Adapted from Chapter 12 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns. In 2014 I was running Jovago, the hotel booking company inside Rocket Internet’s African group, from Lagos.

When he came in, the whole restaurant went quiet. All you could hear was the hum of the air conditioning and the clinking of cutlery being slowly placed on the tables. “I’m not here” was the message everyone was sending by gazing straight at the floor.

He pretended not to notice. He walked through the middle of the room to a free table. He had a tired face and a creased shirt with huge sweat stains under the armpits. He sat down and froze. A particularly brave, or perhaps particularly cowardly, guest got up and moved two tables away. None of the waitresses came over.

I sighed and went to him. “What are you drinking, Abioye?”

“Whiskey on the rocks,” he replied immediately. He knew exactly what was going on around him.

I shouted to the waitresses hiding in the kitchen to serve two doubles, and carried the glasses over myself. “So it’s already happened?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My sympathies.”

To explain why a whole restaurant was afraid of one man, I have to go back to the Monday it started.

The scariest river in the world

Have you ever wondered which river in the world engenders the greatest fear? My friends usually say the Amazon, because of piranhas and anacondas, or the Nile, because of crocodiles. Someone always suggests the Ganges. My answer is a short river, just 250 km long, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, about the same as the Western Neisse in Poland. Not too wide, not too deep, neither especially inaccessible nor protected from spears and arrows.

Its name is the Ebola.

Before I left for Africa I got a supercombo dose of vaccinations and a supercombo dose of knowledge about the microbes that love killing people there. My mom’s advice was: “Use a condom. There’s HIV there.” I also learned that Ebola spreads through fluids, not through the air, so good hygiene virtually eliminates the threat.

Then, on Monday, one of my employees looked at his laptop and said, “Jesus Christ.” When I asked what was going on, he said “It’s nothing” and clicked off The Guardian. They always feverishly got down to work when I caught them slacking. I called up the same article and read the headline: “Ebola patient dies in Guéckédou hospital.”

Uncle Google told me that Guéckédou was a town in Guinea, 1,500 km from Lagos. A stone’s throw. I knew that as long as there was no Ebola there was no problem, but once it appeared in the neighborhood it was better to get out of there. So I went home with a stomach ache and spent two hours on the john. To this day people joke that I am the only person in the world to catch Ebola by reading about it. They can laugh. They hadn’t been in Bamako two weeks earlier, 500 km from Guéckédou. I had. It turned out to be ordinary food poisoning, but I was sick for two days, and that should count for something.

Fear, humor and thermometers

People joked about it more and more, because when someone is afraid of something, they fend it off with humor. And there was something to be afraid of. Thousands of victims in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The World Health Organization set up a crisis team. Airlines from Europe, Asia and the Americas cut flights to Africa. In July came the news that the first Ebola patient had been admitted to a hospital for contagious diseases in Lagos.

Then it all took off. A 24-hour hotline to Rocket HQ. All the white guys on my team suddenly felt ill and went on “sick leave”, and nobody even tried to hide that they wanted out of Africa for a while. HQ eventually announced that anyone who wanted to return could. With flights cut, finding a free seat was a miracle.

We bought hand sanitizers, thermometers and soap dispensers. The guards at the entrance got infrared thermometers and orders to send home anyone above 37°C. Which was a mistake, because in a Lagos summer the temperature reaches 40°C and if you walk to work for half an hour, your body simply heats up. We raised the limit to 38°C, which was sort of pointless. One morning I joined the line and a huge guard told me: “Boss, you don’t have to, with you being the boss.” He couldn’t get it into his head that a white guy can catch Ebola as easily as anyone else.

What a company with a million contacts can do

The myths would bring you to your knees: wash your hands in the Nigerian equivalent of Domestos, drink two liters of salt water a day. Some of my people ended up in hospital with stomach problems. And I thought that I, of all people, had a chance to change something. Across Jovago and the whole Jumia group we worked with dozens of hotels and thousands of other companies. I estimated off the top of my head that we had access to over a million people. So we decided to run an education campaign with our own resources.

My graphic artist prepared a guide, almost entirely lifted from the WHO website. It had to be legible both for geniuses and for people who thought cars were a form of witchcraft: what Ebola is, why it is dangerous, how to avoid it, how to act around someone ill, and a few of the most popular myths busted. We printed several dozen thousand copies. We sent newsletters to our customer and contractor databases. We wrote a training program for the managers of our partner hotels, who were the most at risk and had a duty to inform the health services if they spotted anything suspicious, and ran it by teleconference. They were meant to pass it on to their staff.

We were not alone. The Nigerian tech sector was very active too. An educational app came out, the most popular bloggers wrote about it, celebrities picked it up, and within a week, by cautious estimates, all of us working together had reached over fifty million people. That was something. It confirmed my view that Nigerians are a little like Poles: they fight like cats and dogs every day, but in real danger they unite and can do great things. In the end Nigeria performed very well. Twenty people fell ill, eight of them died, all infected from the same sources. The disease never hit the streets.

My own collapse

Before that happened, I had my own moment of collapse. I was overloaded and more stressed than usual. My vision of Jovago was diverging more and more from Rocket Internet’s. I worked more, slept less, ate worse, and my body announced it was going on vacation. I got weaker, my temperature rose, I lost my appetite. When I started coughing, I checked whether I was bringing up blood. I must have said “I think I’ve got Ebola” a million times, and at some point I believed it. Science has a name for this, confirmation bias: I ignored every argument that I didn’t have Ebola and treated the slightest symptom as proof that I did.

Fortunately, I went to a doctor friend instead of an infectious disease hospital. When I told him my theory, he just laughed. He checked my heart, slapped me on the back and declared me healthy as a bull, but overtired. He recommended a short holiday.

Doctor’s orders. I had meetings planned in Abuja, over 500 km from the danger zone, so I booked a week at the Sheraton: one meeting a day, nothing else. My temperature was checked five times at the airport, but I flew.

In Abuja I lay in bed doing nothing for about a day, and got bored. Then I had a great idea: basketball. The hotel had a court. My only shoes were canvas sneakers I’d bought in Croatia for stony beaches. After twenty minutes my feet were sliding around inside them, so I remembered the youngsters playing barefoot in front of my block in Lagos and threw off the sneakers. I won a few matches against myself and lost one, which put me in a bad mood, but I was having a ball. What I forgot was that those kids had been playing barefoot since childhood, and the skin on their soles was at least a centimeter thicker than mine. At some point I felt a burning, raised my foot and saw a large piece of skin coming off my sole.

“Fuck, it’s Ebola!” I screamed.

It’s good nobody heard me, or I would have ended up in the local hospital. I hid the injury in my sneakers, ran to my room, recalled our own brochure, and poured a whole bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer over the open wound.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge!” I shouted, exploring new levels of pain.

“Hello, sir, is everything okay?” asked someone from the hotel staff through the door about three minutes later.

“Yes, yes,” I said, swallowing my tears. “It’s the TV. Sorry, I’ll turn it down.”

I had to cancel four meetings. My friend Rafał from the Polish embassy came to see me and mocked my suffering cruelly. Three days later it healed. I asked him what the embassy would do if I really had Ebola. Charter a plane, like the Italians did for one guy?

“Forget it. We would have sent you to a hospital for infectious diseases, like anyone else. From where you would never have returned. And by the way, that Italian didn’t survive either.”

“Great. You’ve cheered me up no end.”

“It’s more that I have my own plan. If I came down with Ebola, I would take a whole packet of paracetamol to kill the fever and get on the first plane to Europe. It’s enough to look okay at the airport and not have a temperature.”

If anyone from WHO is reading this, they’re probably turning grey.

The doctor who stopped it

I returned to Lagos on 19 August. It was on that day that Dr Ameyo Adadevoh died.

“Patient zero”, the person who brought Ebola to Nigeria, was Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian lawyer who had been infected in Monrovia. Officially he was flying to Lagos for a meeting of the Economic Community of West African States. A member of that organization met him on arrival, noticed that something was wrong and took him straight to a private hospital, the First Consultant Medical Center, where malaria was diagnosed and treatment started.

The senior registrar of the endocrinology department there was Dr Adadevoh, a woman universally respected for her role in limiting the spread of swine flu, and the grand-daughter of the first president of Nigeria. During her evening rounds she took a short interview with Sawyer and confirmed a suspected case of Ebola. She put him in quarantine. No Nigerian hospital was prepared for Ebola; there was a lack of equipment and trained staff. She dealt with the patient personally, along with a small team. The Liberian government pressured her to discharge him because he held a diplomatic passport. She refused.

Shortly before his death, Sawyer tore off his tubes and demanded to be released, and tried to break out by force. He was almost at the point of succeeding when Dr Adadevoh dragged him back into isolation herself, which was no easy task, as he weighed a good 150 kg. He was already very weak and died four days later. She died less than a month after that.

It is said that only thanks to her devotion, and because she put her own life at stake, did Nigeria avoid the deadliest outbreak in history. If Sawyer had left that hospital, which is surrounded by slums, he could have infected thousands before being found. Nigeria could have shared the fate of other West African countries, where 30,000 were infected and over 11,000 died.

Today she is regarded as a hero, posthumously awarded the highest state honors. A film was made about those events, called 93 Days. If you get a chance to see it, do.

Whiskey with a friend

Back in the restaurant, Abioye drank his whiskey in no hurry. The waitresses had closed up. They, more than anyone, should have known that Abioye was probably the most tested person for Ebola in the country. A few minutes earlier I had felt a bit odd myself. Now I wanted to show this man some friendship. For weeks nobody in Lagos had offered to shake hands, which was one of the recommendations in our own brochure.

But we had known each other a long time. We had started at Rocket in the same office in Lagos. He was an old buddy.

“Your mother was a wonderful woman,” I said, and shook his hand.

“I know,” he replied quietly, but with pride in his voice. Abioye, the well-known Nigerian entrepreneur and son of the heroic doctor, Ameyo Adadevoh.

What I took from it

• Fear spreads faster than a virus, and so does misinformation. A company with a large customer base can do real good by simply repeating what the experts say, clearly.
• Stress makes you see what you fear. Confirmation bias had me convinced I had Ebola when I was simply exhausted.
• Crisis brings out the worst reflexes (a restaurant full of people staring at the floor) and the best ones (a doctor who refused to release a patient).

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This is from Chapter 12, “Blood River”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.

Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify