Written by Ulrike Schuerkens.
Let’s say: I’m not a doctor, but a university professor who is also interested in the socio-anthropology of health. I have been observing for weeks the development of COVID-19 around the world and particularly in Africa where the ManaGlobal project that I coordinate is taking place.
What I have noticed are border closures in the South and North which have prevented a certain number of contaminations triggered by travelers, especially in the countries of the South. Rapid political reactions in Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana and Morocco (where the ManaGlobal project is taking place), which I believe have largely prevented the spread of the disease. The treatments adopted, influenced by the proposals of the university professor and director of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, Didier Raoult, have helped to keep the number of deaths relatively low compared to the many deaths in Western countries. Senegal and also Morocco have adopted the protocol suggested by this controversial doctor in France where his treatment is only allowed for serious cases in hospitals. These serious cases show in the West certain common characteristics: advanced age beyond 65 years or even more, co-morbidities such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems etc.
However, the populations in the four countries where the ManaGlobal project is taking place are characterized by their youth and thus often healthier – despite poverty – than the serious cases in the West with high morbidity rates. The research found that children and adolescents are affected by relatively few cases of COVID 19 or – in case of contamination – they develop benign forms. Can it be concluded that the pandemic will instead have severe effects and high mortality rates in Western countries with different consumption patterns from those in the South and organisms exposed to very different food? The health effects of the pandemic in the South should certainly not be underestimated but the exposure to other pandemics such as malaria appears to protect African populations. Moreover, it seems to me that the limited rate of COVID-19 cases in China – although they are certainly underestimated for political reasons – gives a small glimmer of hope for the health consequences in the South, at least in Africa. The good choices made by doctors in several African countries in the face of the pandemic are compounded by the fact that the drugs proposed by Professor D. Raoult can be administered without the side effects expected in severely affected elderly patients in the West. Moreover, these are the medicines available in Africa (Sanofi Maroc) and known to the populations.
There remain the socio-economic consequences in countries characterized by populations often working in precarious and informal conditions. International and regional solidarity is beginning to be activated in the face of this situation, which exposes populations to famine and subsequently to hunger revolts that will not be long in coming if governments do not react. Confinement has not been applied in Cameroon but in Morocco; in Senegal, a curfew reigns at night in the face of populations who work during the day to meet their immediate needs. Wearing masks has been demanded in Cameroon, Morocco and Senegal and is being suggested in Ghana.
In conclusion, I would say that there is hope in the face of the health consequences of the pandemic in the countries of the South, at least in Africa. The socio-economic consequences are likely to be enormous in the face of countries of the North whose economies are at a standstill and whose importance for the socio-economic systems of African countries is well known.
I first saw (but did not dare to talk) Immanuel Wallerstein at the World Sociology Congress in New Delhi in 1986. That’s like more than three decades ago. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with my PhD supervisor John Markoff, who wrote a review of Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (vol 1). Markoff pointed Wallerstein to me. I have known Wallerstein’s name by reputation and read some of his works in the late 1970s while doing my Master at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada where my thesis supervisor Don Whyte was a follower of Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank. Wallerstein’s The Modern World System Vol 1. was published in 1974. Carleton, like many other Universities in North America in the late 70s, was dominated by the Dependency paradigm of Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Furtado, Cardoso and others. In my Master’s thesis I used aspects of the World System Theories. In the mid-1970s, Wallerstein was teaching at McGill after his tour of duty in West Africa and a teaching stint at Columbia University. Immanuel Wallerstein was not an arm-chair sociologist. He liked to be in the thick of things. During the days of students’ unrest in the late 1960s he was at Columbia University as a junior faculty member supporting the students’ activism. After earning his PhD from Columbia University in 1959, Wallerstein went to Africa to understand the impact of colonialism in Africa. His research output was a book on Ghana and Ivory Coast. Starting as an Africanist and having familiarized himself with deep historical research in the vein of his intellectual guru, Fernand Braudel, Wallerstein developed the world systems framework by building on the Dependency framework and recharging it with a critical reading of Marx. Wallerstein was bold in his observations. While Soviet Union was an avowed socialist state, he refused to accept the possibility of a socialist system within the entrenched world capitalist system. In his world-centric framework, dominated by the logic of capitalism, the existence of other systems was not possible. His prognosis was not short-term, he argued that since capitalism is a historical system, it will decline in the long term, as all historical systems met their demise. But when? He was not sure. And what would replace capitalist system, here too he was not sure that it would be socialism, one possibility is a system yet to be named.
The Research Committee 09 - Social Transformations and Sociology of Development 