Virtual Issue Introduction: Singing and Interpreting COVID-19 in the Keys of Information, Food Security, Waithood, and Humor
In 2020, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus began to spread around the globe, including throughout Africa. The virus, colloquially known as “coronavirus,” “Covid-19” or simply as “COVID,” moved from North Africa into sub-Saharan Africa. On 14 February 2020, COVID-19 hit Egypt, while barely two weeks later, Nigeria became the first African nation south of the Sahara to report a case. Infections soon followed in other African countries. For example, Morocco, Ethiopia, and Senegal reported cases in March 2020. By mid-May, Lesotho was the last country on the continent to confirm a case. African leaders attributed rising COVID-19 infections to travelers from the United States and Europe and expressed skepticism about the widely held belief that the disease originated in Wuhan, China, at one of its open-air markets in 2019.
African countries reported the fewest COVID-19 cases compared to the rest of the world, yet the West questioned these reports based on preconceived, colonialist notions. Early on in the pandemic, developed nations had ruled out Africa as a potential “victor” over COVID-19 due to factors such as the continent’s youthful population, its informal economic systems, its high levels of food insecurity, and its difficulties in enforcing mitigation measures. For these reasons, they expected African countries to experience higher per capita numbers of COVID-19 infections. This proved not to be the case.
African Studies Review’s (ASR) virtual forum brings together articles published in the last five years (2020-2025) that dispute these colonialist notions. These eight articles explain how African countries exercised agency and implemented mitigation measures during the pandemic. These articles also highlight problems that Africans experienced in acquiring COVID-19 vaccines and the exorbitant prices they had to pay to receive doses. As the forum shows, Africans responded in a variety of ways to COVID inequalities. For example, they wrote songs that highlighted these issues, turned to traditional healing, and worked in solidarity to mitigate COVID-19. At the same time, many African leaders registered their opposition to “coronialism,” or the Global North’s colonialist attitudes towards the continent in the face of the virus.
Amy S. Patterson and Emmanuel Balogun contend that responses by African actors demonstrated their agentic abilities and possibilities. Their article, “African Responses to COVID-19: The Reckoning of Agency?” draws out how Africans mobilized civil society, continental organizations, and international bodies to exercise their power. Patterson and Balogun treat two different types of reckonings. First, African countries reckoned with developed nations’ failures to right the wrongs of the past and with their invocation of racist and colonial ideas to defend their use of philanthrocapitalism to promote inequality by limiting vaccine access. In contrast, Africans worked both from the top down and the bottom up to pursue healthcare democracy, to attain legitimacy on the world stage, and to register their grievances against regional, national, or global authorities. Africans also reckoned with the legacies of colonialism’s divide-and-conquer strategy. African leaders worked in concert to overcome this history to find African solutions, to profess African beliefs, and to uphold African traditions in the fight against the pandemic. Their solidarity and responses to the coronavirus projected an image of Africa that they constructed, and which stood in stark contrast to that imposed by outsiders. Lastly, African leaders debunked the assumptions made by the Western world that they would necessarily privilege food security over health and hygiene. But as William G. Moseley and Jane Battersby argue in their article, food security measures and pandemic mitigation were not mutually exclusive.
In “The Vulnerability and Resilience of African Food Systems, Food Security, and the Nutrition in the Context of the COVID-19,” Moseley and Battersby explain that food systems in Africa proved less vulnerable than expected to COVID-19 disruptions due to factors such as Africa’s youthful population, the somewhat late arrival of the virus to the continent, widespread subsistence farming, and shorter food supply chains in some regions. The authors further contend that Africa’s history of fighting infectious diseases like Ebola facilitated the continent’s readiness, as the lessons learned were applied to combating COVID-19. Yet, at the same time, as Moseley and Battersby show, resilience in the face of the virus did not necessarily rule out food system vulnerabilities. Despite shorter food supply chains in some African countries, food production persisted, but not at pre-COVID levels. Lockdowns and closures of markets and other businesses impacted the availability and accessibility of food. These limits caused further problems since food security also consists of two other pillars, utilization and stability. The virus’s spread through both urban and rural areas disrupted the ways in which Africans accessed food economically, materially, and socially. Pandemic-driven supply chain interruptions created high demand and low supply, thus causing food prices to rise. Social networks no longer provided access to food or cash to buy it due to restrictions such as inter-district quarantines and inaccessible public transport. Moseley and Battersby conclude that the continent’s resilience notwithstanding, the vulnerability of food systems was shaped by the continent’s position in the global system.
Kristen E. McLean and Liza J. Malcolm address related themes in their case study of Sierra Leone. In “More Than Disease: Uncovering the Economic, Social, and Political Consequences of Sierra Leone’s COVID-19 Pandemic,” the authors critique the varied ways in which the needs of the state were prioritized over those of the ordinary citizenry in efforts to contain the virus and to mitigate its effects. Through their feminist global health security approach, McLean and Malcolm consider the indirect consequences of COVID-19, including hunger, unemployment, social conflict, and political tension. They underscore, for one, how severe food shortages led to food insecurity and political unrest. The authors also explore how the pandemic heightened existing problems, such as poor prison conditions. For example, they note how after the first inmate of Pademba Road Prison tested positive for coronavirus on 28 April 2020, prisoners rioted, demanding less crowded conditions and access to preventative care, needs made even more urgent by the pandemic. Overall, McLean and Malcolm provide extensive detail on the political, social, and economic consequences of COVID-19, and in so doing, “call for more contextuality relevant, civil society-informed pandemic responses.”
David G. Pier and Micheal Mutagubya, in “COVID-19 and the Ugandan Presidential Election: Contesting Lockdown Authority in Popular Songs,” focus on how music provided a vehicle for information and resistance when the pandemic struck amid a contentious presidential campaign pitting President Yoweri Museveni against musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine. The authors demonstrate how Ugandan recording artists sympathetic to Wine produced popular music that challenged the heavy-handedness of lockdown and the state’s use of mitigation measures to effect political repression. These songs were also a direct response to the state’s musical propaganda about (bio)politics and public health.
First, Pier and Mutagubya show how what they dub “Songs of Information,” produced both by the state and by Wine’s supporters, functioned as important public service announcements. These songs reminded listeners to wear masks, to practice social distancing, to cover their mouths and noses, and to wash their hands regularly. “Songs of Information” also demonstrated how to recognize symptoms and used repetition to reinforce hotline numbers and to tell people how to contact health authorities. “Songs of Debate” and “Songs of Derision,” in contrast, bore more militant, overtly political messages. The former employed a philosophical approach through the use of proverbs and riddles to interpret multiple societal issues before an artist issued a judgment. Through “Songs of Derision,” musicians supporting Wine assumed the role of teachers or alternative educators in compositions that mocked President Yoweri Museveni and his campaign of “social indiscipline.”
In “‘Mbas Mi’: Fighting COVID-19 Through Music in Senegal,” Bamba Ndiaye and Margaret Rowley show how songs promoted COVID-literacy, that is, applicable knowledge about the virus and how to protect oneself against it. The authors analyze forty-two songs from different genres (rap, Afrobeat, mbalax, reggae, etc.) to adumbrate how sociological, political, and historical dynamics facilitated the development of this didactic music. They argue that these cultural artefacts formed an important part of a national strategy to contain and eradicate the virus through a COVID-literacy campaign. Like their Ugandan counterparts discussed above, Senegalese artists also used their platforms and their songs to create memory aids, to discuss prophylaxis, and to provide instructions on steps to take in case of infection. Debunking misinformation and/or endorsing African traditional beliefs were other core functions of the COVID-literacy songs. For example, one of the most egregious, erroneous claims about COVID transmission was that Africans were immune to coronavirus because of their allegedly “stronger” bodies. Artists dismissed this false claim in several ways, from highlighting the virus’s universality to incorporating metaphysics and religious messages in their lyrics. Their approach differed markedly from that of COVID denialists, who challenged scientific knowledge from the West about the virus. As Ndiaye and Rowley show, music emerged as one of the key paths through which COVID-literacy was achieved in Senegal.
Jia Hui Lee, Laura A. Meek, and Jacob Katumusiime’s “Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa: Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda” grapples with truth-claims about COVID-19 in East Africa. The authors tease out how anti-imperialist discourses gave rise to the development of pan-African skepticism about COVID-19 among leaders and ordinary people in these two neighboring countries. Misinformation, infodemics, conspiratorial theories, and fake news fed into a sort of pan-African denialism. The article interrogates how African leaders mobilized this denialism to express their indifference to or refusal to comply with public health measures and to suggest “an alternative pan-African vision.” Indeed, many African leaders dismissed the West’s vaccines, some preferring instead to turn to continental solutions. Examples from Tanzania and Uganda illustrate not only the heterogeneity of responses by African leaders but also how they philosophically analyzed and addressed the disease through the lenses of African self-sufficiency, spirituality, and biopolitics. Tanzanian President John Magufuli, for instance, asserted that the coronavirus couldn’t survive in Jesus’s body; therefore, he turned to spirituality, steam inhalation, and Madagascar’s artemisia herbal tonic to promote an African solution to COVID-19. Similar to Pier and Mutagubya’s analysis discussed above, the authors here trace how public health measures in Uganda were wrapped up in presidential politics. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime also reveal the tensions within African communities over these alternative remedies by analyzing WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter posts.
Ampson Hagan’s article, “Coloniality of Waithood: Africa’s Wait for COVID-19 Vaccines Amid COVAX and TRIPS,” highlights the different ways in which African nations struggled to acquire crucial vaccines during the pandemic. Several international actors, like the United States, the European Union (EU), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) provided the backing for pharmaceutical companies that determined which countries gained access to vaccines. These companies also set the prices and refused to support intellectual property waivers. These same entities prevented poor and emerging nations from developing generic drugs at a fraction of the cost of Western drugs. Service delivery also presented a problem as Africans experienced “waithood,” or a condition by which they lay at the mercy of institutions that controlled the provision of items needed to survive. Manufacturers in the developed world also withheld trade secrets from “risky” Africa. Companies in wealthier nations profited from high-priced vaccines, thereby forcing African countries to assume even more debt during the pandemic. Further, Western desires to test the efficacy of COVID treatments on African bodies revived issues of medical racism that had influenced Western medical outreach during the colonial era.
Albert Chibuwe and Allen Munoriyarwa’s “Laughing through the Virus the Zimbabwean Way: WhatsApp Humor and the Twenty-one-day COVID-19 Lockdown” shows how humor offered a coping mechanism within the context of suffering and served as a vehicle for challenging the state during Zimbabwe’s onerous lockdown. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa selected twenty-five jokes that appeared on WhatsApp, with subjects as diverse as sexual organs, sexual (im)morality, sexual intercourse, lockdown measures, hunger, and the government’s heavy-handedness. Jokes about hunger, for example, addressed Zimbabwe’s dire economic circumstances, the devaluation of its currency, and the reduction in food production. Here, “netizens” made hunger humorous by imagining that a new virus called HUVID-20 would emerge in Zimbabwe due to the inefficiency of food supplies. Jokes also surfaced that made fun of the “militarization” of the pandemic, mocking the state’s dependence on the security forces to enforce the lockdown. And, as Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa highlight, humor also spoke to broader social problems, such as misogyny, amplified by the pandemic. Overall, jokes provided a way for Zimbabweans to speak truth to power, to challenge repression, to provide comic relief, to expose gender inequalities, and to highlight the economic, social and political conditions of contemporary Zimbabwean society. In its depiction of how ordinary people challenged state authority, Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa’s scholarship aligns with that of other contributors to this forum.
Conclusion
The articles included in this forum show the complexities and intricacies of a world seized by COVID-19. While the pandemic presented a profound public health crisis on a global scale, it also provided opportunities for political, economic, and social innovation and resistance. Taking qualitative, interdisciplinary approaches to COVID-driven topics such as food insecurity, didactic music, political contestation, truth claims, disease mitigation, and vaccine provision, the forum’s articles highlight the experiences of ordinary Africans whose voices could otherwise be easily lost. At the same time, these articles also point to how political contests, whether between African elites and grassroots activists or among African leaders and international bodies (and businesses), shaped COVID across the continent. And, more broadly, these articles address two dominant analytic frameworks that shaped understandings of and responses to COVID-19 in Africa: Western-derived “coronialism” and pan-African skepticism.
Thus, in the final analysis, this forum takes African agency as both a focal point and a theoretical frame. While this collection of articles reveals the diversity of the social, economic, and political dynamics that shaped how the continent coped with the pandemic, they emphasize equally how African people at all levels of society sought out African solutions to this global crisis.
Dawne Y. Curry
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
References
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