Of course, they often bring out the worst too and I was not in the region for the huge shock of Ebola. At the time, I never found this work distressing – on the contrary, my experience was that emergencies often bring out the best in human nature. In the latter, I worked in the very districts where 10 years later the deadly Ebola virus first emerged. I spent the first 15 years of my academic career working in and around refugee camps in Africa, trying to understand the consequences for ordinary people of some of the major humanitarian disasters of the time – the Rwandan genocide and the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone being two prominent examples. Whilst journalists and commentators have focussed recently on lessons from Asia in relation to the current Covid-19 pandemic, with some referencing pandemics that have hit Europe and North America in the past, a less obvious question to ask is whether there are also lessons from Africa? I would suggest there are – not least as Africa has experienced perhaps more than its fair share of emergencies, including health emergencies, in the period since independence.
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