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Last week ROAPE and BIEA organised a webinar on the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. Activists and researchers from around the continent discussed the impact of the measures taken against the coronavirus by the ruling classes. In this blogpost we introduce the full video recording of the meeting with all of the speakers, Tafadzwa Choto, Femi Aborisade, Gacheke Gachihi, Lena Anyuolo, Gyekye Tanoh and Heike Becker.  

In a wide-ranging interview, Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb discuss their new book, Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. They argue that the question of our relationship with nature is now finally revealed in its starkest and most dramatic way as a climate emergency. Intensive, capitalist and extractivist agriculture has also generated the processes that have created the current pandemic.

Reporting on the struggle for food and survival in Nigeria, trade unionist Gbenga Komolafe states that the repression and starvation of the poor must end. While in South Africa, Ashley Fataar argues for a wealth tax on the rich to feed workers and the poor.

In a dispatch from their lockdown in Kigali, two UK-based researchers Andrea Filipi and Katrin Wittig reflect on the international media coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic and Africa. They argue that the coverage has recycled stereotypical portrayals of Africa, and that the West may be losing an opportunity to rethink itself and its relationship with the continent.

In a report from Kenya, Gacheke Gachihi asks if the state is fighting Covid-19 or the poor? He writes that since the curfew was enforced across the country the police continue to systematically brutalise and terrorise people living in informal settlements. Introducing a film on state violence and Covid-19 in Kenya, Gacheke argues the poor must demand the right to healthcare, water and livelihood enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Tafadzwa Choto reports from Zimbabwe, and Didier Kiendrebeogo from Burkina Faso on the struggle of the poor for treatment, food and an end to police brutality during the Covid-19 outbreak. Both argue that social distancing must combine with social solidarity.

During the West African Ebola crisis, outreach became critical to combating the spread of infection. In Sierra Leone, Laura Martin writes, comedians proved to be a popular and effective means of spreading these messages, as well as offering relief to quarantined homes. Comedians thrived during this period with regular employment opportunities by local government and NGOs.  Today, comedy outreach is becoming re-popularised as Sierra Leone fights against the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, being a ‘legitimate’ respectable comedian in Sierra Leone is bound up in social and political capital entirely unrelated to comedic talents…

In an interview with roape.net, ecosocialist and writer Ian Angus discusses the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene and Covid-19. He argues that new viruses, bacteria and parasites spread from wildlife to humans because capital is bulldozing primary forests, replacing them with profitable monocultures. Ecosocialists must patiently explain that permanent solutions will not be possible so long as capital rules the Earth.