Contenu du sommaire : L'Afrique à l'épreuve de la pandémie de Covid-19 + Varia

Introduction to the special issue “Africa facing the COVID-19 pandemic: Representations, impacts and responses”

Africa has not experienced the catastrophe that many predicted, including French international media (RFI, France24) in their African bulletins at the beginning of 2021. After having widely speculated on the devastating impacts of health crises on the African continent, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to take its toll, it is now clear that these representations have proven to be misleading.Confronted with these negative narratives, Chinese international media ensured the propagation of alternative voices that would convey “fairer” representations of the African continent. How are these information relays' used by China to further its interests in West African countries in the context of the current health crisis? These media (CRI, Xinhua and CGTN Afrique) promised to spread a favorable image of the region and to avoid disseminating catastrophic stories. They are also useful tools to advance Beijing's interests: the promotion of its health diplomacy, and the defense of Chinese power facing various accusations. Through their programmes, these media use African popular imagination to discredit China's rivals in the region, namely France. They also manipulate the voices of West African people in order to legitimize the need for China's actions of influence and health diplomacy. Studying media content disseminated in West Africa reveals the strategies of influence of Chinese international media, between disinformation and manipulation.

If COVID-19 epidemics confirmed social sciences' interest for the study of social media (Lee Hugues et Pale, 2009) and infodemic (Vosoughi et alii, 2018) in epidemic contexts, it also excluded a large part of the population still important in Africa from the production of knowledge: those who cannot access internet because of lack of connection and/or illiteracy. This paper fills this gap by analyzing local representations of COVID-19, drawing on the longitudinal study of radiophonic discourses in national languages and face-to-face ethnography led by anthropologists among the population. It examines how COVID-19 was appropriated and interpreted by Guinean population through the mobilization of epidemic, political and historic local experiences. It also considers how the evolution of local representations of the pandemics, over time and over political and economic perturbations, illustrates a progressive cognitive and practical lack of public interest in the virus. To do so, radio shows in national languages including participation from the public on COVID-19 topic were systematically recorded, transcribed and translated in French from March to August 2021. National languages included sosoxui for Basse-Côte, pulaar for Moyenne Guinée, kissiye and kpɛlɛɛwoo for the Forest region, and maninkakan for Haute-Guinée. Long-term participant observation and face-to-face interviews were led in the cities of Conakry and Mamou, and in the rural areas of Forécariah from May 2020 to December 2021 among health professionals and general population. These data were analysed thematically and chronologically to examine how the epidemics was discussed and the restriction measures commented by the population through time. From March to May 2020, the massive diffusion of information about COVID-19, both at international and national level, led the Guinean to take ownership of the protection measures against the epidemic – the traumatic memory of Ebola playing a major role. However, as the epidemic event merged with the 2020 controversial electoral process, local populations began to question the relevance of the epidemic management policies and restriction measures. The reduced number of positive cases led to a trivialization of COVID-19 and to a rising popular resistance against restriction measures such as confinement and wearing a mask. The virus appeared exogenous and concerning only national elites and populations of Northern countries. The representation of the epidemic, first powered by the trauma of Ebola, rapidly turned to the register of coercion: now called the “Screwdriver epidemic”, COVID-19 in Guinea appears for the local populations as the reproduction of the unequal relation binding them to their elites, as Guinea is bound to the rest of the world.

Between the beginning of March and the end of May 2020, Burkina Faso experienced a controversial communication around the management of Covid-19 patients. In order to strengthen the resilience of the population in the face of the pandemic, "social" measures were then taken. Finally, barrier measures were strongly relayed by the media, including "Let's get wet with a handkerchief to throw immediately in the trash". This measure strongly disrupts the organization of household waste management in the capital Ouagadougou, now marked by permanent contact between the actors of the sector and garbage waste at all stages of management. This article aims to highlight the effects of Covid-19 communication on perceptions of health risks related to household waste in Ouagadougou. It is based on data collected during the period of confinement introduced in Burkina Faso between March and April 2020.Mainly qualitative, these data were collected from people from waste sector (opinion leaders, pre-collectors, municipal councillors, etc.). These data reveal that the media coverage of barrier measures amplifies the health risks associated with waste and reconfigures the relationship between pre-collectors and waste producers in Ouagadougou. They also show that, in view of the climatic conditions and the time taken at each stage of household waste management, all actors, from pre-collection to landfill, are exposed to the risks of contracting Covid-19 COVID-19 from soiled tissues thrown in the garbage cans.

The ethnic kinship of communities living on the borders of Gabon and Congo and their socioeconomic needs are the main drivers of cross-border mobility between the two countries. While these proximity cross-border flows have been responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS from the Congolese driving territory to the Gabonese periphery, Ebola outbreaks have not spread beyond their original foci on the borders of the two countries. After retrospectively examining the impact of the health crises that confronted the Gabonese border margins during the years 1990-2000, this paper analyzes how the experience gained from the management of these previous outbreaks helped to control the spread of the EVD-19 pandemic in Gabon. From a methodological point of view, this paper is based on scientific and journalistic publications, institutional documents, epidemiological data made available by the Steering Committee of the Plan for Surveillance and Control of the Coronavirus Pandemic in Gabon (COPIL), as well as on field observations. Based on these investigations, and after two years of viral activity, it appears that the response strategy to the COVID-19 pandemic implemented by the Gabonese authorities has led to mixed results.

The closure of the borders was imposed to all the countries as one of the strategies of spatial containment of the disease related to the new coronavirus (COVID-19). This measure, which concerns land, air, and sea borders, was aimed precisely at restricting the movement of populations, in order to limit their propagating effect of the pandemic. The diversity of socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts raises questions about the relevance, operationality and consequences of such a decision from one country to another. This article thus proposes to analyze the meaning and spatiality of the sanitary closure of borders in Togo in West Africa. It is inspired by the work carried out on the phenomenon of closures in geography, which considers the complexity of the variables with highly symbolic, strategic and political implications. The methodological approach adopted here is based on field surveys conducted in Togo at seven border posts, from 4 September 2020 to 30 March 2021, as part of a PhD thesis in geography. It combines a corpus of documents, observable data in the field, and semi-structured and informal interviews. The closure of borders as a strategy to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the extent of the Togolese state's authority over its territory and highlights the weight of the regional political and security context in the national decision to close itself off. Although its effectiveness is contested, this refrontization nonetheless generates political and economic benefits for the state and its border officials, as well as for local populations who benefit from this economy of closure.

Despite exceptional economic and social growth compared to other African states, the Mauritian state has long been considered a periphery of the world system, defined through two main stereotypes: a tropical island paradise for international tourists, but also an island characterized by a great vulnerability linked to its small size, its relative remoteness and its development problems. However, between March 2020 and March 2021, the unique way the COVID-19 pandemic has been managed questions territorial vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it invites us to address the issues of island discontinuity, smallness and islandness that have allowed Mauritian authorities to have a total control of the national space and, thereby, of the health crisis during the first year of the pandemic. However, the stringency of the containment and border closure measures has severely impacted island's economy, particularly tourism that is a major pillar of island development. However, the Mauritian authorities, aware of first signs of decline within tourism activity since 2019, were already thinking on the need to renew their tourism strategy. They have been tending to make this “Covid free” situation an opportunity to rethink the attractiveness of the Mauritian destination and engage in a “building back better” approach. This contribution proposal, which is based on numerous field missions carried out on this island over the past years, particularly in November 2020 and March 2021, intends to question island vulnerabilities in this unprecedented context of health, social and economic chaos.

This article is the result of an intervention at the Journées géopolitiques de Reims (JGR, 2021). Economic security policy is the result of taking into account the reality of economic warfare. Ignored for a long time, economic warfare is slowly becoming an integral part of our understanding of global economic and trade relations. It is essential to understand the global geo-economic and geopolitical context in order to understand the long denial of French and European decision-makers, and the lack of understanding that led to the implementation of economic security measures. Obviously, the evolution of the global geopolitical context, the context of the health crisis accelerates the evolutions, both at the level of political decision-makers who better measure the economic and geopolitical dependence on China, and at the level of companies, victims of cyberattacks increasingly numerous and destabilizing since spring 2020. We will endeavor to show that economic security is essential and not incidental. It is becoming an important factor in the interpretation of economic policies at both the French and European levels. This article first looks at the conceptual approach, then shows how the awareness of the reality of economic warfare leads to the consideration of economic security as a response to the deterioration of the geo-economic and geopolitical context, and then notes that factors such as the pandemic accelerate the implementation of economic security. The very nature of the subject implies the use of academic sources, but also the recourse to the economic press for an indispensable update of the decisions and implementations in the field of economic security.