Following the detection of a new Covid-19 variant, known as B.1.1.529 or Omicron by South Africa on 24 November, several countries across the world moved swiftly to impose travel bans on Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Eswatini and Tanzania. More countries were added onto the list in the days that followed. While the political lords from Europe and America justified the Covid-19 induced travel ban as a strategy to curb the spread of the Omicron variant, it is quite clear that Afrophobia or Afroscepticism, and not science, motivated the travel bans. As a matter of fact, by the time the Africa specific travel ban came into effect, some southern African countries had not even detected any single case of the Omicron variant.
Following this anti-African bias, World Health Organisation (WHO) regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, urged countries to follow science and international health regulations in order to avoid using travel restrictions. She noted that pandemics are managed by science and not prejudice. “If restrictions are implemented, they should not be unnecessarily invasive or intrusive, and should be scientifically based, according to the International Health Regulations, which is a legally binding instrument of international law recognised by over 190 nations,” she said.
But singling out African countries by the West was only just the beginning of what other scribes have described as a “rebranding of Covid-19 as African”. First it was the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which did a good job of exposing racist hypocrisy. The BBC was among the first to attach a label by calling it “the South African variant”. This is despite the WHO announcing changes to how it will label Covid-19 variants, stating that the variants will be named using letters of the Greek alphabet instead of the place where they were first discovered. There is also no evidence to suggest that the Omicron variant originated from Africa. The WHO declared that variants of interest and variants of concern will receive a designated Greek letter listed on its website. The naming system was developed after the WHO consulted experts following reports that labeling the variants by their location of discovery is “stigmatising” and “discriminatory.”
While singling out African countries was very unfair, non-scientific and discriminatory, some media houses in Asia and Germany were unrelenting in serving their readers with racist red meat. The BangkokPost – an English-language daily newspaper published in Bangkok, with a circulation of 110, 000 published a story with a screaming vintage racist headline: “Government hunts for African visitors”. The headline brought to the fore the racist trend of tossing bananas at black soccer players in stadiums. The headline fits a racist pattern and practice of analogising animals with blacks. It is the reason why some people throw banana peels at black soccer players because in their mind a black person is a “monkey” that belongs to the zoo where they are fed bananas.
A political commentator who spoke to this publication indicated that the repackaging of Covid-19 we are witnessing is a foretaste of what would have happened had Covid-19 been first detected in Africa in 2019. “The way some western countries were quick to shut their doors to Africans over the Omicron variant shows that countries around the world would have closed their borders to Africans had Covid-19 been first detected on the continent,” says Ronald Dintle. He also adds that some media houses want to propagate lies that Covid-19 is an African disease.
Stigma and racism also emerged in the German media when a German newspaper called Die Rheinpfalzcarried a front page headline “The virus from Africa is with us”. The story also had a front page picture of a black woman with a child and the picture had absolutely nothing to do with the Omicron variant.
Another Spanish newspaper called La Tribuna de Albacete had a cartoon which depicted black South Africans as carriers of the Omicron variant on a boat on their way to Europe. The newspaper and its cartoonist, Javi Salado, have since apologised for the cartoon which was published on 28 November.
Some commentators have accused leaders mainly from southern African countries of speaking out against the travel bans a little too late. While other people applauded President Mokgweetsi Masisi for not disclosing the four diplomats’ nationalities whose results scientists in Botswana detected Omicron variant, others say this only served to strengthen the West’s disingenuous attempt to redefine and repackage Covid-19 as African virus.
On his Twitter handle, Walter Mzembi who previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry in Zimbabwe said “I’m not sure what this belated disclosure (that they are European) cures now. Masisi missed the heat of the moment which could have turned the tables. Even now it’s not good enough to blanket Europeans. President Masisi must settle this, which specific country did they come from?”
However with no end in sight to Covid-19 and with more deadly variants likely to emerge in the future, African leaders especially from Southern African Development Community (SADC) need a harmonised approach to counter racial anti-African bias from the Western media.
