Plagi w Afryce
Plagues in Africa

An Analysis of the Psychosocial and Cultural Responses of Africans to the Ebola Epidemic and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to present the psychosocial and cultural responses of Africans to the Ebola epidemic in 2014–2016 and the coronavirus pandemic, which was announced in 2020 and has lasted until today, as well as to show the collision – at the level of practices, senses, and images – of religiosity with the scientifically motivated fight against these epidemic threats. The first part of the article reconstructs the “sociology of knowledge” about viruses in African societies. The importance of conspiracy theories about the sources of disease, the indolence of governments in making citizens aware of the scale of threats, and the role of expert systems in shaping the perception of infectious diseases, are shown. Then, the African perception of Western medicine, including vaccination programmes, is discussed. The second part of the article presents the evolution of African customs during plagues, including funeral customs and religious practices. Selected mechanisms of domestication of plagues are discussed: the construction of the figure of a scapegoat, and contemporary forms of the dance of death. Selected political and economic phenomena, questions of faith, the clash of tradition and modernity, and – as the German phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote – the metaphysics of the community, form the context of the analysis.

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