Celebrated Kenyan author Yvonne Owuor says Covid-19 pandemic has divided the world further. She believes the pandemic messaging from the Western mainstream media exposed the historical biases underpinned by deep-seated racist notions.
She argues that:” the pandemic will probably be a story, mostly, of losses and what we have missed. I guess the idealists that this cynical veneer hides imagined that it would be an incredible opportunity for the world to get together, have solidarity. After all, it’s a common existential threat. And they assumed that the petty tribalism, the grandstanding, would be put aside because of life and humanity. And there has also been rhetoric that’s come before regarding climate change and how much solidarity we need and how climate is a common fate. What has happened instead is that the pandemic is like the canary down the mine. I’ve got no faith whatsoever in any of our global systems right now to overcome or even to mobilize humanity to overcome the great existential crisis. It’s a travesty and a tragedy.”
Speaking with noted writer and academic Bhakti Shringarpure, Owuor added that the West generally was “appalling” on the question of Covid-19 in Africa.
“They (the West) were almost like the witches of Macbeth. It was this whole array of bad-hearted individuals who under the veneer of philanthropy were predicting mayhem, death, horror, and disappearance within the African continent. I don’t think one would ever dare to look at that rhetoric within their own world,” she says.
Owuor, who has authored two powerful novels – Dust (2013) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019) – believes the stereotyping of Africans during the pandemic was systemic and has colonial roots.
“The behavior of human beings. I guess it was a combination of things. It’s one thing to have evolved a habit of stereotyping Brown and Black people as being a certain way or projecting horror and things like that. But it’s another thing when it becomes so overt even in the face of tragedy at home. Your house is burning, and your preoccupation is why aren’t Africans dying? Who does that? She adds.
