Geopolitics of Power and Knowledge in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Decolonial Reflections on a Global Crisis

The Poverty of Normal Times Thinking and Theorizing in the Age of COVID-19

Vazquez (2020), a Mexican decolonial thinker, has posited that the way COVID-19 is travelling along the superhighways of the modern world and causing havoc in the Global North has signaled the dawn of de-Westernization. He has highlighted the possibilities of shifting the geopolitics of power and knowledge in a decolonial manner. However, the complacency of Europe and North America in the face of news concerning the outbreak of COVID-19 in China has resulted, according to Vazquez, in “the impossibility of learning from and listening to other regions of the world and even to the south of Europe” (Vazquez, 2020 quoted in Rutazibwa, 2020, p. 3). This colonial mentality is explained by Santos (2014, p. 19) who has argued:

The truth of the matter is that, after five centuries of “teaching” the world, the global North seems to have lost the capacity to learn from the experiences of the world. in other words, it looks as if colonialism has disabled the global North from learning in noncolonial terms, that is, in terms that allow for the existence of histories other than the universal history of the West.

The ironic part is that even among Africans—who have a long history and experience of grappling with epidemics and pandemics, largely because of the negative impact of modern global power dynamics, which invented and reproduced the Global South as the geography of poverty—there is reluctance to tap into this history, experience, and knowledge about responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is probably due to the historical fact that colonialism distablized the colonized people’s self-confidence and agency (Fanon, 1968; Memmi, 1974). Looking to Europe and North America would not help Africa at this time, as there is bigger trouble in Europe and North America than in Africa. This pandemic provides an opportunity for Africa in particular and the Global South in general not to look up to the Global North for salvation but to shift the geopolitics of knowledge by using African endogenous knowledge and the epistemologies of the Global South. What is gratifying is that countries such as Ghana, Madagascar and others have put their scientists to work on endogenous mitigation strategies. The endogenous African initiatives to deal with COVID-19 are detailed at the end of this section.

A poignant point is emerging which is that the knowledge that carried us over the past 500 years and has plunged us into the current civilizational crisis cannot be the same knowledges that is used to take us out of the present crisis and into the future. The way COVID-19, just like the global financial crisis before it, successfully took the world by surprise might be a sign of epistemic crisis—a crisis of knowledge which is no longer able to predict challenges and problems, as they come and let alone being able to successfully protect people. Perhaps Wallerstein (2004, p. 58) had noticed this epistemic crisis when he introduced the concept of “uncertainties of knowledge” and postulated that “we live in a very exciting era in the world of knowledge, precisely because we are living in a systemic crisis that is forcing us to reopen the basic epistemological questions and look to structural reorganizations of the world of knowledge.”

Before the crisis, in 1999, Wallerstein had also made a call for escalation of “rethinking” issues, which he deemed to be normal to the higher level of “unthinking” issues mainly because he had noticed that the nineteenth-century social science was no longer relevant in enabling an understanding of the social world (Wallerstein, 1999). These interventions by Wallerstein dovetail with the long-standing decolonial critique of Eurocentric knowledge and its inapplicability and irrelevance to the people of the Global South in particular and for the modern world generally that is expected to have transcended racism and colonialism. The fact that the modern world is “waiting for a vaccine” (just like waiting for the rains) might be partly a sign that there is a problem in our knowledge domain and partly the evidence of weak health systems across the world.

Leading African scholars and political freedom fighters such as Ake (1979), Cabral (1979), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2012) have been pushing for new knowledge and theorizing as they critiqued “social science as imperialism” (Ake, 1979), abstraction without realism (“to start out from the reality of our land and with our feet on the ground”) (Cabral, 1979), as well as avoiding kite kind of theorizing, which flies above realities on the ground (“riches of poor theory”) (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 2012). According to Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2012, p. 3), the “poor means being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive.” The moment of COVID-19 has somehow made every human being “poor” across the North–South divides in the sense that every person is currently trying to survive the possibilities of infectious COVID-19. Has the COVID-19 pandemic not succeeded to a minor extent to “Southernize” the Global North and making the people in the industrialized societies to at least experience how it is to live precarious lives of trying to survive premature death? At the same time, this question does not succumb to a myth that pandemics like COVID-19 do not discriminate on class and other forms of social stratifications (see Harvey, 2020). Racial capitalism created a gendered, racialized, classified, and even ethnicized workforce (Robinson, 1983). Consequently, the lower ranks of workforce in the health systems across the globe remain racialized and gendered. This is why it is the largely female workforce that is in the forefront of fighting and risking contracting the virus in the old people’s homes, clinics and hospitals.

But still such calls and initiatives to take “endogenous knowledge” (Hountondji, 1997), the “southern theory” (Connell, 2007,), “theory from the South” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012), “epistemologies from the South” (Santos, 2014, 2018), and “epistemic freedom” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) seriously become very important now when the rest of the world is experiencing part of what the people of the Global South have been experiencing for over 500 years. Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, p. 1) made a call for inverting the order of things in the knowledge domain through subversion of “the epistemic scaffolding on which it is erected” so as to take the knowledge from the Global South seriously because “it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large.”

This call makes a lot of sense now that COVID-19 has exposed the fact that the Global North is also vulnerable to epidemics and pandemics. That Africa and the Global South, in particular, have been facing major issues like the epidemics and pandemics. Epistemologies of the Global South embody knowledges emerging from these struggles; hence, they become very relevant in confronting epidemics and pandemics (see Santos, 2014, 2018; Santos & Meneses, 2020). The power and relevance of epistemologies of the Global South is that they are largely experiential and experimental knowledges.

With specific reference to the challenges posed by COVID-19 the Liberian scholar Pailey (2020) posited that Africans do not need “saving” from the Global North during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, she proposed that Africa and the Global North have a lot of knowledge and experience on these issues to teach Europeans. She made reference to her own home country Liberia, which experienced and survived two tragedies—14 years civil war and the three-year (2014–2016) outbreak of Ebola, which killed 11,000 people in the West African region. Pailey (2020) gave the examples of how the Liberian people had to improvise the protective equipment because of its necessity—which is always the basis of all inventions.

The Mozambican scholar Macamo (2020, p. 1) also weighed in to criticize the tendency of African leaders to ‘copy and paste’ European responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that for Europe, it came as an “extraordinary event coming to disrupt their normal lives.” He mobilized the concept of “risk society” to argue that “normality” has not been Africa’s reality and concluded that “We face the same enemy, but not the same risk.” Arguing along the same lines, leading African Intellectuals (2020) in their open letter to the African leaders dated April 17, 2020 also underscored that “Yet, as a continent that is familiar with pandemic outbreaks, Africa has a head start in the management of large scale crises.” The clear message is that Africa has a rich history and experience of dealing with and surviving epidemics and pandemics, and to draw knowledge and lessons from this knowledge to deal and respond to COVID-19 than just copying responses from elsewhere.

In the wake of the Ebola epidemic in West and Central Africa, the African Union (AU) reacted by creating the Africa Centres for Diseases Control (CDC), and this institution has made efforts to provide Pan-African guidelines to African states so as to enable them to deal with epidemics and pandemics in a systematic way in accordance with WHO’s global protocols. The other positive endogenous initiative comes from Ghana where the academy and industries came together in the form of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the Incas Diagnostics and Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research (KCCR) to develop rapid diagnostic test (RDT) kit (Nyavor, 2020). The RDT uses a finger-prick blood just like blood glucose or home pregnancy test to detect different types of antibodies produced by the body when it is fighting against COVID-19 (Nyavor, 2020). This is, indeed, a major breakthrough as it detects COVID-19 after 7 days of infection, and the results are declared at least 48 hours from the testing time (Nyavor, 2020).

The other promising example of African endogenous initiatives comes from Madagascar. A Congolese medical doctor, Dr. Jerome Munyayi, based in Madagascar collaborated with the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (MIAR), producing an herbal remedy called “Covid Organics” (Africa.Com, 2020). The President of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina, has already officially launched the herbal remedy “breakthrough,” which contains a plant cultivated in Madagascar to fight against malaria. Many African leaders including those of Tanzania and Congo-Brazzaville have indicated their interest in importing the herbal remedy from Madagascar. Expectedly, the WHO has jumped in to warn the world that there is no cure yet to COVID-19 arguing that there were no shortcuts in finding effective medication to fight COVID-19.

While the point of caution is well taken, the problem is that the geopolitics of power and knowledge are still titled toward the Global North as the only site of credible science and only space to look to as the world waits for the vaccine. The initiatives being taken at the University of Oxford on the making of a vaccine are not subjected to the same dismissal as those being carried out by the African scientists. The point which emerges clearly is how the efforts and initiatives to deal with COVID-19 have remained stuck within complex global knowledge economy with creativity of Southern intellectuals and scientists silenced, marginalized, and exposed to what Maldonado-Torres (2007) termed the “racist/imperial Manichean Misanthropic Skepticism.” It is skepticism about the very humanity of a people. Decolonization has fought against these resilient skepticisms and continues to produce concepts that enable a better understanding of such moments as the current one—COVID-19.

Paradox, Crisis and Crossroads: Making Sense of the Matters Arising from COVID-19

The concepts of PCC help in thinking through the present moment of COVID-19. Paradox is a mode of analysis, which the Marxists call dialectics. It is a useful mode of analysis, which enables the capturing of contradictory manifestations of phenomena so as to make sense of them. COVID-19 has plunged the world into an unfamiliar territory though it is not so unfamiliar to the Global South, where a majority of people live in what Fanon (1968) termed the “zone of nonbeing” where hellish conditions and premature death is the order of existence (see also Santos, 2007b; Grosfoguel, 2019). In the zone of nonbeing, curable diseases still kill people in large numbers. COVID-19 has revealed that these kinds of paradoxes of the modern world are born out of the colonialism of Euromodernity and its key pillars of will to power, the paradigm of difference, and the paradigm of war (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020).

The first paradox has been that of increased planetary human entanglements enabled by globalization and migrations, which are countered by the forces of re-territorialization, the upsurge in narrow nationalisms, exclusionary xenophobia, and a rising number of what Brown (2010) has termed “walled states” on a global scale. Brown (2010, p. 20) has captured these paradoxes this way: “So, three paradoxes: one featuring simultaneous opening and blocking, one featuring universalization combined with exclusion and stratification, and one featuring networked and virtual power met by physical barricades.” COVID-19 has hit the center of a modern world harboring “fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription” (Brown, 2010, p. 7). This reality partly explains why national lockdowns (re-bordering) were the familiar response across the world and partly why politics and practices of racism and xenophobia are even attempting to assign COVID-19 to a particular subjectivity and particular bodies—the attempts to “other” the Chinese as carriers of COVID-19 is a case in point.

There is a second sub-paradox of the first one, which is that of responding to a pandemic through territorial/national solutions with re-bordering being the key methodology. Closing borders to a virus that does not respect any border is, indeed, paradoxical. For the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was it not going to make sense to develop a regional response to the COVID-19 bearing in mind that the virus’s migration from places such as China, Europe and the USA to the region is agreed? Locking down the region rather than individual small states even before the virus invaded it would have made sense as internal regional life and economy would have been allowed to continue functioning since the virus did not originate in the SADC region. It was only in April that an SADC Regional Response To COVID-19 Pandemic emerged and does not go much beyond endorsement of WHO’s guidelines and national-level interventions, ending with the statement that “SADC Secretariat remains committed to regional responses to COVID-19 pandemic, and appeals for continued regional co-operation and solidarity in the efforts to contain and address the COVID-19 pandemic” (SADC, 2020).

Fundamentally, the SADC response is tantamount to attempts to close the kraal after the bull has already bolted out. The COVID-19 is already inside individual nation-states within the SADC, which makes it hard to mount a Pan-Southern African response. With specific reference to the rest of Africa’s response to COVID-19 one is reminded of Mwalimu Julius Kabarage Nyerere’s warning: “African nationalism is meaningless, dangerous, anachronistic, if it not, at the same time, pan-Africanism” (Nyerere quoted in Emerson, 1962, p. 275). Logically, a pandemic might be better tackled from a Pan-African methodology rather than the usual methodological nationalism.

The national re-bordering methodology has led the South African government to invest R37 million in constructing a 40-km fence on the Zimbabwe–South Africa border as though there is any evidence that COVID-19 comes or will come from Zimbabwe. Perhaps South Africa is taking Melinda Bill Gates’ idea seriously that Africa is yet to witness millions of dead bodies of Africans on the African streets, and Zimbabwe with its collapsed economy is identified as part of that vortex of contagion! The dire situation of Zimbabwe in the context of COVID-19 is well captured by Mandaza and Reeler (2020, p. 1):

COVID-19 may be a unique problem being faced by the country, but it is superimposed on all the problems that existed prior to the epidemic. It is a moot point whether Zimbabwe was fragile or failed prior to COVID-19: what is unarguable is that the state was broken already, reeling from, an absence of visionary leadership, incoherent policies (even admitted by the Finance minister), a broken economy, broken services, and the spectre of mass hunger and starvation. Zimbabwe was in the deepest trouble it could be, even before COVID-19.

Taking into account this situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself, perhaps South Africa is right in thinking that the worst problem for it will come from its northern neighbor if COVID-19 infections escalated on the African continent. While there is some satisfaction in Africa’s civil society circles that the African political elites in charge of states in Africa are currently locked down together with their citizens, making it impossible for them to fly off to overseas for medical treatment, and that this reality has forced them to take the question of health care in Africa seriously, there is not yet discernible domestic increase in public health funding, in general, and medical health research. These micro-political economies of health challenges in Africa have to provoke a mindset shift among the African leaders as there is no Europe or North America to run to for medical attention.

The third paradox is that of a modernity that has promised to overcome all obstacles facing humanity through rational thinking and deployment of science, which created so many modern problems with no modern solutions (see Escobar, 2004). There is an emerging ecological discourse that blames capitalist invasion of the natural environment for the outbreak of COVID-19 and highlights the increasing appetite of the people to kill and eat wild animals. There is also an emerging argument that deadly viral diseases, which are new to human beings, were coming from “biodiversity hotspots such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities” (Vidal, 2020, p. 4). While singling out Africans and Asians as the environmental terrorists who subsist on eating “bushmeat” sounds racist, there is no denial that there is a worldwide ecological crisis caused by capitalist mode of production.

The fourth paradox is the long-standing one of opulence versus poverty, emerging from racial capitalism’s operative logics of creating geographies of wealth and geographies of scarcity, maldevelopment, and underdevelopment (see Amin, 1990, 2011). At the center of this paradox are realities of huge investments in accrual of sophisticated weapons of mass destruction within a world where investment on human health is dwindling; hence, COVID-19 found no country with a health system that was able to deal effectively with it. National lockdowns were partly a methodology of enabling weak health systems to be reconstructed. It would seem that the “will to power” and the “paradigm of war” preoccupied human minds to the extent of forgetting human security of which health systems are a part (see Maldonado-Torres, 2008). For Africans, the weak public health systems are due partly to two-decade-long havoc wreaked on them by imposed structural adjustment programmes with their conditionalities, which recommended budget cuts on subsidies to education and health (Mkandawire & Soludo, 1998). Deregulation and privatization of economies had far-reaching political and socioeconomic negative effects on Africans.

The second important concept is that of crisis. The leading South African intellectual Mafeje (1976, p. 307) posited that “In times of crisis there is an inevitable return to fundamentals. Questions such as the relation of knowledge to the world of experience are revived, often in a disharmonious way.” Earlier on, Kuhn (1962), in his widely read book, also emphasized how “anomaly” and “crisis” lay behind “the emergence of scientific discoveries” and “the emergence of scientific theories.” He put it this way: “Let us then assume that crises are a necessary precondition for emergence of novel theories and ask next how scientists respond to their existence” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 77). Therefore, the African Intellectuals’ (2020, p. 2) call: “African continent must take its destiny back into its own hands. For it is in the most trying moments that new/innovative orientations must be explored and lasting solutions adopted” is timely.

However, with specific reference to COVID-19, the question that comes to mind is that of naming the present moment correctly. Yes, it is a crisis, but what is in crisis? The concept of crisis has been with us for a long time with European philosophers like Slavoj Zizek producing works like Living in the End Times (2011), where eschatological terminology of “ends of times,” “apocalypse,” and “Armageddon” were deployed in an attempt to name the age in which we live. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, biogenetic revolution, and exploding social divisions and ruptures are named as the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse (Zizek, 2011, p. 5). Here, one can see a combined deployment of secular and religious terminology in an attempt to name a moment in human history.

The leading African theorist Mbembe (2019a) has also been concerned with the question of correctly naming the present moment. He introduced the concept of “necropolitics” to name a moment characterized by the “repopulation of the earth,” “exit from democracy,” “society of enmity,” “relation without desire,” “voice of blood,” and “terror and counterterror as our time’s medication and poison” (Mbembe, 2019a, p. 1). This is the state of the modern world within which COVID-19 emerged at the end of 2019. It was already a troubled world. Mbembe (2019b, p. 2) posited that “We must name our times in a way that leaves us with a small window of hope, the hope that not all is lost.” It would seem Césaire’s (2000[1955]) concept of “civilizational crisis” is a better name for what the modern world is experiencing and his triple-judgments are very enlightening: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization. A civilization that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilization” (Césaire, 2000[1955], p. 31).

But naming of the crisis which gives hope comes from scholars of epistemologies of the Global South and decolonial thought. Works by Santos (2007a) and Fischer and Ponniah (2004) provide hope about a post-capitalist, post-colonial, and post-patriarchal world. Such a world is depicted by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2012) as underpinned by “globalectics” and by Escobar (2018) as a “pluriversity”—a world in which many worlds coexist (see also Reiter, 2018). This possible world and possible knowledge are necessitated by a civilizational crisis haunting the present world and present knowledge.

A crisis always takes the world to a crossroads where crucial and difficult decisions have to be taken so as to find a way out of the crisis. In a way, the moment of COVID-19 has to be embraced as that of rethinking and even unthinking conceptions of being human, which are antagonistic to and predatory on nature and conceptions of power shot through by race, gender, class, and other forms of exclusion, domination, and exploitation. Standing at and thinking from the crossroads as a site of making decisions, the African Intellectuals (2020, p. 2) posited that “The global order is disintegrating before our very eyes, giving way to vicious geopolitical tussle” and proposed a “new political idea of Africa’ constructed from ideas adapted to realities across the continent.” But before grappling with the pertinent question of the new political idea of Africa and pontificate on the architecture and character of the possible post-COVID-19 decolonized world order, it is important to briefly engage with the issue of lockdowns specifically.

Lockdowns: Life, Security, Freedom, and Economy

In The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11, Mathew Longo has highlighted the paradox of how to sustain a liberal world democratic order and the freedoms and rights it provides to the citizens versus the imperatives of security. This is how Longo (2018, p. 1) puts it:

In the years since 9/11, two issues—terrorism and immigration—have dominated the global political imaginary. At the centre of each, an institution: the border. Worldwide, states have responded to these challenges via the tightening of population controls within and without the territorial limit of the polity. The centrality of borders to these challenges is immediately manifest. What problem does immigration raise? It is the threat of them overwhelming us. And terrorism? Of them attacking us. Both problematics centre on fantasies of exclusion and binary logics of interiority/exteriority, us/them, identity/difference. In short: borders.

The advent of COVID-19 has exacerbated this paradox by adding the dimensions of saving lives versus the fate of the economy. Lockdowns are part of re-bordering of an extreme type whereby a home/house becomes the boundary/border. Social distancing is even trying to draw a border between individuals. Mbembe (2018, p. 5) introduced the concept of a “security society,” which is “fundamentally fearful of the truth; fearful of the unknown and ultimately fearful of itself. It is this deep-seated fear of itself that is then projected to whoever stands as its opposite.” COVID-19 is the big “unknown” that is feared today. But what is feared more is its host—the human body—the body of the migrant to be specific. This is why scholars like Mezzadra (2013) noted that borders were no longer exclusively and primarily met “at the border,” that is, at the limits of the states’ territory but have extended to the interior creating “borderscapes” that interfere with both private and public life. This reality fundamentally means that when COVID-19 hit the world and necessitated lockdowns, the world was already gravitating toward walling-in for other reasons such as security and obsession with migrants (see also Celikates, 2020). But the African Intellectuals (2020, p. 2) criticized the lockdowns in these words:

Adopting the all-securitarian model of “containment” of northern countries—often without much care to specific contexts—many African countries have imposed a brutal crackdown upon their populations; here and there, violations of curfew measures has been met with police violence. If such containment measures have met the agreement of middle classes shielded from crowded living conditions with some having the possibility to work from home, they have proven punitive and disruptive from those whose survival depends on informal activities.

What is emerging poignantly is the political economy of COVID-19 and, indeed, a political economy of lockdowns and the possibilities of working from home. What is at risk is what Adebanwi (2017) has termed “the political economy of everyday life in Africa,” which is the domain of the poor Africans, where they seek survival and life itself. This “political economy of everyday life in Africa” is characterized by “day-to-day” inventions, innovations, and experimentations (see Guyer, 1996; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 2012). The “securitarian model” of lockdowns has hit hard on this “political economy of everyday life,” which cannot survive even one day of disruption and has continued through resisting state interventions.

At least for countries like South Africa with a functional economy, the idea of “food parcels” though meager is an attempt to mitigate disaster among those poor people who were actively involved in the “political economy of everyday life.” But even in South Africa, there is a lot of talk about how “food parcels” are not given to those without national identity cards, the majority of whom are undocumented foreign nationals. If it is true, then a disaster of a different kind is approaching. For countries like Zimbabwe where the economy collapsed two decades ago and the securocratic state has abandoned any attempts to deliver any service, a looming humanitarian disaster is on the horizon. Unemployment in Zimbabwe is over 90 percent, and the idea of working from home is just impossible. It is within this context that the questions and arguments posed by Shani (2020, p. 2) make sense:

What are the subjects which states are seeking to protect? […]. But what of those who have no home? Or hand sanitizer or face mask? Or access to running water? The referent object of Coronavirus discourse is a homeowner with economic means to take time off work and stockpile food. For the majority of mankind, this isn’t an option. […]. The subject that states protect is a racialized, bourgeois and gendered subject.

Bare lives that were defined by the Italian philosopher Agamben (1998) are becoming even more “bare” under what he termed the “state of exception” (see Agamben, 2005). Lockdowns have literally destroyed the “political economy of everyday life,” where a majority of African people are found. The concept of the “political economy of everyday life” is better than that of “informal economy,” which does not make sense in many parts of Africa, where the “formal economy” collapsed long ago. What also arises from this analysis of the political economy of COVID-19 and, indeed, that of lockdowns based on the ideas of capable states and formally employed people is to map out a possible decolonized post-COVID-19 world order.

The Decolonial Turn and the Post-COVID-19 Decolonized World Order

Rutazibwa (2020) highlighted two key issues. The first was that the COVID-19 pandemic “show us more than the inequalities that we already know but fail to address meaningfully” (Rutazibwa, 2020, p. 2). The second is that “The Corona pandemic blows the lid off the idea of Western superiority” (Rutazibwa, 2020, p. 7). These two interventions amplify the resurgent and insurgent demands for decolonization of the twenty-first century as a planetary liberatory project confronting global coloniality in its multiple faces. At the center, this drive for decolonization are the pertinent questions of life chances, rehumanization, and life futures (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020). The main concerns are about those human beings who have been exposed to “bare life” and who are relegated to the zones of nonbeing. Fanon (1968, p. 252) is a major inspiration for decolonization because he was systematically and consistently critical of the “European game” and openly mobilized against it: “Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.” Fanon (1968, p. 252) continued to push for a decolonial turn: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot the new man.”

At the core of the decolonial turn is what West (2014) termed the “Black prophetic fire” founded on what Robinson (1983) depicted as the “Black radical tradition.” The Black prophetic fire and Black radical tradition “put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others” (West, 2014, p. 1). The politics and practice were informed by an emerging but very strong “We-consciousness” as opposed to the present day “I-consciousness” (West, 2014, p. 1). West elaborated on the key contours of the Black prophetic tradition:

The Black prophetic tradition accents the fightback of poor and working people, be it in the United States against big money, be it in the Middle East against Arab autocratic rule or Israel occupation, be it against African authoritarian governments abetted by US forces or Chinese money, be it in Latin America against oligarchic regimes in collaboration with big banks and corporations, or be it in Europe against austerity measures that benefit big creditors and punish everyday people. In short, the Black prophetic tradition is local in content and international in character. (West, 2014, pp. 4–5)

Perhaps it was because of the Black prophetic tradition’s powerful fire for justice, freedom, and liberation that Andrews (2019, p. 298) called for what he termed “back to black” and concluding that “It is only by rejecting the system of Western imperialism that we can ever be free. But as we leave the house we must bring it crashing down in order to truly liberate not only the Black nation, but all oppressed peoples.” Following is a summary of a vision of a post-COVID-19 decolonized world

The “10 Ds” of the Decolonial Turn and their Relation to COVID-19

Table 1 directly and radically departs from what Blaut (1993) depicted as “the colonizer’s model of the world.” It introduces the key elements of a decolonized model of the world. For over 500 years, the world making from Europe and North America has delivered slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. A decolonized model of the world is not informed by the same logics that drove the colonizer’s model of the world. A word of caution is necessary with regard to de-Westernization as a lever of the decolonial turn because what is happening is a noticeable shift of geopolitical power from Europe and North America to China in particular and Asia in general (Eurocentrism to Sinocentrism), based on elite struggles are over the control of the global matrix of power without decolonizing it. De-Westernization is included under the decolonial turn because evidence indicates that China and Asia’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic better than Europe and North America pocked holes in Global North’s hegemony. That possible shift of power geopolitically cannot be simply ignored, though decolonial struggles have to continue until a pluriversal decolonial world is constructed.

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Table 1.

The Ten-Ds of the Decolonial Turn

Change	Elaboration
Deimperialization	The dismantling of the centuries-long subsistence of the Global North from the exploitation of the resources of the Global South through such strategies as colonialization, debt slavery, imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programs, transfer by multinational corporations of their profits (financial externalization) from the Global South, and military interventions that prolong the underdevelopment of the Global South
De-Westernization	COVID-19 has revealed the internal fragility of Europe and North America thus eroding their claims to superiority and leadership of the modern world. There is emerging shift of control over the global matrix of power from Europe and North America to China (Asia). This is an opportunity for the new political ideals of Africa to emerge
Depatriachization	Gender as a modern organizing principle that inferiorizes women and reduce them to the most exploited people in the world must come to an end. This became apparent as women became the majority in the frontline of care sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and the most exposed to the virus
Deracialization	The COVID-19 pandemic has easily crossed the color-line, exposing all of us to danger. This means that racial discrimination along the line of the human must come to an end
Debourgeoisement	The urgent need to shift from making bourgeois way of life a template of all lives. The rule by a minority of men in charge of the modern nation-states and opening access to wealth to this minority impoverish the rest of us.
Decorporatization	The logic of the rule of market coloniality leading to the commodification and commercialization of everything including life has weakened investment in our health systems and human security. We call for a shift from economies of profit to economies of care.
Democratization	The present asymmetrical and pyramidal structure of global power with a sole superpower supported by accumulation of weapons of mass destruction is inimical to democracy.
Decanonization	The Eurocentric knowledge, which was universalized and canonized, is suffering its deepest epistemic crisis, and this justifies the use of African knowledge and epistemologies of the Global South and, indeed, the opening up to ecologies of knowledges
Deborderization	Lockdowns and re-borderization are temporary and unsustainable securocratic measures that run roughshod against the reality of planetary human entanglements and freedom of movement
Desecularization	The condemnation and, indeed, displacement of rich spiritualities of the world—spiritualities which enabled humans and nature to coexist harmoniously left the world exposed to worldwide ecological crises.

Source: The table was drawn by the author.

De-Westernization is heralding “a multipolar world order” rather than “a pluriversality” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 92). For Mignolo (2018, p. 94): “De-Westernization is enacted economically under capitalist economics and culturally under the revival of memories that Westernization disavowed.” On the other hand, according to Mignolo (2018, p. 94), “Pluriversality is the name and the horizon of all decolonial trajectories, on the planet, arising from the awareness of repressive forces of coloniality.” This is why pluriversality is predicated on a decolonial turn, which is radically different from the colonial turn. This analysis takes us to the last section of this article—the conclusion.

Conclusion: The Case for Decolonial Love in a Post-COVID-19 World Order

What if we make ourselves ready to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic as survivors? Will that not instill a “We-consciousnesses” predicated on humility? As far back as 1955, Aimé Césaire confidently predicted that a decolonial world civilization would replace the colonizer’s model of the world. Césaire (2000[1995], p. 31), which has been based on slavery, colonialism, racism, sexism, patriarchy, and capitalism. When a calamity such as COVID-19 strikes, poverty and social inequalities are acutely exposed. It has also revealed how the operative extractivist capitalist logic of the modern Westernized world civilization, which has provoked nature and plunged humanity into a worldwide ecological crisis.

These brief and, indeed, provisional decolonial reflections on COVID-19 underscore the need for unthinking the logics of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, patriarchy, feminization, and extractive capitalism as an important part of pushing forward the incomplete decolonization project begun in the last century. At the center of this unthinking of the logics of a civilization of death are four core calls. The first is a call to restore a balanced human–nature relationship with sustainable ecosystems here on earth. The second call is for rehumanization through recognition of the humanity of all people, which is required by the decolonial ethics of liberation. The third call is for new post-COVID-19 moral order predicated on decolonial love and its ethics of all humans living together harmoniously. The last is a call for post-COVID-19 life of conviviality underpinned by moral economies of care as opposed to the present society of enmity and economies of profit.