Colonial Virus COVID-19,and,Racialised,Risk,Narratives,in,South,Africa,Ghana,and,Kenya.pdf (original) (raw)
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COVID 19 and Racialised Risk Narratives in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa
2020
Project Background This report is the result of a research project undertaken in partnership with partners in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa between May and July 2020. It was supported by the University of Liverpool Global Challenges Strategy Group COVID-19 Official Development Assistance (ODA) Rapid Response Fund to tackle the COVID-19, or coronavirus, challenges faced by low and middle-income countries (LMIC).
COVID-19 IN AFRICA: THE VIOLENCE OF PREJUDICES IN WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS
Concilium, 2022
This paper is a reflection on the power of the west to frame and represent Africa. Highlighting how colonial interpretive fore-structures constrained western predictions about Covid-19 spread to Africa, it claims that the virus misbehaved, failing to materialize the expected catastrophic outcomes. It contends that the shunning of the vaccine programs in Africa is rather a synecdoche for popular resistance against nonparticipatory policies. Beyond distribution and access to vaccines policies, it advocates a different kind of social justice that includes listening with respect to African voices and empowering the peoples to read, interpret, and tell their own experiences and stories.
Africa and the Covid-19 Information Framing Crisis
Media and Communication
Africa faces a double Covid-19 crisis. At once it is a crisis of the pandemic, at another an information framing crisis. This article argues that public health messaging about the pandemic is complicated by a competing mix of framings by a number of actors including the state, the Church, civil society and the public, all fighting for legitimacy. The article explores some of these divergences in the interpretation of the disease and how they have given rise to multiple narratives about the pandemic, particularly online. It concludes that while different perspectives and or interpretations of a crisis is not necessarily wrong, where these detract from the crisis itself and become a contestation of individual and or sector interests, they birth a new crisis. This is the new crisis facing the continent in relation to the pandemic.
Rising Above Misinformation or Fake News in Africa: Another Strategy to Control COVID-19 Spread
Frontiers in Communication, 2020
Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic is gradually gaining much popularity and amplifying the threat facing humanity about the continuous spread of the virus regardless of one's location. Although some of the influx of these falsehoods may be harmless, others might pose a serious threat by misleading the general population to depend on unjustified and/unsubstantiated claims for protection and show preference for them against scientifically proven guidelines. This paper provides a clear understanding on some COVID-19 misinformation, the inherent implications this poses to public health in Africa and highlights the potential strategies to curb this trend.
Contested Truths over COVID-19 in Africa
Somatosphere, 2021
One of the most significant challenges to confronting and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic concerns the manufacturing, circulation, and interpretation of what we call “contested truths.” By this term, we mean the many and varied ways in which official, institutional, and/or scientific facts and recommendations about COVID-19 are challenged, ignored, or subverted at multiple scales, from the individual to the state. On the African continent, these contested truths are frequently also political contestations over resources, economic priorities, and glaring global (health) inequalities inherited from colonization and neoliberal privatization. This series explores contested truths through discussions of biomedical expertise and authority, state power and violence, and religion and ontological multiplicity, situating these phenomena within ongoing legacies of colonialism, missionization, racism, development, securitization, and neoliberalization on the continent. How ‘truth’ is constructed, regulated, circulated, and contested during this pandemic will likely shape the way future public and global health systems are designed and perhaps even how information is disseminated for many years to come. At the crux of these, and our, discussions are questions about life—and the care, responsibility, and accountability required to support its vitality and flourishing.
AVM Bulletin April 2020, 2020
East Africans do not know what ‘anti-racism’ is. What anti-racism brings them comes from beyond their world. Those promoting ‘anti-racism’ have not been Africans in Africa, but in the West. Africans in the West have stood to benefit financially: anti-racism has, by ensuring income equalities within Western countries, enriched many Blacks living within them. It has not brought the same benefits for Blacks living in ‘their own’ African countries.
Disease Threat, Stereotypes, and Covid–19: An Early View from Malawi and Zambia
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
A growing literature documents Covid-'s health and economic e ects. Can Covidalso exacerbate identity divisions? Psychologists argue that contagious disease increases threat perception, provoking policing of group boundaries and discrimination against perceived outsiders. We focus here on a mechanism underlying this work, the emergence of disease-based stereotypes. Employing survey experiments administered over the phone in Malawi (N= ,) and Zambia (N= ,) in May-August , we explore how insider/outsider status and symptoms of illness shape perceptions of infection, reported willingness to help, and desire to restrict free movement of an ailing neighbor. We nd mixed evidence for outsider stereotypes: Malawians associate the disease more with outsiders; Zambians do not. In both countries, moreover, symptoms more strongly shape perceptions and hypothetical behavior than insider/outsider status, suggesting that objective risk matters more than identities in shaping responses to the illness. tus with gender and age, well-known correlates of severe Covid-(European Commission. Joint Research Centre.,). In a departure from earlier experimental work on disease threats, which did not manipulate disease symptoms, we explore how responses vary based on whether the hypothetical symptoms are clearly related to Covid-symptoms (a fever and cough) or more ambiguous (a fever; a badly injured and infected leg). This allows us to di erentiate reactions due to actual risk of contagion versus those based purely on outsider stereotypes. Our ndings indicate that, in both countries, symptoms strongly and consistently shape reactions to disease in the hypothetical vignettes. Individuals with clear Covid-symptoms are (Malawi) to (Zambia) percentage points more likely to be seen as having Covid-than those with an injured and infected leg. Respondents in both countries were (Malawi) to (Zambia) percentage points less likely to say they would help those with clear symptoms get to the hospital, and respondents were (Zambia) to (Malawi) percentage points more likely to support restricting movement of those with clear symptoms. Insider/outsider status, on the other hand, has weaker e ects that vary across the two cases. We nd little evidence of insider/outsider e ects in Zambia. Zambians do not associate the disease with outsiders. They are somewhat less likely to help outsiders (percentage points) but not more likely to want to limit their movements. In Malawi, on the other hand, we nd clear, if modest, insider/outsider e ects on disease perceptions. Malawians are percentage points more likely to see community newcomers as having the disease versus long-term residents and around percentage points more likely to perceive a Mmwenye or Zambian neighbor as having Covid-than a Malawian neighbor. These e ects seem to weaken when symptoms are clearly and unambiguously indicative of Covid-. In terms of hypothetical behavior, Malawians are percentage points more likely to say they would help outsiders than insiders to the hospital. While most of this e ect is direct, a signi cant portion (percent) is mediated by disease perceptions. Outsider/insider distinctions, in contrast, have no impact on Malawians' views on restricting movement. The experiment highlights the potential for the Covid-pandemic to exacerbate existing lines of division within countries, but also its limits in doing so. On the one hand, insider/outsider stereotypes appear in Malawi. On the other hand, their emergence is hardly a given, as neighboring Zambia does not exhibit similar e ects. Even in Malawi, the e ects are modest and seem to diminish with clearer disease signals. When symptoms clearly indicate Covid-, Malawians view their own kind the same way as they view others: as potential vectors of disease. Di erences in tendencies to associate disease with outsiders across cases do not seem to be explained by varying degrees of bias against foreign-born outsiders. Prior survey work (Lust et al.,) suggests that both Malawians and Zambians associate "outsiders" most frequently with those born outside of the country and project nearly identical behavioral responses to them. We also rule
Frontiers in Public Health, 2023
Introduction: Lockdown measures were introduced worldwide to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and several studies showed the positive impacts of these policies in places such as China and Europe. Many African governments also imposed lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic. These lockdowns met with mixed reactions; some were positive, but others focused on concerns about the consequences of lockdowns. Methods: In this article, we use social listening to examine social media narratives to investigate how people balanced concerns about preventing the spread of COVID-19 with other priorities. Analyzing social media conversations is one way of accessing different voices in real time, including those that often go unheard. As internet access grows and social media becomes more popular in Africa, it provides a different space for engagement, allowing people to connect with opinions outside of their own conceptual frameworks and disrupting hierarchies of how knowledge is shaped. Results: This article indicates which narratives were favored by different organizations, stakeholders, and the general public, and which of these narratives are most dominant in policy discourses. The range of narratives is found to be reflective of the blindness to inequality and social difference of much decision- making by policymakers. Discussion: Thus, contrary to the “we are all in this together” narrative, diseases and public health responses to them clearly discriminate, accentuating long-standing structural inequalities locally, nationally, and globally, as well as interplaying with multiple, dynamic, and negotiated sources of marginalization. These and other insights from this article could play a useful role in understanding and interpreting how social media could be included in pandemic preparedness plans.