Laughing off Ebola in Sierra Leone: Humor in Times of Crisis

ABSTRACT

The West African Ebola epidemic of 2013 to 2016 resulted in a long-term state of emergency and dramatic changes to everyday life. Despite it being a challenging period, humor was still part of social interactions and exchanges. Periods of crisis can lend themselves well to humor due to the fact that both crisis and humor find their foundations in absurdity. This article seeks to build on existing work by looking at humor as a form of production, focusing on how it functioned in different, simultaneous and contradictory terms in social and political life during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. Drawing on fieldwork from Sierra Leone between 2014 and 2020, this article traces how humor worked in practice in relation to social cohesion, as a way of negotiating uncertainty, and analyses the symbolic role it played in interactions between survivors and non-survivors. Finally, it analyses how humor has helped re-frame experiences since the epidemic ended. I argue that humor plays multiple and tangible roles, and can shape social relations during and after times of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Ebola
• humor
• Sierra Leone
• laughter
• crisis
• production

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank her research assistants Joseph Kargbo, Stella Kanu and Juliet Fornah and many interviewees in Sierra Leone, as well as Izuu Nwankwo and Jessica Jones and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback on the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interviews in Makeni and Freetown were conducted in English, while interviews in Bumban were conducted in Limba, with a translator fluent in the language (and himself a fluent English and Limba speaker). Similarly, in Pate Bana Marenk, where Temne is spoken, the author used a translator who spoke both fluent English and Temne. Both were individuals the author has worked with for many years and interviews were translated and written in a notebook in real time to avoid informants feeling any discomfort with recording devices.

2 This is the subject of some debate and contestation. See for example Bah 2017.

3 I heard various iterations of these stories from different people over time.

4 The regulations put in the place for COVID-19 have brought back memories of the Ebola period.

Additional information

Funding

A Global Challenges Research Fellowship at the University of Sheffield helped to pay for this research.