Pandemics in Africa: From the Spanish Influenza to COVID-19

Graduate / Professional

The overarching aim of the course is to understand the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic in Africa in the context of a century of pandemics, their political and administrative management, the responses of ordinary people, and the lasting changes they have wrought. The first eight meetings examine some of the best social science literature on twentieth-century African pandemics before COVID-19. From the Spanish influenza to cholera to AIDS, to the misdiagnosis of yaws as syphilis, and tuberculosis as hereditary, the social science literature can be assembled to ask a host of vital questions in political theory: on the limits of coercion; on the connection between political power and scientific expertise, between pandemic disease and political legitimacy, and, across all modern African epidemics, between infection and the politics of race. The remaining meetings look at COVID-19. We chronicle the evolving responses of policy makers, scholars, religious leaders, opposition figures, and, to the extent that we can, ordinary people. The idea is to assemble sufficient information to facilitate a real-time study of thinking and deciding in times of radical uncertainty and to examine, too, the consequences of decisions on the course of events. There are of course so many moving parts: health systems, international political economy, finance, policing, and more. We also bring guests into the classroom, among them frontline actors in the current pandemic as well as veterans of previous pandemics well placed to share provisional comparative thinking. This last dimension is especially emphasized: the current period is studied in the light of a century of epidemic disease, affording us the opportunity to see path dependencies and novelties, the old and the new. Th 1:30pm-3:25pm