Dean in the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Professor Thabisani Ndlovu during COVID-19 pandemic put together a project called ‘Text, Human Rights and Pandemics: Being Human in Times of Contagion.’
During the pandemic, it occurred to Prof Ndlovu that studying the situation as it unfolded was a worthwhile intervention.
“My article examines how the overwhelmingly dominant genre in The Lockdown Collection (2020), the personal essay, is an appropriate medium to capture the immediacy of the initial hard lockdown in South Africa because of its brevity and resonance,” said Ndlovu.
The article argues that while the essays react to policies of virus containment, the loss and alteration of social conventions, they inevitably reveal the identity of each author and how that identity sits in the imagination of South Africanness.
“This appellation itself incorporates and complicates fraternities that are race and class based in a context of acute inequality and ubiquitous violence,” said Ndlovu.
He further pointed out that the essays display an awareness of the strong relationship between these two aspects and writing about them appears as an antidote to fear and a desire for a better South Africa, as learnt from and suggested by the challenges of Covid-19.
“The pandemic has affected people in many ways. For example, I cite essays where creatives found that they had been reclassified as “non-essential” resulting in loss of income and self-doubt,” added Ndlovu.
Ndlovu also said that there are also essays he discussed at length, which show that even before the pandemic, South Africa had glaring inequalities, some of which were deepened by the pandemic.
“The position of poor students enrolled in varsities that thought all students had the same ‘reality’ and could therefore take part in online learning and teaching is challenged by one of the essays which shows that poor students had a lot to contend with regarding online teaching and learning, given that such students lacked appropriate physical space even when they had been issued with laptops and data,” said Ndlovu.
This special issue is a first in the African continent in that it focalises pandemics and African literature, taking a long shot view of current and pre-2020 pandemics and publications.
“As authors and reviewers, we lived through and witnessed trauma, even as we tried to make sense of it all, especially our own mortality. Most of us fell sick from covid as did some of our reviewers. Some had to deal with covid-related bereavement,” concluded Ndlovu.
The special Issue was published in March 2022 and it was testament to human resilience and triumph over mass infection, fear and death.
By Anita Roji
