The Sunday News
Decoloniality At Large, Cetshwayo Mabhena
Sometimes it is much more important and life-saving to be really afraid than to be courageous and calm in the face of death. The truth that in most cases Coronavirus is just another flue that can pass by our bodies without us knowing it does not help us but it helps the disease to kill most of us.
To be really afraid of the Coronavirus as a true harbinger of death that has come like the Devil’s broom to sweep most of us away from the surface of the earth may be a helpful disposition. The fear of certain death, rather than a calm hope that we will survive this, may be the best way for all of us to advance our sure love for life.
Real panic and true scramble to save our lives from a monstrous pandemic may be what will get us to do all that must be done to prevent infection by this scourge. Masking, social distancing, sanitising and vaccinating may, in our real fear of death, stop being painful rules that we obey to please some authority out there and become military roles that all of us may deploy to save our only lives.
The lack of fear of Coronavirus, our individual calmness around it, and the cold hope that it is other people’s disease not us and that in our case it will be a mild flue when it catches us, is allowing this monstrosity to pick us up one by one and the next one until it picks us up ourselves just like that. It is helpful, both in the military and philosophical sense, to regard this disease as a sure death sentence.
It may even be more helpful to believe that it is a real living monster that knows us by name individually and is moving around looking for us as individuals in order to infect and eat us up. Otherwise the opposite of this fear which is the faith in our individual luck and the belief that it is accidental to be infected is the blind faith that is leading all of us, one by one, to the bloody and dark abyss.
How do we think straight about death?
The human thing to do, especially in Africa, is to pretend that death is not for us but other people somewhere until it knocks right on our own bodies. We fear death so much, or love life that far, that we will go all the way to cushion ourselves with the deluded faith that our time with death is far in coming. Strangely, at least in the literature that I consume, it is not biological scientists but philosophers that have meditated on disease and looked at their own imminent death straight in the eye.
Dying of Esophageal Cancer in 2011, British philosopher, Christopher Hitchens, wrote prize winning essays for Vanity Fair Magazine about the “lump” in his throat, loss of voice, falling hair and disappearing vigour of body, and the wait by a lover of life for sure death and burial. I have not encountered in literature, any medical mind that would look disease and death in the eye straight the way Hitchens, a self-celebrated atheists and believer in not believing in God, any god, did.
Slowly being eaten away by cancer, Susan Sontag thought of and wrote some of the deepest essays in meditation on disease and death. She wrote more vividly than Frantz Kafka publicly pondered the Tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Frantz Fanon and Edward Said also courageously and openly reflected on the Leukemia, cancer of the blood that took them. Medical scientists and biological scientists are happy to write textbooks and journal papers on disease and death out there, not their own illness and face-off with death.
Maybe, after all, we may observe the different ways of handling disease between the philosophical and scientific minds and bodies. It is possible that the philosopher’s calm and collected military gaze at approaching death might be his or her way of being really afraid with nothing to do about it but think as usual and write about it. Much the same way good soldiers die shooting.
Susan Sontag in particular gifted the world of letters with philosophical understandings of disease and death. She is the thinker who noted how when diseases like cancer, tuberculosis and HIV and AIDS came up in the world the myths and metaphors about the maladies spread faster and much more than the cold truths. The very same way conspiracy theories and myths about Coronavirus and its vaccines are hindering the effective prevention of the disease is the way falsehoods about cancer and TB actually killed more people than the diseases themselves.
Sontag’s telling observation was that when a new killer disease comes scientists, political leaders and the population should focus on the truths about the disease and make that truth known and usable in fighting the disease. Otherwise, the advice is, study the disease and get educated in it and deal with it accordingly. If that is not done falsehoods, myths and true lies take over and people die more than they were going to if education prevailed.
Just like in the military and in war, as the Sun Tzu taught us, knowing the enemy well is part of the victory. When real knowledge and education on a pandemic are not dispensed and deployed in fighting it people rush to name and mythologise on the disease and use pure ignorance to cultivate their own deaths. Again, just as war is too important a business to be left to Generals and soldiers; disease, especially of the pandemic levels, is too big an issue to be left to scientists and politicians.
The members of the public should get involved in being educated in and fighting the disease in proper military approaches and drills. Fighting a pandemic demands military and philosophical discipline, I think. Philosophical and military disciplines provide the mental and emotional stamina to look at disease and death in the eye while doing something about preventing and finally defeating it.
It might really help to look at the pandemic as an invading enemy army whose bullets have to be dodged until it runs out of ammunition and burns off. This business of picking up the virus from other bodies and surfaces and transporting it around to others must stop or we submit to depletion by this pandemic.
Let us love Coronavirus now
One of the deepest and also strangest philosophical lessons of Christian faith is the painful paradox of loving one’s enemy. Coronavirus is enemy number one of humanity right now that is killing people in multiples. More frightening is that the disease is killing more people indirectly without infecting and eating them away.
More people that have other regular and random diseases that otherwise could have been saved are dying because the political and medical world is focused on Coronavirus patients and the special care they need in public and private hospitals.
The Virus has become an essential enemy and all politics, science and medical care are trained on it while other diseases that have not been declared pandemics, even if they are also deadly, are eating people away in multitudes.
Even more people, the world over, are dying of impoverishment and loss of jobs, businesses and livelihoods because world economies have grinded to a near total halt. What makes it worse is that even the Coronavirus patients that have become essential patients that governments and scientists are prioritising are really not being saved from death in the numbers that we wish for, more people are dying than those that are being saved. National budgets of countries have been shied away from mediating hunger and other threats to lives and are all deployed towards the fights that, in most countries, are being lost against the Virus.
By the time one is infected and hospitalised, we can observe, one has lost the fight against the disease. To survive the aggressive symptoms and return from hospital is a true miracle of the return from the grave. What should be avoided in the very first place and by all military means necessary is infection.
To love Coronavirus is to know it and own it as our killer that has arrived and is here to stay like Lucifer himself. Our obedience is in doing what Coronavirus wants, in order to avoid being infected and killed by it. It is a tyrannical killer with strict demands for those that must be spared and we must not just get used to it but actually love the rules of our master and monster. Ours is war of loving the troubles of preventing disease that we hate.
The knowledge that the next object we touch and the next blow of breath from another human being on our faces might be the kiss of death is a declaration of the war before us.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
