The Code, the Jab and the Riots

The half-hearted response to the COVID19 pandemic in Europe, a continent that has not had to deal with such disasters for well over a century, continues to be something to behold. 

I mostly work in a part of the world that routinely deals with such phenomena and the response to the arrival of COVID19 in West Africa has been exactly what the European responses were not: swift, decisive, harsh and (mostly) effective. 

As a result it looks like (West) Africa may have been able to keep this particular pandemic mostly under control. We have tonnes of other sh!t to deal with on a regular basis so thank you for letting this particular nastiness pass our shores. (Incidentally, Robert Kaplan’s essay The Coming Anarchy has been wheeled out again, as an illustration of where the world is heading. The article continues to collapse under the weight of its bonkers hyperbole and in the light of the harsh but measured West African response to both COVID19 and Ebola it might be a good idea to bury Kaplan’s heated neo-colonial fantasy for good.)

West Africa did not face the large virus-related street riots like the ones that have been rocking several European countries including the Netherlands these last few days, with probably more on the way. You may not have noticed this but it’s worthwhile pointing out that the majority of those protesting and rioting against being ‘locked out of society’ because they refuse a jab and/or a code…are white. Incidentally, Rotterdam was the scene of race riots, five decades ago, pitting Dutch and Turkish workers against each other. Division was already doing its work and in the 1970s we witnessed the emergence of some pretty nasty extreme right wing political parties and movements. They have, essentially, never gone away and they stand to profit from the deep political confusion afflicting a worryingly large segment of Europe’s populations. 

More recently, we saw the emergence of social movements asserting the right of people of colour to be seen…as people. We saw movements in many parts of the worlds asserting the rights of people of colour not to be murdered or manhandled by police officers (from Black Lives Matter in the USA to EndSARS in Nigeria). We saw movements by people of colour for the right not to be treated as criminals for crossing a border with valid travel documents. We also saw a movement, specific to the Netherlands, in favour of the right not to be compared to some racist blackface caricature, an obnoxious habit a – fortunately dwindling – number of Dutch people still maintain around this time of the year. 

As Babah Tarawally, a perceptive column writer in a Dutch daily observes, the reality of being excluded from society is routine for people of colour in Europe. Exclusion becomes a problem now because it is starting to affect white people, who, on the whole, had little if anything to say about this exclusion, which was previously not available to them. 

Because let us be very clear here: there is a huge difference. Discrimination, exclusion, the two-tier society, exists for people of colour because of who and what they are and for this reason alone they have found themselves singled out for extra passport controls, having a knee planted on their necks , staring down the barrel of a gun or being compared to some stupid blackface caricature. The current looming two-tier society is the result of people making a conscious (one would hope) decision not to get a QR code or get themselves a COVID jab. In the latter case you choose to place yourself outside society. In the former case you already are excluded from society for traits you do not control. It is unbelievably depressing that this needs to be pointed out time and time again. 

The current European turmoil about The Code and The Jab is morbidly fascinating. Folks who never faced any difficulty in their lives because of inalienable traits they possessed find themselves inconvenienced as a result of some relatively feeble public health-related measures. They are screaming “Dictatorship!!” “Separation!!” and most of all “My Rights!!!!”…they are shouting for Democracy and Freedom when they were nowhere to be seen when these things were denied other people in their own country and in large parts of the rest of the world. 

The fact is this: for migrant workers, refugees, immigrants, exclusion has always been a massive hindrance. For the current crop of (again: predominantly white) complainers about The Jab and/or The Code, exclusion is a resource. 

Meanwhile, populist leaders whose barely disguised fascism becomes clearer with every passing day (even when I STILL hold the views I did in this column a few years ago) jump on the pro-COVID bandwagon by decrying public health measures, however weak and inconsistent, as Dictatorship or – in some insanely twisted irony – Apartheid, even Nazism. Some go so far as attaching Yellow Stars to their clothes with “unvaccinated” written on them, an act for which there cannot ever be enough contempt, especially when you realise how quickly these very same  populist leaders will start sending masses of people into deportation camps the minute they get into power because they campaign on an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Other agenda. 

Do we see a pattern emerging here? I think we do. I will be heading back to my slightly less deranged part of the world, hopefully before various corners of Europe go back into lockdown, thanks to the same crowd that turned some towns and cities into virtual war zones in these past few days and weeks. 

The Corona Chronicles, Bamako

Part four – what on god’s green earth were they thinking…?

 

Conversation between two medical students overheard on a train in The Netherlands, many many years ago:

“So we’re off to Africa then, for our internship.”

“Yeah. It’s great, man! You get to cut into people.”

To my eternal shame, I was too shocked/too timid to interfere.

And here’s another conversation I overheard, this time not in a Dutch train but a taxi in the Guinean capital Conakry. It is the last week of the year 2003 and the whole West African region is still in shock following a horrific air crash, at Cotonou, Benin. The report on the Guinea-registered plane’s final moments, even when couched in technical aviation terms, is harrowing.

The doomed aircraft. Photo: Torben Guse, retrieved from the website oldjets.net

I vividly remember seeing this piece of junk parked at Conakry’s Gbessia International Airport and thinking: you will have to drag me kicking and screaming into that thing! On Christmas Day 2003 it crashed. What was the considered opinion of the taxi occupants in Conakry?

“It’s a conspiracy.”

“So it can’t possibly have anything to do with non-existent maintenance, untransparent ownership, a transport minister lying about its airworthiness, chaotic overbooking and catastrophically bad luggage loading at Cotonou?”

“No. Conspiracy.”

Alright, that’s settled then.

Two observations.

1. There is ample historical evidence that the continent of Africa has been used as a testing ground for aspiring doctors and ruthless pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that would keep them in check, especially during colonial times, was their own moral compass – if one were present at all. 
2. Africa has more than its fair share of conspiracy theories. For 26 years, it was the method of governance in Guinea – that taxi conversation sprung from the rich field of conspirational thinking it cultivated. The crimes of France, well-documented, give rise to the idea that the French are probably also the evil geniuses causing massacres in Mali. Or at the very least sponsor terrorism/jihadism. And outsiders bring diseases, which was, in all probability the thinking behind the attack on a medical convoy in deep Guinea, in the midst of the Ebola epidemic.

And now there’s COVID-19. Like all crises, it brings out the best in some and the worst in others, the latter often in the shape of an endless parade of yet more conspiracy theorists, who blame anyone and their canary for their own bumbling incompetence in the face of a major health crisis. The current occupant of the White House is a prime example.

Social media have exploded with folks babbling incoherently about Bill Gates controlling the WHO, the virus being the Chinese Communist Party’s avenue to world domination, chips being introduced surreptitiously into body parts we did not know we had, vaccines being surreptitiously introduced during routine medical checks by lizard people looking to control everyone and then there’s of course the inevitable dog-whistling misfit bringing up George Soros at every opportunity…

There is no room for nuance in these scenarios. And into this utter and complete mess wade these two:

Have you seen them? They are Camille Locht, research director at Inserm (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale) and Jean-Paul Mira, head of Intensive Care at Paris’ Cochin hospital, where another famous French doctor once walked the corridors…

These two found it necessary to discuss, two weeks ago, on a mainstream French television network, the idea of using Africans as guinea pigs if ever a vaccine against COVID-19 were to be proposed. I find the actual discourse too crass to reproduce here but for those who can follow French, here’s a link.

What? The? Hell?

Which is what the internet thought. And predictably, it fed straight into the ballooning body of conspiracy theories and of course reinforcing old ones. But this is not about damage control through communication, as Inserm attempted to do.

This is about two individuals working in the medical profession, which is, let’s be clear, supposed to be governed by the highest ethical standards, blithely and openly discussing how you can dispatch living breathing human beings to some kind of rarefied abstract space where they become objects for experimentation – as was the case with those two medical students I overheard on that train. It was offensive, dehumanising, monumentally ill-judged and yes, of course: it was racist.

The upshot of all this is that you will have to work harder than ever to convince an already fundamentally skeptical population that there are perfectly good reasons to allow trials to be executed all over the world – including Africa.  There has, for instance, been an argument about the exclusion of Sub-Saharan Africa from the WHO’s Malaria Eradication Program in the 1960s and whether or not this set back anti-malaria efforts on the continent.

But before any experimentation happens, two criteria must be met. One is called informed consent, which means that whoever volunteers knows exactly what they are volunteering for. And second, all standard safeguards must be in place to protect volunteers against the consequences should anything go wrong, which is the exact opposite of what these two were proposing.  And as a result of their nonsense, rationality, already in the back of that Guinean taxi, takes another hit. Thank you for nothing, you &^#€!&% French dimwits.

The WHO website currently records 109 cases confirmed in Mali, with 9 deaths. Mali’s Ministry of Public Health notes 123 confirmed cases and 10 deaths; 26 patients have recovered.