No Place Like Hope
The COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa
© Michele Spatari / 2020
South Africa has become the epicentre of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in Africa despite enforcing one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, as the pandemic exacerbated deep economic inequalities and weakened a feeble governance.
It went from the surprise that sprung from a distant observation to a disillusioned denial; it became slowly part of a new normal, and finally hit the mark with the power of surging numbers and the inevitable toll of deaths. Predictably, the pandemic reached South Africa: its coming has blurred racial and economic divides and puts strain to deep running fault lines, contradictions etched into its people consciousness.
At the beginning of March 2020, amid raging numbers in China and Europe, South Africa discovered that Patient Zero was among its population, and a scramble to contain the panic and the rush to supplies was finally met by an inevitable lockdown. Deserted streets, panic buying and curfew. The humming of the South African Army patrol vehicles and the familiar blue lights of the police filled the streets of Johannesburg. From deep into their recessed dwellings and into the overcrowded buildings and the shacks of the informal settlements, residents learned the reverse irony of “physical distancing”: a defiance to the law of physics, a surreal reality for those to whom the simple notion of “space” sounds unmeasurable.
But the measure of it has been imposed with sticks and whips. With rubber bullets shot at close range. During night raids where residents have been woken from their provisional beds in overcrowded rooms. Life at the margins of society has been reduced to a matter of square meter occupancy. South Africa followed the climbing numbers, masks on the noses and hands in gloves, peeking over the shoulders and making peace with a new reality: the people, its most vulnerable people, was starving. The lockdown left an economy already in survival mode, on its knees: the hand-to-mouth feeding scheme that has most of their able men and women leaving the inner city and the townships looking for wages that would feed their families revealed its bare teeth, its limits and its failure.
As kilometres long lines have recalled in the memory of South Africans the queues that marked the passage from the horror of Apartheid into the new democracy, the private sector and few public actions have tried to patch the emergency. The livelihood of thousands of families are now on the line. A food line.
A relatively young population is put to test, its resilience proofed against underlying HIV and TB conditions, adding insult to injury in an explosive mix of racial tensions, exacerbating economic disparities and feeble governance. Stay at home, they said. In South Africa it’s a thread that pulls memories from the past. Apartheid, dispossession, segregation.
This work was originally commissioned by the festival Cortona On The Move for The COVID-19 Visual Project: A Time of Distance and can be viewed in full at covid19visualproject.org, an ongoing permanent archive of the Coronavirus crisis.