COVID-19 in the African Continent examines the development, achievements, and challenges that have resulted owing to COVID-19 pandemic and how these precarious socioeconomic situations are being managed in African countries.

COVID-19 in the African Continent examines the development, achievements, and challenges that have resulted owing to COVID-19 pandemic and how these precarious socioeconomic situations are being managed in African countries.

The coronavirus has rattled humanity, tested resolve and determination, and redefined normalcy. This compelling collection of 29 short stories and essays brings together the lived experiences of covid19 through a diversity of voices from across the African continent. The stories highlight challenges, new opportunities, and ultimately the deep resilience of Africans and their communities. Bringing into conversation the perspectives of laypeople, academics, professionals, domestic workers, youth, and children, the volume is a window into the myriad ways in which people have confronted, adapted to, and sought to tackle the coronavirus and its trail of problems. The experiences of the most vulnerable are specifically explored, and systemic changes and preliminary shifts towards a new global order are addressed. Laughter as a coping mechanism is a thread throughout.

This report is a snapshot of perspectives across the African continent on the implications of COVID-19 and what a post COVID environment might look like. The contributors are the intellectual thought leaders of the future mixed with cross-generational reflections so that the monograph covers the multi-generational concerns of generations X, Y, and Z.We have chosen to focus on this continent for several reasons not the least of which is the unique way in which African social movements mobilize and operate from a grassroots perspective. There is less reliance on social media as an echo chamber inciting action. Community-based shared grievances surrounding food security, corruption and common goods and the deeply layered engagement of the diaspora create a different dynamic than that experienced in the West. The influence of the diaspora on the continent is not viewed as external interference but intrinsic to community-based issues. Activism might be considered synonymous with simply existing, unlike the west activism is not a political choice which one may eschew. There is no choice about activism being framed politically or viewed as a political cause, it is more a question of activism as an existential imperative protecting a way of life which has to be defended and maintained regardless of the crisis at hand. Youth engagement in activism is not a question of simply being a part of online social movements which are fashionable or current. Livelihoods and lives depend on community engagement.The size of the continent and the impact of the African diaspora on Western politics and economies is also a crucially important reason for this report. One of the key lessons learned from COVID-19 is that security can no longer be framed purely from a national, state-centric, and western-centric view. Insecurity has to be understood in the context of the communities impacted. Individual communities experience insecurity in different ways.

Has South Africa ‘done well’ at limiting illness and deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic? Academic and political commentator, Steven Friedman, thinks not. While the country’s mainstream media believes it has, in his view the evidence tells another story. South Africa has experienced by far the most cases and deaths in Africa – at one point as many as the rest of the continent combined. One Virus, Two Countries: What Covid-19 tells us about South Africa offers a searing analysis of government and expert scientists’ responses to the pandemic. Friedman argues that South Africa is two societies in one – a ‘First World’ which resembles Western Europe and North America, and a ‘Third World’ which looks much like the rest of Africa or South Asia. The South African state, the media and the scientific community have largely tried to deal with the virus through a ‘First World’ lens in which much of the country was either invisible or a problem – not a partner. Friedman argues this approach prevented the country from responding in a way which would have protected most citizens. This is why case numbers and deaths are so high: South Africa has done worse than the rest of Africa not despite the fact that it has a ‘more developed’ health system, but because it does. One Virus, Two Countries is a controversial book that will rouse much needed debate about South Africa’s health and economic system in a context of serious inequality.

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed? The experts in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.