“This is a people’s war”, declared President Museveni after the country’s first COVID-19 case, adding, “I have come here to lead the war of the wananchi [against Covid-19]”[1]. When COVID-19 became a reality in Uganda, the government announced ‘a war of the wananchi’[2](“a people’s war”) against the virus through a series of incremental measures. …
…“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” cries Nietzsche’s madman in a famous parable of The Gay Science. “Are we not continually falling? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing [5, 7]? Isn’t empty space breathing at us
In August of this year, when the Ebola outbreak escalated in Liberia and a state of emergency had been declared for the country, Fatu Kekula, a young Liberian nursing student, improvised personal protective equipment (PPE) to care for her father, mother, sister, and cousin. After three of the relatives survived, her method was featured prominently in the international news media …
On July 20th the food crisis in the Horn of Africa was officially declared a famine. In David Keen’s 1994 book The Benefits of Famine he argues that famines are “naturalised” as “disasters”, and that this naturalisation obscures the processes which cause hunger, the “identifiable forces within the province of rational human control” Susan George wrote of in her 1974 …