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15 January 2019 \u2013 O\u00efcha, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. World Bank Photo Collection, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n
From 2018 to 2020, an outbreak of Ebola virus disease<\/a> hit the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and caused 2,287 deaths.<\/p>\n Media coverage focused on the difficulties that medical teams faced due to insecurity in the region. In addition to the activism of armed groups, they faced violent protests from the local population, who believed that the organisations seeking to assist them had a hidden agenda to harm them. The media story was that conspiracy and collusion theories were the main barriers to gaining the population\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n In his course at the Coll\u00e8ge de\u00a0France, the anthropologist and doctor Didier Fassin suggests eschewing fact-checking these theories and rather to consider them as \u2018a window to the world\u2019 providing access to overlooked realities. These accounts might carry a deeper truth than a strictly factual one about the denounced schemes: they could contribute to a better understanding of power relations and inequalities, of relations to science and authority, and of memory of past events.<\/p>\n Luise White<\/a>, a historian of Africa, wrote similarly about vampire stories. She explains that \u2018their very falseness is what gives them meaning; they are a way of talking that encourages a reassessment of everyday experience to address the workings of power and knowledge\u2019(1)<\/sup><\/a>White, L. (2000). Speaking with vampires: Rumor and history in colonial Africa<\/i><\/a>. University of California Press<\/span><\/span>