Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Paradox defines the positionality of being African and a citizen of the planet in modern times. Being an African you know that you naturally belong to the human family in the planet like Asians, Americans and Europeans but somehow you have come to be the poor, troubled and troubling cousin within the extended human family. African states and nations know it too well, especially their leaders, that African countries belong to the comity of states and nations as represented in the United Nations but the unity of nations in the international union still has some super-powers and non-powers, non-powers in shape of African and other states and nations of the Global South.
Even as we were told in the heady 1990s that we have become a happy Global Village, economic and political reality in the world has shown us that in the Global Village, as Paul Zeleza observes, there are chiefs and commoners.
Africans and some Asians and Latin Americans became and still are the commoners of the Global Village. Today I seek to ponder the paradox of being African in a world punctuated by a global Corona Virus pandemic, a pandemic that has brought into the front seat old inequalities, apartheid, nationalism, discrimination and hatred that have always marked the modern colonial world system that is our reality today. It is such an unequal, unjust and unfair world where black and African people do not only suffer the burden of inequality but unequality itself, not being in the equation of equality in the very first place.
The power of the false
The power of the false is presently expressing itself through tragic consequences in Africa as the Third Wave of the coronavirus sweeps across the continent. There were countries that got sold to the falsehood that in the first place the virus itself does not actually exist. Some countries that believed that the virus exists got persuaded by another falsehood that it was a simple conspiracy by western countries to eliminate black people under the sun.
Yet another mesmerising falsehood was that black people by their nature are largely immune from the virus that seemed to be more aggressive towards white people. There are some African countries that entertained the outlandish idea that God by his grace would protect them from the pandemic and their populations would be insulated from death.
There was a strong way in which such drills against the spread of Corona Virus as masking, sanitising, social distancing and militant regimes of personal hygiene were understood and dismissed by some of us as irritating bullying from health and political authorities. Lockdown measures on their own were variedly understood as oppression and persecution, an attack on personal and collective freedoms of people. Enthusiasts of capitalist economics pedantically advanced the argument that economic effects of lockdowns would kill people and economies fare more that the pandemic would.
Some enterprising prophets and pastors also sprang up with some prophecies about the origins and what was going to be the end of the virus in different countries. Religious pronunciations and allegations of 666 conspiracies against Africans triumphed. Traditionalists also appeared here and there with supposed remedies and other traditional and herbal solutions to the pandemic. The trouble with conspiracy thoughts, ideas and theories is that they are almost always based on some truth or partial truth and that is how they can be convincing.
My observation is that Africans are paying the price in many dead bodies because science, reason and informed thinking were not given a chance in the fight against the pandemic. Conspiracy theories and falsehoods were allowed to prevail over truth and the African multitudes were misled into what is unfolding as a medical tragedy in the continent. Asia and Europe from where the Virus arrived in Africa are fast walking out of the pandemic when the Third Wave is just about to envelope the continent in a dark cloud of death. China, where the Virus was first reported has returned to normal life and business.
The conspiracy of conspiracy thinking
It has turned out that conspiracy thinking about the virus itself and the vaccines against it has become the real conspiracy against the people of Africa that are now in the receiving end of a vampiric pandemic. Suspicion about the vaccines being poisons and the pandemic being a myth has prevented many Africans from reacting scientifically and reasonably to the deadly virus. It is one of the chief paradoxes and tragedies of Africa that we have had to fear the virus itself and also dread the vaccines that have been fashioned against it. And, to add misfortune to injury, all this does not mean that Africa has historically not been conspired against by Europe, and America.
Conspiracy thinking comes so easily to Africans because for centuries they have seen and known how it is to be conspired against economically, politically and medically.
The historical encounter that brought African into contact with Europe, Asia and America was a colossal colonial and slavish conspiracy from which Africa might never recover.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected] .
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