OPINION: Many no longer ‘fear’ the virus

In these coronavirus battered times, I rarely leave my man cave, thanks in part to the fact that I can conduct all my business online.

I did head to Ruaka on Limuru Road, on Monday. It was getting to 5pm, and there was a massive jam. It reminded me of the period after the post-election violence of 2008, when Nairobi and many parts of Kenya were all but dead.

Then minister Chris Murungaru quipped that he had never been happier to see traffic jams creeping back to Nairobi’s streets, because it was indicative of a slow return to normalcy. The Ruaka jam brought a similar delight. Except, coronavirus hadn’t been defeated. The people, as they have done over the ages in the face of adversities that is the defining condition of life in Africa, had finally plucked the courage to confront the monster and their fears.

Even before the Kenya government had considered any measures to formally “re-open” the economy other others like South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, are doing, parts of it had reopened considerably.

In many parts of the city, streets are crowded, and hawkers are back. If it weren’t for the face masks and the ubiquitous sanitiser, it would look like a normal slow day. This, as Kenya’s confirmed cases of Covid-19 continue to rise.

It’s not because the people aren’t aware of the risks. With the informal economy being the largest urban employer, and so many living from hand to mouth, it was inevitable that they would soon bolt out of lockdown. As the popular expression goes, the lottery of being infected by the virus, is a far more attractive option than the certain of starving to death if they don’t get out to eke out a living. Now it’s mostly the grim consequences of being caught in a tight spot during the curfew, that is keeping many compliant. But that is only part of the story. Most peoples, but Africans in particular, process danger very differently because it surrounds them on all sides, on most days, in most places.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the rebellion in northern Uganda was its worst, we made a suicidal journalistic foray into the area. Past eerie villages and abandoned gardens, we all of a sudden came upon a grass kiosk. Of all things, it had a shiny new Pepsi Cola sign.

Inside, the young attendant had a crate of Pepsi, and on his “counter” were sweets, cigarettes, handkerchiefs hanging on a wire on the side, there were some over-the-counter pain killers, and buns. There wasn’t any other sign of life around.

It seemed extremely dangerous, and risky that he would set up shop in such a desolate place, where he would be easily robbed and killed by both the rebels and government troops.

However, he was unafraid. He said business was good. He smiled when we asked how he got his supplies. As to his customers, he said they were all around, but we couldn’t see them because they were in hiding. They came out when they needed to shop. And he was apparently selling to both sides of the war.

There was that story out of Yemen. When the capital Sana’a was being pounded, there was a place that served as an underground church for East Africans on Sunday. Despite all the restrictions on alcohol, roadblocks, and murderous purist militia, on the rest of the days the “church” was a bar, serving smuggled Tusker and other drinks from Kenya, and offering an illegal feed of the English Premier League on the TV as bombs rained outside. The drinks probably set off from Lamu, or made their way from Kenya, into Somalia, and on through the battle lines.

In many of our countries, there is a vast space that is not governed through the provision of public goods like education, health, housing, security, transportation, or lighting by the state. Often the only form of state intervention is police and military terror in periods of restlessness and protest against rigged elections.

Survival takes broadly two forms. One is innovating solutions; people, for example, make lights through all sorts of contraptions off car batteries, or steal it from the powerline a distance off. A year ago, a community worker in an African country that will remain unnamed, shocked me when he told me he went to an area outside a town which had a 10-kilometre-long illegal power line, passing through bushes and gardens supplying stolen electricity to about seven villages.

The second is daring and courage that is deep wired in, especially, the marginalised sections of society. It is informed by the knowledge that they will likely die soon through a hundred possible ways. Coronavirus doesn’t change those odds. And then, also, by this entrenched idea that we die when our time has come, and trying to do anything to turn back that clock, is an unwinnable race against fate.

To many of these people, trying to beat the coronavirus is not a health issue. It’s a class privilege.