Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake: Anthropology, Culture and Society

‘A compelling account of how antiblackness and colonialism maintain a grip on the infrastructure of global health, showing us where to aim the hammer in our efforts to knock them off’—Seye Abimbola, University of Sydney

‘Reveals the faultlines of inequality and racism in global health formed by colonialism and how they continue to shape global public health practice. A must read’—Rashida Ferrand, Director, The Health Research Unit Zimbabwe

‘A compelling and original account linking antiblackness to the coloniality of contemporary global health practice, and the racial politics of care during a public health emergency’—Adia Benton, author of HIV Exceptionalism

This major new account of the 2014–2016 West African Ebola crisis offers a radical perspective on the racial politics of global health. 

Lioba Hirsch traces the legacies of colonialism across the landscape of global health in Sierra Leone, showing how this history underpinned the international response to Ebola. The book moves from the material and atmospheric traces of colonialism and enslavement in Freetown, to the forms of knowledge presented in colonial archives and in contemporary expert accounts, to disease control and care practices. 

As the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, health inequalities around the world disproportionately affect people of African descent. This book aims to equip critical scholars, medical and humanitarian practitioners, policy makers and health activists with the tools and knowledge to challenge antiblackness in global health practice and politics.

Lioba Hirsch is a Wellcome Research Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.