Epidemics and Pandemics: lessons from the Past

This Webinar marks the beginning of the Webinar Series: Conversations Around Pandemics in Africa in the Wake of COVID-19. It seeks to put into perspective the history of pandemics and epidemics in Africa. it will also reveal how these were managed in the past by various players including the state, the community and individuals. This Webinar comes before the commencement of Webinars directly dealing with the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Overall, the Webinar series seeks to provide a platform for academics to discuss international, continental, regional and country specific responses to the pandemics and disasters in general in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak which the world has been grappling with since January 2020. The pandemic has brought with it muliti-facted strategies implemented by international organisations, states, civic organisations and individuals. It has also ignited conversations around the histories, politics and economics of pandemics. This Webinar series seeks to explore these dynamics in and around the African context providing in-depth academic analysis of the effects and impact of the pandemic as well as the strategies adopted. Questions that we will seek to answer include among other things, what does this pandemic mean for African economies, its politics and society? What is there to learn from histories of pandemics, crises and disasters both inside of Africa and outside of it? We seek to add academic analysis to this cataclysmic phenomenon, which will change the world as we know it today.
This Series of Webinars will engage some of the questions that have already been asked and continue to be asked by academics and non-academics alike about the efficacy of capitalism in today’s world and its role in crises. Are there opportunities in the midst of this crisis for new economic thinking? What does the pandemic reveal, not just about the nature and structure of economies in Africa, but also about global inequality when dealing with questions of preparedness and responding to the multi-faceted effects of Covid 19 and other pandemics such as cholera, ebola, typhoid etc? Like the 2008 economic crisis, the COVID – 19 pandemic has provided another opportunity for scholars to question the national, international and local financial and economic systems that are in place and how they work.

Objectives
1.Explore the various responses and experiences of state and non-state organisations to COVID-19
2.Discuss the responses and attitudes of societies and communities on digital and non-digital platforms
3.Assess the meanings and implications of the pandemic as well as lived experiences on African economies and societies
4.Discuss the interpretations and meanings around the pandemic within the context of Africa’s economic, religious and political institutions.
5.Understanding epidemics and pandemics in history.
6.Provide a lens of intersectionality in unpacking COVID-19 and its impacts.

Presenter: Dr Glen Ncube, Lecturer in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Title: "Grappling with the Pathocene: Africa and the Corona Virus Pandemic in Historical Perspective".