In the early 1990s, a Ugandan immigrant named Charles Ssenyonga went to Canada. Ssenyonga was HIV positive at a time when little was known and understood about the disease and when the response to it was to isolate and criminalise the infected.
Ssenyonga got into multiple consensual sexual relationships with Canadian women who he infected with the virus. One of these women opened a criminal case against him, earning him the tag of “Canada’s most notorious Aids criminal”. But Ssenyonga would die in 1993 before judgment could be rendered in his case.
The death of Ssenyonga only deepened the racist attitudes of Canadians towards people of African descent. In her bestselling book titled Trial Without End: A Shocking Story of Women and Aids, Canadian journalist June Callwood expressed sentiments that were held by a majority of Canadians – that Ssenyonga was a representation of “African Aids” – the exotic “other” who came into Canada to infect its people with a deadly virus. Ssenyonga became a reflection of all Africans. We were a dirty and diseased people best left on our continent to die of the dreaded disease.
Almost 30 years later, we find ourselves confronted with another Ssenyonga situation. This time it comes in the form of the Omnicron variant of Covid-19. A week ago, SA scientists announced that the new variant had been isolated and identified. Within hours, the United Kingdom and other countries in the European Union, as well as the United States and a number of Asian countries had announced stringent travel bans on SA and other countries in the SADC region.
Such action was not informed by any scientific inquiry. Very little is known about the Omnicron variant except that it has multiple mutations that are possibly on its spike, and that it is possibly more transmissible than the Delta variant that devastated the world in the previous wave. All these are still assumptions which SA’s leading epidemiologists are working around the clock to find answers to.
At the moment, no-one knows where this Omnicron variant originated – only that SA’s highly sophisticated and advanced infectious diseases infrastructure was able to isolate it. And by then, it had already been found in New Zealand, Belgium, Brazil, India, France and many other places.
Despite this, the Western world insists that it is a “South African variant” and as a result, have opted to punish the SADC region that is still reeling from the devastating effects of the Delta variant that decimated national economies and collapsed weak, public healthcare infrastructures.
But even if this variant had come from Africa, the reason would’ve simply been that we have been unable to vaccinate a significant proportion of our populations. Less than 6% of Africans are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 owing to the hoarding of vaccines by developing countries.
They entered into deals with pharmaceutical companies to skip the queue on obtaining vaccines and have refused to waive intellectual property that would allow us to manufacture our own vaccines. The vaccine manufacturers are also charging African countries $26 per dose – more than twice what was charged developed countries which today have largely reached herd immunity.
Instead of being honest about this, it is more convenient for them to cement the narrative of the dirty and diseased African. It is a convenient narrative that ignores the effects of vaccine nationalism. It is a racist narrative that subjects Africans to cruel othering.
And worse than this, it is a colonial narrative that says Africa is only good for extracting mineral resources, but the lives of its people are of such insignificance that they can die from this pandemic – as long as Western lives are saved.
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