Reflections on Race and the COVID19 Outbreak in UK and Globally

Leona Vaughn

From late January to early February 2020, I was researching with partners from across East, West and Central Africa in Ghana and Kenya. We shared stimulating conversations and gained crucial insights into local experiences, expertise and challenges within antislavery research. Especially relating to safeguarding people from the possible harm research can do, even with well-meaning.

I was surprised on my arrival in Accra to be temperature checked by airport staff in full personal protection equipment (PPE) and detailed questions about recent travel and evidence of my injections. I hadn’t experienced this on previous trips to Ghana, and no such checks had been undertaken on us when we left the UK.

When I asked our local colleagues what it was for I was told that the ‘Wuhan’ virus was a concern to Ghana, especially as they have such a deep relationship with Chinese business and government. However, the person said, the Ghanaian authorities had recently banned flights from China.

I never really gave the virus much thought after that, showing now on reflection the ease with which I was convinced of the racialised nature of the virus and its supposed geographical containment.

Further checks on arrival into Nairobi several days later therefore did not phase me, and I assumed it was based on the same concerns.

The presence of Chinese investors across Africa, especially Western Africa, has been growing in the last few decades. Often to the upset of local people – I have heard this from my own family – but also often trumpeted by governments, as I witnessed on Ghanaian TV last year, as relationships that are not ‘tainted’ by the colonial past which exists with Europeans.

Again, in Kenya, the virus was not uppermost in my mind. The absence of screening or temperature checks on my journey back through Holland into Manchester on 5^th February reinforced that this was not a concern to people in Europe.

Outbreak

Gradually the enormity of the virus for the world came to dawn upon me, as the coverage of its decimation of Italy and rampage through Europe reached UK TV screens and newspapers.

Yet again, the focus was on Chinese travellers and students in official statements about risks of infection. Race hate crime against those assumed to be Chinese spiked in the UK and around the world. Ironically, the first cases of the virus in the UK were of white British people who had recently travelled.

I remember at that time feeling lucky that I had not been ill after my recent travels, but also feeling guilty that my UK colleagues and I could possibly have been unknowing carriers of the virus into the countries we visited.

The latter weighed heavy on my mind as I thought of our research partners who had travelled to attend the workshops and of the wonderful warm reception I had experienced in the local communities, especially in James Town Accra.

How would these communities possibly be able to cope with the virus, when isolation and distancing was a real physical and financial impossibility of life and death proportions?

As a Black British person, of African Caribbean and Middle Eastern descent, I also read with concern the early social media myths or ‘misinformation’ which began to circulate about our magical immunity to this disease, even referenced by Idris Elba when he spoke of contracting the virus. Then the subsequent heartbreaking reality began to emerge that we, as part of the wider grouping of ‘people of colour’, were contracting and dying of the virus more than any other group in both the UK and USA.

So that made me think about Black people elsewhere in the world – the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America?

The rumbling concerns from health practitioners, politicians and scientists are focussing on what is making Black people more susceptible to the virus. Black here being universally applied as if there is no difference where people are living.

For those who are willing to see it, the evidence is plain even at this stage of our understanding. Black people’s susceptibility to the virus in the Western context is not biological, it is a matter of longstanding, persistent racial inequality.

So, what about Black majority countries?

Reflecting on my experience of Ghana and Kenya in terms of the virus affecting only ‘foreigners’, I wondered what was the view there about these Western narratives of Black susceptibility or immunity?

How much had the early immunity myth impacted the countries across the continent, if at all?

Had it influenced how seriously the virus was taken by governments and people alike?

I wanted to know and understand more.

While I knew that I could find an opportunity to initiate this exploration from the UK, I also knew this had to be done in a particular way. The research not only had to centre the voices of my African research colleagues, but it also had to find a way for them to direct it. This was important to me.

I may be of African descent, but my perspective is without a doubt shaped by the fact that I have been born and raised in the UK.

I am an observer, not a narrator of African experiences.

I regularly critique the extractive, colonial nature of the way much British research of Africa is undertaken, so I had to make sure that I wasn’t just another part of that problem.

This project is the result.