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Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided by PAS.

Speaker: Chernoh Bah

Title: The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals & Rogue Politicians

Abstract: The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa presents an in-depth investigation that challenges the official narrative surrounding the origin and widespread transmission of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic – one of the most catastrophic human tragedies in the twenty first century.
It argues that the western narrative, which rashly pinned the origin of the epidemic on a two-year-old boy in a small Guinean village and implicated the backwardness of Africans as the cause for the widespread nature of the outbreak, was neither corroborated nor challenged by Western journalists and the Western academic establishment. It explores why, at the initial stages of the outbreak when thousands of men, women and children were dying, Western media already settled upon a narrative that blamed and criminalized the victims for the epidemic’s explosion.

The book establishes the West African outbreak as the continuation of a colonial legacy of multinational corporate exploitation, political corruption, and western dehumanization of the African. Glaringly absent from the official narrative, it argues, is how the billions of dollars of foreign corporate investments existing in West Africa’s natural resource exploitation and the strategic international military and governmental intelligence interests in the region (including billion-dollar animal-testing and deadly-pathogen laboratory projects) served as the foundations for the outbreak. It is only from within this global context that the conditions of the outbreak and its widespread devastation can be properly understood.

Bio: Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is an award-winning journalist and political activist based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Born in 1979, he was educated at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College. He holds a degree in African history and sociology and a diploma in African studies as well as certificates in economic and financial journalism and judicial reporting on international criminal justice.

Bah helped found the Awareness Movement, and organization formed to unite young Africans in Sierra Leone to campaign against the atrocities of Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front. The effort culminated in the establishment of The Nations Newspaper, as the first English publication in Conakry dedicated to the cause of providing news and analysis on the conditions of ‘refugees’ in Guinea and conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Following the end of the Sierra Leone conflict, Bah also founded the Africanist Movement, which organized thousands of West Africa’s youths into one of most powerful revolutionary organizations in “post-colonial” West Africa fighting for African unity and control of Africa’s resources.

Bah has been President of the West Africa Media Forum and is the author of Neocolonialism in West Africa (2014) and The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals and Rogue Politicians (2015).