Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: COVID, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article explores the impact and implications of the South African state’s adoption of a tough militarized, bio-medical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the COVID pandemic in the rural former Bantustans (“native reserves”) of the country. It argues that, while the “war on COVID” produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living “with custom” in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes that amplified the risk of infection and death. The paper focuses on how the state constructed measures for these spaces and managed social interaction and burials in the migrant heartlands. The paper suggests that families “living with custom” in the former homelands were treated differently from other citizens, existing in what Giorgio Agamben (2004) might call a “state of (greater) exception.” Villagers used the metaphor of the gate closing on them (ukuvala isango) to describe their experience and exclusion during lockdown as customary practices were banned, local health facilities closed for deep cleaning, and bodies sealed in plastic at state hospitals and mortuaries. The latter measures disturbed rural families much more than police violence or the closure of government clinics because it presented a serious threat to social reproduction. The paper provides evidence of how families fought to restore conviviality by exhuming the bodies wrapped in plastic to allow them to communicate with kin and ancestors. It also shows how, after lockdown, vaccination was often treated as a family matter not an individual choice, and how families moved quickly to fix the spiritual insecurities wrought by COVID. The paper concludes with a harrowing account of the new epidemic of hunger and malnutrition that is stalking these landscapes as conviviality is not enough to secure survival. The paper highlights the limits of narrow bio-medical and individual rights-based approaches in dealing with health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities devastated by COVID in rural southern Africa.