The World Health Organisation has described the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo as “deeply alarming”. A British-led medical response is on standby. This is the stuff of Victorian nightmares: a haemorrhagic fever erupting in the heart of darkness, and the old imperial power, clad in scrubs rather than red coats, mobilising its doctors once more.
But let us not mistake charity for competence. The true alarm is not the virus itself but the structural rot that allows it to flourish. The Congo has suffered Ebola outbreaks for decades.
We know the drill: trace, isolate, vaccinate. Yet here we are again, sounding the same tocsin. Why?
Because the West’s engagement with Africa remains episodic and reactive. We pour billions into emergency response but starve the very health systems that could prevent such crises. A British medical team is admirable.
It is also an admission of failure. The real scandal is that we have not learned the lesson of the 2014 West African epidemic: that disease is a symptom of a broken global order. We treat the fever but ignore the infection.
Until we address the poverty, corruption, and weak governance that allow Ebola to become ‘endemic’, we will be forever on standby, waiting for the next outbreak to shock our sensibilities. The ghosts of empire demand more than a bandage. They demand a reckoning.
