A Story of Ebola Sketchbook
It is a sketchbook “for pencil, ink and felt” collected during an ethnographic mission in Burkina Faso, in Lobi country. Its author, Diniaté Pooda, left Burkina Faso several years ago and he became a cocoa farmer in Ivory Coast, just on the border with Guinea—an area greatly mourned by an Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016. If he has not experienced it directly, his drawings give us a fairly precise portrait of the epidemics, beginning with an original scene where “flying animals” find themselves carriers of the disease after their consumption of purposely poisoned oil palm nuts. These animals are slaughtered by coloured men and eaten, and Ebola soon contaminates these latter and takes them away. From one poisoning to another, it is not the epidemic that is told, but a story of Ebola that gives meaning to this tragedy. Beyond rumours or a simple conspiracy theory, this story drawn by Diniaté Pooda questions what creates the conditions for a risky commensality in the context of nature exploitation mediated by foreign interests in Africa. It is up to us to trace here a complementary genealogy interweaving environmental changes and the risks of the emergence of infectious diseases.