Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Mabhena
As the vaccines become available, at a price, coronavirus will eventually become a disease of the poor much like HIV and Aids. Those countries and communities, social classes of people that have the means will buy themselves out of danger.
The disease might just fade out of world focus and become part of the long list of African diseases and problems. The discourse of coronavirus as an African disease and an African problem can already be deciphered around the global talk about the South African strain of the coronavirus called N501Y.
The United Kingdom recently announced its own unique strain of the virus but that did not raise as much alarm as the South African one. We are told that the South African mutant is more virulent and much more transmissible than any other, and might actually resist vaccines and achieve a wild spread of its own that the world might not know how to manage. Not only poor African economies and polities will lead to coronavirus making Africa its home but also the location of Africa in the world as the “heart of darkness” will very easily domesticate the virus in Africa.
One after another European countries have begun banning flights from South Africa as part of preventing the South African strain of the virus from penetrating their territories. The African, that is South African strain of the virus, is now the most feared monstrosity within the regime of viruses that are identified as corona. The racial and xenophobic constructions of Africa and Africans as the owners of poverty, ignorance and disease were always going to catch up with us. Not only diseases but almost all problems of the world end up assuming and being given an African identity, coronavirus will only be an addition to a long list of world problems that end up as African problems.
Desire for power and domination
St Augustine of Hippo once imagined the city-state of the 5th century as the City of God that was to be protected from evil and the pagans. What troubled the holy city and was to prevent its rise to be the city of God was what Augustine called the libido Dominandi, the desire for power and domination, a desire that had the same or more force than sexual temptation. Friedrich Nietzsche was to call it the Will to Power. The worldwide struggle against the coronavirus was supposed to remind all of us of our common humanity and fear of death. We were surely supposed to be alerted by the fear of death of our common familihood and vulnerability to death.
The world was surely supposed to discover itself as the city of the people of God that are bound together by a common fear and a common destiny. The libido dominandi would not permit that. Old differences and prejudices have proved much stubborn and more durable than the ties that should keep us one. The very struggle against a consuming pandemic has easily degenerated to a platform for the battle of the domination and control of the world. Soon enough a virus that is eating away at all humanity is going to be given a race and geographic location like all other things dark and evil that end up given to and owned by Africa.
Even the much awaited vaccines are being received by the world with mixed feelings and fears of the genetic engineering that they might come with. More fear, however, is genuinely in Africa among Africans that for a long time have been abused as guinea pigs and other experimental objects for western ideas, science and chemicals. Where they are supposed to be celebrating the possible arrival of medicines and remedies Africans genuinely and rightly fear poisoning in a world where poisons and weapons are first tested on them. But truth is we need the vaccine and we need it urgently!
The many Horsemen of the Apocalypse
When Zizek pictured the end of the present world he imagined four horsemen of the apocalypse namely the ecological crisis, the biogenetic revolution, social inequalities and the economic meltdown at a world scale. In Africa I can see all the horsemen of the end times plus many other pandemics added unto them.
The world has its problems that affect its people that include Africans but Africans have their own crises that the world has added unto the continent and its subjects. We live in what Walter Mignolo defined as the “colonial difference” that is burdened by the reality of those that occupy the “imperial difference,” the masters of the universe that can weaponise everything including diseases and medicines.
As even the sun is hottest in Africa every problem of the world achieves its intensity and virulence in Africa. Together with the wider world Africa fears the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and on its own it has to face more other monstrosities of being Africa in the world, being what Julius Nyerere called the “devil’s headquarters.” If the whole world is a “risk society” then Africa is a riskier armpit of the globe. We find ourselves afraid of the many viruses and also the medicines that are fashioned against them.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Hogsback, Eastern Cape, South Africa: [email protected].
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