Decolonisation pathways: coloniality and Afican responses to COVID-19, Vol. II

Abstract

The prolonged COVID-19 lockdown across many countries in Africa, and the world at large, did take a huge toll on the resilience of societies, markets and governments. This second volume of Decolonisation Pathways makes it clear and bold that pandemics are too serious a matter to be left to epidemiologists and pathologists alone. Contributors to this volume start with an acknowledgement that although a pandemic is global, the COVID-19 pandemic was differentially experienced and responded to in various countries and locales in Africa. Many governments across the African continent kept claiming, and perhaps rightly so, that they were responding to the science of the day. The scientific voice echoed in those pandemic years, however, was not democratic enough in its scope, let alone stabilising. Without doubt, not all African states turned to the West (Europe and North America) or to the East (China and Russia) for reference and rescue in ‘flattening the COVID-19 transmission curve’. But even counterhegemonic efforts observed in some African polities in the wake of the pandemic were still wrapped in anti-colonial, but not necessarily decolonial idioms and praxes. In the main, African responses to COVID-19 further exposed the enduring effects of European colonial rule insofar as crisis management in formerly colonised spaces is concerned. The force with which the dictates of COVID-19 science—whether from the West, East or homegrown—were implemented was indeed reminiscent of the European colonial experiment for many citizens and residents in Africa. The authors here refreshingly return the debate to traces of coloniality—and attempts at decoloniality, if any—in African responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read together, the chapters of this volume point to where it hurts most: they remind their readers that a great many responses to COVID-19 in Africa exacerbated the vulnerability of formerly colonised people, who already had historical layers of underlying conditions.