led to political isolation.
The quarantine became the central point of dissent, not just because it restricted African travel but because there was a difference between how low-income West Africans were managed in the outbreak. Journalist Clair MacDougall contended, “The government exodus contributes to a sense among citizens that Liberia’s wealthy and powerful have left the country’s poor to fend for them- selves. Many expatriates who work for non-governmental organizations and international companies have been evacuated, and their lavish apartments with 24-hour electricity and running water are now empty.” MacDougall questioned the wayward politics and the double standard that exist in Liberia but on a global scale. Who is afforded quality healthcare and the ability to move and who is told to isolate, without funds, travel, or a livelihood?
The 2014 outbreak in Liberia showed that quarantine was not enough. Infectious disease specialist Amesh Adalja wrote, “While decisive action is needed to combat Ebola and other diseases, the quarantine of a geographic location applied to a people without evidence of infection functions not to control but to promote its further development.” Besides lacking scientific credibility or moral standing, quarantining West Point assumed that all seventy thousand residents at West Point were incubating Ebola. To understand the outrage and the stakes of the matter, one has to consider how pre-existing social structures amplify inequities.
The lockdown was not just an inward event that trapped a com- munity into a hostile environment; it was heavy, overwhelming, an example of what the late philosopher Lauren Berlant called “slow death.” The lives of poor Liberians were temporarily suspended, bracketed by confinement, while those with far more resources could transcend it.
By August 2014, the WHO considered West Africa — not Ebola — a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. That is to say, the region, rather than the disease itself, was considered a public health risk, even though, by that time, there were cases in Italy, Spain, the UK, and the United States. The preliminary mismanagement of the Ebola virus outbreak and cordoning of West Point conflated militarization with health but did little to salve the cuts that wounded Liberian society. During the brief stretch of time that they were enacted, the policies had little to do with the life cycle of the microbe. If public health officials had looked at historical examples, they might have been able to provide more pointed and effective measures.
Copyright © 2025 by Edna Bonhomme. From the forthcoming book A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN SIX PLAGUES: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19 by Edna Bonhomme to be published by One Signal Publishers, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
