As the world comes to grip with its latest pandemic, what began as a joke provoking a rash of comical responses has now become a troubling reality. The fear of Coronavirus, or more properly speaking Covid-19, is the beginning of wisdom. Places as far flung as Chile, Argentina, Iran and Japan have come under the deathly claws of the vicious virus.
At the latest count, more than one hundred thousand cases have been reported with over four hundred and fifty fatalities spread across seventy three countries in five continents. In Iran, a top adviser of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died and the country’s Vice President as well as the Deputy Health Minister are suspected to have contacted the virus. Italy has followed Japan in temporarily shutting down their school systems. The Tokyo Olympics is threatened.
In Nigeria, Chikwe Ihekweazu, a top Health official who volunteered to join the WHO team on a fact-finding mission to China, has been ordered to go on self-isolation upon his return. What President Donald Trump, with characteristic haste, had dismissed as a hoax, has now reached the shores of America with vengeful fury, provoking the impressively proactive American authorities to declare a global emergency.
It is the wise and inscrutable Chinese themselves who famously admonished us to pray to live in interesting times. And what times could be more interesting than this particular one. The economic indicators point to a looming dip on the global chart. The IMF has predicted a general economic downturn. Some conspiracy theorists are already fingering a neo-Malthusian plot to cull the human population.
The real Yellow Peril is here with us. Corona may well be the spirit of the ancient Chinese civilization taking its vengeful toll on modern western civilization for earlier infractions and humiliations. The seizure of Hong Kong penultimate century may well be one of these. One of the rumours abroad is that the Corona virus is a tragic spin off of a Chinese experimentation with how to bring the rebellious people of Hong Kong to heel through viral bombardment. With their courtly smiles of devious gratitude, the Chinese never really forget.
For many who harbour anti-Chinese sentiments, the handshake has truly gone beyond the elbow. In Wuhan where the virus originated and in many parts of Europe, the old handshake has now been replaced by what can only be described as a kick-start which looks like some ritual preparation for kung-fu fighting. The end of the bear hug and the warm embrace as we know them may well be nigh.
As it is usual with humanity, the outbreak of coronavirus has provoked extraordinary acts of heroism accompanied by the normal dose of human villainy with quacks, mountebanks and the devil’s apothecaries looking to profit from human misery. Nigeria has registered strong presence in both departments, with a notorious pharmacological charlatan better known for electoral jiggery-pokery claiming to have patented a cure for the pandemic. This is not the first time.
Penultimate week, a Canadian family of five flying to Paris were forcibly taken off the flight after passengers complained of the protracted coughing of their daughter, despite the testimonial of doctors that the poor child only had common cold and was safe to travel. Almost seventy years after, Albert Camus, the great French Algerian novelist, would have strained to find enough evidence to warrant his eloquent testimony to the inherent nobility of humanity under desperate pressure as evident in his allegorical novel, The Plague.
In the event, not many are surprised that the Chinese and American authorities still have time for their hegemonic feud as each tries to outdo the other with countervailing narratives about the Corona pandemic and its true provenance. Having initially dismissed the whole thing as a hoax, the American leadership quickly ratcheted things up, accusing the Chinese of a massive cover-up as part of a botched plot to unleash a viral warfare on America.
On their part, the Chinese have only come short of accusing America of being behind the pandemic in a bid to hamstring the resurgent and rampart Chinese military and economic might. The auld enemies are truly at it and in the process the real truth is in danger of becoming a casualty of ideological warfare between two contrasting visions of human society and its future.
In this war of meta-narratives, or what the WHO Director General famously denounced as “infodemic”, the Chinese seem to have an edge. Their authoritarian suzerainty over the entire Chinese society allows a complete lockdown of the Chinese mental space which facilitates their power and ability to control and modulate the narratives at will whereas the American mental space because of its overriding egalitarian outlook will not brook or tolerate any official attempt to impose a monolithic consciousness or monological narrative on its denizens.
It is a question of national pride. All human societies are basically the same. What differentiates them is the system of governance and the national ideologies encoded as the organizing principle which gradually insinuate themselves into the national DNA is a result of prolonged naturalization and habituation.
America is a land of immigrants with an overriding Judaic/ secular code wired into the DNA, whereas China is not a land of immigrants and has remained the same for more than a thousand years, with the people merely exchanging the docility under classical feudalism with the docility imperative to communist state capitalism.
Once in a long while, that docility and passiveness are often roused into revolutionary rebellion inspired from above in the face of injustice and inequity but at the end of it all, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The Forbidden City of the old Chinese emperors remains the Forbidden City of the new Chinese emperors, minus the ancient inequities and tyrannical incompetence.
It is an engrossing and perplexing human drama which has characterized the rise of modernity and its different versions since the advent of the nation-state paradigm. Embedded in the current Corona hiatus are contrasting visions of how human societies ought to be organized for the maximum benefits of their habitués and a continuing clash of civilizations emblematized by a resurgent China and a backsliding western world epitomized by a troubled America.
China’s sterling achievements in the last seventy years of state capitalism cannot be controverted. It is the very first time in the history of humanity that a ruling elite have succeeded in lifting so many people out of the poverty trap within so short a time. As a result of prudent and disciplined management of national resources, the Chinese leadership have turned China into a legendarily rich and well-provisioned country beyond the imagination of its people.
Within a time frame, the Chinese Communist Nomenclatural have transformed their country from a feudal backwater which was the butt of savage jokes and derision by western societies to a magnificent modern society replete with all the glittering and dazzling paraphernalia of a modern nation on its own terms. From a vast, chaotic and primitive land whose more powerful neighbours took turn to rape and humiliate, China has become a first class military power and leading economic stronghold.
This is a modern miracle story which is as stunning as it is staggering. But it is not the entire story. Despite the rapid modernization, there are still pockets of primitivism and fetishism embedded in the vast Chinese landscape. It is obvious that there are areas of China still living in the sixteenth century in all their hideously unsanitary conditions that modernity has not been able to work over.
Whether this is a deliberate oversight on the part of the authorities to preserve some aspects of pristine Chinese culture or an indulgent nod in the direction of aboriginal Chinese customs as a psychological fillip to appreciate where they are coming from remains to be seen, after all America itself boasts of some pristine communities marooned in the Allegheny mountains and the Yalla enclave of former runaway slaves in South Carolina bristling with superstitious bunkum.
Whatever it is, this is what is responsible for the Coronavirus debacle. Even from the hellholes of post-colonial Africa, anybody who has watched the viral video of the Wuhan market for wildlife will feel sorry for humanity. This is a relapse into the Stone Age or something before modern hominid first emerged from its odoriferous caves to lay the foundation of a truly human society.
Modernity cannot accommodate this fetid anomaly or it is bound to infect the rest of the world with its dank and horrific seepage. Ironically it will be helped along by the willy-nilly rampaging momentum of globalization. This is why at the last count, far more countries have succumbed to coronavirus beyond its originating summons. Surely, if the Chinese want to enjoy their newfound wealth and prosperity this is not the way to go.
The second point to note is the fact that despite modernization and modernity there is a persistence of racism and structured xenophobia in every segment of the Chinese society. As a result of its isolation and self-enclosure for centuries, China is not very welcoming of foreigners. In every material particular, China remains a cultural autarky with the dynamism usually engendered by the influx of immigrant talent largely missing.
As a result of ancient myths and ancestral prejudices, the Black person is regarded as a devil from outer space in most segments of the Chinese societies and often viewed with contempt and cruel condescension, whereas in neighbouring Russia there were outstanding nineteenth century writers with Black ancestry who were considered the toast of the society.
All this will have to change, if China were not to suffer a drastic reversal of fortunes in the coming epoch. As for a heterogeneous and ethnically diverse post-colonial nation like Nigeria marooned between rampart feudalism and struggling modernity, the Chinese Example ought to have shown that modernization is not a tea party. It is now more than clear that something will have to give.
In national emergences such as we saw during the Ebola crisis, Nigeria relied on its abundance of individual heroism and committed nationals rather than institutional bulwarks. But this is not nearly enough for national mobilization in the face of a truly determined pandemic.
As we have seen with the Chinese Example and American Exceptionalism, a nation requires a national ideology by whatever name it is called, driven by core values in order to face existential exigencies. This is the lesson our moribund ruling class has refused to learn and it will continue to haunt us.
By Tatalo Aremu