By Hady BA
Many of us in Africa complained a lot about the fact that not only the Western press, but also the World Health Organization (WHO) itself seemed incredulous that the majority of Black African countries had succeeded in curbing COVID-19 where Western countries were generally unable to do so. Some viewed in this attitude some sort of racism. It seems to me that we can indeed detect a touch of racism in some of these reactions, especially in some of the moves to explain our successes. There is often a naturalization of our achievements in which they are not attributed to the result of conscious work, or our experience with infectious diseases or the competence of our doctors, but rather to the result of circumstances beyond our control. Such a presumption of incompetence is not surprising. It is the direct consequence of racist theories that can be dated back at least to the 18th century and which posit that black people are incapable of abstraction and planning and therefore cannot manage our own affairs independently. These racist theories are fairly well known and remain operative in the collective unconscious. However, I would not like to focus on external explanations for and attitudes toward our success. Rather, I would like us to take this pandemic as an opportunity to reflect on what it reveals about the image we have of ourselves. To do so, I would like us to answer the following question: Why does the Raoult Protocol, proposed by the controversial physician and microbiologist Didier Raoult, seem to work in Senegal?
The Senegalese President himself mentioned the Raoult protocol as explaining the success of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Seydi, who is coordinating our national response to the pandemic, instead of taking credit for our success, has placed himself under the tutelary shadow of Professor Raoult and attributed our success not to the talent of his teams but to our adoption of the protocol of the wise man from Marseilles. What is surprising is that this success is not replicated elsewhere. Morocco has adopted this cocktail but is not doing as well as us. The Marseilles institute of Professor Raoult himself paradoxically does not succeed in emulating the Senegalese efficiency in using the protocol. In a more systematic way, a review article published in September 2020 in the Journal of Internal General Medicine, which looks at studies carried out between December 2019 and June 2020, concluded that: “The available evidence suggests that CQ or HCQ does not improve clinical outcomes in COVID-19. Well-designed randomized trials are required for assessing the efficacy and safety of HCQ and CQ for COVID-19.”
How then can we explain, on the one hand, that the Raoult Protocol is effective in Senegal and only in Senegal, and, on the other hand, that the Senegalese doctors and authorities place themselves under the tutelary shadow of this foreign professor instead of claiming their own success?
Regarding the first question, I think that unlike what our authorities, including health authorities, say, the Raoult protocol is no more effective here than elsewhere. After all, before we added this protocol to our therapeutic arsenal, we were at zero deaths. The deaths began after the introduction of this protocol. Post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”) is certainly not a viable mode of reasoning, but neither can we exclude the possibility that sometimes precedence is accompanied by causality. We could have here a case of post hoc et propter hoc. Until a serious study is done, one cannot decide one way or the other. Moreover, this so-called Raoult protocol is, in Senegal, part of a well-established protocol of which it is only one aspect. From an epistemological point of view, what the apparent success of this protocol shows is the value of implementing a rigorous methodology before using a drug. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of confirmation bias. Thus, just as the fact that our first deaths occurred after the adoption of this protocol does not prove that this protocol is responsible for those deaths, neither can we attribute the Senegalese successes to the use of this protocol while ignoring all other aspects of the Senegalese health protocol and ignoring other international experiences.
The second question we asked seems more interesting to me. When the pandemic occurred, the Senegalese President decided to trust his scientists. The Senegalese physicians, epidemiologists, and scientists are the ones who defined our health protocol, calibrated the messages to be communicated to the people, asked for and obtained the reduction of economic activities, suggested a curfew, obtained that all positive cases be hospitalized and that their contacts be accommodated in hotels free of charge, etc. It is also our doctors who made the choices that allowed us to care for our patients. How can we explain that we attribute the credit for our undeniable success to a French professor? To understand this, I propose that we take a detour through Nietzsche’s philosophy and his proclamation of the death of God.
It is in The Gay Science (L3§125) that Nietzsche first declared the death of God. At this specific part, he concludes his tirade with the following question: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” The idea of the death of God can be understood as the Nietzschean response to the Pascalian concern that we are being thrown into the universe. Where Pascal takes refuge in religion, Nietzsche bets, on the other hand, on the human being and affirms that the goal is not to subdue ourselves to any destiny, to any divine decree, but to kill God, to dare to take his place and be truly the creators of our destiny. This theme appears interestingly in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In particular, Nietzsche stages the one he named the last Pope. Having noted the death of God, this last Pope does not defrock. He goes to the mountains in search of people to whom the news would not have reached in order to continue celebrating Mass with them.
What does this idea of the death of God have to do with the African and singularly Senegalese reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic? To understand this, let us remember what this last Pope said to Zarathustra:
“And I served that old God until his last hour. Now, however, am I out of service, without master, and yet not free.”
What Nietzsche shows here is that it is not enough for the death of God for the ex-believer to escape his grip. It is not even enough for the ex-believer to acknowledge this death of God. Freedom is not only a state; it is first and foremost a choice, a heavy responsibility that we sometimes refuse to take because it is frightening. What is a world without God? What is life without a master? It is life without clear direction, chaotic, uncertain—a life in which we must make decisions without being able to fall back on God’s will in case of failure. This idea, according to which responsibility is a weight that is not easy to take, seems important to me because it explains our behavior as former colonized people.
This pandemic is historic. For the first time since independence, we in Senegal had to manage a major crisis by ourselves. Senegal has never, consciously and deliberately, managed a major crisis without calling for outside help. Even when there was that water crisis of at the Keur Momar Sarr company’s sites, which was a simple piping problem, the French army helped us distribute water to the affected people. French and Chinese companies have been approached to repair the pipe. With regard to this pandemic, by force of circumstances, it was impossible for us to call upon foreign expertise. Countries that traditionally showed us the way forward were entangled in their own problems. As a result, the President of Senegal was forced to rely on local expertise. Local experts therefore defined and implemented the health protocol that led to the Senegalese success.
Faced with this historic event, Senegal and most African countries have risen to the challenge endogenously. One argument raised to relativize the success of African countries is that it is not possible that all African leaders acted rationally while European societies as a whole would have acted irrationally and ineffectively. To this, we can provide three answers. The first one is that when it goes the other way, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. The economic choices of the entire continent seem disastrous without it seeming incredible to us. The second is that it is not true that the whole of Europe has mismanaged the pandemic. There is variability in the pandemics’ management across Germany, Sweden, Denmark, France and Spain. Finally, there is also variability in African responses to the pandemic. Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Morocco are not doing as well as Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, or Mali.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that most African countries, like Senegal, have managed this crisis well and endogenously. Why don’t we pay more attention to this and, above all, why, on our own initiative, have we put ourselves under the tutelary shadow of Professor Raoult, not only at a popular level, but also at the level of decision-making bodies and actors in the system?
It seems to me that the Nietzschean figure of the last Pope provides the answer. Just as the last Pope found the idea of God’s death too dizzying and did not draw all the consequences even though he could grasp it intellectually, so, too, as former colonized people used to be assisted, do we not collectively manage to accept and acknowledge our competence, even our technical superiority over our former colonial masters.
This is a risk that had already been theorized by thinkers of cultural alienation such as Frantz Fanon and Cheikh Anta Diop. One recalls that in his speech called Address to the Youth of Niger, Cheikh Anta Diop calls on young Africans to get rid of the idea that “the truth sounds white” (my translation) and the need to have the knowledge they produce be validated by the European external authority. In the same way, Fanon shows in The Wretched of the Earth that one of the major problems that the former colonized people must face is the restoration of the internal springs of a society that has been ideologically conditioned not to believe that it is capable of taking its destiny into its own hands. The feeling that our destiny depends on external authorities is a prevailing feeling at all levels of colonial and post-colonial societies. It is exactly this unconscious feeling of illegitimacy that we see at work when our doctors and our politicians place themselves under the tutelary shadow of a European scientist. To use a Gramscian expression, the cultural hegemony of Western imperialist thinking is such that its victims are incapable of appreciating their own success.
However, one may object that in spite of everything, this has not prevented the Senegalese people as a whole from properly managing this pandemic and that, therefore, even assuming that my analysis is correct, this inferiority complex has absolutely no importance or real consequences. In my view, this objection is invalid for at least three reasons:
- First of all, truth is a value in itself. It is important that we have a correct appreciation of our own situation in order to project ourselves.
- Second, if we do not diagnose the mechanisms that place us under the domination of others, we will never be able to take our own responsibilities and be truly free and independent.
- Finally, we’ve been lucky that in this crisis Westerners were too busy to help us. Imagine what would have happened if the disease had started in Africa! It is perfectly conceivable that our authorities would import French expertise to come and chaperone our doctors. However, in this specific case, it would be more appropriate for us to share our expertise with our former metropolis. Foreign interference on our processes could have been catastrophic.
To conclude, it seems to me that what this pandemic has shown is that in terms of managing epidemics, we have all the technical and human resources to achieve better results than those of countries much more developed than we are. The question that arises is that of scalability. If we have the capacity to manage such a serious problem, doesn’t it mean that we have the resources to deal with all the problems facing our societies as long as we disregard outside interference, refuse the help that is usually offered to us and trust endogenous expertise?
There is something properly dizzying about a positive answer to this question. What is at stake in a reflection on our management of this pandemic is the discovery that having let others act as the demiurges on our destiny since independence is perhaps what keeps our continent underdeveloped. We must accept undertaking a radical project of independence and endogenous definition of our objectives and the means to achieve them if we want to beat the evils that plague our continent. For such a project to be possible, all stakeholders must not only be convinced but also be persuaded of our ability to meet the challenge. These actors need to understand the scope of what we have achieved in our management of the pandemic. This work of persuasion, of creation of a new cultural hegemony leading to development, must be done by the thinkers of African societies so that our societies make of this post-pandemic era a new start allowing us to trigger the development for the black continent, which necessarily involves the restoration of our dignity and the conscience of our agency. Otherwise, we will act as President Macky Sall did on France 24 and credit all our successes to our former masters through their most famous guru.
Mouhamadou El Hady Ba
Hady BA is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cheikh Anta Diop University. Trained in Dakar as a philosopher, M. Ba holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from The Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Before coming back to Dakar, Hady Ba has worked on the development of Natural Language Processing tools that uses open-source resources like the web to detect and anticipate security threats. At Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dr. Ba teaches logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and cognitive science and has written papers in epistemology, computer science and cognitive science. Hady Ba is one of the officers of the Senegalese Philosophical Association and has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Connecticut writing a book about the Epistemology of the Global South.
This was a good post. Thank you.