Mother of All Labour: Vulnerability and Immunity in Times of Ebola

Abstract

Wonkifong Ebola treatment unit was unique at the time of the outbreak that hit the Guinea in 2014. Contrary to other infrastructures run by Western workers, Wonkifong mainly employed personnel from Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cuba. Even so, the unit constituted a racialised landscape where proximity to white agencies granted privileges to certain groups of racialised people while excluding others. In a humanitarian infrastructure aimed at empowering knowledge of epidemics in the Global South, Black children were quarantined without their parents and left mostly unattended. After many months, former patients were hired as nannies to remedy the infrastructure’s blind spot. These women were employed to care for the children thanks to their immunity to the virus. Building on the concept of a ‘politics of life’ and exploring how these women were exploited as ‘medical superbodies’, my article sheds light on how the humanitarian infrastructure produced a gendered labour that mirrors other economies exploiting female Black bodies such as the colony or the plantation. Relying on an ethnography of practices of care and mobility within the unit, this piece underlines how the postcolonial segregation at play during the outbreak operated not strictly in terms of skin colour, but in terms of gender and closeness to white power.

Keywords

• humanitarian aid
• race
• ebola
• gender
• immunity