who had “risen” to become a school inspector and didn’t share the good fortune with his family. So again, as with ezanga among the Bakola people in northeastern Gabon, there were jealous animosities underlying the accusations of sorcery. Then another brother died, and a nephew, at which point family members burned the older brother’s Mbomo house and sent a posse to kill him. They were stopped by the police. The older brother, though now taken for an evil magus, escaped vengeance. Then community relations deteriorated generally as more victims died from the invisible terror, with no cure available, no satisfactory explanation, to a point where anyone who looked out of the ordinary or above the crowd became suspect.
Another element of the dangerous brew in and around Mbomo was a mystic secret society, La Rose Croix, more familiar (if barely) to you and me as Rosicrucianism. It’s an international organization that has existed for centuries, mostly devoted to esoteric study, but in this part of the Congo it had a bad reputation, akin to sorcery. Four teachers within one nearby village were members, or were thought to be members—and these teachers had been telling children about Ebola virus before the outbreak occurred. That led some traditional healers to suspect that the teachers had advance knowledge—supernatural knowledge—of the outbreak. Something had to be done, yes? On the day before Barry Hewlett and his wife arrived in Mbomo, the four teachers were murdered with machetes while they worked in their crop fields.
Soon afterward, the disease outbreak expanded to include so many community members that sorcery no longer seemed a plausible explanation to local people. The alternative was opepe, an epidemic, Mbomo’s equivalent (in Kota, one of the local languages) to what Barry Hewlett had heard about, from the Acholi, as gemo. “This illness is killing everyone,” one local man told the Hewletts, and therefore it couldn’t be sorcery, which targets individual victims or their families. By early June 2003, there had been 143 cases in Mbomo and the surrounding area, with 128 deaths. That’s a case fatality rate of 90 percent, at the top of the range even for Ebola virus.
With their deep interest in local explanations and their patient listening methods, the Hewletts heard things that wouldn’t fit within the multiple-choice categories of an epidemiological questionnaire. Another of their informants, an Mbomo woman, declared: “Sorcery does not kill without reason, does not kill everybody, and does not kill gorillas or other animals.” Oh, yes, again gorillas. That was another aspect of the Mbomo brew—everyone knew there were dead apes in the forest all roundabout. They had died at the Lossi sanctuary. They had died, so far as Billy Karesh could tell, at Moba Bai. Carcasses had been seen in the environs of Mbomo itself. And, as the woman said, sorcery didn’t apply to gorillas.
16
When a silverback gorilla dies of Ebola, he does it beyond the eyes of science and medicine. No one is there in the forest to observe the course of his agony, with the possible exception of other gorillas. No one takes his temperature or peers down his throat. When a female gorilla succumbs to Ebola, no one measures the rate of her breathing or checks for a telltale rash. Thousands of gorillas may have been killed by the virus but no human has ever attended one of those deaths—not even Billy Karesh, not even Alain Ondzie. A small number of carcasses have been found, some of which have tested positive for Ebola antibodies. A larger number of carcasses have been seen and reported by casual witnesses, in Ebola territory at Ebola times, but because the forest is a hungry place, most of those carcasses could never be inspected and sampled by scientific researchers. The rest of what we know about Ebola’s effect on gorillas is inferential: Many of them—major portions of some regional populations, such as the ones at Lossi, Odzala, and Minkébé—have disappeared. But nobody knows just how Ebola virus affects the gorilla body.
With humans it’s different. The numbers I’ve mentioned above offer one gauge of that difference: 245 fatal cases during the outbreak at Kikwit, another 224 at Gulu, 128 in and around Mbomo, et cetera. The total of human fatalities from Ebola virus disease, since its discovery in 1976, is about fifteen hundred—not many compared to such widespread and relentless global afflictions as malaria and tuberculosis, or to the great waves of death brought by the various influenzas, but enough to generate a significant body of