Authoritarian Violence, Public Health, and the Necropolitical State: Engaging the South African Response to COVID-19

Theodore Powers

doi:10.1515/opan-2020-0105

Abstract

Abstract Following COVID-19’s arrival in March 2020, the South African government implemented a restrictive state-led response to the pandemic, limiting infections along with the survival strategies of those at greatest risk of illness. While the country’s aggressive tactics towards the pandemic have been lauded by some, the public health response has taken a violent turn towards the country’s historically marginalized Black urban population. How are we to make sense of the ruling African National Congress’ decision to utilize the South African state’s capacity for violence towards poor and working-class Black urban communities? How can this disease response be contextualized within the broader dynamics of citizenship across South African history? Building on these questions, I analyze South African efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the state response to an outbreak of bubonic plague during the colonial era. I propose that the South African state carries within it divergent historical continuities, some of which carry forward the necropolitical modalities of the colonial and apartheid eras and others that redistribute resources to safeguard life.

Highlights

For Arundhati Roy (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to serve as a portal, opening a door to a new world where the failures of the present give way to a future based on different social, political, and economic ideals
Why would the ruling African National Congress (ANC), a party that helped to bring South Africa into its democratic age, implement policies that enact lethal violence towards historically marginalized Black South Africans, who serve as its political base? How are we to situate the violence that has accompanied South Africa’s COVID-19 response alongside earlier attempts to control infectious disease outbreaks?
Based on research in Uganda, the authors outline how the relationships between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) providing treatment and Ugandans accessing these services operate as a patron-client relationship, with HIV/AIDS treatment provided based on fulfilling particular responsibilities rather than as a human right

Summary

Introduction

For Arundhati Roy (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to serve as a portal, opening a door to a new world where the failures of the present give way to a future based on different social, political, and economic ideals. For a post-colonial society such as South Africa, examining these historical continuities alongside a consideration of the modalities of state authority enables one to see how power dynamics informed by history produce constraints on the transformative potential of the present moment. Agamben’s contribution brings to light that modern states act in ways that seek to increase productivity, wealth, and human welfare, as Foucault emphasized, and exercise lethal violence towards particular groups with impunity. On this point, Achille Mbembe’s (2003, 2019) contribution to debates on sovereignty is salient for the case considered here, given that his work focuses on these dynamics from the perspective of the global south. As Mbembe notes, invoking parallels between these historically particular examples serves to displace African societies into a premodern past and construct them as backwards, deviant, and a continued site of otherness

62 Theodore Powers

Pathogenic Antecedents

Findings

South Africa and the Necropolitical State