Abstract:
Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer’s 2020 book Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds was about the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Farmer puts the epidemic within the complex historical context of economic exploitation, colonialism and conflict in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. This paper seeks to mimic the same steps Farmer followed in studying the West African Ebola epidemic from a social medicine perspective in regards to the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from 2018-2020. An analysis of Belgian colonialism, colonial medicine and suppression of African nationalism will demonstrate how these forces of ‘structural violence’ have contributed to war and an under-resourced health infrastructure in contemporary Eastern DRC. The 2018 outbreak of Ebola will be used as a case study to examine the human consequences of the long history of economic and political marginalization of Congolese people. These consequences befall the health of Congolese bodies, especially women. Like violence with weapons, the violence of poor health is a human construction and therefore preventable. In the final section, recommendations will be made as to how the response to the 2018 epidemic could have been better informed by the unique historical context of Eastern DRC.