The dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, this year’s recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize, is the third consecutive black winner of the gong instituted in memory of Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Johnson, popularly known as LKJ, follows in the wake of British poet Lemn Sissay (2019) and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2018).  

It’s no exaggeration that LKJ, who went to Britain from Jamaica at the age of 11 to follow his mother, part of the Windrush generation, did more than most to make black “cool” in Britain and beyond. In his music and poetry, he not only threw orthographical conventions by the wayside – “Inglan” for England, “revalueshanary” for revolutionary – but with songs like Sonny’s Letta, LKJ put at the centre of British attention the ignominy and hardship of the black experience in the United Kingdom. 

In this hymn, Sonny is writing to his mother from Brixton prison relating his experience of how cops came up upon them as he and his friend Jim were waiting for a bus, “not causing no fuss”. Without provocation, “Out jump tree policeman/ All a dem carryin baton/ Dem walk straight up to me and Jim.” It is then that Sonny fights back, resulting in the death of the cop. 

When the poem came out on the reggae album Forces of Victory in 1979, his second album, black youths in Britain were in rebel mode. The white establishment had thought that black youths would happily continue to do the lowly paid working-class jobs that their parents from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Caribbean had originally come to do in the 1950s – cleaning hospitals, driving buses and other menial work.  But the children of the migrants, born on British soil, were having none of it.  

Reggae was the chief sonic expression of black angst and wherever the sound was played – black nightclubs, blues house parties – it occupied a semi-legal status. So policed was it that on weekends, in Brixton in London and other predominantly black neighbourhoods across the UK, a kind of a sonic police would drive around with a sound level meter trying to find out where music was being played loudly.  

The 1980 cult reggae film Babylon, the documentary Blues Parties and the Closure of Black Night Clubs in London and the banned 1978 PBS documentary Blacks Britannica all point to the precariousness of the black experience in Britain. 

Black youths couldn’t have fun without looking over their shoulders for cops. All that angst and, most importantly, defiance are captured on the 1980 album Bass Culture. On the album, which features some of LKJ’s best-known songs, including Inglan is a Bitch and Street 66, the dub poet was backed by producer and bandleader Dennis Bovell’s band.

Black experiences echo

It was around this time that, by chance, South African poet Rustum Kozain, who was born and grew up in Paarl in the Western Cape, first heard LKJ. A childhood friend who used to visit Kozain at his family home had LKJ’s Forces of Victory and other reggae albums. 

“It’s winter 1980. I am 13, 14 and there is something in LKJ’s voice. You can’t quite figure out a lot of what he is saying, because of the Caribbean English he is using, but we could figure out it was anti-authoritarian. There is something about the voice, the defiant tone.” The standard fare that he had grown up listening to was pop on the radio and his father’s jazz collection. “You listen to Sonny’s Letta and you say, what the fuck? This is a completely new thing. How is this possible?”  

Kozain came of age during the government’s state of emergency and even though a lot of LKJ’s preoccupations about contemporary Britain were foreign to him, they were in some ways familiar. It was, after all, apartheid South Africa. “The social and economic milieu that he is describing is reflected in what I see around me all the time,” said Kozain. “Reggae provided a lens for us through which we could look at South Africa.” 

When he looked outside the perimeter of his high school, he saw a poor neighbourhood that evoked Bob Marley’s Trenchtown. Reggae foregrounds slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean and Americas, but these two evils are also the Cape’s original shame. So reggae music speaks to Kozain and his friends and as they listen to it, they learn to decipher the idiom and the patois.

When a young Kozain enrolled to study for a bachelor of arts degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1987, he took a course in sociolinguistics in which they looked at Caribbean English and spoke about Rasta English. Apart from this course, most of the curriculum at the time was centred on the Anglo-Saxon canon, English and American literature. 

When he encountered Rasta English, “I said, hey, this stuff I know about.” He was surprised that reggae could be spoken about in an academic setting and eventually he did a long paper on LKJ. For his master’s degree, he did a comparative take on LKJ and Mzwakhe Mbuli, the South African “people’s poet”, with the dissertation “Contemporary English Oral Poetry by Black Poets in Great Britain and South Africa: A Comparison Between Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mzwakhe Mbuli”.

“What made me go back to LKJ was when South African critics were, in my opinion, patronising Mbuli because they lionised him as someone who had revolutionised English poetics with music. And I said, ‘But there is a guy who has been doing this long before Mbuli.’” The gist of what paternalistic critics were saying was: Mbuli’s poetry could not be deep because he was coming from an oral tradition. Thinking of LKJ’s song Reggae Fi Dada, Kozain revolted against this thinking. “That’s an oral poem, but look at how deep that poem is. It is multilayered.” 

When he went to university, Kozain hadn’t read the Greek classics. In the rarefied atmosphere of 1980s UCT, this was likely considered a big faux pas. But Kozain hadn’t realised that he alreadyknew the classics. “I wish I had realised then already that Bob Marley and LKJ were my classics. LKJ is my Virgil or whatever.” Since 2006, LKJ’s poetry anthology Mi Revalueshanary Fren has been part of the Penguin Modern Classics.  

Kozain’s poetry collection, Groundwork, won the Olive Schreiner Prize in 2014 and the Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2013. Sometimes Kozain quotes LKJ in his own work, or tries to bring something of the poet into his verse in different ways. 

LKJ’s cultural autonomy

With the PEN Pinter Prize in the bag and as one of two poets on the Penguin Classics list, how much more mainstream can one get? Yet LKJ is getting mainstream attention, not as a sellout but on his own terms. In 2008, he told The Guardian newspaper that mainstream acceptance was “great. But they recognise me, not the other way round. Some black and Caribbean poets seek a kind of validation from these arbiters of British taste. But they really didn’t exist for me. I was coming from a position of cultural autonomy. I did my own thing, built my own audience and established my own base. My audience was ordinary people.”

It is not a surprise that LKJ is getting on to lists and being awarded prizes. He returned poetry to its original democratic intentions of being meant to be recited for “ordinary” people. By fusing it with reggae, which together with jazz and the blues are the cornerstones of diasporic black music, LKJ’s achievement was singular. 

I interviewed LKJ in April 2009, before a four-city tour in which he performed in Johannesburg, Makhanda, Durban and Cape Town. At the time, he explained that the gains enjoyed by minorities hadn’t come about by happenstance. When he said this, George Floyd, Trayvon Martins, Collins Khosa, Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor were still alive and the Black Lives Matter movement was still on the distant horizon.  

“We fought for the changes,” he said. Though significant concessions have been won – for instance, there are more senior black people in the police force – LKJ said “racism remains endemic in the force”.

He said that black youths were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts. Eleven years later, as the events of the past few weeks attest, the fight for racial equity is far from over even though a lot has changed. The police in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, in France and especially in the United States continue to kill and brutalise black people with impunity.

Given the movement that coalesced in the wake of Floyd’s police killing, the “fuck da police” import of a key poem in LKJ’s oeuvre and the general anti-authority and anti-authoritarian messages in his work, it’s difficult to think of a more worthy recipient of the PEN Pinter. 

This article was first published on New Frame

The death of Ivorian Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly has left the governing party without a presidential candidate — less than four months before elections. Speculation is rife that President Alassane Ouattara may end up seeking the third term he had earlier said he would not pursue.

Gon Coulibaly, 61, died on Wednesday after taking part in the weekly cabinet meeting. He arrived back in the country from France less than a week before, where he had been receiving treatment for a heart condition for the past two months. He travelled there regularly since major surgery in 2012.

When he was evacuated on May 2, amid international border closures because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government said it was for a routine medical check-up. Days later, it was disclosed that he had had a stent inserted and needed several more weeks of rest in the French capital before returning home.

The “Lion of Korhogo”, as he was affectionately called — referring to the northern city from which he hailed and where he was one-time mayor — was Ouattara’s chosen successor. “I pay tribute to my younger brother, my son, Amadou Gon Coulibaly, who was my closest ally for 30 years,” the president said in a statement read out on national television. 

“The death of Gon Coulibaly forces the RHDP [The Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace] to review its entire strategy built around Gon Coulibaly. The party must make tough choices and President Ouattara will return to the heart of the political game for this electoral battle,” said Ousmane Zina, a political analyst based at Alassane Ouattara University in Bouaké, the country’s second-biggest city. “We cannot say for sure he will be a candidate, but he will in any case be the pillar of the RHDP,” he said.

Party leaders have not ruled out a third term, despite lingering doubts over the constitutionality thereof. “Everything is possible today,” Adama Bictogo, the RHDP executive director, told reporters at the party’s headquarters on Thursday, adding that party leaders would be meeting shortly to decide.

Eight days of national mourning were declared, starting on July 10.

Rivals eye the nomination

Ouattara fell out with his main coalition partner, Henri Konan Bédié, over the issue of a third term in 2018, when he suggested that a new constitution adopted in 2016 reset the clocks – this would allow him to run again, if he wished. Bédié, 86, who supported Ouattara in elections in 2010 and again in 2015, announced his bid for the presidency for the opposition Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire, known by its French acronym, PDCI, last month. 

When Bédié pulled his party out of the  governing coalition, several key members decided to stay, including secretary general in the presidency Patrick Achi and Vice-President Daniel Kablan Duncan. Their senior positions in government could make them eligible presidential candidates, but their origins in the PDCI may disadvantage them, according to analysts.    

While the October vote could pit the longstanding rivals against each other once again, quelling the presidential ambitions of those within the party’s ranks may be challenging – Defence Minister Hamed Bakayoko, who was interim prime minister while Gon Coulibaly was on medical leave, being among them.

A Bakayoko candidacy will be appealing for many reasons, said Tochi Eni-Kalu, an analyst at Eurasia Group, in an emailed note. “A charismatic politician, he is popular among the party base and young Ivorians; also, he has a proven electoral track record, having handily won a competitive mayoral race in Abobo, Côte d’Ivoire’s most populous municipality,” he said. “But party elites have long held reservations about his readiness for office — recent media reports alleging his involvement in drug trafficking will do little to alter these perceptions — and Ouattara’s decision to pick Coulibaly in the first place was partly informed by the latter’s technocratic reputation, something which Bakayoko lacks”.

Whoever does end up leading the RHDP ticket will also have to contend with exiled former national assembly speaker and ex-rebel leader Guillaume Soro, who announced his candidacy last year after falling out with Ouattara. Soro, 48, has since been convicted and sentenced in absentia to 20 years in jail for embezzlement of public funds and money laundering, and still faces a charge of endangering state security. He denies the allegations, which he deems to be politically motivated.

A nation on edge

Elections in the world’s top cocoa grower, which have seen some of the world’s highest economic growth rates in recent years, are building up to be the most tense since Ouattara took office in 2011, after five months of post-electoral violence that left more than 3 000 people either missing or dead.

The 2011 violence was triggered by then-president Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to concede defeat. Gbagbo was acquitted on charges of crimes against humanity in The Netherlands-based International Criminal Court in January last year, but is awaiting the outcome of the prosecutor’s appeal of the acquittal. In May, restrictions on his conditional release were eased to allow him to travel to any country that is prepared to receive him, but as of Wednesday, Communications minister Sidi Touré said the Ivorian government had not received any requests for his return.

The RHDP is expected to announce its new candidate a week after Gon Coulibaly’s funeral, according to Bictogo, with the electoral commission deadline to submit candidates’ names set for September 1. 

“At this stage I can’t tell you definitively who the candidate will be, but rest assured that it will be a choice who unifies, not divides,” Bictogo said.

Last month, we joined the Democratic Republic of the Congo in celebrating a remarkable achievement — the end of an Ebola outbreak that had caused thousands of deaths and tremendous suffering in the country’s east. But sadly, the country could not afford to pause for a breather — a few weeks earlier, a separate Ebola outbreak had been reported in the country’s Équateur Province.

Six months into it, the world is still reeling from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like the recent Ebola outbreaks, this novel coronavirus has brought into sharp focus the dangers posed by a class of diseases called zoonoses  —  those which jump between animal and human populations. 

Covid-19 is the latest  — and one of the most devastating  —  zoonotic diseases to affect us in generations, but it is far from the first. Ebola, SARS, MERS, HIV, Lyme disease, Rift Valley fever and Lassa fever, to name a few, are all examples of zoonotic diseases. Today, 60% of all infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic, as are 75% of all emerging infectious diseases. Most of these are transmitted by wild animals, but others enter human populations through livestock. MERS, for example, was transmitted to humans through camels.

While today’s immediate priority is saving lives and incomes, we must also look at the conditions that have allowed zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19 to become more prevalent — and importantly, identify how to prevent future outbreaks.

In the past one hundred years, the human population has increased almost four-fold and the world has witnessed an unprecedented decline in the natural environment. From unsustainable agricultural intensification and our increased use and exploitation of wildlife to our infrastructure choices and unsustainable energy production and consumption, we have failed to nurture the planet on which our very lives depend. And that has triggered a rise in the emergence and spread of new zoonoses.

In a scientific assessment released this week, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) argue that to prevent the next pandemic, countries must urgently integrate human, animal and environment health expertise and policy  —  a one-health approach to protect us and protect the planet.

One health is not a new concept, but its uptake and institutional support is uneven. Specifically, our assessment finds that the weakest link in the chain today is environmental health, despite a growing understanding of the links between our habitat and human health. Conservation experts monitoring great apes, for instance, can be a valuable part of zoonotic disease surveillance in communities living in proximity to them.

Experts monitoring habitats  —  and their destruction  —  also have a role to play, because we know that forest fragmentation has an influence on the emergence and spread of zoonoses. These experts should be working with livestock keepers, veterinarians and other environmental specialists to limit the spread of zoonotic diseases by jointly managing spaces where livestock and wildlife co-exist.

For example, in 2018, livestock experts working closely with human healthcare professionals in Kenya detected the emergence of Rift Valley fever and deployed livestock vaccinations and other interventions to contain its spread.   

As we look at recovery from the current pandemic and the investments required to avoid another global catastrophe, one-health strategies should be front and centre.

Countries in Africa and others around the world that have managed deadly zoonotic disease outbreaks have much to offer. They have developed public health measures  —  from education campaigns to monitoring and contact tracing by local health centres  —  to protect members of the public when these outbreaks do happen. It’s no accident that the nearly two-year-long Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo did not lead to large-scale outbreaks in neighbouring countries. 

Through experience, many African countries have improved their response to zoonotic outbreaks, something that has so far borne fruit as they address Covid-19, with countries locking down and instituting physical distancing early on in the pandemic. Others quickly made health-related economic adjustments such as moving to mobile money to curb the risk of disease transmission through cash transactions.

With the world more interconnected than ever before, we have the opportunity to mix the wisdom of experience with the promise of innovation for solutions that can address the complex human, animal and planetary problems that brought us Covid-19.  

Today, the chain reaction from a sick planet to sick animals and humans is clearer than ever. Preventing the next pandemic will require protecting the health of the planet and all who inhabit it.

Inger Andersen is the executive director of the UNEP and Jimmy Smith is the director general of the ILRI

COMMENT

Many “orphans of consciousness” have been revealed by the Black Lives Matter protests that are unfolding worldwide as an outrage to the murder of George Floyd.

It is also a stark reminder of prejudice against people from other minority groups, such as those with disabilities. Being aware of and highlighting the violation of the rights of people with disabilities in many parts of the world remains an important step in addressing this problem.

During the eugenics movement, around the time of World War II, the lives and rights of disabled people were disregarded and disrespected to such an extent that they were subjected to sadistic experimentation and euthanasia. Although the practice of euthanasia was eradicated some years later, many other forms of discrimination remain to this day. The superstitious regard of people with disabilities in many developing countries, such as epileptics in East Africa being ostracised and forced to sleep in graveyards until recently, is one example. 

There is also the environmental inaccessibility of many geographical areas; prejudice against the reproductive rights of those with disability; the lack of access to information and education for so many with various types of disabilities, including those who are blind or deaf; and the economic inequalities of which minority groups, especially disabled people, often bear the brunt.

There should be emphasis on the need of our mindlessly doing-orientated society to stop shying away from its shadow — vulnerability, physical passivity and deformity  — represented by people with disabilities. 

In fact the  terms “vulnerability, deformity and physical passivity” need to be reclaimed as potentially meaningful and ultimately empowering in creating a healthier, more mentally stable society. At the very least, “different ability” should be celebrated and not dismissed or sidelined. 

Associations, assumptions and perceptions around disability need to be reshaped and funding for and the rights of disabled people should be prioritised.

This is of paramount importance in halting injustices, violations of human rights and crimes committed against people with disabilities.

In this country we still have huge problems with inequality, but we are adamant not to repeat atrocities of our past. The protection of minority groups is written into our Constitution and highly regarded. It is time to stand up for the rights of all minority groups; and never again allow them, including people with disabilities, to be marginalised, overlooked and underestimated.

Marguerite Black works as the executive director of the Dandelion Initiative, a non-profit organisation providing psychosocial support to ill, disabled and disadvantaged youth. She is the author of The Dandelion Diary: The Tricky Art of Walking, and a wheelchair user who is planning to further her PhD in prejudice and disability

COMMENT

 In an information vacuum, plausible but uninformed and even ludicrous opinions have free rein. How Covid-19 modelling is being done and the data used is not clear, which makes it easier to propagate inaccurate “facts” with a tone of authority.

One of the more pervasive misunderstandings arises from early talk of “flattening the curve”, reinforced by the British slogan “Protect the NHS” — as if the sole goal there was to prevent overwhelming the National Health Service. We must remember that this is the Brexit government that owes its existence to cynical use of misleading, manipulative slogans. This slogan appropriates one — “Protect our NHS” — used in to campaigns against privatising the NHS.

Is “protecting” a health service a rational or sufficient goal? It is certainly rational but by no means sufficient. It is not surprising that anyone uninformed of epidemiology could arrive at the incorrect conclusion that the sole effect of measures such as lockdowns is to delay the spread of the virus so as to lower the peak number of infections without reducing the eventual total. If this is the case, the major effect is reducing preventable deaths — those who only die if the hospital system is overwhelmed.

If you are making an economic argument, it is easy to use this erroneous starting point to say that more lives may be lost to consequences of mitigation measures such as poverty.

If you watch more recent British pronouncements, heavy play is made of containing R_t to between 0.7 and 1. This points to the real strategy and to understand this we need a little epidemiology.

Definitions

First, some definitions:

R₀ is the  basic reproduction number: the average number of new infections caused by a single infected person. R₀ applies where no one who encounters an infected person was previously infected

R_t is the effective reproduction number: the average number of new infections caused by a single infected person at a particular time time (R₀ is R_t when t = 0). As time goes on, R_t becomes less than R₀ because an infected person is more likely to encounter others who are infected or who have recovered and are immune

Herd immunity threshold: the fraction of the population where R_t is 1. If more people get infected, R_t declines and the number of new infections no longer accelerates.

The value of R₀ is determined by three things: how infectious the virus is,  how long a person stays infected and how social mixing spreads it.

The first two factors can be attacked by pharmaceutical measures including cures and vaccines; the last by nonpharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, hygiene and masks. Societal variability results in wide variations in R₀ in different parts of the world; 2.5 is a commonly quoted value.

Why R_t is the number to watch

R_t is an important indicator of how far the pandemic has progressed. As long as it remains relatively stable and above 1, you have exponential growth — think of that as compound interest on steroids. Through much of March, cases were increasing in the United States at 20% to 40% a day. A rate like that is not sustainable; it would reach the entire population in a matter of weeks. In practical terms, this sort of rapid growth is likely to be curtailed by behavioural change before natural progression of the disease results in a significant drop in R_t because the spectre of bodies piling up shocks people into containment measures such as staying at home.

If R_t drops to 1, the number of new cases stabilises and the number of new cases drops when it is below 1.

Epidemiology theory predicts a bell-shaped logistic curve — as R_t approaches 1, it gets less steep then falls off as R_t drops below 1. In countries that have successfully suppressed it — New Zealand and Germany — their graph of active cases has a similar shape but the peak is very different, illustrating relative effectiveness in suppression. Both have gone from rapid increase to a peak through to a decline and, now, sporadic new cases.

The immune herd — or not?

Herd immunity is one of the most misunderstood concepts. If you know R₀, you can calculate the fraction of the population that corresponds to the point where it starts. If R₀ is 2.5, herd immunity occurs when 60% of the population is immune or currently infected. (For comparison, common seasonal flu with R₀ = 1.3 has a herd immunity threshold of 23%, but it does not die out even with widespread vaccination because it mutates rapidly and there are multiple strains).

Herd immunity is not a target to aim for: the disease does not magically switch off. If you arrive at a 60% herd immunity point (corresponding to R₀=2.5) while the disease is spreading at full speed, you overshoot and nearly 90% of the population is infected before it stops. Herd immunity is, however, a useful target for vaccination. If you vaccinate to that level or better, a new local outbreak rapidly pushes R_t below 1 and fizzles out.

Back then to what “flattening the curve” should really be about. If your nonpharmaceutical interventions  consistently push R_t down to below 1, you have faked the situation where you have passed the herd immunity threshold. In other words, you make the disease behave as if it has a lower R₀. If you keep this up long enough, it will eventually fizzle out with a much more consequential reduction in deaths than the “flattening the curve” rhetoric implies. The catch? If you lower your guard, it will flare up again and — as seen in the US and Melbourne in Australia — could result in pressure to go into lockdown again.

Not so many will die and other myths

Understanding the level of fatalities is another area of significant confusion. There is broad agreement on some things — age is a significant factor, as are comorbidities. The biggest confusion is over the fraction who die and potential worst-case scenarios in the face of inaction.

Estimating the effective fatality rate is complicated by a number of issues. Standards differ widely — one reason advanced for Belgium’s extremely high fatality rate is that all deaths that could be attributed to Covid-19 are counted, even without a positive test. In other areas, excess mortality (the number who die over and above the average for the time of the year) suggests that Covid-19 deaths are under-counted. Since most deaths are associated with comorbidites, without a test, you cannot be sure that Covid-19 is the proximal cause. 

Counting deaths as a fraction of confirmed cases is unreliable because standards and coverage of testing also vary widely. Case fatality rate is also misleading when cases are increasing fast, because there is a lag between reporting cases and death.

Another complication is that in many areas, daily statistics dip over a weekend. It is implausible that the virus takes weekends off. The most likely explanation is that staff don’t work over weekends and get behind reporting and record numbers against the incorrect date.

 The best we can do is look at a scenario where the disease is relatively far advanced and take that as a base for estimating. In the Bronx, more than 0.3% of the population has died. Testing for antibodies suggests that about 20% of the population in New York City has been infected. This suggests that more than 1% of the population could die if the disease is not checked by nonpharmaceutical interventions. That figure may be an overestimate because vulnerable groups could be disproportionately represented among those already infected. But even 0.3% projected nationwide is a lot of deaths.

One of the unusual attributes of the disease is wide variability in severity, with a large fraction only being mildly ill and many having no symptoms at all. This has led to the most ludicrous claim I have seen: that 80% of the population is immune. For this to be the case, R₀ would have to be far higher than the common estimate of 2.5. For a disease to spread so fast, if 80% of the population is immune at the start, implies that it is one of the most infectious known, and there is no evidence to back this up.

How do we get out of here?

I am not sure what the government’s plan is but let us go with containing R_t. If we study the progression of R_t (calculated by various South African research groups), it has been between 1.2 and 1.4 since early in April. This indicates that the strategy has been at least partly successful and the final number of infections should be significantly lower than had we not acted.

The number of active cases has not peaked, so we are not in the same place as countries like Germany and New Zealand. Without effective contact tracing, the more likely outcome is a long slow road to bringing R_t below 1.

Complete suppression requires bringing R_t below 1; with R_t in South Africa fluctuating in a narrow band above 1, the number of cases continues to grow exponentially (about 5% a day and we can expect this to continue as long as R_t is in the same narrow band) — if at a much lower rate than without nonpharmaceutical interventions.

We still run the risk of health services being overwhelmed, if at a less dramatic speed than with unconstrained spread. If the models the government uses indicate a peak at a level that does not overwhelm the health system, they should publish the models and data. It would be interesting to know what they are doing to lower R_t and when a drop to below 1 is expected.

We really need a much smaller number of active and new cases to make suppression by testing, contact tracing and isolating viable.

Is there any good news out of all this? Slowing the spread has two benefits already: we have clearer ideas about treatment based on experience of those hit harder and earlier, and a clearer idea of risk factors. These two areas of improvement alone could significantly cut deaths.

Learn more

If you want to see stats in a cleanly-presented form including the evolution of R_t in South Africa, Media Hack Collective in partnership with the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism maintains an easy-to-read dashboard.

The UK HealthKnowledge site has a simple introduction to epidemiology.

What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations is a good place to visit to understand the relationship between R₀ and R_t.

If you like playing with software, here is my herd immunity grapher.

The medical literature is extensive and harder for the beginner; these sources are a good start.

Philip Machanick is an associate professor of computer science at Rhodes University

The cases of brutal enforcement of the Covid-19 lockdown wasn’t the work of a few bad apples but was rather part of an unofficial policy of police violence. The directive was, as the minister in charge of the South African Police Service (SAPS) said 20 years ago: “When we visit criminals we will not treat them with kid gloves … We will unleash the police force on them.” 

Police Minister Bheki Cele didn’t give that directive — it was Steve Tshwete, a former safety and security minister. In 1999, he launched “a war on crime” when he said: “We are going to deal with criminals in the same way that a bulldog deals with a bull … We are going to give them hell.”

But the police were already giving people hell back then. And they never stopped.

The Brixton murder and robbery unit tortured Lucy Themba, 54, and Charlotte Pharamela, 24, in June 1996 with beatings, suffocation and electric shocks. Siphiwe Zide, 16, died in police custody on April 10 2000 in Barkly East: the police drove their van over his head. Thabo Mabaso, a journalist, went to Gugulethu police station to report a minor traffic accident on June 27 1998: the police assaulted him so badly that he lost an eye.

First beaten by soldiers of the South African National Defence Force in his Soweto home on September 5 1998 and then transferred to the police station in Germiston, Zweli Kenneth Ndlozi, 22, was found dead in his cell on September 7. A forensic pathologist examined his badly injured body, which appeared to have cigarette burns, and declared the cause of death to be “consistent with hanging — torture not excluded”.

David Bruce, then a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, said in a 2002 report on police brutality that, from April 1998 to March 1999, the Independent Complaints Directorate (now the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, Ipid) recorded “1 051 cases of deaths as a result of police action, 468 cases of attempted murder and assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, 128 cases of torture and 736 cases of common assault”.

Two decades later, not much has changed. A 2019 Viewfinder exposé in the GroundUp news site into police violence revealed that between April 2012 and March 2019 Ipid recorded 42 365 criminal complaints. The claims against the police were serious: murder and death in custody. 

And Ipid’s budget was slashed. 

With just 531 criminal convictions from the 42 365 complaints, either South Africans are going out of their way to tell a whole bunch of outrageous lies or the state isn’t all that interested in doing something about police brutality. 

In 2015, the police minister, Nathi Nhleko, unlawfully suspended Ipid head Robert McBride. Why? McBride had been trying to make the directorate function. According to McBride’s recent testimony at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, police crime intelligence officers moved into Ipid during his 18-month suspension. 

Police ministers don’t talk about how, according to the World Economic Forum, South Africa ranks 121 out of 144 countries in terms of police reliability. 

Nor do they talk about implementing police reform as per the National Development Plan, which calls for a demilitarised and professional force. Without such, crime rates will not decrease.

Instead, and as they have done for the past 20 years, ministers just keep on endorsing violence and the police keep on obliging. In a 2017 speech to Parliament, police minister Fikile Mbalula said: “We must declare war against crime. We must declare crime as domestic terrorism.” In 2008, deputy safety and security minister Susan Shabangu told the police: “You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility.” 

Echoing Tshwete’s instruction to police members in 2000 that criminals are “subhumans”, the deputy police minister in 2015, Maggie Sotyu, instructed the police to: “Treat heinous criminals as outcasts, who must neither have place in the society nor peace in their cells! They must be treated as cockroaches!”

Nazis called Jews cockroaches during World War II. Hutus called Tutsis cockroaches during the Rwandan genocide. The Hong Kong police are calling pro-democracy protesters cockroaches. The philosopher David Livingstone Smith recently pointed out in The Washington Post that “this sort of derogatory language can lead to a deeper kind of genuine dehumanisation. You call people cockroaches a lot, you start thinking that they are subhuman.” 

And where does President Cyril Ramaphosa sit in all of this? He brought shoot-to-kill Cele back from the wilderness. Mbalula is his transport minister; Sotyu is the deputy minister of arts, culture and sport, and her boss, Nathi Mthethwa, was police minister when mineworkers were killed in 2012 at Marikana. Their law enforcement strategy is well-known: the police must beat and kill those it sees as criminals. 

Just one cabinet reshuffle, a mere flick of a pen, is required to bring in politicians committed to police reform. If Ramaphosa doesn’t do that, then he can only but be in agreement with an unofficial policy of police violence in a lost war on crime.

Tristen Taylor is a research associate in the unit for environmental ethics in the department of philosophy at Stellenbosch University. He writes in his personal capacity

If the moral test of a nation is how that nation treats its most vulnerable members, especially its children, then history will not judge us kindly. 

Since numbers don’t lie, let us revisit some of the figures. Last year’s crime statistics revealed that, on average, three children are murdered each day in South Africa. According to children’s organisation, Door of Hope, since the national lockdown, at least 11 babies have been found dead after abandonment. The number of children who have been killed is unknown. 

Let us remember, however, that behind each of these numbers there is an  actual person who was once a living and breathing human being. May we never forget little Alexia Nyamadzawo; two-month-old baby Nkanyiso; Kuhlekonke, Khwezi and Siphesihle Mpungose; Ayakha Jiyane; and most recently Amahle Quku and the one-day-old baby dumped in a river before he could be named. There are countless other children whose names we will never know. 

A country where its most vulnerable citizens — women, children, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, among others — are killed indiscriminately is surely in crisis. But in South Africa, violence against women and children is more than a crisis, it is an epidemic. 

During the course of history, child killings have been the practice of many cultures. Giving birth to twins at one stage was considered evil and one of them had to be killed. In other cultures, where girls are viewed as weak and a burden on the family, female infanticide is still practised.

Quite shockingly, right up until 1987 in the United States, medical operations were performed on babies without anaesthetics because it was believed that infants felt no pain. Even as late as 1999, it was commonly believed in some circles that children could only feel pain at the age of one. With this type of thinking there is little doubt as to why children and infants are seen and treated as inferior.

The Constitution is very clear when it comes to the rights of children. Section 28(d) underscores that every child has the right “to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation”. Yet three are murdered a day. 

The murder of children is not a new phenomenon, it is a public health and structural issue which we have been continually facing. It did not start with lockdown, although it may have been amplified during the period of confinement, and it will surely not end with its lifting. 

Creating more awareness and programmes to address gender-based violence (GBV) and child abuse, changing society’s perception of children and women, establishing a GBV command centre and passing new legislation are all good initiatives in curbing the scourge of child abuse and killings. 

Recently, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that there were three GBV Bills in parliament awaiting approval. The government’s most current strategy is the 2020 Gender-based Violence and Femicide National Strategic Plan (GBVF-NSP) by the interim steering committee which was established in April last year, after the historic 2018 presidential summit on GBV. On paper, these no doubt show the government’s commitment of government to addressing the scourge. Yet, reality paints a different picture.

Unfortunately, it is not the first time that the government has developed strategies and policies addressing the issue. In 2012, key national policies such as the National Policy Framework on Child Justice and the National Policy Framework on the Management of Sexual Offences were developed. These resulted in the establishment of the inter-sectoral committee on child justice and the inter-sectoral committee on the management of sexual offences respectively. From 2013-2018 there was the South African Integrated Programme of Action Addressing Violence Against Women and Children. 

Furthermore, there was the establishment of multi-sectoral partnerships such as the National Council on Gender-Based Violence (NCGBV) and the inter-ministerial committee to investigate the root causes of violence against women and children. Then there was the formation of the National Child Care and Protection Forum (NCCPF) and the National Domestic Violence inter-sectoral committee, among others. 

This no doubt begs the question — do we need another policy or strategy or committee or even another summit? The policy is existent, but what needs to be questioned is the will of the departments responsible to implement the key policies. The most recent GBVF-NSP mentions little with regards to addressing the violence against children in practical terms. In this regard, another policy is not the answer. 

According to the World Health Organisation, infanticide is rooted in psychosocial and structural factors such as poverty, lack of social support, lack of access to services and dysfunctional relationships.

Therefore, what is required is an on-the-ground, holistic, comprehensive and implementable intervention which acknowledges that infanticide is both a public health and a socio-economic issue.  

Such an intervention should prioritise prevention, reproductive health, gender-based violence and child protection services. Moreover, interventions should prioritise women. In nearly two-thirds of murder cases of children, mothers have been identified or suspected as perpetrators. 

The pre and post-natal support that women receive in healthcare facilities should go beyond just attending to the physical well-being of pregnant women and mothers. This includes compulsory psychosocial support and parenting initiatives to pregnant women and, where necessary, to extend these to their partners and families. 

Prioritising reproductive services also means the need to review practices in the health system, such as  access to contraceptives and reducing the stigma surrounding termination of pregnancy. GBV interventions need to educate people on the implications it has on children and the risks thereof.  

Developing successful initiatives will require that we identify, understand and record factors (including patterns) that lead to the murder of infants. This would help develop evidence-based and effective intervention initiatives. 

One initiative the state can consider adopting and/or drawing lessons from is the Child Death Review (CDR) project. The project was initiated by Professor Shanaaz Mathews to monitor, investigate and lobby for justice for murdered children. The CDR initiative, which has been expanded to all mortuaries in the Western Cape, investigates the cause of child death, seeks justice for the murdered child and, most importantly, prevents other deaths. 

There is little doubt that South Africa has some of the most progressive legislation and policies on child protection and children’s rights. What is required to address the scourge of child killings is an intervention strategy that combines preventative public health and socio-economic efforts. 

Although in itself such a strategy might not eradicate infanticide, it may help us to protect South Africa’s most vulnerable members, whose lives and cries have been ignored for far too long. 

Viewing the Yemeni civil war as a yet another example of the religious struggle for dominance in the Near East between Saudi Arabia’s Salafi Wahhabism and Iran’s Shia Islam would be seeing the forest for the trees. Although the ideological divisions within Islam certainly form a component of the conflict, on this occasion, division along sectarian lines does not fully explain the forces at play in the Yemeni civil war. A closer analysis of the Houthi insurgency and the broader conflict quickly dispels the sectarian lens through which the conflict is often portrayed and uncovers vested interests from across the world.

As a starting point, it is worth noting that the majority of the Houthi insurgency follows the Zaydi sect of Islam. This sect is so different from Iran’s Twelver Shiism that several of Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Sunni supporters actually align themselves with the insurgency. Further illustrating the fact that the dispute in Yemen cuts across different sects within Islam, is the fact that the Houthis repeatedly violated recommendations from Iran when they captured the capital of Sana’a in 2014. Finally, Yemen’s various factions in the war were on the verge of signing a peace deal in 2015 before seemingly unexplained Saudi airstrikes derailed any hopes of a ceasefire being reached. 

Therefore, with no end in sight to the conflict plaguing the nation, the question worth asking is: who benefits from a Yemen at war?

The answer reveals a panoply of foreign interests at play implicating, among others, the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. This coalition serves as the opposition to self-gratifying Iranian interests in Yemen as well. Therefore, only if we see Yemen as an invaluable piece in the region’s political chessboard do we finally understand the apparently senseless actions that continue to perpetuate the civil war. Yemen has essentially become part of a three-way bid for regional dominance. 

The main orchestrators of this war are the Saudi-backed Hadi coalition, the Iranian-backed Houthi coalition and other sporadic actors in the region, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Examining each interest in turn helps to explain the erratic nature of the conflict and paints a bleak picture for the Yemeni people.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is arguably the most visible interest in the war. Their intervention in Yemen is a change of pace for the Saudis who have largely sought to influence events from afar and orchestrate events through indirect means as opposed to committing boots on the ground. With the Arab Spring of 2011 came the reinvigoration of several social movements across the region and unity across political lines for a democratic transition. This posed an imminent threat to Saudi interests in the Near East. Former political enemies such as the northern Houthi rebels and the Hiraak secessionist movement formed a joint front with the goal of overthrowing Saleh. Unable to stem the tides of change ushered in by the Arab Spring, the Saudi kingdom constructed an alternative plan to replace Saleh with a government that would maintain the status quo.

So, why does the oil-rich kingdom have such a vested interest in Yemen? The strategic bombing runs of the Saudi forces which have left the eastern Hadramawt region relatively untouched serves as a vital clue to the motives behind their involvement. The alluring status of the Hadramawt region in east Yemen lies in the Saudi’s hopes of constructing an oil pipeline through the area. Confirmation of this pipedream was provided by a leaked communication.

In this leaked message we finally understand the overarching scheme behind Saudi Arabia’s interest in a destabilised Yemen. Furthermore, if the multiple human rights violations and civilian bombings were not enough to convince reluctant sceptics of Saudi Arabia’s indifference to the real needs of the Yemeni people, its relations with AQAP is damning. Saudi Arabia has avoided any confrontation with AQAP so long as the terror group remains a key ally in defeating the Houthi insurgency. How does the saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? This method is not a new strategy for the Saudis and has been utilised in its support of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria as a useful tool to defeat the Shia government of Bashar al-Assad. Sadly, whereas Saudi support of AQAP serves both groups’ interests, it does not serve the Yemeni people. The expansion of AQAP in the east of Yemen has prompted the group to call themselves the “Sons of Hadramawt” and has emboldened the terror organisation to carry out its jihad in Yemen (which includes the imposition of Sharia law). But the Saudi kingdom is not the only party playing a role in fuelling the war.

After burning their fingers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US foreign policy in the Near East shifted to a more indirect, but no less influential, strategy. During the tenure of former president Barack Obama, the Hadi-government was heavily equipped with US weapons and ammunition. Subsequently, the discovery that those very same US cluster bombs were being used in air raids to destroy large swaths of residential land and rural hospitals forced former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon to tepidly concede that the US involvement in Yemen may amount to a war crime. 

The Trump administration has simply continued the precedent set by Obama in its approval of billions of dollars in arms deals to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Reasons for American involvement in the region were alluded to in a statement to the US Senate committee on foreign relations by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, in which he said: “Iranian malign activity poses a fundamental threat to the stability of the Middle East and to American security at home and abroad…[Iran] directed repeated attacks on civilian and military infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates by Iranian-designed explosives-laden drones and ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, who receive financial, technical, and material support from Iran.” 

Thus, the fear over growing Iranian influence in the region and the geopolitical as well as economic benefits of a US-friendly Yemen serves as important reasons for their involvement in the country.

The UK have also been implicated in fuelling the war. A recent report by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) found that the UK had facilitated the transfer of £6.3-billion in arms and ammunition to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson personally oversaw the contribution of £1.2-billion in arms during his time at the helm of the foreign office. Additionally, with British and US personnel overseeing operations in the command centre of the Saudi-coalition, there can be little doubt as to the the two countries’ influence in perpetuating Yemen’s civil war.

The UAE have also sought to increase their control in the region, but the reasons for Emirati interest in Yemen is more multifaceted than the other actors. The UAE is keen to keep the rise of Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al Islah in Yemen, in check. Following Al Islah’s alignment with the Saudis, the UAE wasted no time in providing support to Yemen’s secessionist movement in the south, the Southern Transitional Council (STC). A short period of regional fighting ensued in the Aden region before the UAE overwhelmed President Hadi’s Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) forces. With the south of Yemen now effectively in Emirati-control, Saudi Arabia intervened to quell any threat to its broader goal of defeating the Houthi insurgency. The Saudis managed to coax the STC over to their side of the war with the Hadi-government now only ruling as a proxy force in the region. Control over Yemen’s southern region and the numerous port cities along the peninsula has bolstered the UAE’s commercial and energy interests. This then, was ultimately the driving force behind the UAE’s emergence as a role-player in the conflict.

Finally, we arrive at the principal opposition to the Hadi-coalition, namely the Iranian-backed Houthis. The Houthi rebels have a long and checkered history in Yemen, but the modern Houthi movement formed in 2004 as multiple groups in the northern region of Sa’dah coalesced to form a unified resistance to government rule. Between 2004 and 2010, six successive wars were fought between the Houthi rebels and the government with the Houthis expanding their influence and support with each subsequent encounter. The arrival of the Arab Spring provided the perfect opportunity for the Houthis to adopt a more populist rhetoric to their insurgency which has since seen them make significant strides in their bid for power.

Iran has sought to apply deft touches and subtle interventions in Yemen. Iran’s indirect involvement is seen by many commentators as an attempt to establish a weaponised, stateless, non-Sunni force aligned with interests in Tehran. An important caveat though, is the fact that Iran’s interference in Yemen only seems to have escalated once the civil war broke out and there is little evidence of major institutional links to the Houthi insurgency prior to the war. Increased Iranian influence on the side of the Houthis, however, was recently personified by a meeting between the Houthi ambassador to Iran and the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. 

A leak from private intelligence company Stratfor further confirms the growing presence of Iranian influence in Yemen. It is important to note that Iran’s involvement from a distance is a tactic employed by the country in other parts of the Near East. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) have supported local insurgencies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hashd al-Sha’abi in Iraq as a mere means to an end for greater Iranian power in the region. Ultimately, Iran’s backing of the Houthi insurgency seems to be little more than a ploy to destabilise Yemen and install a leader with a friendly disposition towards Tehran.

As the war rages on, the likelihood of reaching a peaceful settlement becomes a remote dream of the Yemeni people. All the external role-players have made significant investments in the war and are unlikely to relinquish their bid for regional dominance. Thus, as the maelstrom ensues and likely worsens in the wake of Covid-19, the only voices not being heard are those of the Yemeni people themselves. UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator Mark Lowcock best described the situation when stating: “Yemen is now on the precipice. Right on the cliff edge, below which lies a tragedy of historic proportions.” 

Covid-19 may be the final push over the edge.

Cameron Joseph is an undergraduate medical student at the University of Cape Town. He has a keen interest in investigating the effects of geopolitics on healthcare across the globe. This is an edited version of an article first published by Merion West and used with permission.

 

A network of giant internet-enabled balloons from Google’s sister firm Loon is to provide internet access to remote areas of Kenya.

Loon previously used balloons during an earthquake in Peru.

4G COVERAGE

The project was announced two years ago but final sign-off from the Kenyan government was only recently given.

It is now being fast tracked to help improve communications during the coronavirus pandemic.

The balloons will provide 4G coverage so that people can make voice calls and video calls, browse the web, email, text and stream videos.

SOLAR-POWERED BALLOONS

The balloons’ 4G internet service has been tested with 35,000 customers and will initially cover a region spanning 50,000 kilometres.

The 35 solar-powered balloons will be in constant motion in the stratosphere above eastern Africa. They are launched in the US and make their way to Kenya using wind currents.

One field test of the service showed download speeds of 18.9Mbps and upload speeds of 4.7Mbps.

Loon began as one of Google’s so called “moonshot projects” in 2011. Google teamed up with Telkom Kenya in 2018 to provide a commercial service.

EXCITING MILESTONE FOR INTERNET SERVICE

According to Loon’s chief executive Alastair Westgarth, the spread of COVID-19 has meant they are “working as fast as we can to realise service deployment.”

“This is the culmination of years of work and collaboration between Loon, Telkom and the government,” Westgarth said.

Telkom Kenya’s Mugo Kibati said, “It is an exciting milestone for internet service provision in Africa. The internet-enabled balloons will be able to offer connectivity to the many Kenyans who live in remote regions that are under-served or totally unserved, and as such remain disadvantaged.”

Critics said it would have been better in another African country because Kenya already has an estimated 39 million out of a population of 48 million people online.

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