CSA&GCSA&G

Food, symbolism and gendered identities in Zimbabwean Politics: Mama Grace’s ice cream and the 2017 Zanu-Pf leadership change

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Introduction: Food, an inquiry

I seek to provoke deeper inquiries into the centrality of food, food substances, food and the spectacular, and ways of and the sub-texts of serving and consuming food, as well as the ways of imagining food in Zimbabwean politics. Globally, food has become an increasingly contested site for re/thinking about power, imagi/nations, re/distribution, access and agency. This work focuses on the symbolic, cultural and political significance of the ice cream served by Mama Grace Mugabe, (Zimbabwe’s former First Lady) during rallies. The acceptances and rejections of the ice cream, and Mama’s love, care, visibility and naturalized role in the nation graphically reflected the emergent factions within Zanu-Pf and also helped to widen them. To this extent, food, and specifically, the ice cream, acted as an agent of change leading to the ‘new dispensation’ led by Emmerson Mnangagwa. In addition, the ice cream or food serving in general, sprung as an agent of gendered identities as well as their re/production.

Food and the everyday

In Zimbabwe and elsewhere, food emanates as central to the socio, religious, economic and political aesthetics of groups. Food, consumption habits and culinary rituals are rooted in and exhibit social symbolisms and meanings related to kinships, friendships, political relations and class (Edwin 2008). In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, there are “various meanings that food, eating, and hunger acquire in the portrayal of Okonkwo” (Olufunwa 2000:1). The late Zimbabwean controversial writer, Dambudzo Marechera, in most of his works, especially The House of Hunger, focuses on the centrality of food in households and the emanating disorder and violence that results in the absence of food, or its unhealthy and unappetising state. Marechera shows the vulnerability and vulgarity of those who are weak, poor and feminized through food distribution and food disorders. As the narrator says “I couldn’t have stayed on in that House of Hunger where every morsel of sanity was snatched from you the way some kinds of bird snatch food from the very mouths of babes” (Marechera 1978:1). He goes on to show the politics of food even playing out in the imagery of violent gastral outlets and how that relates to the socio-economic, political and religious facets and a human di/satisfaction that goes beyond the physical. Among other works, Coming of the Dry Season (1972) and Waiting for the Rain (1981) by Charles Mungoshi imagine the importance of food through an imagination of droughts or dry seasons, poverty and deprivations. However, an analysis of the central themes in the above works reveal the concepts of hunger and food as going beyond just the physiological as hunger and deprivations relate to identity politics and issues of lack of freedoms and disempowerments. As Lewis (2016:6) argues, “Since eating is perceived to fill the place of some other desire, hunger is seen to result not only from food deprivation, but from other denied or withheld yearnings.”

Apart from being a means of life sustenance, food is also a system of communication, a body of images, a decorum of usages, situations and behaviour (Barthes 1975). In the African pre-colonial period, food was important to traditional events and meetings. In the Ibgo society in Nigeria and elsewhere, a kola nut is used by a host as a ritual for welcoming guests into his home. This is a powerful symbol of mutual respect, hospitality, friendship and community (Edwin 2008). This view is supported by Kammampoal and Laar (2019) who posit that the Ibgo consider the kola nut as very important in formal and informal gatherings and has enormous cultural capital in satisfying socio-religious functions. It is used as a token of friendship, benevolence, and honor, and is given to a visitor as a sign of hospitality, personality and civility, making it central to Igbo livelihood. The renowned writer and critique, Chinua Achebe makes the kola nut ritual central to his writings by evoking that, ‘He who brings kola brings life.’ Relatedly, Achebe notes; “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it from his own compound” (Achebe 1994:166-7). Though the language is patriarchal and centred on a man’s world, these proverbs are very powerful in revealing that food, food rituals and gatherings have social, religious, economic and political meanings and relevance. In South Africa, research on food reveals there are gendered implications of access to food and gendered labour manipulations in food production and preparation (Lewis 2016). In Zimbabwe, the Shona proverb, Ukama igasva hwunosadziswa nokudya (relationships remain incomplete until you partake of a meal) reveals the importance of food during gatherings and how the serving of food is important to kinship, friendship, loyalty and harmony. Food is central in, among others, traditional ceremonies, family gatherings, funerals and weddings. This links to Freud (1938)’s and Madeira (1989)’s sentiments that eating and drinking with someone symbolically confirms social community and mutual obligations and that food performs social interaction, status and acts both positive and negative social relationships. In the same sense, I see Grace Mugabe’s serving of ice cream at rallies as a political and gender aesthetic.

Food and Zanu-Pf’s politics of the spectacular 

Historically, Zanu-Pf has used food to entice, especially the disadvantaged and impoverished people to vote for it rather than voting for opposition parties. Banking on its ability to provide food, Zanu-Pf situated itself as the mother-provider making sure that children in her nest do not starve, or do not have feelings of starvation and negligence. Those children seen as rebels or refusing to embrace Zanu-Pf are denied food provisions and considered worth dying in a way that evokes Mamdani (1996)’s notion of citizen and subject where state sovereignty use biopolitics to create some kind of ‘death worlds’ for those termed non-citizens. The politicization of food in the context of climate-change induced drought as seen through Zanu-Pf’s selective distribution of food along party lines can be used to exemplify this. Opposition supporters are denied access; they are deemed undeserving by virtue of their political identity – they deserve to die. Food politics is therefore part of the manipulation, electoral malpractices and bribery prevalent in Zimbabwean politics.

More interesting, however, is that food has also featured in Zanu-Pf internal politics, particularly its 2017 factional politics, especially in the context where Grace Mugabe (a member of the G40 Zanu-Pf faction), assumed the role of mother-provider in her contest for power and authority with the Lacoste faction headed by Emmerson Mnangagwa. The 2017 Zanu-Pf factional fights therefore, mirror the symbolism and cultural politics of food in Zimbabwean politics and Zanu-Pf politics in particular. Thus, food was instrumental as the basis for surveillance, for getting to know the loyal and disloyal. As Grace Mugabe served ice cream at rallies and other events, many expressed gratitude towards Mama’s generosity and made public spectacles of gratitude, satisfaction and loyalty to Mama’s love, care and visibility. However, emphasis on eating Mama’s provisions belittled many in the process who then became fed up with Mama and rebelled. This became a performance of refusal and rejection to toe the line, a reflection of oppositional voices and dissent and has therefore been a metaphor for change.

Apart from food being used for rallying people behind particular parties, groups and individuals, food has been used as a show of power, a demonstration of gendered and sexual identities. This complex has occurred in a context where the Zimbabwean ‘national family’ has been seen as “an imaginative construct of power relations” (Hunt 1992:196). It is sensible to argue that food has discursive underpinnings in patriarchy and issues of power and resource re/distribution. For some time, Grace Mugabe found agency and political manoeuvring within Zanu-Pf politics by re/producing and performing her gendered role of feeding and caring. However, considering Grace’s fall from grace, challenging simplistic ideas about agency forces us to question the entrapment in patriarchal networks of food sources, food re/production and food re/distribution that link with abilities to control food access and be active political agents.

It is therefore imperative to focus on the discursive underpinnings of food. The ice cream narrative reflects how a naturalized and normalized order of mother provisions, which itself is anchored on patriarchy, is used in the contest for power and authority in Zimbabwe. Food, and in this case, ice cream is packed with massive symbolic and cultural politics associated with Zanu-Pf’s politics of the spectacular and Zimbabwean nationhood. There is therefore a close relationship between food and speech (Olufunwa 2000), hence food and food ways constitute discourse and discursive subjects.

Ice cream and mother/ing the nation

Considering that nations are recurrently figured out through the iconography of familial and domestic spaces (Mawere 2019, 2016; McClintock 1993; Yuval-Davies 1997), Grace Mugabe was imagined as the mother of the Zimbabwean nation by virtue of being the First Lady. Motherhood in the Zimbabwean cultural context is associated with many positive attributes. The worthiness of a mother is framed within the mother’s ability to care for and feed her children. Grace’s distribution of food visualizes and memorializes motherhood and mother-child intimacy.

Grace owns a huge dairy farm in Mazowe, Mashonaland Central. At this farm, other dairy products such as yoghurt, and ice cream are produced. It is important to locate Grace Mugabe’s power and influence within Zanu-Pf and the nation in her innovative projects such as food production and processing at her farm. To some extent, Grace’s efforts speaks to food sovereignty as it relates to women appropriation of food, the value of women’s contributions and the recognition of their contribution to production (Sachs 2013). At the peak of Zanu-Pf’s factional battles, Grace Mugabe addressed many ‘meet the people rallies’ around the country and considering her role as the mother of the nation, the ‘meet the people rallies’ were avenues where the mother met her children and distinguished between the loyal and the disloyal. Zanu-Pf leadership was expected to attend these rallies and participate accordingly. Failure to attend was seen as a sign of insubordination and not supporting the mother’s efforts to assemble, watch over, nurture and take care of the children and one could be labelled a saboteur of the national project.

When Grace Mugabe fed people at rallies with ice cream, itself a by-product of milk, she attained the symbolic role of a mother feeding and caring for her children and a national mother feeding and caring for the Zimbabwean nation. Breast feeding is considered as a physical, psychological, economical and symbolic presence of a mother. Motherhood is associated with love, care, compassion and sustenance which allow individuals and nations to grow. To this extent, negative motherhood is associated with individual and national death. The ice cream given at rallies came from the Mugabes’ Gushungo Dairy farm, which however is more associated with Grace to underwrite, naturalize and normalize her gendered role as a mother caring for and feeding her children as well as a mother in touch with the soil and therefore with positive femininities. The meanings of land (the Gushungo farm) and the re/productive body of women (Grace) as the source of food and national sustenance is spectacularly demonstrated by Grace Mugabe’s distribution of ice cream from the Gushungo farm, giving women’s labour in general and Grace in particular, some agentive power. Through the distribution of the ice cream made at her farm, Grace shows her industrious, entrepreneurial and innovative skills and therefore, her ability to perform her naturalized role as a mother who takes care and feeds the nation.

One is forced to re/imagine the Gushungo farm as Grace Mugabe’s extended breasts from where the nation gains sustenance and livelihood, again buttressing the dominant gender categories in the re/constructions of nationhood but also subversively re/imagining the power of women in their marginalized identities. The ice cream both symbolically stands for breast milk and also as a symbol of modernity. Although this links well with Grace’s acquired identity as a modern woman associated with flamboyance, it also positions her as a powerful and innovative woman who moves beyond traditional food ways.

Anyone who fed on the ice cream was symbolically feeding on Grace Mugabe’s breasts, an act which reflected the recognition of her motherhood and her role as the mother of the nation. Since Grace Mugabe was associated with negative motherhood (Mawere 2019), this performance of her children’s loyalty, contentment and happiness helped to dispel negative images. In providing and feeding her children, Grace managed to “create sustaining relational bonds, generating a sense of security, wellbeing and contentment” (Lewis 2016:3) for herself and those whom she fed. Through the control of food distribution, which basically is a feminine and undermined role, Grace attained power and authority over Zanu-Pf and Zimbabwe, she because a central point of both life and death in Zimbabwean and Zanu-Pf politics. To some extent, this speaks to “how productive freedoms [and power] are embedded in socially neglected practices” (Lewis 2016:2-3) that are associated with the domestic space. Within the domestic space, Grace Mugabe acquired some agentive powers that made her central to both Zanu-Pf and Zimbabwean politics. Thus, by performing her socially expected role as a mother, Grace attained power and authority and managed to perform surveillance on the nation which for some time, enabled her to secure and protect her power and ambitions.

However, “Unhealthy eating habits can be seen as a form of ‘hunger’, an embodied ‘emptiness’ that results from eating food that is disconnected from relationships of responsiveness, care and intimacy (Lewis 2016). Following this argument, poisoned or contaminated food substances such as is alleged by the Lacoste faction on Grace Mugabe’s ice cream are characteristic of the hunger and the emptiness of Zimbabwean nationalism as they are indicative of self-centredness, extractive and impersonal tendencies rather than mutuality, unity and communal. Refusing Grace’s ice-cream was a performance of the rejection of a poisoned motherhood and a poisoned nationalism.

The Ice cream, Lacoste victimhood and poisoned nationhood

Positioning themselves as victims of ice cream poisoning, and a poisoned motherhood, Mnangagwa and the Zanu-Pf Lacoste faction did not see Grace’s poisoning as only physical on targeted bodies, but also as symbolic of national poisoning and destruction caused by a woman who had broken boundaries. The poisoned ice cream or food offered by the mother of the nation alludes to national food insecurity, which would negate national growth, especially within the narratives of Zimbabwean nationalism where food and re/production is central to nationhood. Thus, the absence of positive connections between the mother and the nation is mirrored through the poisoned ice cream. The poisoning or imagined poisoning of Mnangagwa’s body is characteristic of the poisoning of the national body by Grace Mugabe. Due to her alliances with the G40, who were considered undesirable elements, Grace Mugabe had become contaminated (Mawere 2019) and as a mother of the nation, her breast milk (and ice cream) was now poisoning and destroying the nation. What is more interesting is that ice cream poisoning situates Grace and women into the dominant discourses that characterize women as witches and witchcraft as a feminine characteristic (Mawere 2019; Gaidzanwa 1985).

As a response to the poisoning, immediate action (such as done to Mnangagwa to detox and save him) was supposed to be taken to detox and save the Zimbabwean nation, hence the coup d’état framed on Operation Restore Legacy which took the nation by surprise was swiftly carried out by the military junta. Even though Mnangagwa might not have been poisoned by Grace or poisoned through the ice cream, and even if his illness was just some drama, the poisonous ice cream became a metaphor for rejecting Grace’s love and care, and Grace as a mother of the nation. For the Lacoste faction, Grace’s breast was poisonous and produced poisonous milk which if the nation had continued to drink, it could have been fatally contaminated. This discourse is made reasonable through Grace Mugabe’s association with the G40, group which had been virtually homosexualized, dislocated from the Chimurenga ethic and ultimately regarded national pollutants (Mawere 2019, 2016). Thus, the same source and driver of Grace’s power, which is food distribution, was altered through a discourse of poison which sensitized that the seemingly source of life was the source of death, that the nation was drinking from a poisoned breast.

In addition to the allegations of Grace poisoning both Mugabe and Mnangagwa as fitting in with witchcraft troupes, there is also a ‘femme fatale’ idea (often depicted in film noir), that is associated with Grace. This idea positions women as tempting seductresses and their offerings as ‘toxic’ to men, as they offer a ‘dangerous sexuality’, causing powerful men to fall (Sathyamurthy 2016). The femme fatale relates to the Shona proverb, mukadzi munaku akasaroya anoba (if a beautiful woman is not a witch, she is a thief), which basically associates beauty and seduction with danger. This is interesting in relation to Grace allegedly seducing Mugabe and possibly ‘leading him astray’. Characterized as a loose, urban and flamboyant woman and nicknamed marujata or Gucci Grace, before and in her marriage to Mugabe, and postured as an adulteress (Mawere 2019), Grace Mugabe is associated with a poisonous sexuality that enables her to dominate and control men. Defying dominant feminine sexualities which are posited as private, pure and loyal provides reason for the ‘poisonous’ label given to Grace and provides justification for her rejection as mother of the nation. A revelation of female eroticism is out of touch with nation-craft as seen through various attempts to control the bodies of women and to keep women in specific spaces (Mawere 2019, 2016). It is in this sense that Operation Restore Legacy was also an operation to ‘cleanse’ womanhood and restore women to their ‘proper’ places. The refusal of Grace Mugabe’s offering or dish by the Lacoste faction can therefore be read as a refusal to be trapped by Grace’s ‘poisonous’ sexualities and an effort to decontaminate national motherhood, which is the source of national livelihood and survival.

Conclusion: The paradox

It is essential “to make food and the politics of food visible…as a way to tackle directly issues of patriarchy, capitalism, the ecological crisis, power and agency in our own spaces, and to truly decolonise food” (Andrews and Lewis 2017:7). Grace Mugabe fell into the trap of dominant discourses that provide binary spaces for men and women, and that locate the joys of motherhood in domestic spaces such as caring for and loving children. It is crucial to know that it is this effort to submit herself to the expectations of motherhood and the dictates of patriarchy that contributes to and trigger narratives that disqualify her motherhood. By trying to impress and perform the gendered role of providing as expected of motherhood, Grace’s efforts suffer a backlash as the same expectation which she had fulfilled and marked her as a mother and powerful woman became instrumental to her enemies. The same food, or ice cream which she provided to the children became a weapon in the hands of the Lacoste faction as narratives that Mnangagwa was given poisoned ice cream circulated. This meant that the nation’s motherhood was poisonous and therefore dangerous to the nation’s being. The same ice cream which Grace used to claim and perform motherhood and attain power became a metaphor for her failure as a mother, leading to the collapse of her power, that of her husband, Robert Mugabe, setting the pace for Mnangagwa’s new dispensation.

This article was first published on Gender Justice, a CSA&G project.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achebe, C. 1994. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books.

Andrews, D. & Lewis, D. 2017. “Decolonising Food Systems and Sowing Seeds of Resistance: Disentangling knowledges about seed”, The African Centre for Biodiversity.

Barthes, R. 1975. “Towards a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption.” In Elborg Foster & Robert Forster (eds.), European diet from Pre-industrial to modern times. New York, 47-59.

Edwin, S. 2008. Subverting Social Customs: The Representation of Food in Three West African Francophone Novels. Research in African Literatures, 39(3),39-50.

Freud, S. 1938. Totem and Taboo. New York: The Modern Library.

Gaidzanwa, R. 1985. Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature. Harare: College Press.

Hunt, L. 1992. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kammampoal, B. and Suuk Laar, S. 2019. The kola nut: Its symbolic significance in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL),7(8), 26-40.

Lewis, D. 2016. Bodies, matter and feminist freedoms: Revisiting the politics of food. Agenda, 30(4),6-16.

Madeira, K. 1989. “Cultural meaning and use of food: A selective bibliography (1973-987).” In Mary-Anne Schofield (ed.), Cooking by the book: Food in Literature and culture. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State, 207-15.

Mamdani, M. 2018. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marechera, D. 1978. The House of Hunger. London: Heinemann.

Mawere, T. 2019. Gendered and Sexual Imagi(nations): the 2018 Zimbabwean E(r)ections and the Aftermath, Pretoria: CSA&G Press.

Mawere, T. 2016. Decentering nationalism: representing and contesting Chimurenga in Zimbabwean popular culture, PhD dissertation. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape.

McClintock, A. 1993. Family feuds: Gender, nationalism and the family. Feminist Review, 61-80.

Mungoshi, C. 1981. Waiting for the rain. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House.

Mungoshi, C. 1972. Coming of the dry season. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Olufunwa, H.O. 2000. Eating With Kings: Food and Ambition in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, 17(1), 69-71.

Sachs, C. 2013. “Feminist Food Sovereignty: Crafting a New Vision”, Paper Presented at Conference on Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue. Yale University, 14-15 September. (Available at https://www.tni.org/en/briefing/feminist-food-sovereignty-crafting-new-vision, accessed 10 March 2020).

Sathyamurthy, K. 2016. “Femme Fatale: Tropes of deviant sexuality and empowerment” (Available at https://go.distance.ncsu.edu/gd203/?p=17783 , accessed 20 April 2020).

Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications.

 

Just LeadersCSA&G

Reflecting on my time at the CSA&G – Chris Joubert

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by Chris Joubert

Chris JoubertBack in 2014 when my friend told me about the CSA&G volunteer training he was doing, I saw it as a pointless distraction.

A few weeks later, we both had a large gap between our classes, and he had to attend a catch-up session at the Centre. I went with him to this session in order to kill some time and it was incredible.

My friend had joined the Future Leaders at Work volunteer programme of the CSA&G to find something to put on his CV and not just “be a student”. I did not really see the point of this because I had never considered that I would have to do more than just get my degree.

Both my parents never finished school and to them if their kids went to university, they would have better lives. When I got into UP it was sort of a surprise to most of my family members because I was not the type of person who excelled at school. A few of my teachers told my parents that I might have a problem “paying attention and staying on topic”.

They were not wrong. I got into a disagreement with a teacher about why a certain “nude” colour was considered “mens kleur” (the default colour of “humans”). In short, I was “that kid”, who always had a smart answer or had to be difficult. My sister called it an “obedience disorder”. In her view I had an impulse to disobey authority figures. I needed to learn to listen and follow orders, “because that is how it is”, she said.

Arguments like these have always annoyed me. The fact that something is “that way”, just because it is what it is, was never a good enough answer for me. Going to Tuks was, however, a great opportunity and I did not want to disappoint the people who gave it to me. So, I knew I would focus on my studies and not get distracted with anything other than what I had registered for.

During that first 2-hour session at the CSA&G, I learned that the Centre was the type of place that asked difficult questions. The type of questions most people I knew would answer with “that’s how things are”.  During my second year I formally joined the Future Leaders at Work (now called Just Leaders) training and a few societies.  I looked forward to these sessions mostly because it was one of the few places that encouraged me to imagine what the world could be like, rather than asking me to assimilate to how the world is.

By the end of the year I signed up for the Befriender programme, which provides pre and post test counselling for people who want to test for HIV, as well as the rapid test itself. The training taught me a lot about lay counselling, but it forced me to do a lot of self-evaluation and come to terms with some personal things I did not like dealing with.

After that I ended up spending a lot of my time at the Centre. I only had to volunteer 2 hours a week for the programme, but I ended up spending most of my day there. I absolutely loved counselling. I loved being able to help people and in some small way being able to make a difference. By the end of 2016 I graduated from Tuks and thought I would have to leave the Centre but fortunately I still managed to volunteer there. In 2017 I started volunteering for about 20 hours a week and before the end of that semester they offered me a position.

Working at the Centre is great and is something I would literally have done for free. In a way the Centre changed for me. This change presented me with an opportunity: as a volunteer I was mostly using the Befriender skills and my job description was clear; as a staff member I was giving a chance to do whatever I wanted to support and promote the Befriender programme.

Not being given a narrow job description seemed frightening at first. Soon I learned that it was quite freeing. I got a chance to be involved in what I was interested in. I started by co-facilitating the training and supervising of new Befrienders.  The Befriender training runs for 7 straight days, roughly 8 hours a day. By now I have facilitated a number of Befriender trainings and it is so amazing to see how much a person can change in one week.

Each group of volunteers I have been a part of training is so unique. Training and working with these volunteers is one of the most enriching and at times extremely challenging things I have ever done.

While the Befriender programme takes up most of my time at the Centre, I also started getting involved in other activities, like doing talks at TuksRes. From time to time TuksRes approaches the CSA&G to give talks to their students, often around sex, sexualities, gender identity and GBV.

Even though these talks mostly happen in the evenings, and in some cases I have shown up a bit tired to some of them, I get a surge of energy speaking with these students. I sometimes take the safe CSA&G space for granted and forget that it is still not very easy for people to talk about some things. Creating a safe space and allowing people to speak more freely really empowers everyone.

Beyond the work I do with students at the CSA&G, it has been a true honour working and learning from the staff members of the Centre. We never have a single dull moment. Considering the diversity of the people who I have met at the Centre, there is always a fantastic blend of intriguing perspectives, new information, and of course, humour.

With the nationwide lockdown in affect and no clear sign of when it will end, most of the type of work I am used to, has essentially stopped. Frustrating as that may be, I suppose like most of my time at the CSA&G, this challenge brings a new opportunity to try new approaches to our work.

An important part of the CSA&G is the environment it creates. During this lockdown, a lot of people are left feeling vulnerable. A safe space is one of the things people really do need right now.  How do we continue to provide that safe space?

CSA&GCSA&G

SOCIAL DIS – EASE: A reflection

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Excerpt from a forthcoming CSA&G monograph

by Mary Crewe

Folks, we either have a country or we don’t[1]

Earlier in 2020, Paul Simon recorded from isolation, American Tune for Til Further Notice 03/19/2020:

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered

I don’t know a friend who feels at ease

I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered

or driven to its knees[2]

 

In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003:5) makes the point that after WW1, there was the realisation of the ruin Europe had brought on itself. That is what we need to reflect about when we think about COVID-19, the lockdown, the destruction of the economy and surely the fracturing of society.[3] While the virus was a random event and circled the world very rapidly – the response – the shutting down of society and the economic and social consequences that will follow, were entirely the decision of our own and other governments, backed up by the hysteria and anxiety generated by WHO and the pandemic of panic that was created by the media. The early responses late 2019, set the scene for what was to follow. Mainstream media revelled in crisis and drama and rising hysteria and the South African media has largely followed suit. One notable exception is the news updated regularly by the Swiss Propaganda research group (https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/) offering fully referenced facts about COVID-19, provided by experts in the field, to help readers make a realistic risk assessment.

We are in the nightmare of a random control trial of one. There is no control group, just the experiment. No placebo, just the untried drug.  The state is now invested and locked into lockdown orthodoxy. If it works and the epidemic is contained, those who imposed this will be heroes, if not they will be able to claim that they were acting on the best evidence available at the time. The bio medics and the epidemiologists will win either way.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) exhorts us to “play your part”’ in the fight against #COVID19. “Follow the rules, and cooperate with healthcare professionals,” so too the politicians who will also have a greater arsenal of weapons for social control and further action.[4]  A phrase much-beloved of politicians is that they are “following the science”. Mostly however, this is being used “far more as a blame-deflecting tactic than as an acceptance of the disagreements, hypotheses, uncertainties, and traditions of rigorous questioning of actual science.”[5] The National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden warned that governments are using the coronavirus to build an “architecture of oppression”.[6]

The world, said Edward Said is full of, “not so much intellectuals, but experts and professionals – and there is a great pressure on them to commodify their skills and expertise in a given field. And by virtue of that they then belong to a community of experts whose whole role is selling the wares to the establishment. That the principle goal in mind is not to tell the truth, or to say what the alternative to the present is, but rather to maintain the status quo, to satisfy the customer – to represent the ideas of power that rule the world in which we live.”[7]

What we have seen, are seeing with COVID-19 is the array of experts on our TV screens telling us what we ought to know, what we ought to do and how we ought to behave. The public health crisis has hastened the transition to autocracy, and there are serious doubts about the capacity of countries to effect a course correction once the threat from the virus abates. S. Y. Quraishi, the former Chief Election Commissioner of India, writes that, “Joseph Cannataci, the UN special rapporteur on right to privacy, has rightly observed, ‘Dictatorship often starts in the face of a threat.’ Earlier it was the invisible and distant threat of terrorism that demanded obedience, now it is the threat of pandemic – a fear closer to home – that is pushing people to give away their rights.”[8] The question is for how long?

The imposition of any kind of emergency, formal or informal, without an expiry date, should be cause for deep anxiety – as is the case with the current Lockdown 4 where there is no sense of a time frame – just the implicit threat that one way or another it will depend on how we all behave.

This is political science, in other words, as opposed to empirical science.[9] As Lionel Shriver wrote, when this is all over we deserve an enquiry – conducted by independent scientists who’ve not attached reputations to any policy or prediction.[10] In years to come, we too will see that this was a plot against ourselves, or as in the world of sport the disastrous own goal.

Of course attempts to curtail epidemics raise – in the guise of public health – the most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile the individual’s claim to autonomy and liberty with the community’s concern with safety.[11] How does the polity treat the patient who is both a citizen and a disease carrier? When does the citizen become merely a subject? And in the end what is most important, the rights of the infected or of the uninfected? Sometimes, as Sontag wrote, a disease is just a disease.[12] But, such is the power of fear, of the unknown, of infection, of epidemics, that diseases become powerful metaphors for social issues beyond the death and the pain that they cause.

From the earliest times to the present, epidemics have affected human history in myriad ways: demographically, culturally, politically, financially, and biologically. Humans have never known a time in history when epidemics did not loom large. This is as true today as it ever was. And, despite claims that we would defeat it we are still living with HIV, with the shadow of cholera, with TB, with the memories of Listeriosis. All of these it was claimed would change the world as we knew it. In the end, though, we have learned to live with them rather than be controlled by them.

In this way we, too have forgotten about them.

In 2018, a total of 63 000 people died of TB in South Africa and the WHO estimates that around 301 000 people fell ill. There is, however significant uncertainty about this estimate since there is a 95% chance that the real number lies between 215 000 and 400 000.[13] AVERT estimates that South Africa has the biggest and most high-profile HIV epidemic in the world, with an estimated 7.7 million people living with HIV in 2018. South Africa accounts for a third of all new HIV infections in Southern Africa. In 2018, there were 240,000 new HIV infections and 71,000 South Africans died from AIDS-related illnesses.[14] And let’s not forget that South Africa, in 2017, had the worst outbreak of Listeriosis in global history.

There are no daily mention of AIDS and TB in the news, no condolences to their families, no flags being flown at half mast, no saluting of the health care workers, and no social panic about drug resistant TB.[15] All these diseases have available treatments and yet, these figures are astoundingly high.

Bambi in the Headlights

It’s astounding how various Ministers can, without shame or irony, say that COVID-19 has shown us the inequalities in this country. The lack of water, of power, of roads and transport. How could they not know this intimately? Why have they not acted before with water tanks and mobile support units? It’s not as if we have a shortage of labour – far too many people available for such work. But it’s part of finding an external agent to blame. This is the result of Apartheid – correct – but that’s not a new insight. Close your eyes and you would think that you were back in Apartheid South Africa, ponderous ministers having interminable press conferences surrounded by compliant bureaucrats, and brooking no questions or dissent.

Growing up under Apartheid you were schooled on the irrationality of power. On the capriciousness of Ministers and politicians making things up on the hoof, deciding what was good for you and what was not. We listened to Apartheid Ministers saying why Black people should not have access to alcohol or good housing or education. We hear it again. Apartheid, of course set the pattern for how we live, but what is actually happening to change this?  In 25 years, many kilometres of piped water can be laid, many flushing toilets can be built at schools, many points of power can be connected, many panes of glass can be fixed in schools and chalkboards replaced. The fact that there have been gains in these things does not make the absence right, it makes the insult of poverty worse.

It cannot be that these terrible social inequalities are only now being exposed by COVID-19.

Hierarchies:  Necessary and essential?

How are the lockdown decisions made? There is the fiction of the collective but that is disingenuous. This is a modern Cabinet working in a modern, constitutional democracy. It is not an NGO governed by the collective. Who determines, during this time, what is necessary? Who decides that it is possible to buy a winter duvet but not a cotton duvet cover? That expensive bubble bath can be bought, but not short-sleeved shirts?  We have debated the cigarettes and alcohol and hot chicken endlessly and there are reasons that transcend public health at play. Smoking will not add to your risk of the virus (it is possible it may be protective) nor will alcohol.[16] The lockdown started as necessary to contain the virus and then morphed into moralising, irrationality, seeming indifference and a lack of care.

As they (and we) regard the pain of others the various politicians claim to care – but they don’t, not really. No, “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain. The failure of these politicians is one of imagination, of empathy – we do not hold the lived reality of people in mind.[17] Compassion, is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers.[18]

If they cared, they would take and use the money from the “sin” taxes, they would clarify and simplify the lockdown conditions, they would allow exercise all day and they would admit to failures of government.

This is why the rhetoric of “our only interest is our people’s health” feels no longer avuncular but tinged with something more sinister.[19] In the same way that Sontag asks who the “we” is – who is the “our” in this? In far too many of the comments made by people in power there is a sense of power, of patronage or patriarchy and the sense that the populace – we the people – have to be controlled, brought into line and shown the folly of our ways. Were there a real understanding of ‘our people’s health’ then there would be no ban on cigarettes, alcohol or hot food. The moralising that comes from some of the medical commentators about the costs of emergency services, and of the health benefits of not smoking or drinking, are simply fatuous in relation to COVID-19.

In addition, the threats and bullying made by some of the decision makers are simply markers of a profound disrespect for “our people”.

“For Minister Cele to treat the public as errant schoolchildren – if one of you misbehaves, none of you can play outside – is behaviour that is way beyond the scope of the [Disaster Management] Act. Indeed, it has no place in a constitutional democracy. To be sure, in an authoritarian state, or sadly the USA of President Trump, collective punishment is employed. But in a constitutional democracy, such threats should have no place.”[20]  People who deliver threats of this kind have no place in senior political positions. Listening to this kind of menacing paternalism are we really surprised at the levels of sexual and gender-based violence in our country?  What is our nation’s beleaguered identity in times of crisis?[21]

What is necessary?

By the same reason, what or who is essential? We are allegedly all equal but some are more “essential” than others, we have a new hierarchy. Those that are now regarded as “essential” are also those that society tends in “normal times” to neglect and abuse. Teachers, nurses, refuse removal workers, store cashiers and many, many more are now “essential”. We have never considered them that before – if we did we would have paid them “essential” wages. We would make sure that the disparity between the earnings of doctors and nurses was not so vast, or between civil servants and the people employed in the local and provincial authorities who actually do the work.

It’s easy to understand the cynicism. Please don’t blow the vuvuzelas at 7pm, clap on Thursdays, cite us in speeches when at all other times the people now regarded as “essential” rank very low in the employment hierarchy – and whose professions are dismissed with disdain by many middle-class people and so called “captains of industry”. It is also easy to understand their fear. Never respected, before but now you’re placed in the frontline as essential to the response.

Who is essential?

We have been here before

“In September 2005, Dr Nabarro, the WHO’s public health expert coordinating the response to avian influenza, told the Associated Press that a global avian influenza pandemic could kill 150 million people worldwide.”[22] “The overall human death toll was low — in the hundreds — but scientists and government officials feared that the virus could ignite a human pandemic reminiscent of the catastrophic 1918 Spanish flu. Emergency plans were drafted, experimental H5N1 vaccines were created and tested, antiviral drugs were stockpiled. And then … nothing happened.”[23]

In 2020, in his COVID-19 narratives, Nabarro claimed we would see explosive outbreaks in just 2-3 weeks, a pandemic that doubles in around 2-5 days, which means an 8-fold increase in a week, a 250-fold increase in three weeks and a 1000-fold increase in 4 weeks – the WHO was projecting terrifying levels of world deaths.[24] Bill Gates made the point that, “this is a nightmare scenario because human-to-human transmittal respiratory viruses can grow exponentially … [and] … that curve would never bend until you had the majority of the people infected and then a massive number seeking hospital care and lots of lots of deaths.”[25]

So who do we believe? Increasingly the bio medics – the “expert” virologists and epidemiologists are telling us that there is a great deal about this virus that we do not know or understand. That does not stop them, confidently, from speaking with authority. If they got it so wrong with avian flu, is there the possibility that they could be so wrong again. Dissenters are seldom listened to, and no one seems to be anxious that the Imperial College study (not peer reviewed and later admitted to be flawed) was the one that set the tone.[26]

At the start of the HIV and AIDS epidemics we were faced with similar reactions. There was social and political panic. There were calls for isolation and quarantine. In our country we faced calls for the criminalisation of infection, for AIDS to be a notifiable illness and for people not to consume alcohol as this would lead to a lowering of inhibitions, unsafe sex and infections. Early on there was the anxiety and fake news about touching, kissing, saliva, and sharing utensils. AIDS, we heard, would change the world as we knew it, destroy the country, the region. It would cripple industry and the bureaucracies. There were dreadful images of marauding bands of young people threatening our security and many apocryphal stories of deliberate HIV infections or horrifying acts that required prompt action.[27]   None of this came to be. The wild projections of the numbers that would be infected and die were wrong, over dramatised and in the end we live with AIDS.  Indeed we forget now about the daily toll that AIDS takes on the society.

People are now saying that we need to “learn” to live with this virus and not to be controlled by it. We need to understand it and manage it. This message is not the one that the stages of lockdown give us – that message is that we are controlled by and at the mercy of this virus.

This has led to discomforting “war talk”. Boris Johnson referred to COVID-19 as an “invisible mugger”.[28] President Ramaphosa has said that we will need to think “post war”.[29] Essential people are regarded as being on the frontlines, fighting “the war” in the trenches. The economy was “destroyed” by COVID-19, as if this virus has declared war on the economy.  In fact, being controlled by the virus rather than controlling it – a clear and rational decision was made that “we” would destroy the various economies of the world by shutting both them and populations down. Along with the war talk we have the exaggerated use of language.

We have seen all this before – James Baldwin may have been right when he claimed people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.[30]

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country (or even one’s own) is a quintessential modern experience: “the cumulative offering of more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialised tourists, known as journalists. These journalists come together now with a new powerful force of bio medics and politicians.”[31]

In the end – a peasant that Inspector Salvo Montalbano met in the pursuit of solving a case said, “I don’t think, Mr ‘Nspecter. I don’t wanns think no more. The world’s become too evil.”[32]

It has, but if we are to try and understand the calamity that has taken place in our country – we need to remember that there must be criticism: “there must be a powerful critical consciousness if there are issues, problems, values – even lives – to be fought for.”[33]

 

[1] Osnos, Evan. How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/how-greenwich-republicans-learned-to-love-trump#intcid=recommendations_default-popular_d96957bf-198e-4b8c-92bc-f729db3fff0c_popular4-1 [Accessed 5 May 2020]

[2] Thurschwell, Pamela. American Tunes for Coronaviral Times: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and John Prime, 2020 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/american-tunes-for-coronaviral-times-bob-dylan-paul-simon-and-john-prine/?utm_source=Los+Angeles+Review+of+Books+Subscribers&utm_campaign=ffd60b05fd-02%2F16+Newsletter_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_06979e2d46-ffd60b05fd-345801969&mc_cid=ffd60b05fd&mc_eid=a15351b95c [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[3] Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2003), p5.

[4] This quote is the slogan being used by the NICD in reference to Covid-19.

[5] Cowper Andy. “Slippery Language and Defensive Politics Try to Hide the Real Problems,” The BMJ Opinion, 30 April2020. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/04/30/andy-cowper-slippery-language-and-defensive-politics-try-to-hide-the-real-problems/ [Accessed 4 May 2020].

[6] Swiss Research Propaganda. “Facts about Covid-19,” Swiss Propaganda Research, 2020.  https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ [Accessed 2 May 2020]

[7] Tariq Ali. Conversations with Edward Said.  (Seagull: New York, 2006), pp.110.

[8] Quraishi, S. Y. Across the World, the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Become an Invitation to Autocracy, 2020. https://thewire.in/government/coronavirus-pandemic-autocracy [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[9]Cowper Andy. “Slippery Language and Defensive Politics Try to Hide the Real Problems,” The BMJ Opinion, 2020. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/04/30/andy-cowper-slippery-language-and-defensive-politics-try-to-hide-the-real-problems/ [Accessed 4 May 2020].

[10]Shriver, L. I have Herd Immunity, 2020.  https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/I-have-herd-immunity [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[11] Baldwin, Peter. Disease and Democracy. (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).p 3

[12] Sontag, Susan. AIDS and its Metaphors. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1989), p10.

[13]Louw, Marcus. 63 000 TB Deaths in SA in 2018, 2019. https://www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2019/10/18/63-000-tb-deaths-in-sa-in-2018/ [Accessed 3 May 2020].

[14]Avert. HIV and AIDS in South Africa, 2020. https://www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-around-world/sub-saharan-africa/south-africa [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[15]The Western Cape premier suggested that flags should fly at half-mast in honour of people who have died from COVID 19.

[16] The Economist. Smokers Seem Less Likely Than Non-Smokers to Fall Ill with Covid-19, 2020. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/05/02/smokers-seem-less-likely-than-non-smokers-to-fall-ill-with-covid-19  [Accessed 3 May 2020].

[17] Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2003), p7.

[18] Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2003), p101.

[19] Singh, Kaveel. Tobacco Ban: Our Only Interest is Our People’s Health, Says Ramaphosa, 5 May 2020.  https://m.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/tobacco-ban-our-only-interest-is-our-peoples-health-says-ramaphosa-20200505 [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[20] Professor Balthazar. Is This Truly Necessary? 5 May 2020. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-05-05-is-it-truly-necessary/ [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[21]Hattersley, Giles. The Judi Dench Interview: “Retirement? Wash Out Your Mouth” 4 May 2020. https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/judi-dench-vogue-interview [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[22]Bonneux, Luc and Van Damme, Wim. “An Iatrogenic Pandemic of Panic,” BMJ, 332:786 (2006).

[23]Branswell, Helen. What Happened to Bird Flu? How a Major Threat to Human Health Faded From View. 13 February 2019.  https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/13/bird-flu-mutations-outlook/ [Accessed 4 May 2020].

[24] Nabarro, David. Get Ahead of Covid-19 NOW! 22 March 2020. https://www.4sd.info/covid-19-narratives/narrative-eight/ [Accessed 4 May 2020].

[25]Wayland, Michael. Bill Gates Calls Coronavirus Pandemic a “Nightmare Scenario,” But Predicts Lower Death Toll Than Trump. 5 April 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/05/bill-gates-coronavirus-pandemic-a-nightmare-scenario.html [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[26]Medical Brief: Africa’s Medical Media Digest. Debates Rage Over “Severely Flawed Imperial Study Sparked UK Lockdown. 1 April 2020. That https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/archives/debate-rages-over-severely-flawed-imperial-study-that-sparked-the-uk-lockdown/ [Accessed 3 May 2020].

[27]Crewe, Mary. “AIDS, Democracy and the University,” Unpublished address. (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2004).

[28] Sharaitmadari, David.“Invisible Mugger”: How Boris Johnson’s Language Hints at His Thinking. 27 April 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/27/muggers-and-invisible-enemies-how-boris-johnsons-metaphors-reveals-his-thinking. [Accessed 5 May 2020].

[29] Erasmus, Des. Radical Economic Transformation Best for SA Post-Covid-19, Says Ramaphosa. 6 May 2020. https://city-press.news24.com/News/radical-economic-transformation-best-for-sa-post-covid-19-says-ramaphosa-20200506 [Accessed 6 May 2020].

[30]Crewe, Mary. AIDS, Democracy and the University. 2006. Unpublished address.

[31]Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador, 2003), p18.

[32]Camilleri, Andrea. Rounding the Mark. (London: Picador, 2006), p.111.

[33]Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 28.

CSA&GCSA&G

When losing means everything and nothing

/in /by

by Pierre Brouard

I have been having contradictory feelings about loss and Covid-19.

On the one hand there is a sense that the virus has caused so many losses. Not only the obvious loss of life, or the losses of economic and other forms of certainty (noting certainty is ephemeral anyway), or the loss of hope that we cling to in times of difficulty; but on the other hand there is a sense that people who have got nothing left to lose just don’t care. They don’t care if they get infected, they don’t care if they fall foul of the law and various lockdown restrictions (becoming ever more convoluted as we move into a “staged” lockdown process), and frankly they may not even care if they die. To be blunt, and hopefully not patronising, if you have nothing to lose, the pain of loss means nothing to you. It’s a luxury to entertain hope when hope has not brought the things you need to live a dignified life.

The losses, and their associated grieving processes around Covid-19, are by now well documented[1], and they include not only loss of life, income, normality and hope, they include anticipatory loss as one contemplates what might lie ahead.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed what has become orthodoxy around “stages” of loss[2]. More properly viewed as episodes or affective states which can occur in any order or even overlap, they include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as responses to loss. And in recent times a sixth stage has been postulated, meaning, which refers to ways in which we integrate a loss experience into our belief system and world view.

As someone who has worked with these themes very productively over the years, including work I have done through the HIV epidemic, I find them a useful “hook” for clients (and partners and family) to understand how they are coping with the swirling emotions around losing someone or something which is dear. Sometimes counselling involves “psycho-education”, taking a client through explanations of psychological ideas. When I drew the “stages of loss” on a piece of paper for a client, this became a transitional object for her, something she could literally hold on to, to carry her through her daily journey of grieving.

I attended a loss workshop conducted by Kübler-Ross, in the early 1990s. It was a revelation. Participants were invited to sit next to Elisabeth and encouraged, as we all sat in a watchful circle, to go back to the very core of their loss, accompanied by what I can only describe as unearthly and haunting wails and sobs. It was a frightening and unsettling experience – needless to say, this much more private and restrained person did not make use of this technique, certainly not in front of all those people, but I shed a lot of tears anyway. It is impossible to be unmoved by so much grief, especially when it is as shockingly performative as it was in that workshop. One can debate the usefulness of these rituals – I am a believer in “getting feelings out” – but sometimes if it is uncontained or feels gratuitous, more harm can be done.

The workshop also revealed things about Kübler-Ross herself. She had an inner core of steel. I guess you had to, to manage that amount of raw pain, and some of her utterances felt chilling, reflecting an unyielding adherence to particular views about the “work” one had to do to process loss. In her Swiss-German accent, Kübler-Ross’s pronunciation of “work” came out at as “vurrk” – it felt like an instruction rather than a suggestion.

One anecdote she shared stays with me to this day.

She described her own mother as a very controlling person, unwilling and unable to accept and receive help. In her last months, her mother had had a stroke and was thus completely dependent on others. “This was her vurrk” said Elisabeth, somewhat ominously. Did I sense schadenfreude?

Ironically, she herself suffered a series of strokes in her old age and she reportedly expressed bitterness that her readiness to die was going unfulfilled.[3] While regarded as a pioneer in her work around death and dying, Kübler-Ross’s later years were also associated with increasing eccentricity: she became fascinated with near-death experiences and an advocate for people’s stories of seeing a shining light and familiar faces; and she fell under the spell of a psychic channeller in California. Subsequently she renounced the psychic, but had damaged her scientific reputation.

This essay is not an attempt to discredit Kübler-Ross: her own story is complex – her father was allegedly cruel as a parent, a visit to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland after the war left a lasting impression on her, and my recollection of her anecdote about her mother suggests unresolved feelings. In spite of, or because of, this history, she was able to humanise the dying person and her work contributed to the development of the hospice movement.

But it is worth considering if the unquestioned orthodoxy of Kübler-Ross’s stage theory offers an opportunity to revisit her ideas and suggests new ways of thinking about loss and our response to Covid-19.

An essay by Jesús Rodríguez Sánchez[4] offers some critique – this almost feels sacrilegious, but it is necessary: the loss stages are ubiquitous in Covid-19 analyses, which rely on popular notions which have become part of everyday language.

Firstly, while Kübler-Ross expanded her ideas over time and insisted the stages were not sequential, much of the early visual representation belied this. This speaks to a desire for explanatory order and patient classification: as a medical doctor and psychiatrist she would have absorbed some of the culture of biomedicine. And this order, once imposed on a patient, has clinical implications. I recall working in an HIV clinic in the late 1980s where a clinician said to me “this patient is in denial, you have to get him out of it today”. To him, the stages were mechanistic, inevitable and sequential. A person with HIV “in denial” was a danger to himself and others, and the counsellor was the mechanic of the brain who had to “fix” the problem.

As Sanchez’s essay notes, what this presents is the temptation to engineer the process of dying for patients: “our expectations become shaped by the progressivist philosophy in such way that the genuine experiences of dying are pre-empted by our sense of how people ought to die. The progressivist philosophy carries an implicit norm, such that we even feel an obligation to move the dying along – to get them through denial, anger, bargaining and depression to acceptance. We feel frustrated, cheated, or that we have failed if this does not happen. We become obsessed with the stages as normative protocol [and] we are treating dying as a technical problem.”

Furthermore, Sanchez’s essay notes the implicit valuing of the “good dying patient”, one who accepts death with serenity or calmness, as befits the stage of acceptance. There is neatness and an “aesthetics of death” which is favoured here: “a bias that makes [the] acceptance [stage] morally desirable, and places an obligation on health care professionals to realize it in their patients… the tranquil, accepting dying person causes no disturbances and is simple to manage.”

The aesthetic implications are thus: the model is an attempt at “tidiness”; to label and control the experience of the dying person. In the words of Larry Churchill (in Sanchez) “Far more important than any reservations we might have about the progressivist philosophy of dying or the achievement of an aesthetically pleasing death is the fact that the stages provide labels to place upon the dying person. The effect of the labels is to categorise and control – to manage not only the dying person (who is ‘out of control’ by Western technocratic standards), but to control the meaning of the experiences as well.”

Sanchez’s final critique is around scholarship – he notes seminal texts on dying which Kübler-Ross either did not know about or eschewed in favour of interviews with, and observations of, terminally ill people.[5] Of course rigorous in-depth observation is a powerful source of information and commonplace in qualitative research, but it is interesting that Kübler-Ross privileged her own observations over those of her predecessors.

As we sit today with the global Covid-19 phenomenon, observation is a key part of understanding not only the physiology of the virus but the social and political response to it. It is crucial to bolster these observations with other forms of evidence and enquiry: what do previous epidemics tell us, how do we understand regional and global variations, what do we know about human and social behaviour that can help us respond in ways which are helpful and tolerable?

We now think about loss, death and dying in orthodox ways, often neglecting to think about variables of belief system, age, race, culture, and historical period.  In the same way that Kübler-Ross’s work may have contributed to an aesthetics of dying – a “tranquil, accepting dying person causes no disturbances and is simple to manage” – I wonder if we are seeing the rise of a “Covid aesthetics”; the tranquil, accepting citizen who causes no disturbances and is simple to manage? The corollary of this is the restless, questioning citizen who is framed as “difficult”.

This good citizen accepts the loss of civil liberties and accepts the bona fides of the State, they go along with lockdown requirements, the orthodox view of an appropriate Covid response. I am not suggesting here that our response is the wrong one, but I am interested in the aesthetics of compliant citizenship. It would be an understatement to say that such compliance is breaking down. What if the excessive loss of life bred indifference, what if those who had nothing to lose feared short term starvation rather than a medium term and not inevitable death? What if we wanted a pleasing and ordered response from our citizenry to satisfy needs for control? What if this became an end in itself, morally desirable and normative? Anything else is unpatriotic, it might be said, not good for the collective.

In some ways the lockdown stages and our response to them (we are in denial that we have to go without for much longer; we are angry when we can buy winter pyjamas but not sleeping shorts; we try bargain with the state by saying “you can have your smokes but give us our alcohol”; we slump into the sofa when we realise nothing will ever be the same; and we reluctantly accept that there is nothing we can do against the power of the state) echo Kübler-Ross’s, they are a somewhat mechanistic view of a complex humanity. But they have failed to control the meanings we bring to this experience. It would be powerful, and I argue it is necessary, to deepen our understanding of these meanings.

[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-grief-in-the-age-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-4801931

[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/five-stages-of-grief-4175361

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/aug/31/mentalhealth.guardianobituaries

[4] http://kalathos.metro.inter.edu/kalathos_mag/publications/archivo7_vol1_no1.pdf

[5] : K.R. Eissler, The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient; Herman Feifel, The Meaning of Death; Robert Fulton, Death and Identity; Barney G. Glasser and Anselm L. Strauss, Awareness of Dying; Edwin S. Shneidman, Essays In Self-Destruction, and David Sudnow, Passing On.

CSA&GCSA&G

Locks Down and Quarantine Queens: Thoughts on Gender and Hair Fixation During a Global Pandemic

/in /by

By Gabriela Pinheiro

Introduction

Throughout the month of April 2020, a quick and random survey of various social media and online news platforms has revealed a curious trend. At this time, the rapid spreading of COVID-19 has resulted in a coronavirus pandemic, killing more than 100 000 people globally[1]. Most of the world’s citizens are now living in varying degrees of “lockdown” conditions, where there are stringent limitations to personal and social mobilities, and worldwide imperatives to #stay-at-home in order to #flatten-the-curve. Given these (somewhat-apocalyptic) circumstances, it has been interesting to observe that, alongside the aforementioned coronavirus-related hashtags, others are trending including: #quarantine-curls, #buzzcut-season, #home-haircut-fail, #don’t-try-this-at-home and #lockdown-before-and-after.

Explicit references to hair, and to hair-related anxieties specifically, have dominated online spaces and interactions during coronavirus quarantine. Especially considering the increasing number of daily virus-induced deaths, and the collective sense of uncertainty, fear and grief that people are experiencing, one questions the current fixation with hair. The significance of hair to human histories, identities, societies and relationships, however, means that its focalisation during times of crisis may reflect broader sociopolitical arrangements and patterns. In this paper, current hair fixations are explored in relation to wider connections between gender and other identity markers including race, class, age and geographical positioning; illustrating the centrality of human hair to everyday life. To facilitate the discussion, I offer brief analytic insights into a series of 15 Twitter posts (or ‘Tweets’) that feature language constructing relationships between hair and coronavirus conditions such as lockdown and/or quarantine[2].

A key feature of coronavirus lockdowns is the restriction of people’s movements, allowing the continued performance only of activities and services that have been deemed “essential”. In most countries, “essential” activities and services do not include routine visits to hair and beauty salons, and/or the consumption of some cosmetics products. However, in certain countries, like the United States of America (U.S.), higher-than-usual sales have recently been recorded for at-home hair dye because “in front of dimly-lit mirrors, people are shaving their heads or dyeing their hair” (Demopoulos, 2020). In New York City (one of the worst-affected cities in the world, where almost 20 000 people have died as a result of coronavirus infection[3]), some hair professionals have reported that their clients are expressing panic at not being able to have their regular hair treatments during the pandemic. According to journalists, some stylists are even resorting to making their clients’ colour formulas and delivering customised home-hair kits. These custom hair kits are reputed to cost as much as 75 U.S. Dollars (roughly 1400 South African Rand), and include step-by-step instructions with tutorials that are also being provided using virtual platforms such as FaceTime and YouTube (Landman, 2020). In this paper, I suggest that lockdown-induced fixations with hair are not random or coincidental, but reflective of broader hair politics that illustrate the social and psychological significance of hair in everyday life.

Hair Rules: The Social and Gendered Significance of Hair

For sociological and anthropological researchers (e.g. Alubafi, Ramphalile, & Rankoana, 2018; Lester, 2013; Synnott, 1987), the emotions and symbols that become attached to human hair (such as ‘panic’, for example) are indicative of the idea that hair, a seemingly-straightforward, biological attribute, is in fact laden with psychological, political and societal meaning. Hair is deeply-rooted (pun intended) in our personal and private sense of identity, but it is simultaneously a public, physical attribute that becomes imbued with connotations, stories, experiences and values. Hence, hair symbolism is complex and nuanced, and perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in gendered domains; where boundaries between personal and political spheres are contested and blurred: hair is private, but it is also exposed to public scrutiny. Moreover, whilst hair growth occurs all over the human body, particular hair ‘zones’ carry subtle ideological significance that appears to be based largely on Western heterosexual gendered stereotypes. The gendered politics of hair are organised and naturalised so that society’s expectations and scripts for male versus female hair are often opposite and contradictory (Synnott, 1987).

Culturally[4], heterosexual, binary definitions of masculinities and femininities suggest that men are generally less closely-identified with their hair, and perhaps more concerned with facial and chest hair as key markers of androgenic hormones and maleness. Typically, men are expected to keep their head hair short, uniform and ‘neat’. Norms prescribe that men should also have some facial hair, but they are generally not pressured to remove hair from other bodily zones[5]. Conversely, social expectations and standards are different for most women, who are generally socialised to identify more intimately with their head hair. Normatively, the worth that a woman encompasses seems to depend, to a considerable extent, on the length, texture and aesthetic quality of her head hair, but her value is also contingent on the absence of hair in other bodily zones such as the armpits, legs and pubis (Synnott, 1987). The immense social and gendered significance of hair is also supported by economic consumer patterns, where there is a considerable ‘grooming gap’ in the amount of time and money that women versus men spend on hair styling and products, and where the worth of the global haircare market is estimated at 90 billion U.S. Dollars (Isser, 2020). Feminist scholars and activists, including Audré Lorde and Germaine Greer, understand hair as a symbol of women’s gendered and sexual subjugation at the hands of patriarchal values. In relation to hair, Greer (1971) states:

I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room […] The rationale of depilation is crude. In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido. If they do not feel sufficient revulsion for their body hair themselves, others will direct them to depilate themselves. In extreme cases, women shave or pluck the pubic areas, so as to seem even more sexless and infantile. (pp. 38–61)

Greer (1971) constructs the patriarchal pressure for women to groom their head, face and body hair as unreasonable and uncomfortable. In the above statement, she highlights the manifestation of patriarchal gender codes in human hair practices, drawing clear parallels between norms for women’s sexualities and the hair prescriptions that are imposed by a codified, heterosexual society. Moreover, her words suggest that the routine hair grooming that she performs is not done because of personal choice and enjoyment. Masquerade, pretending, false and bought reinforce the sense of falsity and unnaturalness that she experiences when she engages in patriarchally-motivated hair practices, because these routines are invested in the gratification of external, societal pressure, and have little to do with her agency and personal choice as a woman. Greer (1971) also states that human hair is considered bestial, and that the qualities espoused by archetypal ‘beasts’ (aggression, acting on primal instincts and urges, assertiveness, action, etc.) are traditionally reserved for males only. These examples highlight the tension between private and public performances of hair and aesthetics, where many women feel obligated to express and present their bodies to the outer world in particular ways.

During the coronavirus pandemic, people on lockdown are spending considerable amounts of time in the privacy of their homes, as compared to their daily routines before the COVID-19 crisis began. On social media, many people’s posts have implied that the coronavirus lockdown/quarantine situation has provided a time to ‘let themselves go’ in terms of physical appearance and routine grooming practices. In line with what Greer (1971) and other feminist scholars have argued previously, this may be an indication of the idea that people (and women, in particular) adhere to traditional hair and grooming practices only because they are pressured to do so socially. In Tweet 1 (below), the Twitter user shows how dominant imaginings of human hair tend to associate its growth with bestiality, inhumanity, savagery, brutality and depravity. The user compares the ‘new’ presence and increased growth of people’s body hair (under lockdown conditions during the pandemic) to the untamed and non-anthropoid archetype of the werewolf. Interestingly, the increase in body hair is accompanied by changes to the size of people’s bodies in lockdown, illustrating how the presence of body hair is generally perceived as a symptom that someone has ‘let themselves go’ (and may therefore be ‘judged’) in physical appearance:

Tweet 1: @Roxi Horror (2020, April 7): when the quarantine ends, people may look a little different than they looked before. Remember not to judge anyone for the size of their body, any new body hair, the sharpness of their fangs, their new tail or how they howl when the moon comes out.

Other posts and interactions, illustrating the tension between private and public performances of gendered hair practices, have circulated widely on social media during the coronavirus pandemic. Aestheticians (especially in the U.S.) have reported that many female clients are anxious over growing body hair because they have to stay at home and cannot maintain their routine visits to beauty salons. In a recent news article (Demopoulos, 2020), one beauty professional stated: “We actually don’t recommend waxing at home, it’s potentially dangerous and the results will probably be disappointing. Why not go natural? It’s one less thing to deal with”. Particular aspects of this statement also support the sentiments expressed by Greer (1971). The beautician highlights the fact that when one is confined to the home (private) space, then it is more acceptable to ‘go natural’. The implication, in this instance, is that it would be unsightly and unpalatable to the public if a woman was to leave the home (private) space with normal body hair still visible. In the second portion of the statement, there is also evidence to suggest that, like Greer (1971), many women feel that routine beauty practices are burdening: something to ‘deal with’. It becomes clear that many of the beauty conventions and standards that we take for granted as normal and necessary are in fact societally-constructed and replete with sexist discourses about the way that a woman’s body should appear. During the coronavirus lockdown situation, we have been presented with a chance to reflect on the reasons why we engage in these conformist practices in the first place.

In Tweets 2, 3, 4 and 5 (below), the Twitter users show how societal rules for hair seem to be internalised so that the manipulation and control of our hair becomes more emblematic of gendered codes, and not so much a representation of personal choice. A series of analytic insights is offered below each of the posts:

Tweet 2: @readwithcindy (2020, April 8): when this quarantine is over I will be curious to see which hangs lower to the ground, my armpit hair or my saggy boobs.

In Tweet 2, the female user alludes to the fact that, because she is confined to the home space (‘quarantine’), she has been allowing her armpit hair to grow as it would naturally. Interestingly, the choice to let her armpit hair grow out is accompanied by a rejection of other gendered expectations that women encounter: in this case, the convention of wearing a bra. The implication is that her breasts will droop in the absence of their normative underwire support, and that they will hang down in the same vein as her newly-grown armpit hair. These transgressions of gendered hair norms are possible only because of ‘quarantine’ conditions, where remaining in the privacy of the home means that social expectations for hair need not be respected or fulfilled.

Tweet 3: @The Magnificent Cork (2020, April 7): I feel so sorry for women at the moment. Without their hair and nails done they actually look ridiculous. Honestly like, its lousy #lockdown.

In Tweet 3, the male user demonstrates patriarchal hair (and general grooming) expectations in action. He states that women ‘look ridiculous’ during the coronavirus lockdown because they are confined to their home spaces and thus cannot engage in routine beauty practices such as getting their ‘hair and nails done’. The user communicates his disapproval of women’s ungroomed and natural bodily states and condemns them with the word ‘lousy’. This post illustrates the patriarchal values that tend to underpin Western gendered hair norms and beauty standards: in order for women not to be ‘lousy’, or pitied by men, they should remain pristine in their physical condition at all times.

Tweet 4: @Maria Nabil (2020, April 8): Another good hair day wasted in quarantine…*blessing your timeline*.

Tweet 5: @clairequinn1352 (2020, April 13): My hair looks so good today and it is a travesty we are in quarantine.

In Tweets 4 and 5, the female users suggest that a ‘good hair day’ is ‘wasted’ in coronavirus ‘quarantine’, mainly because of the ‘travesty’ of having to stay inside without being able to show the public that their hair is groomed according to social standards and expectations. These sentiments suggest that what we do with our hair is not so much about personal choice, but about ensuring that we make good appearances in public and social realms of everyday life. These ideas are (re)articulated aptly by Juliet A. Williams, a gender studies professor from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who reiterates that the coronavirus pandemic has created an opportunity for people to think critically about their everyday conformity to gendered aesthetic expectations (Demopoulos, 2020):

For many people the crisis is the first time they’ve ever seriously considered [the question] ‘How would I choose to look if I didn’t have to worry about what other people think? You see a much wider spectrum of self-presentation. You see a rejection of gender stereotypes: long hair, short hair, grey hair. All of the things that we do to create the illusion that there is such a big difference in the way men and women look are being taken apart.

In Tweet 6 (below), the female user illustrates that coronavirus quarantine is a ‘no rules apply’ time for conventional gendered grooming and hair practices. She has to ‘hide’ the fact that she has chosen to go braless whilst engaging in the one-hour-long exercise/outside break that still applies in some countries on lockdown. The path is ‘well-populated’ and so she is forced to conceal the appearance and movement of her natural breasts in the absence of a bra. For her, coronavirus quarantine feels like a ‘no rules apply’ time. The rules to which she is referring are gendered, hence the references to her long hair and her decision to go braless (allowed only because it is quarantine). Tweet 6 thus reiterates the ideas expressed by Greer (1971) and Williams (2020), who suggest that the gendered codes for hair performance and expression are governed by patriarchal values, and that lockdown (a condition during which people do not venture out into the public eye) presents a unique historical moment for us to think critically about why we present our hair (and our bodies) in the ways that we do.

Tweet 6: @Fleurie (2020, April 8): using my hair to hide that I’m not wearing a bra was going well until I hit a strong headwind on a very well-populated walking path LOL why does quarantine feel like a general “no rules apply” time?

Connections between Gendered and Racial Identities in Global Hair Hierarchies

Gendered hair politics are further complicated by their intersections with geopolitical, racial and classed ideologies and positionings. Modern hair hierarchies are configured largely according to the systematic hegemony of conservative, white supremacist patriarchy (Alubafi et al., 2018). In the West, ideas from popular culture dictate that long, straight and shiny hair is irrefutably feminine, sexy and valuable. These hair standards are typified in the stereotypical performances of Caucasian femininity that abound in Western popular culture and media, which are replete with gendered hair mythologies including Rapunzel, Mary Magdalene and Lady Godiva. Gendered and racialised tropes that involve hair are also popular, including the all-too-familiar Dumb Blonde woman and the Tall, Dark and Handsome man. The Dumb Blonde trope is particularly visible in the collective consciousness of white, patriarchal Americans: innocent, passive, void of intellect, seductive, air-headed, youthful (but sexually experienced and experimental) and coquettish, the Dumb Blonde trope is epitomised in both fictional and non-fictional figures like Marylin Monroe, Grace Kelly, Elle Woods and Britney Spears (Horn, 1979, as cited in Synnott, 1987). In contemporary hair politics, the rise of tropes like the ‘Karen’ (Can I Speak to the Manager?) haircut also illustrate some of the ways in which white, middle-aged women who do not have long and ‘youthful’ air are constructed as slightly ‘butch’ and as ‘ball-busters’ (Rennex, 2019).

The connections between hair, gender and politics are becoming ever-clearer during the coronavirus pandemic. In the U.S., Ainsley Erhardt (a talk show host on U.S. President Donald Trump’s favourite conservative-leaning morning show, Fox and Friends) expressed concern about how women in America were going to get their hair and nails done in the context of social distancing and lockdowns: “All my friends are saying, you know, this is not a priority — people are dying and I realize that…but they can’t get their nails done,” she said. Shortly thereafter, social media users responded with critiques that her statement and the concerns she was expressing presented as a “perfect distillation of Trump Republicanism” and “rich white lady problems”. At the time of writing, the U.S. had more than 76 000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and a total of 849 recorded deaths, which begged the question: how legitimate are concerns about our physical appearance given our current circumstances and especially the knowledge that people are dying daily? (The News, 2020). Perhaps hair fixation by politicians and popular media figures illustrates the West’s tendency to focalise ‘rich white lady problems’ at the expense of devoting attention to issues of substance and urgency.

The same anti-feminist, conservative patriarchy is internalised by other anti-feminist women: Marabel Morgan (1975, p. 114, as cited in Synnott, 1987), for example, offered the following advice on how a woman should greet her husband on his return from work (the assumption being that she does not work outside of the house): “Greet him at the door with your hair shining, your beautifully made-up face radiant, your outfit sharp and snappy…. Take a few moments for that bubble-bath…. Remove all prickly hairs and be squeaky-clean from head to toe. Be touchable and kissable”.

Owing to their dominance of global hair hierarchies, and because they find their roots in decades of racist and oppressive histories, hegemonic ideas about hair are entangled intimately with the privileges afforded by Western white patriarchy (historically and contemporarily). Hence, it is possible to view hair as a corporeal artefact that (re)produces derogatory discourses about blackness, and about black women in particular. The politics of gender, hair and race have been shaped by the early (and enduring) racist influences of colonialism and slavery. As systematic forms of oppression and exploitation, colonialism and slavery catalysed the erasure of positive ideas about natural African hair, predominantly through the exportation of Africans to the West in the slave trade. In colonial America, white slave owners characterised African hair textures as “woolly” and favoured black women with straighter hair and lighter skin for ‘employment’ as personal house slaves; whilst those black women with kinkier hair and darker complexions were confined to work in the cotton fields (Nyamnjoh & Fuh, 2014, as cited in Alubafi et al., 2018). Chigumadzi (2016) found that black people living in Brazil and the Caribbean have shared hair stories, because in the American experience, a woman with ‘good hair’ is a woman with long, shiny and straight hair. In the neo-colonial period, where white patriarchy and cultural imperialism persist, many ideas about black people’s hair continue to be informed largely by two colonial misconceptions in particular: that natural black hair is dirty or unsanitary, and that natural black hair does not grow. To elaborate on the ways in which these gendered and colonial rules continue to play out in modern hair hierarchies, Mokoena (2016, as cited in Alubafi et al., 2018) notes that:

Many black women who wear weaves and relax their hair will explain their choice by either saying that their natural hair is unmanageable or that natural hair is dirty. This is one of the most enduring stereotypes about black hair. People will even cite the anecdotal evidence that Bob Marley’s dreads had 47 different types of lice when he died. These are urban legends of the worst kind because they perpetuate the stereotype that only black hair attracts lice, and other vermin, which is scientifically untrue.

In South Africa, with its history of colonial rule, apartheid machinery employed the same discursive strategies and racist tactics to divide people on the basis of particular aesthetic features and supposed ‘biological’ differences. In this context, hair was one of the most visible and public indicators of race, second only to skin colour. It is no secret that, in the name of ‘science’ (eugenics), the apartheid government institutionalised invalid and racist measures such as the ‘pencil hair test’ in order to classify South Africans as either ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ (black, mixed race or Indian) (Chigumadzi, 2016). Black women’s hair thus became (and remains presently) one of the most highly-contested aesthetic practices in the South African imagination (Alubafi et al., 2016; Chigumadzi, 2016). Racial slurs to describe African versus Caucasian hair textures were (and are still) propagated through polarising vocabularies such as kroes-hare (meaning ‘kinky’ hair) versus lekker-hare (meaning ‘nice’ hair). These vocabularies illustrate how “distinctions of aesthetic value – beautiful and ugly – have always been central to the way racism divides the world into binary oppositions in its application of human worth” (Mercer, 1987, p. 35). In the post-apartheid era, hair politics and his(hair)stories continue to exert a profound influence in shaping many black women’s perceptions of themselves and also their relationships with their bodies; especially in relation to an ostensibly superior (and ‘more beautiful’) white other (Alubafi et al., 2018).

The interconnections between hair and race are also evident in the biologising and totalising racist discourses that continue to (re)appear in everyday talk and interaction around black women’s hair. In a recent study by Alubafi et al (2018), black women living in Tshwane (Pretoria) noted that ‘good hair’ is still largely understood to mean ‘white hair’ (sleek, long and straight).  Moreover, many black women express feelings of frustration and humiliation when white people ask if it would be okay to touch their afros; that these requests from white people are inappropriate and serve only to reproduce racist ideas about which types of head hair are (ab)normal (Gassam, 2020). In these everyday interactions, a particular kind of relational and power dynamic (re)emerges, where whiteness has voyeuristic privilege, and blackness is exhibited purely to satiate white consumption, fascination, entertainment and pleasure.

One is reminded in this instance of historical figures such as Saartjie Baartman (see, e.g. Catanese, 2010). However, one also need not look very far in order to encounter contemporary illustrations of the same corporeal violences (central to which are questions relating to human hair). In the sphere of modern sport, for example, racist/sexist hair politics manifest in the ‘scientific’ (read: humiliating and discriminatory) measures that are sometimes used to evaluate women athletes; especially those who are not white. Dutee Chand is an Indian athlete who identifies as a woman, but she was recently suspected of having high levels of androgens (male hormones) and was thus subjected to a series of ‘sex verification tests’: one of which entailed the measuring of her pubic hair; the length of which was then recorded and graded according to a five-grade scale (Padawer, 2016). Similar procedures were conducted on the body of South African athlete, Caster Semenya, whose case demonstrates another example of intersectional identity discrimination (along gendered and racial axes) at the hands of conservative white patriarchy in the sporting arena (North, 2019).

Moreover, South Africa’s current education system also reveals how historical racism and sexism endure in contemporary hair politics: a case in point is exemplified by the August 2016 incident at Pretoria High School for Girls, where administration insisted that black female learners straighten their hair in order for it to adhere to the school’s code of conduct (which stipulated that girls’ hair should be ‘neat’ and ‘tidy’). These examples reflect how human hair remains fundamental to the maintenance of historical racist/misogynistic policies, and how the complex image of black hair is fraught with historic emblems of black people’s purported inferiority (Alubafi et al., 2018). Whilst many white women endure (re)articulations of sexist oppression in patriarchal matrices, it seems that “the racial implications of hair texture [and hair in general] take on added significance for black women, given the central role accorded to hair in racialized constructions of femininity and female beauty” (Caldwell, 2003, p. 18).

In Tweet 7 (below), the male Twitter user makes references to black women and the hair and grooming practices to which they must normally conform. The reference to race is made explicit through his use of the word ‘nigga’. This word is a variant of the word ‘nigger’, which has a particular history that finds its origins as a racist slur used by white people against black people in the mid-1800s. However, the term, and black people’s use of the term, have evolved to take on new meanings. One new way in which black people employ the term ‘nigga’ is colloquial, to refer to other black people in casual conversation and as a reclamation of the term as part of a positive and collective identity (see, e.g. Rahman, 2012). In Tweet 7, the black male user is referring to the ‘niggas’ (boyfriends or partners) of black women, whom he references through the word ‘ladies’ and the inclusion of a photo of a stylish black woman. In the Tweet, he suggests that quarantine is a time where black women are unable to adhere to conventional beauty standards, implying that as soon as the coronavirus pandemic is over, these women will hurry back to beauty salons to receive their usual beauty treatments. He also suggests that, in order to have sex with (or ‘give it up’ to) their ‘niggas’ (from whom they have been separated because of coronavirus lockdown), these women will need to first make sure that they adhere to gendered codes for grooming: they should be ‘fully waxed’, their nails should be done and their head hair should also be properly groomed:

Tweet 7: @B. (2020, April 8): Ladies first day out of quarantine on the way to their nigga house fully waxed, nails & hair done and ready to give it UP [photograph of stylish black woman].

Gender, Age and Hair in the Western Imagination: to Go Grey or to Die?

In Western aesthetics, there is also a clear interplay between hair, gender and the identity marker of age; where Western standards of beauty show an obsessive reverence towards youth and its preservation, and a complementary devaluing of age and elderliness. Synnott (1987) notes that grey hair is often one of the first physical and public signs of human mortality, and that grey hairs (and ageing) are often concealed through conventional dyeing practices. However, where grey hair and ageing are concerned, there is also a (gendered) double standard in most youth-focused, Western settings: for women, greying hair is generally perceived negatively, as a sign of aging: there is a loss of youthful characteristics (including women’s ‘crowning glory’) that make femininity intelligible and seductive to patriarchal masculinities.

For most Western men, however, greying hair is often regarded as ‘distinguished’; hence, the old adage: men age like fine wine, but women age like milk. The metaphorical ‘souring’ of women as they age, common in Western framings of beauty and gender, alludes to the double standards characterising gender codifications and aesthetic rules. The constraining effects of these rules featured prominently in a 1983 scandal, where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration admitted that hair dye may cause cancer, and many female consumers of Clairol’s hair dye said that they would rather die than ‘turn grey’ (Banner, 1983, as cited in Synnott, 1987). In Tweet 8 (below), it is evident that coronavirus conditions, such as ‘self-quarantine’ mean that people (and women, in particular) can get away with foregoing their usual beauty and hair colouring routines because they are not going to be seen by anybody. The female Twitter user places ‘without a bra or makeup’ next to ‘growing out your grey hair’ and this syntax shows that gender rules for hair have become somewhat relaxed whilst women are confined to their homes during a period of time when public appearances do not matter to the same degree as they would normally:

Tweet 8: @paget_brewster (2020, April 8): maybe during self-quarantine, you do a little touch up on interior house painting, without a bra or makeup, while growing out your grey hair…

Re/rou(o)ting His(hair)stories: Hair as Resistance

Human hair is very often the site of interwoven discriminatory politics, but it is also a battleground for people’s resistance to societal conventions: hence, it is far from neutral, but rather highly-ambivalent and contested. Historically, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of 1950s-60s America were underpinned by aesthetic ideologies and practices that encouraged black people to reclaim their natural styles, and the afro was glorified with the slogan Black is Beautiful (Synnott, 1987). As a parallel to these bodily and hair-related modes of resistance, the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement in apartheid South Africa meant that black people started to reject the primacy of white beauty rules, drawing attention instead to political blackness, and to black power, through their hair choices: as a key part of their rebellion against racial and gendered configurations, many black South Africans wore afros and other natural styles in order to symbolise a return to themselves, and a collective reframing of negative ideas about black physicality and black bodies (Biko, 2004, as cited in Alubafi et al., 2018). Furthermore, some black women in the recent study by Alubafi et al (2018) expressed that their hair still serves as a contested, ambivalent and dynamic part of their daily aesthetic lives and routines, including the resistance of pre-1994 hair imagery: importantly, they emphasised that South African black women who straighten their hair, or wear wigs and extensions, are not simply imitating their white counterparts, but that the free adoption of different styles (some of which were previously thought to be owned and worn exclusively by white women) forms a core part of the liberation of black people and black hair.

In the present era of hair and gender, the continued and gradual dismantling of dominant hair hierarchies is evident. Through their hair adornment and style choices, many black women in South Africa are gradually disrupting racist and sexist his(hair)stories, as was especially publicised and highlighted in the protest by Pretoria High School for Girls learners following the 2016 incident at their school (Alubafi et al., 2018; Chigumadzi, 2016). It is also positive to see that people’s questioning of normative hair conventions is occurring in creative domains, through film and other media. In 2020, for example, Matthew Cherry’s Hair Love was awarded an Oscar upon being recognised as the best animated short film of the season. The film has been hailed as a celebration of representation, and of a young black girl’s journey of self (and hair) acceptance (McKenzie, 2020). These forms of resistance allude to the subtle, but powerful capacities for hair to tackle and neutralise aesthetic and socio-political hegemonies in the context of global race/gender arrangements.

Other forms of hair protest include those witnessed in social movements such as the Hippie and Punk movements (Synnott, 1987), and in the growing refusal by many women to remove their body hair and/or to keep their head hair long. Within LGBTQIA+[6] and drag scenes, performance artists such as Conchita Wurst (who wears a beard) have also made significant contributions to hair resistance (Tallie, 2014). The increasing prevalence of women’s unshaven armpits, and the growing popularity of women’s buzzcuts, show how feminine shame has started to become feminist (‘crowning’) glory (Lester, 2013). During coronavirus conditions, such as lockdown and quarantine, more and more people seem to be questioning the hair practices in which they engage on a daily basis. One might argue, then, that the global pandemic has offered an opportunity for critical thought and reflection around mainstream hair norms (in relation to gender, race and other identity markers) and that the ‘letting go’ of convention might alter and (re)shape the ways in which we think about aesthetics in the post-coronavirus era.

The Psychosomatics of Hair: Loss, Locks and Life Transitions

Psychosomatically, the gendered nuances of hair are also visible, straddling both private and public spaces: In one study (Synnott, 1987, p. 383), the following was expressed by a woman who had lost all of her hair through radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer: “When you lose your hair, you feel like you have nothing to live for […] a girl just isn’t a girl without her hair”. Her sentiments and ‘feelings’ allude to the centrality of hair as a core part of her sense of self as a legitimate and worthy woman in society. Moreover, the level of pain that she experiences in relation to the loss of her hair is comparable to the grief and emptiness that is typically associated with death and mourning. According to some psychologists (see, e.g. Radin, 2019), the urge to cut one’s hair during periods of grief can be likened to shedding a layer of skin; a way to rid the Self physically of difficult emotions and experiences.

The gendered connections between grief and hair are observable across numerous cultures, where head hair among Punjabi women, for example, symbolises life and vitality and is thus left dishevelled and unwashed during the mourning of husbands (Herschman, 1974, as cited in Hirschman, n.d.). The female Twitter user who posted Tweet 9 (below) uses a simile device to show how coronavirus quarantine compares to the feelings associated with a breakup. The loss of normalcy and routine that happens during quarantine is likened to the loss of an intimate partner, and feelings including ‘sadness’ and longings for ‘revenge’ are expressed. Interestingly, the ‘revenge bod’ is polarised with the image of being ‘sad as shit and eating everything you can find, binge watching shit tv’, which shows how people’s personal and private aesthetic performances are different in private and public domains. The ‘revenge bod’ is usually created for the purpose of showing one’s ex what they are missing, and so again this communicates the idea that gendered bodily practices are largely maintained by external pressures that women feel. This is the case both during quarantine and during a breakup. The ‘chopping’ of this user’s hair is mentioned in relation to the feelings of loss, sadness and yearning for normalcy that characterise periods of grief and mourning:

Tweet 9: @Kristen Leanne (2020, April 6): Quarantine is like a breakup: one day you’re fucking sad as shit and eating everything you can find, binge watching shit tv. Next day you wanna work out and get that revenge bod…then you wanna chop your hair off and colour it [crying emoji].

Many women who have experienced other types of trauma also express desires to cut their hair or even to shave it off entirely. In popular culture, examples of this are represented in film and other media. In the 1988 film, The Accused, the protagonist decides to cut her hair into a very short style after she is gangraped and discovers that her rapists have not been found guilty (Radin, 2019). This is also evident in Tweet 10 (below), where the female Twitter user constructs cutting one’s hair during quarantine as something inevitable (‘when you cut your own hair’). The cutting of the hair is cathartic because the experience of being in quarantine is traumatic. This is likened to the gendered tropes that are common in films and other media:

Tweet 10: @CamGurrrl (2020, April 13): When you cut your own hair in quarantine pretend to be a female character who’s gone through a significant and/or traumatic event, and now has her spontaneous, tearful, cathartic haircutting scene scored by rousing music.

Another, highly-publicised and notorious example can be identified in the case of Britney Spears, who, in 2007, (in)famously shaved her own head whilst in the midst of personal trauma involving a war with the American media, a divorce, substance abuse and mental health difficulties. After years of alienation and torment as a puppet of American popular culture and media, Spears later explained that the notorious head-shave symbolised a reclamation of her personal identity and individuality, but also a physical way in which to handle the emotional pain that she was experiencing. Having been sexualised from a very young age Britney used the buzzcut moment as a mode of defiance and resistance against stigmas surrounding gender and mental health (Morrish, 2017):

She seemed to be trying, with befuddled brilliance, to tell the truth. She recoiled from celebrity culture by mortifying her own flesh. She stripped herself, publicly, of her sexuality. She presented herself as grotesque. Her mortification of the flesh at 25 is just the latest example of how bizarrely-troubling American society finds the female body.

Coronavirus lockdown/quarantine periods are also periods of transition and change, involving considerable stress and anxiety for many people. The psychological and affectual impact of this situation may be expressed through people’s decisions to change their hair or modify their physical appearance in other ways. For the remainder of the tweets (below), brief analytic comments are provided that illustrate this.

Tweet 11: @Krestamir (2020, April 6): new piercings and hair color after this quarantine [tongue emoji]

There is the implication of a transitory period for the user. She is going to have these bodily procedures performed after quarantine, showing that she will be coming out of a difficult time in her life. The tongue emoji is a performative way of communicating a particular message or emotion.

Tweet 12: @Jo (2020, Apr 8): The worst part about this quarantine is that I can’t dispel my manic energy in negative ways. No tattoos/piercings, no dyeing my hair, no impulse buying, no going to the Pub and ordering everyone shots of Jameson. What am I supposed to do? Hike? Read? Meditate? Fucksakes.

Dyeing one’s hair is constructed as a way to ‘dispel [her] manic energy’. This female user is manic because of the quarantine. Other maladaptive or destructive (‘negative’) activities or coping mechanisms are mentioned, symbolizing that cutting one’s hair is something that we often do when we are not coping. This suggests that quarantine and coronavirus pandemic are difficult to handle. There is also the polarization of healthy coping mechanisms with unhealthy ones…in society’s view, drinking, dyeing your hair, buying things impulsively and getting body modifications like piercings or tattoos are considered unhealthy. The healthy mechanisms involve hiking, reading and meditating. ‘Fucksakes’ expresses anger and exasperation.

Tweet 13: @kj (2020, April 6): btw I dyed my hair like…the 2nd day of quarantine I am not stable lmao.

Tweet 14: @emo_mom (2020, April 6): this quarantine put y’all in the same mental state you were in when you were 13, that’s why you’re listening to your “emo throwbacks” playlist and dyeing your hair

Tweet 15: @Tallulah (2020, April 4): quarantine made me do it. Instead of having a meltdown, I dyed my hair.

Evidently, hair is laden with psychology and affect: one makes changes (like cutting and/or dyeing) the hair during times of ‘instability’ (like coronavirus lockdown/quarantine conditions). In Tweet 13, the ‘lmao’ stands for ‘laughing my ass off’ and could signal the idea that the female user finds the quarantine situation absurd. In Tweet 14, the female user refers to the ‘emo’ trope, which is known to emphasise emotional expression and is usually typified by reverse mullet and jet-black or rainbow-hued hairstyles. The reference to this trope suggests that quarantine has initiated a ‘mental state’ that is highly emotional. Finally, in Tweet 15, these sentiments and ideas are reinforced: the female user cites ‘quarantine’ as the reason for a ‘meltdown’ (emotional instability) and goes on to mention changes that she has made to her hair instead.

Conclusions

In this paper, a series of tweets (posted during the month of April 2020, in the context of coronavirus lockdown/quarantine conditions during the global pandemic) was analysed thematically, and the analytic insights were connected to broader theory around hair politics to show that hair is significant to people in ways that are personal, emotional, psychological, social, spiritual, historical, political, economical and sexual. The ideological effects of hair are particularly evident during the global pandemic, which has presented us with an opportunity to reflect critically on the reasons, values and ideas that underpin our daily adherence to (mainly Western) aesthetic conventions. Expressed through social media platforms such as Twitter, quarantine-related hair fixations and anxieties reveal the affectual and political intricacies with which hair is imbued.

References

Alubafi, M. F., Ramphalile, M., & Rankoana, A. S. (2018). The shifting image of black women’s hair in Tshwane (Pretoria), South Africa. Cogent Social Sciences, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2018.1471184

Caldwell, K. L. (2003). “Look at her hair”: The body politics of black womanhood in Brazil. Transforming Anthropology, 11(2), 18–29. doi: 10.1525/tran.2003.11.issue-2.

Catanese, B. W. (2010). Remembering Saartjie Baartman. Atlantic Studies, 7(1), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810903515592

Chigumadzi, P. (2016, October 5). White schools versus black hair in post-apartheid South Africa. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/opinion/white-schools-vs-black-hair-in-post-apartheid-south-africa.html.

Demopoulos, A. (2020, April 4). Shave it, dye it, or grow it out: there are no rules for quarantine hair. Daily Blast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/there-are-no-rules-for-quarantine-hair-so-shave-it-dye-it-or-grow-it-out.

Foley, K.E. (2017, June 11). It’s totally normal—and maybe even useful—to cut off

all your hair to deal with loss. Quartz. https://qz.com/1002590/its-totally-normal-and-maybe-even-useful-to-cut-off-all-your-hair-to-deal-with-loss/.

Fox News sparks a firestorm by talking hair, nails during global pandemic. (2020, April 8). The News. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from: https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/635330-fox-news-sparks-a-firestorm-by-voicing-concern-on-hair-and-nail-during-pandemic.

Gassam, J. (2020, January 8). Stop asking black people if you can touch their hair. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/01/08/stop-asking-black-people-if-you-can-touch-their-hair/#3cf5ffa350a7

Greer, G. (1971). The Female Eunuch. Paladin Books.

Hirschman, E. C. (n.d.). Hair as Attribute, Hair as Symbol, Hair as Self. 13.

Isser, M. (2020, January 5). The grooming gap: What “looking the part” costs women. Salon.com. https://www.salon.com/2020/01/05/the-grooming-gap-what-looking-the-part-costs-women_partner/.

Landman, B. (2020, March 20). People are freaking out about having bad hair during coronavirus quarantine. NY Post. https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/people-are-freaking-out-about-having-bad-hair-during-coronavirus-quarantine/.

Lester, N. A. (2013). The Why and the Where of Hair. The Lion and the Unicorn, 37(2), v–xvi. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2013.0018

McKenzie, J.P. (2020, February 10). Watch Matthew Cherry’s Oscar-winning short film Hair Love: it made history on Kickstarter. The Oprah Magazine. https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a30755213/matthew-cherry-hair-love-short-film-oscars-2020/.

Mercer, K. (1987). Black hairstyle politics. New Formations, 3, 33–54.

Morrish, L. (2017, February 17). What Britney’s head shave can teach us about mental health 10 years on. Konbini. https://www.konbini.com/en/lifestyle/britney-head-shave-mental-health-10-years/.

North, A. (2019, May 3). “I am a woman and I am fast”: What Caster Semenya’s story says about gender and race in sports. Vox. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/5/3/18526723/caster-semenya-800-gender-race-intersex-athletes

Padawer, R. (2016, July 15). Indian Dutee Chand, set to run in the Olympics, has been humiliated by sex-testing. New York Times. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/indian-dutee-chand-set-to-run-in-the-olympics-has-been-humiliated-by-sextesting-20160704-gpyeat.html.

Plantive, C. (2020, April 8). To cut or not to cut? in U.S., quarantine slows everything but hair growth. South Cape Forum. https://www.suidkaapforum.com/News/Article/International/to-cut-or-not-to-cut-in-us-quarantine-slows-everything-but-hair-growth-202004080837.

Radin, S. (2019, March 26). We asked a psychologist and hairdresser why haircuts are so emotional. Dazed Digital. https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/article/43790/1/psychologist-drastic-haircuts-emotion.

Rahman, J. (2012). The N Word: Its History and Use in the African American Community. Journal of English Linguistics – J ENGL LINGUIST, 40, 137–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424211414807

Rennex, M. (2019, December 16). Junk Explained: Who And What Is A “Karen”? Junkee. https://junkee.com/karen-explainer/234989

Synnott, A. (1987). Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair. The British Journal of Sociology, 38(3), 381. https://doi.org/10.2307/590695.

Tallie, T.J. (2014, May 19). Hirsute Phoenix: Conchita Wurst, Beards, and the Politics of Sexuality. Notches. http://notchesblog.com/2014/05/19/hirsute-phoenix-conchita-wurst-beards-and-the-politics-of-sexuality/.

Waldstein, A. (2016). Studying the Body in Rastafari Rituals: Spirituality, Embodiment and Ethnographic Knowledge. Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, 2(71).

About the author

Gabriela Pinheiro is a critical social and psychological researcher. Gabriela joined the CSA&G in 2020 where she manages the Gender Justice Project in collaboration with the Irish Embassy and is also involved with other ongoing work in the CSA&G. She completed her Master’s in Research Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand and interned at the UNISA Institute for Social and Health Sciences. Her research background includes work in the South African Higher Education sector and community engagement. She has particular interest in the study of critical social psychologies, genders and sexualities, and student health/wellbeing.

Footnotes

[1] At the time of writing. For updated statistics and further information, visit: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/.

[2] These Tweets were selected randomly. Using the Twitter application, the recent Tweets were filtered to show those from April 2020, before typing the following keywords into the search bar: coronavirus hair, quarantine hair and lockdown hair. This is just a small collection of Tweets related to coronavirus and hair, and an array of others can be viewed on Twitter: https://twitter.com/explore.

[3] At the time of writing. For updated statistics and further information, visit: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/.

[4] I refer in this instance to hegemonic Western standards and cultures of beauty. It is important to recognise the heterogeneity and plurality within and between different cultures when contemplating the politics of hair and beauty. In Rastafarian culture, for example, many men choose to wear their head hair long (and/or in dreadlock styles) because they believe that this is where their strength lies. This example alludes to the dynamic nature of hair politics across and within different cultural groupings (see, e.g. Waldstein, 2016). Gendered hair norms are also contested and resisted – this is discussed in later sections of this paper.

[5] There are exceptions to this uniformity, even within dominant Western beauty cultures. If we think about sport, for example, many male athletes choose to remove body hair because the practice is perceived to enhance physical performance. This alludes, again, to the plurality of hair expression by different people, even when they are see as falling within a particular group or culture.

[6] Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and allies

Just LeadersCSA&G

Social distancing and privilege – looking at Covid-19 through an intersectional lens

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by Vickashnee Nair

I sit alone on my couch in the quiet and warm flat that I share with my partner.

The roads are quiet, except for the occasional truck that delivers goods to the shopping complex adjacent to where we live. Sometimes a car darts by and the sound of rain patters down to remind me that Mother Nature continues to do her work. Otherwise, this small suburb in Randburg is still.

As I sit and ponder this, I am aware of how many privileges and luxuries this illuminates. There is food in my fridge, we are able to afford this flat, I can live with my partner, and we both have cars in order to get food or healthcare if we need to. We both have enough space to work, we both have working Wi-Fi and laptops, and we have the means to see this out through steady incomes, which we get from jobs that allow us to work from home. Also we have social support through our families, friends and colleagues, and I am able to afford Zoom sessions with my psychologist every week.

Yet these privileges are often not thought of consciously as they lie beneath the surface of many people’s lives. Because these are our lived experiences and realities, we can purport to know them. But when it comes to the realities of other people, people who are not as privileged, people who are oppressed even, we can be out of touch. To get in touch we need to imagine, to be mindful, and to empathize.

As news reports flood in of other areas, especially in what are termed ‘townships’, I have noticed the narratives and images that have emerged. How some are not able to social distance due to lack of space in their homes, lines outsides offices to collect grants, people loitering in the streets, clashes with police and the SANDF, and limited or no access to finances as many rely on unsteady or unreliable employment.

Not just townships feature in these narratives, but Johannesburg city spaces too, where the familiar white, blue and gold of police vehicles features in videos uploaded to social media and the news. Images and videos of violence between citizens and police flash past my eyes and I find myself unnerved by this.

All of these news reports have made it plainly clear to me the disparities between communities’ experiences of this global pandemic. I have seen people stockpile their trollies and empty shelves, disobey orders to go jogging or walk their dogs, and work from office spaces with multiple monitors,  visiting well stocked fridges and making bread from recipes on Instagram. These speak to those in more affluent and privileged communities. The lockdown has had some effect there, but many are still able to function in relative comfort.

However, I think of those who live in small spaces with large families, who won’t get any income this month besides the grant of an elderly member. I think of how hand sanitizer is something you have seen before as a luxury not a necessity, and how you are only able to buy a basket of groceries from bare shelves to sustain you and your family throughout the next month.

The pandemic affects everyone, but not in the same way.

I refer here to intersectionality. This is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw to explain the varying identities that exist within one person. She highlights how an individual might experience forms of oppression or privilege based on these varying identities (Dhamoon, 2011). These identity factors include race, class, gender, sexual orientation, gender, and many others.

So one individual might simultaneously experience privilege and oppression. For example, I am an Indian, female, middle class, tertiary educated, queer, and cisgender individual. Now on some of those identity markers I am privileged, through being middle class, tertiary educated, and cisgender. On others markers I experience oppression or lack of privilege, through being a woman, Indian, and queer. These aspects have historically brought oppression, discrimination and sometimes even violence. So privilege and oppression work together in complex ways, ways which are unique to each person.

As a result of this, each of us experiences and views this pandemic differently and in such multifaceted ways: intersectionality is a lens through which others see us and a lens through which we see the world. It would thus be counterintuitive to generalize about communities and make assumptions about people based on what one is able to discern on the surface. Even I am guilty of this, as what I write is based on what I have discerned through news reports and articles on different communities. My lenses not only inform which article I choose to draw on, but which articles I even see. We are all guilty of this; we reveal our “positionality”. Of course we try to unlearn what society has molded us to be and we think (or should think!) about our lives, positions and biases every day. This unlearning process is painful and hard. We have to challenge our misconceptions and our lack of self-awareness every day and in every interaction.

This is so telling now when we are surrounded and engulfed by fake news, WhatsApp messages, viral videos, and news reports around Covid-19 and its impact upon humans. We need to be mindful and aware. But this is not enough, we need to channel this into action. We need to reflect, speak about and discuss this, we need to challenge, mindfully. We should be respectful of others, not make assumptions, and share with others and not stockpile for ourselves.

It is within our own intersectional selves that we find such complexities; humans are nuanced and tricky, and yet this is what makes us fascinating.

It is in these discrepancies, privileges and oppressions that we find tensions. We cannot assume a lack of information or education means people act in a particular way; there are always other factors at play, such as communal and cultural factors. From my outsider experiences of townships, they seem to be hubs of social activity, entrepreneurship, bonding, togetherness, sense of community, philanthropy, kindness, and liveliness. There are taxis, cars and people everywhere, filling the roads and streets with life. This is the everyday experience of South Africans and when a nationwide lockdown is announced, of course this will make the transition incredibly difficult for many.

That is what has made this entire process difficult. We have had to go from a communal, social and bustling society, to a completely quiet, ghostly country, where we can only exist in the smaller spaces of our homes. This has been a dramatic and painful shift. For everyone in different ways. Even for those who have to work, their lives have been impacted in drastic ways. They have to work harder and more carefully, they live with anxieties of leaving their homes and with possibly being infected.

There is an unease as well as an eerie calm in the country. But this does not mean that we should play into and fall prey to it. We need to be proactive and reflective. It is not enough to simply acknowledge difference, but we need to build awareness of the consequences of difference, and make this part of our everyday lives.

References

Dhamoon, R.K., 2011. Considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality. Political Research Quarterly, 64(1), pp.230-243.

My name is Vickashnee Nair and I am a 26-year-old Indian female originally born in Lenasia. I joined CSA&G as a researcher for the Just Leadership Programme in 2020. I have completed my Masters in Community Based Counselling Psychology through the University of Witwatersrand and I am working towards becoming a registered Counselling Psychologist. My interests include sexualities, gender, mental health, community and health psychology, and race. I have had experiences working in therapy and assessment in various communities, including the student population.

CSA&GCSA&G

Shame on you, shame on me: a pandemic of shame

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by Pierre Brouard

More than ever, as we grapple with a virus which is causing so much fear, shame is a key tool for social control, and an often dangerous one.

This was certainly true for the Polish professor with Covid-19, Wojciech Rokita.[1] Rumours had spread – both online and in local media – that 54-year-old Rokita had not complied with his quarantine and had visited a car showroom after being diagnosed. A lawyer representing Rokita’s family said the professor had not violated his quarantine, and had taken his own life as a result of the “wave of hate” he faced online. In a similar vein, there have been reports of increased suicides in France, of people scared of Covid-19 but also scared that they had infected others.

Shame is a social dance. The shamed and the shamer are bound together in an interlocking rhythm: to experience shame you must know that, one way or another, you have transgressed the social order. To shame another you must be a vigilant observer of that very same social order, and of the transgressor. They need each for the dance to stay in rhythm.

Shame is highly emotive: whether you are the shamed or the shamer you can be sure that you will experience an intense flush of emotion: humiliation in the shamed, hubris in the shamer.

The Dutch sociologist, Johan Goudsblom,[2] notes how shame has almost universal manifestation in human beings: “involuntary bodily changes – the most spectacular of which is blushing – and a number of behavioural reactions such as hiding one’s face behind one’s hand, or bowing one’s head down, which may be highly spontaneous, but which are also susceptible to learning, controlling, ritualising.” [3]

More of shame as ritual later.

Not only have we all been there, “in shameland” as Goudsblom calls it, but we will carry the memories of it as long as we live. Sometimes a memory of shame can evoke the same feelings of many years ago. Every now and again I recall an experience where I, then a young gay man, was humiliated by two older gay male academics who were evaluating a research proposal of mine: the mere recollection can induce heart palpitations, sweating, rage and helplessness. I had revenge fantasies for years! Some people take their revenge in other ways, they kill themselves when they cannot endure the shame visited upon them.

An intriguing aspect of the manifestations of shame is that while they signal a desire to be small, invisible, unnoticed, unseen perhaps, they are very successful in drawing attention to the self: they are conspicuous. A blush says “look at me, don’t look at me” suggests Goudsblom.

This desire to be seen and yet not seen is one I will come back to later. But for now I want to suggest that this is also a possible motivation in the shamer – when we shame other people we want to signal something about ourselves, and to ourselves: that we are virtuous, that we “know better”, or even that we occupy a morally higher ground. Even when we anonymously report those who, for example, disobey a lockdown order, our intention is that they are seen and punished: our shaming of others must manifest in some form of visible sanction.

The idea that shaming and being shamed are inextricably linked is further explored by Goudsblom. For humans to survive they must resolve, or live with, the tension between solidarity and hierarchy, dimensions of social groups, the groups we need to learn to be human. Hierarchy is on a continuum from respect to contempt, while solidarity is seen on a continuum from affection to enmity.

Shame occurs when ties of solidarity and hierarchy are impaired: we have broken the rules of the powerful (the president as stern father, for example) and we have distanced ourselves from emotional ties (our connections to our fellow lockdown-ees). Shame is both a personal and social injury, even death, or at least it feels that way. It is always unpleasant, and painful. The social body has been damaged as much as the psyche.

Social pain, says Goudsblom, “involves a two-way traffic. In the act of shaming, messages of pain are exchanged. When others catch someone in the act of doing something unseemly, they may actively ‘shame’ that person. Victims realise that they have harmed their own position; they are in danger of humiliation and expulsion, and let it be known to the others that they acknowledge this. The inner awareness is as it were the ‘domestic policy’ of shame, the outward display its ‘foreign policy’ aspect.”

So social pain is social in two ways: “it is inflicted socially by the people who ‘shame’ (as punishment) and it is demonstrated socially by the person who is ashamed (as atonement).” Perhaps punishment and atonement need each other to be meaningful.

One of the key intentions, it would appear, in Covid-19 shaming is the desire to defend a particular status quo, to protect the social body from harm, and to shore up the defences against an “invader”, a physical virus which can kill. This is the “noble” in Covid-19 shaming: an act often praised, and indeed seen as a social good. I take no particular issue with this view: to shame the lockdown transgressors is to defend against the shattering of a group, a society, literally a defence against physical disintegration. Whether this achieves this aim is debatable: there is evidence sometimes to suggest otherwise.

Dr June Tangney, a psychology professor at George Mason University, and author of Shame and Guilt, doubts shaming will prevent poor pandemic behaviour. “By shaming people, we’re actually encouraging the opposite,” she says. “When people feel shamed, they tend to get very defensive, they tend to blame other people, they’re disinclined to take responsibility, and they’re not any more likely to change their behaviour.”[4]

What I wish to add here to this issue is the question of fantasy in shaming, the fantasy of not only of defending the social, but defending the self, through the invocation of defence mechanisms. The key defences against psychological (not social) disintegration are the mechanisms of splitting and projection.

In an essay on defence mechanisms, Joseph Burgoin[5] describes splitting as a mental process that enables us to makes distinctions: to take an undifferentiated, confusing mass of experience or information and divide it into categories that have meaning.  Without splitting, nothing would make sense to us.  We wouldn’t be able to understand the world around us because we couldn’t divide the mass of sensory input into meaningful categories.

But splitting can also do the opposite: it can remove meaning by separating parts of a whole that actually belong together. “This is where it becomes a defence mechanism and is used to ward off unbearable feelings and emotions,” says Burgoin. “Let’s say that I have a hard time bearing my anger and aggressive feelings. In truth, I’m a nice and also a not-so-nice person, with a mixture of loving and hating impulses; when the anger and hatred can’t be tolerated, however, I will split them off: the loving and socially acceptable feelings – those are me – and the hostile aggressive ones are not me.  Thus I have split myself (more accurately, my awareness of myself) into parts and disowned one of them, which almost always goes hand-in-hand with projecting it outside.”

So splitting and projection are defences (against the awareness of unpleasant parts of the self) which work together. When we split off a part of our experience (the undesirable quality) and “project” it onto another person we “see” in them what we are unwilling or unable to see in ourselves, often leading to misperceptions of other people, and perhaps the self. It can be argued that another function part of the projection

There is an irony here: splitting and projection, I have argued, are defences against psychological disintegration because they protect and maintain a vision of the self one can tolerate. Yet being able to tolerate one’s good and bad, dark and light, is also a sign of psychological integration, an ability to cope with ambivalence and ambiguity.

One of the consequences of excessive or splitting is rigid (either/or) thinking: people who break lockdowns are bad, not capable of good. As a person who obeys the lockdown, I am good, not capable of bad. Shaming others serves the purpose, then, of reinforcing the good of the self, denying the bad and antisocial, seeing it embodied in others. In some cases, excessive splitting and projection is accompanied by grandiosity, and self importance: I have done the right thing, without my action people would died.

It can also be argued that in shaming others we assuage the guilt we may feel: either we have done the very thing we accuse others of, but were not caught; or we know that given different circumstances we may have been tempted to, for example, break the requirements of lockdown. This guilt has to be disowned and placed on others, for self respect to be maintained.

In Covid-19 shaming, then, the shamer and the shamed are joined in a ritual of splitting and projection. The shamer sees the shamed as bad, and the shamed must internalise this badness to meet the requirements of atonement. The rituals of atonement are all too familiar to us. Sincere “sorrys”, chastened cadences, embarrassed explanations must meet the required standard. And even when they do, forgiveness may be withheld, the enjoyment of moral power must be not be denied just yet.

A key consequence of lockdown shaming is to deny the full humanity of the shamed. They are villains, the repository of our collective projected rage, and in a sense we cannot see their humanity. And it is much easier to shame individuals or categories of people who are powerless to challenge the labels we use to other them, than to see that lockdown violations may have more complex roots. These can be psychological, but often they are sociological: people on the margins have little to lose.

The South African state has perfected the art of shaming in this lockdown. People who want alcohol are bad, smokers are irresponsible, people wanting cooked food are “spreaders”, a word that is naked in its blaming and othering. There are also implicit suggestions of patriotism or treason – it’s for the good of the nation, for the safety of the people – so you need to obey. If you do not, you are not only a “spreader” but also a betrayer of the nation state.

The best weapon against shame is empathy says psychology writer Melissa Kirk[6]. I would argue this not just the empathy of looking into the eyes of the homeless teenager on your street corner and feeling his  pain and desperation – lockdowns are not kind to people who live with the precarity of daily begging – but the empathy that says this inequality is shameful, how can we tolerate a society that tolerates this?

Through Covid-19 we have an opportunity to learn that shame and shaming ennoble no one, and they don’t advance our responses to the pandemic.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/04/pandemic-shaming-is-it-helping-us-keep-our-distance

[2] http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0005.104

[3] Casimir and Schnegg note that while what is considered shameful may be context specific, data across 135 cultures shows that the phenomenon of blushing in shameful situations is a panhuman one. See https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1017/CBO9780511489853.013

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/04/pandemic-shaming-is-it-helping-us-keep-our-distance

[5] http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/splitting/

[6] https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/test-case/201106/shame-you-do-you-use-shame-control-others

CSA&GCSA&G

Challenges of making the change to working from home and isolating

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by Vickashnee Nair

The roads are ghostly, not a single pedestrian or car.

This is an odd sight and sound for me as usually these roads are bustling with honking cars with differing ideas of how a traffic circle works. I miss the chattering of women walking by, holding packets full of groceries with small children in tow as they lumber behind.

I sit in the small flat that I share with my partner and it’s all so quiet. Now and again a truck labours its way through the roads to the delivery entrance that is neighbour to our complex. We hear the deliveries as they come through at odd hours of the morning and evening. I normally tune this out, or find it a nuisance; however these days it provides comfort knowing that we are not the only people left in this quiet part of Randburg.

Very occasionally, a car will zoom past our flat, always seeming to get to their destination in haste. I wonder where the occupants are coming from and where their destination is in these troubling times. Are they fetching some necessities from their local supermarket or getting medication for someone who is ill? Are they transporting medical professionals who have had a long day working at a clinic or hospital? Or are they just taking a break from the lockdown?  I wonder about this all as I sit on the couch attempting to immerse myself in theory and research.

The words swim on the page and sometimes they become blurry lines, like hieroglyphics or a foreign language. I shake off the cobwebs in my brain and try to renew my energy with a cup of coffee or a walk around our small flat. We are both confined to this space until the 1st of May 2020 and for us it’s been an adjustment. We are not allowed to walk around the complex so we resort to getting fresh air on our small balcony. Some days it’s better to keep dry and warm inside as the Johannesburg weather can be unforgiving.

I have always worked and studied in contexts where I interact with people on a daily basis and I have to travel in order to work. I am a counselling psychologist by training so naturally human interaction is part of my life and work.  I have found the lockdown and working from home a weird and even unnerving experience.

My partner works in a bank and she has often worked from home in the past and has found the transition markedly easier than I have. However, there is still difficulty in being locked in and not being able to see others or leave our flat.

I am grateful for the Zoom therapy sessions that I have every Wednesday with my psychologist. It has become an hour each week to really check in with myself and have feedback from someone outside of our little bubble. It feels like a reality check and grounds me.

We try to avoid social media and the news as it has become saturated with one thing, COVID-19 and all that accompanies it: death, illness, overwhelmed hospitals, poor leadership, people not abiding by lockdown rules, people staying in using Zoom for meetings and people generally trying to adjust to what has become a global pandemic.

For myself this saturation in the media has been overwhelming, but it’s hard to look away. The human in me is curious and it wishes to know what is happening in the world. However, at the same time it fills my heart and mind with an emptiness and anxiety that is hard to describe.

Trying to find a routine and feeling like a productive human can feel almost impossible during these times. Seeing others who seem so productive in their bread making, article writing, and exercising, it’s hard to feel productive and energized. However, there are small moments that make me feel appreciative and sane. Such as a cup of coffee in the morning looking at the rain, knowing I do not have to brave that in order to make the trip to work, or the silence and space that even our small flat can afford us.

I do not hope to be incredibly productive these days, but rather I look for small wins and try to focus on things that make me feel in control, or like a human again. And that is all I can do in a world that has become infused with war like talk, where humanity as a whole seems less hopeful. I focus on what I as an individual, with my many complex parts and abilities, can do to contribute and add, while at the same time maintaining my own balance, so as to preserve myself, my mental health and sense of purpose.

In all this, I acknowledge the many privileges I embody and possess, mindful that this is my perspective, which may look so different to many others. I do my part and I hope that each day comes.

My name is Vickashnee Nair and I am a 26-year-old Indian female originally born in Lenasia. I joined CSA&G as a researcher for the Just Leadership Programme in 2020. I have completed my Masters in Community Based Counselling Psychology through the University of Witwatersrand and I am working towards becoming a registered Counselling Psychologist. My interests include sexualities, gender, mental health, community and health psychology, and race. I have had experiences working in therapy and assessment in various communities, including the student population.

Just LeadersCSA&G

Leadership during Covid-19

/in /by

By Vickashnee Nair

What makes a person a leader is complex, especially during crises such as the one we all face at this point in history.

Why leadership matters now

In these times, leaders can seek to emerge, and those that have been longstanding leaders are tested. This goes beyond the obvious examples of presidents, ministers, and politicians; but to community leaders, pastors, celebrities, activists, managers, bosses, CEO’s, and many others. Leaders all hold positions of power and how each chooses to wield such power plays out in numerous ways.

This might be partially due to the idea that leaders depend upon their followers and how these followers define, and think about leadership (Felfe, & Schyns, 2010). One cannot exist without the other, one is the flame and the other the kindling with which to ignite it. Followers need to perceive their leaders as trustworthy, charismatic and transformational (Felfe, & Schyns, 2010).

Now more than ever leaders at the forefront of managing and addressing this unprecedented pandemic are being scrutinized by their followers. Every address to the nation by President Cyril Ramaphosa is followed by analysis and discussion. Commentators have critiqued decisions by leaders in the USA and the UK, noting how citizens, often poor and black, have been at the mercy of the decisions made by their leaders with regard to access to housing and healthcare. And when followers see their leaders become ill with Covid-19, they are reminded that we are all mortal and fallible. Boris Johnson’s ill health, and that of numerous celebrities, reminds us that the virus does not discriminate, and can make their followers feel anxious.

What kind of leadership do we need right now?

Leadership is a complex phenomenon and can mean such a variety of things. A useful definition is that it is a collective relational phenomenon that is “cultured” and situational (Kirk, & Shutte, 2004): it emerges in a specific context and time. This contrasts with notions of charismatic leadership invested in heroic individuals and ones usually in dominant hierarchical positions in a community or organizational system.

Presidents and leaders who feature regularly on social media and television screens offer one kind of leadership, but community leaders offer what has been called “distributed” leadership. This emerges through a process of dialogue, connectivity and empowerment: leadership within communities of different people who come together in collaborative endeavour (Kirk, & Shutte, 2004). Plurality and robustness of engagement are its hallmarks.

However, when there is a global crisis that faces leaders and people, there is a sense of urgency and immediacy and leadership efficacy tends to look very different as priorities drastically change. In this context it can be argued that there is a need for both charismatic, confidence inspiring leadership (it is seen as decisive), as well as elements of distributed leadership (it is seen as collaborative and inclusive).

What pressures do leaders face?

The response of people during a crisis is often to look to leaders to “do something” (Boin, & Hart, 2003). Leaders are often the face of pandemics, crises and periods of hardship for many: they can emerge as either heroes or scapegoats (Boin, & Hart, 2003).

As unease sets in, and there is a growing sense of vulnerability, people often look to something (or someone) to help with such uncontainable feelings. As a leader, the pressure to react in an authoritative manner to such anxieties of people is quite formidable (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Citizens expect to be safeguarded by the state, and returned to a sense of normalcy (Boin, & Hart, 2003). Crises, or in this context a pandemic, are highly chaotic, and dynamic, fuelled by uncertainty and threat; which all significantly disrupt social, political and economic processes (Boin, & Hart, 2003). Something so labyrinthine poses a challenge to most leaders.

How should leaders respond?

How do leaders respond in ways that still maintain their status as leaders but allow them to adjust and be flexible during a pandemic?

What might be helpful here it to look at how leaders seem to perform against the expectations of the public. Discrepancies between expectations and performance have been explored by Boin and Hart (2003) and they seem applicable to the Covid-19 pandemic. One expectation is that leaders should put public safety first; however research has found that leaders often have to consider the economic and political losses of regulating and enforcing maximum safety (Boin, & Hart, 2003).

This highlights how there are costs to public safety during a pandemic: in order to prevent spreading of the virus and to ensure the safety of its citizens South Africa has enforced a lockdown that has severely limited movement and activities across the board. This has come at the cost of social lives and income for business, has impacted on the economy negatively, and has changed the way schools and tertiary institutions have had to take the academic year forward. This all in hopes of achieving a greater good, albeit with sacrifice. However, it is often this cost that is hardest to adjust to, even though it is a means to an end.

This adjustment that has been a source of conflict between government and its citizens. There have been individuals who have attempted to go against this public health safety mandate: they have looted liquor stores, held wedding ceremonies with numerous guests, or tried to smuggle people in car boots across provincial lines (Grobler, 2020; Karrim, 2020; Maphanga, 2020). It is tempting to see them as “antisocial” but they illustrate how curtailments on freedom are a painful price to pay and not straightforward.

During a crisis there is also an expectation that leaders should be seen to take charge and provide clear directions for crisis management, apparently operating alone as the symbolic head of crisis operations. In fact, crisis operations often work through multiorganizational, transjurisdictional, polycentric, response networks, and there is lateral collaboration (Boin, & Hart, 2003). Evident here is a tension between appearing decisive, yet at the same time consulting widely. Perhaps what is needed is a blend of both these approaches.

Arguably, President Ramaphosa has approached decision making in the pandemic in this way. He has consulted with various sectors, stakeholders, experts and professionals before making pivotal decisions (Evans, & Cowan, 2020). He has shown collaborative leadership, working with others to make decisions that impact on the whole country. While this seems to fit in with ideals of community leadership, there is a sense of an individual who is able to steer a firm and decisive course.

What then emerges is an approach to crisis leadership. Crisis leadership is a specific response during critical situations like a pandemic. Competent crisis leadership has two stages: the emergency phase, and the adaptive phase (Heifetz et al., 2009). In the emergency phase the leader undertakes to stabilize the situation and buy more time, and in the adaptive phase they need to respond to uncertainties of the populace (Heifetz et al., 2009). It would seem we still find ourselves in the emergency phase as we attempt to stabilize our country and buy more time – South Africa, like much of the world, still finds itself in lockdown and under stringent restrictions. As these need to shift, the test for President Ramaphosa will be how he leads during the adaptive phase.

What is an effective leader right now?

Drawing on the work of Kerrissey and Edmonson (2020), there are a number of steps that a decisive crisis leader may need to take: acting with urgency, communicating with transparency, responding productively to missteps, and engaging in constant updates. All seem to highlight how imperative it is to communicate, respond with speed, and react with productivity and practicality. Similar sentiments are found in a study by Wooten and James (2008) on leadership competencies during crisis management. The following emerged: signal detection which involves making sense of the situation; empathy with those impacted; prevention and preparation which includes agility; and containment and damage control which encompasses decision making under pressure; and learning and reflection (Wooten, & James, 2008).

Looking at all of this holistically an image of a leader during hardship emerges: someone who is able to work collaboratively, get the best information possible, engage in thoughtful planning, execute well, act decisively and inspire confidence. It is an almost impossible task and no one person every gets it completely right!

What does all this mean to me?

As previously mentioned, leaders are not always powerful presidents, statesmen, or politicians, or even the people whose faces light up screens across the world. Beyond the form of leadership we want from someone like our President, as explored above, all of us can offer more humble forms of leadership in our everyday interactions and more localized spheres of influence. This has caused me to reflect upon my own leadership role professionally.

I have recently started a job at the CSA&G, one which has required me to take on a leadership role with the Just Leader programme. This is a volunteer and leadership development programme for students at the University of Pretoria. It builds active citizenship in student leaders and promotes social justice, critical consciousness and inclusive practices.

The programme has been a prominent one at the Centre and its alumni have taken the work into their personal and professional lives. It was a daunting task to work with and manage students as I had never been placed in a position of leadership before, and it was a learning curve for me each time I walked onto campus.

Through interactions with each volunteer, I began to get a sense of each person, their personalities, their stories and their voices. This helped me get to know the programme better and see in vivo how relationships between students have thrived. This felt like a privilege and it has made me reminisce on my own experiences of being a student and my own development.

However, leadership comes with its own difficulties and growing pains. Being decisive and taking responsibility for others has not been easy. And the Covid-19 pandemic has made my role much more challenging. I was faced with anxieties of panicked students and students who felt “disillusioned with it all”. Students were wondering how they should proceed, and were worried about dangers of infecting or getting infected. This confronted me and made me question all my decisions. I had an inkling of how leaders at higher levels might have felt as they struggled to deal with this pandemic.

My colleagues in the programme and I had to make the difficult decision to delay all activities during the lockdown. We had to decide to be flexible about how we worked with students. We had to make our work and the mission of the programme translatable to students when we could not be in the same room as them.

Leaders have quite rightly been the focus of many discussions around this pandemic, as they have become its face. We will remember the faces of those who delivered national addresses, or who gave supplies to those in need, and those professionals providing lifesaving advice and information. They confronted us with the hard but necessary changes we had to make, even when they faced a backlash Leadership is not for the faint hearted.

 

My name is Vickashnee Nair and I am a 26-year-old Indian female originally born in Lenasia. I joined CSA&G as a researcher for the Just Leadership Programme in 2020. I have completed my Masters in Community Based Counselling Psychology through the University of Witwatersrand and I am working towards becoming a registered Counselling Psychologist. My interests include sexualities, gender, mental health, community and health psychology, and race. I have had experiences working in therapy and assessment in various communities, including the student population.

References

Boin, A. and Hart, P.T., 2003. Public leadership in times of crisis: mission impossible?. Public administration review, 63(5), pp.544-553.

Evans, S., and Cowan, K. (2020). ‘Ramaphosa to make ‘serious decisions’ about lockdown based on science, possible economic, repercussions’, News24, 9 April. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/ramaphosa-to-make-serious-decisions-about-lockdown-based-on-science-possible-economic-repercussions-20200409 (Accessed: 20 April 2020).

Felfe, J. and Schyns, B., 2010. Followers’ personality and the perception of transformational leadership: Further evidence for the similarity hypothesis. British Journal of Management, 21(2), pp.393-410.

Grobler, R. (2020). ‘Lockdown trunk call: Man arrested for trying to smuggle girlfriend to Mpumalanga’, News24, 20 April. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/lockdown-trunk-call-man-arrested-for-trying-to-smuggle-girlfriend-to-mpumalanga-in-car-boot-20200420 (Accessed: 20 April 2020).

Heifetz, R., Grashow, A. and Linsky, M., 2009. Leadership in a (permanent) crisis. Harvard Business Review, 87(7/8), pp.62-69.

Karrim, A. (2020). ‘Bride and gloom: KZN couple arrested on wedding day’, News24, 5 April 2020. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/lockdown-bride-and-gloom-kzn-couple-arrested-on-wedding-day-20200405 (Accessed: 20 April 2020).

Kerrissey, M.J. and Edmondson, A.C. (2020). ‘What good leaders looks like during this pandemic’, Harvard Business Review, 13 April 2020. Available at: https://hbr.org/2020/04/what-good-leadership-looks-like-during-this-pandemic (Accessed: 20 April 2020).

Kirk, P. and Shutte, A.M., 2004. Community leadership development. Community Development Journal, 39(3), pp.234-251.

Maphanga, C. (2020). ’21 arrested after 16 liquor stores looted in the Western Cape, Cele calls urgent meeting’, News24, 12 April. Available at: https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/21-arrested-after-16-liquor-stores-looted-in-the-western-cape-cele-calls-urgent-meeting-20200412 (Accessed: 20 April 2020).

Wooten, L.P. and James, E.H., 2008. Linking crisis management and leadership competencies: The role of human resource development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 10(3), pp.352-379.

CSA&GCSA&G

Framing Poverty and African Men: thoughts on the South African socio-economic response to Covid-19

/in /by

by Christi Kruger

Something of an opportunity appeared to show up for President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government amidst the crisis of Covid-19. Being the president of any country during a global pandemic is certainly not an enviable position; yet for Ramaphosa, the moment might have presented an opportunity to truly assert and entrench his power. Ramaphosa stepped into the role of president following what has arguably been the most tumultuous of the post-apartheid years under the presidency of Jacob Zuma. From the onset Ramaphosa appeared to position himself as a force of calm and reason in opposition to the stormy Zuma-era characterised by a certain type of anti-intellectualism, large-scale corruption and so-called “state capture”. More than two years after he first took up the position of president however, the initial optimism that marked the start of Ramaphosa’s presidency started to fade. As unemployment grew and the South African economy slipped into a recession at the start of 2020, it seemed that little would come of the new dawn that Ramaphosa had promised (Statistics South Africa, 2020).

The crisis created by Covid-19 therefore provided Ramaphosa with a moment in which he could display efficient leadership. Indeed, as the crisis surrounding the virus began to unfold in March 2020, many duly praised his decisive and immediate actions. While world leaders such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson met warnings regarding the virus with scepticism and disregard, Ramaphosa was commended by, among others, the director-general of the World Health Organisation for placing the lives of citizens before the economy (Harding, 2020; Maromo, 2020). In addition, and again in stark contrast to the anti-intellectualism demonstrated by Trump and Johnson, Ramaphosa was also commended for his willingness to listen to medical, scientific and epidemiological counsel.

In spite of this initial optimism serious questions ought to be asked about the ways in which the South African government has handled this crisis. One of the questions that stands out to me is that of the government’s treatment of South Africans living in poverty. The past month has shown that the South African state continues to imagine “the poor” in moralist terms. In this short piece, I focus, in particular, on the idea of moralising poverty and scapegoating certain citizens as belonging to the category of “the undeserving poor”. Black African men have furthermore been specifically imagined as such belonging to the category of underserving poor over the last couple of weeks, further entrenching a moralising aspect carried over from the past. I argue that the government’s – witting or unwitting – implicit stereotyping of black African men as “the problem” has impeded the state’s ability to engage with the pressing economic crisis facing the real majority of South Africans.

The Poverty Dichotomy

Serena Romano (2018: 1) argues that poverty is often conceptualised within the dichotomous framework of deserving/undeserving. This means that we tend to imagine people as either “worthy poor”, those thought vulnerable and worthy of compassion and assistance; or, we tend to imagine people as being responsible for their own poverty and therefore “unworthy” of compassion and assistance. The former tends to include groups such as widows, disabled persons and orphans, while the latter consists of people perceived by society as able-bodied enough to be able to find their own way out of poverty.

While Romano points out that there have been attempts to do away with this type of dichotomous thinking over the last century, the stigma that surrounds poverty lingers. Even in a country such as South Africa where more than half of the population is officially classified as living below the upper-bound poverty line, the idea that poor citizens are responsible for their own material position is persistent. It rightly seems absurd to think of such a large number of people being complicit in their own dire material circumstances, but the power of the idea of “an undeserving poor” often remains because of its use in upholding the political status quo.

Romano (2018: 3-4) outlines three ways in which the idea of “an undeserving poor” remains useful to those in power. It is, firstly, useful when governments are faced with limited social assistance budgets. Having a notion of the undeserving poor means, for such governments, that they are able to direct social assistance only to those who prove themselves “worthy” of assistance. The second is that the idea of the underserving poor serves as a means of social control over others in society as a whole. The exclusion of a portion of the population from, for example social assistance, reminds and encourages others to follow the implicit rules that have been set by society and the mechanism of the state. The undeserving poor, thirdly, “perform an action of ideological legitimization” of political agendas. In other words, this category is used as a scapegoat-category onto which all negative stereotypes and representations can be projected to validate certain political agendas.

There is something uncanny in reading through Romano’s description of the poverty dichotomy at the present time. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread across the globe, and with a significant number of countries having entered lockdowns, the world economy appears to be in a freefall that is bound to last several years. The International Monetary Fund has already predicted, at the beginning of April, that the global economy will likely shrink by at least 3% by the end of 2020 with up to 170 countries to see a decline in its GDP per capita (Islam, 2020). In the United States, generally considered to be the world’s largest economy, more than 22 million citizens applied to receive unemployment benefits in the month of April (Ghoneim, 2020).

The state of the South African State

On the surface, it seems that the South African case contradicts many of Romano’s points as outlined above and that poverty would therefore be thought about differently here. Unlike many other countries, South Africa’s system of social assistance is unconditional and non-contributory. Any South African citizen, permanent resident, or refugee may apply for and receive social assistance providing that their annual income does not exceed the means test that is attached to social grants (South African Social Security Agency, 2015). Further to this, poverty is generally accepted to be one of the legacies of the colonial and apartheid regimes, thus moving the poverty discourse away from individual agency and toward larger systems of oppression. It could therefore be reasonably assumed that poverty has become less moralised in South Africa than elsewhere; and, especially so in a period where the state is willingly shutting down the majority of economic activities. Still I argue, in this piece, that the moralisation of poverty continues to be upheld and entrenched not only by those citizens who find themselves outside of the poverty dichotomy altogether, but by the state itself.

Before I continue to unpack how the moralisation of poverty has unfolded during the South African lockdown, it is important to grasp fully the extent of poverty in the country. In 2019, 25.2% of South Africans were unable to afford the most basic nutritional requirements and 40% of could not afford both food and non-food items; and 55.5% of South African citizens able to afford both food and non-food items still fell under the widest definition of poverty, subsisting on an average income of less than R1227 per month (Statistics South Africa, 2019).[1] More than half of all South Africans, I would like to repeat, survive on less than R1227 per month.

Even before the added pressure from the Covid-19 pandemic, the country’s official unemployment rate was 29%. Of this number, black African men below the age of 35 make up the largest unemployed demographic. The unemployment rate refers, however, to the ‘narrow’ definition of unemployment only: it considers only the unemployed who are actively searching for employment. When taking into account the ‘broad’ definition of unemployment, namely including the unemployed who are willing to work but are not actively searching, the number is significantly higher (Le Cordeur, 2015; Klasen & Woolard, 2008).

On the whole, this is a very dark picture indeed of state failure. In the almost three decades since the official end of apartheid, the state has failed to put in place measures that would ensure that its citizens have access to employment, housing, and other social benefits. In addition to the high levels of poverty and unemployment, Statistics South Africa’s 2018 Household Survey indicates that nearly 40% of South African households do not have access to a flushing toilet that is connecting to a public sewage system or septic tank; 12% of people’s only source of clean water was a communal or public tap; and 15% of South Africans had no access to electricity, to mention a few examples of the structural inequalities that many live with (Statistics South Africa, 2019). It is therefore surprising that it is the state itself that has put in place mechanisms which perpetuate the moralisation of poverty, simply reproducing the idea that some citizens are more deserving of assistance than others.

When he announced that South Africa would enter an official lockdown, President Ramaphosa set out several measure that would be put in place to assist and support those who would be affected by the lockdown period. The most pertinent and detailed of these measures was the establishment of a Solidarity Fund to which small businesses could apply for loans and the utilisation of the UIF-system to process payment from a Temporary Employer-Employee Relief Scheme (Ramaphosa, 2020). Although Ramaphosa mentioned that a safety net was being developed to support those working in the informal sector, it remains, to a large extent, unclear how and where this safety net will be deployed. As I am writing here, we are well into the third week of the lockdown and still there is little sign of any concrete help for citizens outside the formal economy.

In the weeks that followed the start of the lockdown, an interesting contradiction developed. One the one hand, the government’s attempts at financial support remained largely aimed at the formal sector, thereby excluding the one in six South Africans active in the informal sector. One the other hand however, Covid-19 screening and testing measures were scaled up in informal settlements, dense townships and other poverty-stricken communities. Even without any further discursive developments or concrete interventions, these two interlinked developments already begin to set the stage for the moralisation of poverty. The close linkage between poverty, illness (in both the metaphorical and physical sense) and immorality is, after all, an old one. These two events may seem unrelated, and it was almost certainly not consciously set up by the state in manner that speaks directly to the way I have set up here. Yet, it displays a particular type of thinking on the part of the South African state. It shows who the state imagines as worthy of assistance and who it imagines as the problem and as a potential obstacle.

Historically, the ANC has maintained an explicitly socialist approach to its policy development despite the various neo-liberalist turns the ANC-led government has taken from the late 1990s onward. Testament to this approach is South Africa’s impressive social assistance network: from 1996 onward it was expanded to reach almost a third of the population by 2015 (Ferguson, 2015: 5). In July 2015 approximately 16.7 million recipients received monthly social grants, a considerable rise from the estimated 3 million recipients in 1994 (South African Social Security Agency, 2015). Instead of utilising the existing systems of social support however, the South African state chose to pursue a neo-liberal approach. Economic support was made available to those who are part of the formal economy and are therefore, by default, needed to “rebuild” the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic, while the support for the poor was in actual fact left in the hands of non-state actors such as NGOs and private charity organisations.

Lockdowns, as implemented across the world at the moment, rest on a number of assumptions about citizens’ material positions. It assumes that one has access, in a structural sense, to everything one would need to survive at home for several weeks. It also seems to understand homes in a fairly individualised, Western sense: homes are assumed to be inhabited by nuclear families where parents are able to simultaneously work from home and provide childcare. Boundaries between households are also implicitly assumed in the idea that every single household has definite boundaries separating it from the next. In South Africa, generational poverty together with the spatial layout of the country during the apartheid era has led to high-density townships and informal settlements that tend to be far away from commercial centres. The houses in these spaces were not designed for, nor are they capable of, housing inhabits indoors for weeks on end. As I have pointed out above, many people who live in these areas have no running water, share toilets with neighbours, and have to use public transport to reach supermarkets. By default, therefore, more than half of the South African population were effectively set up to become dissidents before the period of lockdown had even started.

The Undeserving African Man

In this way, a cycle of undeserving/deserving poverty was put in motion. Soon after the lockdown started images of those who did not adhere to the restrictions started circulating. In line with the notion that women and children are counted as among the “deserving poor”, black African men quickly emerged as the most underserving among the poor. We saw images in news articles and on social media of young, black African men roaming the streets or inside illegally operated taverns; homeless men were shown to be unwilling to cooperate with local officials who were trying to take them to shelters; and mobs of mostly men were seen raiding liquor stores.

A very particular form of masculinity emerges here, in these images, as a representation of a social “problem”: the caricatured masculinity of black South African men. In his monograph, (Un)knowing Men: Africanising Gender Justice Programmes for Men in South Africa, Sakhumzi Mfecane notes that there has been a lack of theoretical engagement with African masculinities. We know, however, that African masculinity, conceptualised in its singular form, has historically often been used to connote a problematic identity. This has been deeply entwined with racialized constructs of African men as brutal and oversexualised (see, for example, McClintock, 1995). I should note, of course, that criticism of the ways in which African masculinities have been portrayed does not exempt actual men from the problems that have been caused by hegemonic masculinities. Mfecane (2018: 7) points out that “many of the most social problems created by men for themselves and women, like gender-based violence, rape, crime, alcoholism, and ill-health, are rooted in these hegemonic constructions of masculinity.” One should be cautious, however, of imagining all black men as a part of a homogenous group who all inhabit the same problematic identity.

It appears to me that such imaging is exactly what Ramaphosa and his government have inadvertently brought about. Black African men have been framed as the undeserving poor through current depictions of them. The particular way in which the lockdown has been implemented, together with the socio-economic conditions of many African men, has meant that these men are being portrayed not as poor, hungry and desperate, but as delinquents who put others as risk through their refusal to cooperate with the state. This presents a rather stark contrast to the kind of masculinity that Ramaphosa himself has presented since the start of this crisis. Whereas generic Black men have been portrayed as unengaged with current social issues and unwilling to work with the state, Ramaphosa has presented himself – and is, in turn, presented – as a calm, competent and rational statesman who has compassion for his country. He displays all of the qualities that have traditionally been expected of men: decisiveness, knowledge of global economies, empathy and the ability to make tough choices to protect “his” people. A father to the South African nation.

The South African father clearly expected his sons to misbehave however. The deployment of the South African Defence Force, for example, signals the kind of violence that Ramaphosa anticipated during the lockdown. The military, a force that carries with it a very particular kind of identity entwined with necessarily violent warfare, was called up not to fight the corona virus, but to restrain and subdue South African citizens who are then, by definition, cast into the role of enemies. Several news outlets have reported instances where poorer citizens – mostly those without access to private vehicles – have been stopped by military and/or police officials while legally walking to grocery stores. This presents black African men with a particular problem. As infantilised adults they can chose to cooperate with officials and subject themselves to being humiliated in front of others by doing squats, push-ups or other forms of nonsensical “punishments” for their perceived illegal behaviour. Or, they can resist and risk being arrested, injured or, as has happened several times now, killed. On Twitter one man shared how deeply the images of adult men being taunted by the army touched him as it reminded him of scenes that played out in front of him during the apartheid years. Other users too shared memories of fathers, uncles and brothers being humiliated and tortured by police and how the present moment echoes these collective experiences of trauma. One could argue that none of this is related to race or gender, but I have heard of no instances where white South Africans have been subjected to the SANDF’s “corrective measure”, and while there have been a few instances reported involving black women these remain in the minority. While there have been countless reports of illegal alcohol and tobacco trading in wealthier suburbs, black African men continue to be imagined as the ones illegally seeking alcohol and reacting violently to the lack thereof. In this way, black African men are not only deemed unworthy of assistance but also racially stereotyped in particularly harmful and unjust ways.

It is true, of course, that some men are violent alcoholics and that, as countless reports have shown, gender-based violence has soared worldwide in the advent of myriad forms of lockdowns instituted across the globe. This does not mean, however, that men are not worthy of assistance – and we ought to protect boy children from internalising the idea that they do not deserve the same support as girls and women. In fact, it calls for a thoughtful social and economic response to the social problems that are bound to continue during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of using this moment as one in which to affirm a post-apartheid government that has truly broken away from its colonial and apartheid roots, Ramaphosa’s government continues to demonstrate how firmly South African society remains saddled with the baggage of apartheid ideology.

This article was first published on Gender Justice, a project of the CSA&G and supported by the Irish Embassy in Pretoria.

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[1] These three levels correlate to the three different national poverty lines: the upper-bound poverty line, the lower-bound poverty line, and the food poverty line. In 2019, the rand value attached to these lines was, respectively, R1227, R810, and R561 per capita per month (Statistics South Africa, 2019:3).