THE STRENGTH OF WEAK CITIES? DECONSTRUCTING COVID-19 IN URBAN AFRICA.

• Author: Agbiboa, Daniel

Africa is home to the most rapid urban growth in the world: the continent's urban population increased tenfold between 1960 and 2020, from 53 million to 588 million. (1) Given that about 95 percent of COVID-19 cases occur in cities, and given the sobering realities that accompany Africa's rapid urban growth, including subpar health care systems, expanding slums, and an intensifying informal economy, cases and deaths on the continent were once expected to surge and provoke a monumental disaster. (2) African cities were warned in the spring of 2020 to "prepare for the worst" (3) as they "stand [no] chance in the fight against COVID-19." (4) One BBC News article ran the headline "Coronavirus: Africa could be the next epicenter." (5) A France 24 headline read: "Vulnerable Continent: Africa and the Coronavirus." (6) Presented as a fait accompli, these apocalyptic predictions reinforced tropes of endemic crisis and passivity that have cast a long shadow over how we think, write, and teach about urban Africa. The common denominator for these fixed and linear framings is the failure to parse the African city as a primary site of agency, collective organizing, resourcefulness, and possibility. Yet, while Africa accounts for 17.2 percent of the world population, it accounted for only 2.7 percent of all COVID-19 cases globally as of March 2022. By comparison, North America accounted for 22 percent cases and Europe more than a third. Between then and February 14, 2020, when the first case on the continent was detected in Egypt, Africa recorded 251,754 deaths, about 42 percent of them in South Africa. Compare this to 1,017,010 deaths in Asia, 1,000,428 in North America, and 1,868,883 in Europe. Africa as a whole has experienced fewer COVID-19 deaths than France; even then, just five countries--South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria--account for 60.6 percent of the continent's reported cases and 71.2 percent of deaths. (7) What does this appreciable disparity reveal or occlude about the management of public health emergencies in African cities?

This essay explores lessons learned from addressing the pandemic in urban Africa, including early and aggressive responses, community-led initiatives, and sound public health policies derived from longstanding experience with infectious disease like the Ebola epidemic from 2013 to 2016. It argues that COVID-19 creates a critical space for a reality check, that is, for defamiliarizing commonsense representations of African cities. In doing so, the essay invites us to see familiar things in unfamiliar ways and in unlikely places. It begins by deconstructing ways of viewing African cities in the extant literature. It then offers a critique of journalistic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, taking examples from major global media outlets. Finally, it assesses timely and decisive steps taken by governments and local communities in Africa to contain the virus.

DECONSTRUCTING THE AFRICAN CITY

African cities typically emerge in the extant literature as extreme or exceptional; hopeless or hopeful. On the one hand, they are represented as bastions of expanding slums (where around 60 percent of the continent's urban dwellers live), biting poverty, rising unemployment, and surplus humanity; in short, as places that fall short of the expectations of modernity, which is said to have its fans et origo in the West. (10) This dystopian reading reinforces colonial images of Africa as a wasteland dotted with crime, disease, and "dirty natives." (11) Far from being passe, this tendency towards homogeneous and binarized representations of African cities is alive and well in today's dominant analytical frameworks, which closely align Western cities with modernity and non-Western cities with developmentalism. African cities thusenter urban studies as not-quite-cities--as problems to be solved--and as cities struggling to acquire "world class" status. Lagos, for instance, brands itself as "Africa's Big Apple," (12) while Johannesburg promotes itself as a "world class African city." (13) As anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff argue, "To the degree that, from a Western perspective, the Global South is embraced by modernity at all, then, it is an outside that requires translation, conversation, catch-up." (14) Relaxing this parochial practice of gazing at non-Western cities through Western lenses would require seeing Africa as people (15) and "people as infrastructure," (16) which is to say, as products of social networks and inventive responses that animate the city.

Growing calls to move beyond Afropessimist discourses that view the African city as a basket case of multiple pathologies, what geologist Matthew Gandy calls the "aesthetic of chaos," have opened a hopeful door for exceptional readings of the African city. (17) Such readings underscore the coping mechanisms, improvisations, and inventiveness of city dwellers in Africa, whose daily and defiant struggle for survival and recognition is interpreted as defying commonsense logic and Western notions of order. This viewpoint is exemplified by Rem Koolhaas, who sees the congestion and chaos of Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and sub-Saharan Africa's largest city, as revealing a hidden order. Far from being backward, says Koolhaas, Lagos is at the "forefront of a globalizing modernity." (18) While this aesthetic framing usefully underscores the rise of new forms of urbanism in Africa, it overlooks dire realities facing the informal workforce that constitutes about 87 percent of employment in Africa, especially extortion, dispossession, and displacement.

Going beyond essentialist narratives that describe African cities as extreme or exceptional, this essay takes up the challenge posed by critical urbanists to defamiliarize ways of conceptualizing urban Africa that have ensured that the non-Western city is so fully eclipsed by an omnipotent Western city as to be rendered "inaudible, unspeaking, and unspeakable." (19) Through a concretization of how governments and local communities in urban Africa have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it aims to do more than merely call for a "postcolonization" and "de-Westernization" of urban studies, but instead to reconstruct urban theory from a primarily non-Western perspective. In so doing, it shows why contemporary urban scholarship and policymaking should reconfigure African cities as complex, innovative, and adaptive human ecosystems. This entails engaging with African cities from a dynamic rather than static position, as well as seeing crisis in urban Africa as a terrain of action and meaning rather than simply as context.

BEYOND THE HEADLINES

News coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa has recycled colonial representations of the continent as both an imminent and an immanent threat, and city dwellers as both a risk and at risk. At the onset of the pandemic, the United Nations estimated that without government intervention, 1.2 billion Africans would be infected with the virus and 3.3 million would die. Even in the best-case scenario, where African governments strictly enforced lockdown and social distancing measures, the UN maintained that once a threshold of 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people per week was reached, the continent would experience 122.8 million infections, 2.3 million cases of hospitalizations, and 300,000 deaths. (20) Consequently, the UN called for a $100 billion safety net to mitigate the imminent doom about to strike Africa.

Patently, catastrophic predictions about the pandemic in Africa have not come to pass; at least, not yet. Puzzled by this, many analysts have floated conspiracy theories that cast the continent as a suspect community with a hidden smoking gun. (21) Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is largely ignored: What if some African cities, governments, and public health strategies have been more effective at addressing COVID-19 than those of the West? Put differently by the Comaroffs: "What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the so-called 'Global South' that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?" (22)

The coverage of infectious viral diseases in Africa--from HIV/AIDS to SARS and Ebola--is at its core apocalyptic and myopic, denying an entire continent of 54 countries any agency or capacity for action. (23) The narrative around COVID-19 follows a similar pattern. Take two characteristic stories of the BBC and New York Times, major media outlets in the United Kingdom and the United States, countries that paradoxically have had two of the highest COVID-19 infection and death rates in the world. On September 3, 2020, an article by BBC journalist and author Andrew Harding entitled "Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?" cited epidemiologists who suspected that Africa's low death rates were due to its impoverished, crowded, and unhygienic neighborhoods, which were said to afford some level of pre-existing, cross-protective immunity against COVID-19. They theorized that other human coronaviruses, such as those that cause the common cold, might also elicit an immune response against COVID-19. (24) Were this supposition true, it would prompt the question: Why did we see exponential surges of COVID-19 in other densely populated nations with a similar combination of slums, such as Brazil and India? (25)

Harding's piece both reproduces and upends the "outbreak narrative" that blames a pandemic's spread on primitive ways of life and primordial spaces, resulting in the stigmatization of entire groups and places. (26) During the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, some Western experts interpreted the lack of basic social amenities, overcrowded living and working conditions, and cultural practices like bushmeat consumption and burial practices as primary drivers of the spread of the infectious disease. By contrast, in South Africa, poor infrastructure and dense...