Biggest test of our acquiesence not Covid-19 infection
Had the story of Covid-19 in SA been told in advance, only the most credulous would have believed it. The president goes on live television to tell the nation that a virus is coming and if we don’t shut down the country at once untold numbers of us will die. Few have seen evidence of this virus thus far. Almost nobody is ill. The country has only the word of its president to go by, buttressed by innumerable voices from abroad. SA has never shut down before; the action the president is ordering is unprecedented.
The country does indeed lock down, only to discover something so nasty as to be almost unimaginable. Those who live in urban townships find that they have been airlifted out of the present and dumped into a parodic version of the 1960s. Armed men swarming in without notice and chasing people off the streets; civilians being frogmarched through public space for daring to leave their homes, forced to do jump squats and push-ups as instant punishment; breadwinners cut off from their places of work; schools closed indefinitely; entire settlements forced to deal with rising hunger under armed guard.
Had you told me in advance that all this was going to happen I would have predicted a rocky ride. Scepticism about this invisible pandemic would soon grow, I would have said. South Africans are not the most credulous bunch. Why should they swallow a story about a pandemic which seems never quite to arrive? Nor would I have imagined people would tolerate being policed as their grandparents were. The affront a quarter of a century into democracy would be too much, I would have thought.
And yet how human beings come to interpret what is happening to them in unheralded times is, we learned quickly, unpredictable.
In early June the University of Johannesburg and Human Sciences Research Council released the results of a survey I found astonishing.
Weighted for race, education and age, the survey showed that by the end of May, just more than two months into the lockdown, 78% of people said they were willing to sacrifice their human rights to help control the spread of the virus; 84% thought the president was handling the situation well. People had resigned themselves to extreme suffering to combat the pandemic; 43% reported going to bed hungry, up from 33% at the end of April.
One can assume almost no respondents knew of anyone who had fallen ill from Covid-19, yet nearly half reported being frightened and just more than half believed the worst was still to come.
Why are people so extraordinarily acquiescent? The president says a great many things people do not believe; SA’s political classes are not, of late, regarded as the most credible bunch. Why is he believed this time?
The answer, I think, is that the idea of a global catastrophe has existed in the collective human imagination for a long time now. It has been rehearsed in people’s minds over and again. When people listened to the president they did so not as South Africans but as members of a vulnerable species spread across the globe, a species increasingly aware that it is in precarious relationships with other species and itself.
That is also, I think, why people have tolerated being policed as their forebears were during apartheid’s darkest years. In the face of an existential emergency one offers forbearance in the face of whatever authority is at hand, as distasteful and inadequate as that authority may be.
If the legitimacy of SA’s democratic regime is to be tested by Covid-19, it is not the short-term test of a sudden lockdown, it seems. It is the long, slow drip test that will unfold as the country comes to experience what it means to have grown poorer.