The African continent was affected by COVID-19 at a rather late stage. In South Africa, the curve rose very slowly, with the first case of Corona being confirmed on 5 March. Further cases were followed by a prompt reaction from the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa: beaches, parks, schools, and playgrounds were closed by mid-March. The infections, which initially affected European travelers, are now spreading rapidly throughout the country, especially in poorer areas where people have little access to health care.
With 3,200 people having died in connection with the virus and almost 200,000 confirmed infections,[1] the country is the most affected on the continent. It is also one of the countries with the largest gap between rich and poor in the world. The virus makes this even more visible.
Professor Sean Jacobs from the New School in New York, founder of the website africaisacountry, shares his insights into the situation in his home country, South Africa.
"I wanted to undercut the dominant media narratives about Africa"
L.I.S.A.: Professor Jacobs, not only are you Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York, you also founded "Africa Is a Country" in 2009, "a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing", focusing on the African continent from an African perspective. How did you come up with the idea for this project? Can you tell us about its development and also about the effects you see from those more than ten years of your work?
Professor Jacobs: In 2001, I came to New York City as a visiting student at The New School. At the time I was doing a Ph.D. in Politics at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Not long after I started blogging about Western media debates about Africa, including as “Leo Africanus”. Mainstream media coverage of Africa in Europe and the US was abysmal. Outside of the large, mainstream and most popular media outlets, the popular sources about African politics and culture were blogs that highlighted development debates, NGO issues, the pros and cons of US or EU foreign policy for Africa argued between Americans, and aspirational politics of African elites like the idea of the “Afropolitan” or the “African Renaissance”. They had very little to do with actual African politics, aspirations, or perspectives. I saw Africa Is a Country (AIAC) as intervening in those debates. But I also wanted to introduce audiences to leftist perspectives on African affairs and to undercut the dominant media narratives about Africa. Much of the inspiration for such perspectives come from my background coming of age in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when an alternative or Left press, publications like Grassroots, South, New Nation, The Weekly Mail, Work in Progress and South African Labour Bulletin, left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to emulate that media. Outside South Africa, I was particularly influenced by the style of the Ugandan magazine, Transition.
AIAC's founding coincided with political debate moving from traditional media to almost exclusively online. I am not naive about the internet (we all know it is a cesspool of rightwing propaganda and misinformation), but the ability to self-publish, has vastly contributed to democratizing the public sphere. I also know that despite our best efforts most Africans still source the news they read about themselves or other Africans elsewhere on the continent, via non-African sources. Nevertheless, I am very proud of the work we have done. I think we have managed, particularly in our early work, which was mainly media criticism, to make foreign correspondents think twice about the way they portray Africa. We have also created space for over 1,000 contributors, including a number of first-time authors, to write to a global audience. More recently, we want our work to be seen in languages other than English and we are keen to produce more visual media. Today, Africa Is a Country is considered one of the leading sites providing thoughtful and incisive commentary from the Left, about the continent.