Very few will quickly forget the two-year pandemic that saw more than 4.5 million people lose their lives across the world. Those left behind carry the scars of losing loved ones in isolation, under lockdowns, and under restrictions, we never thought we would see.
The loss of family, friends, children, privacy and health was borne by all and could make one forget that this wasn’t the first pandemic that wrought havoc in Africa and the world.
Ebola is just one such. It was discovered roughly in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. At the time, no outbreaks had been recorded until 1994. It has killed more than 14000.
Veronique Tadjo’s novel In The Company of Men, initially published in 2017, looks into the epidemic’s effects and examines how the globe responded to it. Right at the beginning, the reader is invited into a scene where two boys are hunting in a forest near their home. Here they kill and prepare bats to eat. One month later, the boys are dead from a disease that no one seems to have a cure for.
Throughout the book, Tadjo provides different experiences and encounters with the epidemic. She writes from the perspectives of health professionals, volunteers, recovered patients, nurses and doctors. Her most intriguing view is when she writes from the perspective of an ancient tree.
The book opens and closes with a Baobab tree that speaks of the importance of harmony between nature, animals and people, something the tree says used to exist before rapid industrialisation.
“Men turn our branches into firewood and bleed our trunks. To reach and exploit an area where trees of great age and wisdom stand, men ruthlessly cut down everything in their path. They see in us nothing but marketable goods. Just look at our soil, how parched it is, how devoid of nutrients!” says the Baobab tree.
The fascination with this tree is solely based on the fact that we rarely consider how pandemics or epidemics affect the harmony of life that’s threaded together through nature, people and animals.
Nature is watching us destroy it. The trees see humans as greedy, “fighting over their bodies” to gain more wealth while viewing themselves as the “architects of nature” and the superior species on earth.
In the novel, the tree is highly critical of man’s role in the degradation of nature and how the epidemic is a consequence of them “waging war on the forest” by cutting down trees to make wood and paper.
It also recalls the discovery of gold and how men ransacked the villages to get their hands on it, destroying trees to make the excavation process easier. While doing so, the mercury used to spot gold particles was released into the rivers making the water acidic and killing the fish.
“From one day to the next, they abandoned their fields, their legends, their customs, their beliefs. The trees that crashed to the ground took climbing animals and crawling animals with them. I was deeply saddened by this, for I knew that our equilibrium had been lost and that many animals were being forced to flee deep into the forest for safety,” says the Baobab tree.
The tree acts as an authoritative voice that observes the patterns and behaviours of human beings and their lack of consideration for nature and other living organisms. The tree states that the only way to restore what has been lost is through man changing his habits and patterns towards life as we know it.
Tadjo splits her time between Côte d’Ivoire and her home in London. While there, she told the Mail & Guardian how she wanted to write a different kind of novel that not only documented the epidemic’s effects on West Africa between 2014 and 2016 but also included unique voices to show how animals, humans and plants were affected by Ebola.
She explains that her choice to personify the tree was to provide a perspective that symbolises wisdom from a figure that’s played a vital role in the ecosystem of life. Placing the epidemic back into the environmental crisis was vital for her and she used the Baobab tree as the storyteller.
Tadjo explains that this comes from the rich African oral tradition, where there is a lot of freedom. Everybody can talk, animals can talk, nature talks, and man is within nature, not the conqueror.
“I didn’t want to write a linear story, so what I did is try to find voices of different people who were involved in fighting the disease. So that’s why everyone in the book comes to the Baobab telling their story and the story is of grief because death was present but also a story of courage, a lot of courage because it was needed to fight that disease,” Tadjo says.
Another theme Tadjo touches on in the novel is the importance of western and indigenous medical practices. Tadjo unapologetically shines the gaze of her book on how there became a sudden need for doctors to recruit the assistance of traditional healers to help educate people on Ebola, its symptoms and the health implications.
She also shares that the book’s title is written to address “men ” as human beings and not just gender. The novel brings together animals, people and nature. These forces in the ecosystem of life need to be one and in harmony.
In The Company of Men also knits together a thread of real-life superheroes existing in the form of volunteers, doctors and nurses who worked in isolated areas treating the infected, sick and dying.
You travel with these superheroes and experience how they put their lives on the line daily while attending to patients. One doctor eventually caught the disease, later dying from it.
One of the patients who survived is the sister of the two boys who died after hunting and eating bats. She has built immunity against Ebola and chooses to become a volunteer encouraging those that are ill to keep fighting despite the sickness. She uses her own story of lying in the same beds as they are yet she survived.
A stand-out chapter was the experience of a medical doctor working at an Ebola centre whose name is not revealed in the book. The doctor describes what it’s like working inside the facility and the state of patients in severe stages of illness with faces that look “like death masks already”. This chapter also unpacks the difficulty of assisting patients while trying to protect oneself during an epidemic.
“I’m a trespasser in the Kingdom of Death. This is his private domain, his empire, where he rules with absolute power. I feel like an astronaut floating in space, a thousand miles from earth. The slightest tear in his spacesuit and he’s lost. The slightest tear in mine and, just like him, I’m lost too,” the doctor says.
Tadjo mentions that part of the struggle in writing the novel was creating an intriguing way to retell a traumatic experience in a manner that’s enlightening and not depressing.
“What I wanted to do is leave the reader with some information, but at the same time I wanted the reader to enjoy the story because if you don’t then you won’t read the book so that was a challenge.”
In the Company Of Men is published by Jacana and is available at selected book stores. The price ranges from R165 to R195.