Ngendo-Tshimba

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. 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.