The headlines are grim, as they always are when Ebola rears its haemorrhagic head in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Médecins Sans Frontières, that perennially alarmed band of medical missionaries, tells us the spread is ‘deeply alarming’. And what does Britain do? It deploys medical teams. How noble. How predictable. How utterly reminiscent of the Victorian era, when we used to sail off to darkest Africa with quinine and Bibles, convinced of our civilising mission.
Let me be clear: the situation is indeed dire. The current outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri provinces is the second largest in history, and it is unfolding in a region that is a veritable powder keg of militia violence, political instability, and public distrust. MSF is right to be alarmed. But the British response is not a simple act of humanitarian goodwill. It is a geopolitical reflex, a muscle memory from an empire that refuses to accept it is dead.
Remember the fall of Rome? When the barbarians were at the gates, the legions were sent to the frontiers, not to save the barbarians from disease, but to protect the interests of the empire. Today, our interests are different: we fear a pandemic, we fear the images of dying children on our screens, we fear the loss of our moral authority. So we send doctors, just as we sent missionaries and soldiers before them. The language has changed from ‘civilising’ to ‘stabilising’, but the underlying script is the same.
Consider the irony. Britain, a nation that has spent the last decade gutting its own National Health Service, now finds the resources to dispatch medical teams to the Congo. We have nurses sleeping in their cars because they cannot afford petrol, yet we can airlift a field hospital to Goma. This is not compassion; this is cognitive dissonance dressed up in white coats.
And what of the intellectual decadence that allows us to pretend this is a purely altruistic venture? We pat ourselves on the back for our global health security initiatives, but we ignore the historical context: the exploitation of Congolese resources, the support for corrupt regimes, the arms sales that fuel the very conflict that hampers the Ebola response. We are fighting a disease with one hand while fomenting the chaos that spreads it with the other.
The MSF warning should be seen for what it is: a cry not just for medical aid, but for a fundamental rethinking of our engagement with Africa. Ebola is a symptom, not the disease. The real pathologies are poverty, war, and the legacy of colonialism. Britain sending doctors is a band-aid on a bullet wound. It makes us feel good, but it does not heal.
So as you read the next update on the ‘heroic’ British medical teams, pause. Ask yourself: what are we really doing there? Are we saving lives, or are we saving face? The fall of Rome was not caused by a single plague; it was the accumulation of imperial overreach, moral bankruptcy, and a failure to adapt. We are not Rome. But we are playing the part.
Let us not mistake motion for progress. The Ebola outbreak will, eventually, be contained. The British teams will return home to a hero’s welcome. And the root causes will fester, undisturbed, until the next ‘deeply alarming’ headline. That is the true cycle of history. And we are too busy patching up the present to learn from the past.
