Sub-Saharan Africa Will Most Likely Ride Out the Covid-19 Storm

Amid the ongoing Covid-19 carnage, there are fears that Africa will be blown apart by the virus. World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued a chilling warning to African countries: “The best advice for Africa is to prepare for the worst.”1 It was not an idle warning. Africa has been the stage for pandemics before. Besides, as two French doctors unconsciously expressed on television, sub-Saharan Africa is occasionally where ethical boundaries are pushed when developing vaccines.2 Meanwhile, many global media outlets are foretelling another African disaster. An editorial in The Guardian notes, “the moment has not quite arrived. But an axe is poised to fall on untold numbers of largely defenceless heads, a massacre almost too appalling to contemplate.”3 Philanthropist Melinda Gates was quoted as saying, “I am worried.… I see dead bodies in the streets of Africa.”4 The juxtaposition between a Covid-19 pandemic in Africa and genocidal violence is nothing new. It draws from a racialized history of objectifying black bodies, and a despondency frame in which Africans are cast as defenseless victims, lacking autonomy and agency and needing a savior. While the menacing spread of Covid-19 is treated with shock elsewhere, in Africa, the onslaught of Covid-19 is considered inevitable.