Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa : Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda

Lee, Jia Hui; Meek, Laura; Katumusiime, Jacob

doi:10.1017/asr.2023.69

Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa : Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda

Abstract

Abstract: en The comparative analysis of three “contested truths” around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalation as an alternative therapeutic for COVID-19; and (3) the resistance by many Ugandans to complying with public health measures such as lockdowns. “Contested truths” is used as an analytical framework to center the specificity and situatedness of truth-making in East Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic.; Uchanganuzi huu wa kulinganisha kweli tatu zinazoshindaniwa kuhusu Uviko-19 (COVID-19) ndani ya Afrika Mashariki unaonyesha kuwa maarifa ni zao la mazoea ya kielimu yenye mafundo, yasiyolingana, yanayobishaniwa na yanayofungamana na mifumo ya mamlaka. Lee, Meek, na Katumusiime wanachunguza (1) ujenzi wa mashaka ya pan-Afrika kuhusu Uviko-19 ambayo yanatokana na mijadala ya kupinga ubepari; (2) machapisho katika mitandao ya kijamii ambapo umma wa kidijitali wa Tanzania ulitathmini kwa kina uvutaji wa mvuke kama tiba mbadala ya Uviko-19; na (3) ukaidi wa Waganda wengi dhidi ya kutii sheria na taratibu za kiafya za umma kama vile kusitishwa kwa shughuli zote za umma. Wanapendekeza mfumo wa uchanganuzi wa “kweli zinazoshindaniwa” ambao unazingatia umaalum na hali ya kutengeneza/kutafuta ukweli ndani ya Afrika Mashariki wakati wa janga la Uviko-19.

Description

Full text: Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in
East Africa: Examining Opposition to
Public Health Measures in Tanzania and
Uganda
Jia Hui Lee
, Laura A. Meek
and Jacob Katumusiime
Abstract: The comparative analysis of three “contested truths” around COVID-19 in
East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and
disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and
Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-
19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which
Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalation as an alternative ther-
apeutic for COVID-19; and (3) the resistance by many Ugandans to complying with
public health measures such as lockdowns. “Contested truths” is used as an analytical
framework to center the speciﬁcity and situatedness of truth-making in East Africa
during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Resumo : A partir de uma análise comparativa, Lee, Meek, e Katumusiime examinam
três controvérsias epistemológicas em torno da COVID-19 na África Oriental: (1) a
construção de um ceticismo pan-africano em relação à COVID-19, baseado em
discursos anti-imperialistas; (2) a discussão em redes sociais na qual o público digital
da Tanzânia avaliava criticamente a inalação de vapor como uma alternativa
African Studies Review, Volume 66, Number 4 (December 2023), pp. 873–898
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the
African Studies Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction,
provided the original article is properly cited.
doi:10.1017/asr.2023.69
Jia Hui Lee is the Junior Professor for Science and Technology Studies (STS) of the
Global South at the University of Bayreuth. His research draws on STS and
anthropology to examine the production of scientiﬁc knowledge, including biol-
ogy, in East Africa. He is interested in multispecies anthropology and in the
relationships between the animal and machine. His work has appeared in Annals
of Science and Arcadia, and in edited volumes published by Duke University Press
and Routledge. Email: jiahui.lee@uni-bayreuth.de
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terapêutica para a COVID-19; e (3) a resistência de muitos ugandenses em cumprir
medidas de saúde pública, como o isolamento. Ao analisar essas “verdades
contestadas,” os autores demonstram que o conhecimento é um produto de práticas
epistemológicas entrelaçadas, desiguais e disputadas, ligadas a estruturas de poder.
Muhtasari: Uchanganuzi huu wa kulinganisha kweli tatu zinazoshindaniwa kuhusu
Uviko-19 (COVID-19) ndani ya Afrika Mashariki unaonyesha kuwa maarifa ni zao la
mazoea ya kielimu yenye mafundo, yasiyolingana, yanayobishaniwa na yanayofunga-
mana na mifumo ya mamlaka. Lee, Meek, na Katumusiime wanachunguza (1) ujenzi
wa mashaka ya pan-Afrika kuhusu Uviko-19 ambayo yanatokana na mijadala ya
kupinga ubepari; (2) machapisho katika mitandao ya kijamii ambapo umma wa
kidijitali wa Tanzania ulitathmini kwa kina uvutaji wa mvuke kama tiba mbadala ya
Uviko-19; na (3) ukaidi wa Waganda wengi dhidi ya kutii sheria na taratibu za kiafya za
umma kama vile kusitishwa kwa shughuli zote za umma. Wanapendekeza mfumo wa
uchanganuzi wa “kweli zinazoshindaniwa” ambao unazingatia umaalum na hali ya
kutengeneza/kutafuta ukweli ndani ya Afrika Mashariki wakati wa janga la Uviko-19.
Résumé : L’analyse comparative de trois « vérités contestées » autour de la COVID-19
en Afrique de l’Est démontre que le savoir est le produit de pratiques épistémologi-
ques nouées, inégales et contestées liées aux structures de pouvoir. Lee, Meek et
Katumusiime examinent: (1) la construction d’un scepticisme panafricain à l’égard
de la COVID-19 qui s’appuyait sur des discours anti-impérialistes; (2) les messages sur
les médias sociaux par lesquelles le public numérique tanzanien a évalué de manière
critique l’inhalation de vapeur comme traitement alternatif à la COVID-19; et (3) la
résistance de nombreux Ougandais à se conformer aux mesures de santé publique
telles que le conﬁnement. Les « vérités contestées » sont utilisées comme cadre
analytique pour centrer la spéciﬁcité et la situation de la vérité en Afrique de l’Est
pendant la pandémie de COVID-19.
Laura A. Meek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community, Culture,
and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is a
cultural and medical anthropologist who researches global health interventions,
fugitive science, and the politics of healing in East Africa. Her current book
manuscript, Pharmaceuticals in Divergence, explores everyday experiments with
pharmaceuticals as evidence of both radical uncertainty and world-making inno-
vation in contemporary Africa. Her work has also appeared in Africa Is A Country;
Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Anthropology and Humanism; Science, Technology, and
Human
Values;
Feminist
Anthropology;
and
Medicine,
Anthropology,
Theory.
Email: laura.meek@ubc.ca
Jacob Katumusiime has completed an Interdisciplinary PhD at the Makerere Institute
of Social Research (MISR) - Makerere University. Jacob is a recipient of both the
Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellow-
ship and the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship. He is a Fellow on the
Mellon Project, “Decolonization, the Disciplines and the University” and was a 2023
Guest Researcher in the Department of Government at the University of Bergen
(Norway). Jacob’s research interests are in religion and politics, social movements,
political violence, decolonization and postcolonial studies. Invested in decoloniza-
tion discourses, Jacob’s research vision is of historicizing and theorizing breakaway
religious movements in postcolonial Africa. Email: jkatumusiime256@gmail.com
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Keywords: COVID-19; epistemology; global health; Tanzania; Uganda; digital publics;
decoloniality; truth; civil society; protest
(Received 20 February 2023 – Revised 04 August 2023 – Accepted 25 August 2023)
Introduction
One of the most signiﬁcant challenges to confronting and mitigating the
COVID-19 pandemic has concerned the manufacturing, circulation, and
interpretation of what we call “contested truths.” By this term, we mean the
many and varied ways in which ofﬁcial, institutional, and/or scientiﬁc facts
and recommendations about COVID-19 have been challenged, ignored, or
subverted. In some instances, truths are contested because government
ofﬁcials worry that mitigation measures to thwart infections might devastate
people’s economic livelihoods. In other cases, distrust for the World Health
Organization (WHO) runs deep, with many seeing the institution as oper-
ationalizing a geopolitical agenda to disempower African nations. For yet
others, lockdown rules dictated by political leaders appear as patent
attempts to quell protests and stiﬂe political opposition. Rather than assume
that lockdown protests in Uganda, state-led COVID-19 “denialism,” or
alternative healing in Tanzania—the three cases under consideration—
are practices stemming from ignorance, misinformation, or conspiracy
theories (Ogola 2021), we take such controversies seriously as sites of
contested truths.
We contend that labels such as “fake news,” “misinformation,”
“infodemic,” and “conspiracy theories” (The Lancet Infectious Diseases 2020)
perpetuate colonial violence by removing certain questions from consider-
ation while imposing irrationality on those who are said to articulate them
(Knight 2003). In the spaces from which we write, these disqualifying labels
silence the voices of marginalized populations whose distrust and suspicion
are well founded, given histories of colonial conquest and extraction in
Africa, and exacerbated by decades of Western-imposed neoliberal deregu-
lation (Fassin 2007; Richardson 2020). Further, as other scholars have
observed, the notion that Africans are especially susceptible to conspiracy
theories or somehow unable to discern fakery from truth is rooted in colo-
nialist epistemic geographies that locate the production and circulation of
conspiracy theories (and rumors) in the African continent (White 2000,
2021). This racialized and pathologizing view further assumes that African
products and knowledge must be fact-checked, evaluated, and accredited by
experts in the global North.
Seeking to unsettle such a framing, we focus instead on the political,
religious, and socio-economic processes that manufacture, legitimize, and
distribute certain “contested truths” around COVID-19 in East Africa. This
article attends speciﬁcally to three epistemological controversies that
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surfaced in Tanzania and Uganda between 2020 and 2022.1 First, we
examine the construction of a pan-African form of COVID-19 denialism
that drew on anti-imperialist discourses in Tanzania, led by its late presi-
dent, John Pombe Magufuli, at the outset of the pandemic. Second,
analyzing social media posts on Twitter (now X), we consider the ways in
which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated state endorsements of
alternative therapeutics for COVID-19, such as steam inhalation (kupiga
nyungu or kujifukiza).2 Finally, through an analysis of resistance to COVID-
19 guidelines in Uganda, we demonstrate how indifference or refusal to
comply with public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic acted
as a challenge to normative, hegemonic truths as they came to be monop-
olized by state power. This comparative analysis across multiple scales,
from the individual to the global, and at various levels, including student
unions, social media postings, and corporate news media, enables us to
offer a general analytical framework that attends to the speciﬁc and unique
social and political contexts of these phenomena without subsuming them
under global (North) experiences of the pandemic (see Mamdani 1996).
Rather, we challenge how assertions of truth or its attendant putative
opposites, such as “conspiracy,” “disinformation” or “fake news,” are
themselves scalar claims rooted in colonial geopolitical ideas about Afri-
ca’s subservient place in the production of global knowledge (Ferguson
2006; Hecht 2018).
Given the highly infectious nature of the COVID-19 coronavirus, we
conducted research using methods described as the “virtual turn” within
African Studies (Luongo & Lawrance 2022). Using a combination of media
and discourse analyses, we examined newspapers, YouTube videos, television
programming, online news websites, and social media postings to track
emergent local, national, and regional discourses in Tanzania and Uganda
that contested various public health responses to the pandemic. Our case
studies contribute to an archive that has previously excluded African voices
and perspectives. As Nanjala Nyabola (2022:8–11) notes, for instance, there is
a glaring absence of any historical records about how Africans navigated the
1918 inﬂuenza pandemic.3 We seek to correct this over-representation of
Euro-American “truths” and the concomitant (colonial) marginalization and
erasure of African knowledges and societies. Our archive will thus provide
critical documentation of how individuals and societies in Africa transformed
and reorganized information into speciﬁc actions for surviving an unprece-
dented global health crisis. At the same time, including different scales and
levels of action enables us to demonstrate how African communities and
governments sometimes drew on or disrupted hegemonic biomedical dis-
courses in order to enact social and political change, such as autonomous
control over public health policy, equitable access to treatments, and eco-
nomically inclusive interventions. We therefore move away from approaches
that take knowledge itself as an object, and instead attune ourselves to the
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enactments and transformative effects of knowledge claims during crises,
what Susan R. Whyte (1997) describes as the “pragmatics of uncertainty.”
Contested Truths as an Analytical Framework
The case studies examined here build on each other to make a broader
argument about the power and performativity of truth claims in postcolonial
contexts. The ﬁrst section focuses on the Tanzanian government’s denial of
the risk posed by the coronavirus; we underscore that seemingly irresponsible
or anti-scientiﬁc positions are frequently also political contestations over
resources, economic priorities, and glaring global (health) inequalities
inherited from colonization and neoliberal privatization (see Richardson
2020). Next, we show how contesting truths does not work in binary terms, as
merely truths or falsehoods. Rather than simply endorsing or invalidating
steam inhalation as a COVID-19 therapeutic, Tanzanian social media users
discussed and debated it as an alternative or adjunct to social distancing,
particularly at a time when vaccines were unavailable or inaccessible in Africa.
Finally, we turn to student and artist-led protests against public health
measures to show how Ugandan civil society pushed back against hypocritical
and authoritarian state action, successfully negotiating with the state for more
equitable public health measures.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate how contested truths in East
Africa: 1) refused inequitable international relations (through the articula-
tion of an alternative pan-African vision); 2) grappled with the nuances of
medical practice and knowledge beyond either/or binaries (thus challeng-
ing hegemonic biomedical claims as well as the converse impulse to roman-
ticize “tradition”); and 3) reconﬁgured power relations within nations
(through the efforts of a robust civil society). What is revealed is that the
stakes of knowledge claims are always multiscalar; “truths” interpellate both
global and local communities, professional and lay audiences alike, and the
coloniality of knowledge can therefore be met and challenged on each of
these levels. As an analytical framework, the concept of contested truths
enables us to examine the knotted complexity of global health responses in
East Africa, and particularly those practiced under emergency circum-
stances, as ongoing challenges, accommodations, or exploitations of existing
power relations that have endured since colonialism (see also Affun-
Adegbulu & Adegbulu 2020).
Patricia Kingori (2021) notes in her introduction to a special issue on
“fakes” in Africa that ideas about what counts as “real” reveal unequal power
relations that condition the production and accreditation of knowledge. The
current political economy of knowledge privileges Euro-American institu-
tions as sites of authentication and accreditation while presuming African
spaces to be sources of deception and fraud. Persisting since colonization,
these asymmetries of power continue to shape knowledge production in and
of the continent, and in turn, authorize certain knowledges as valuable,
signiﬁcant, or truthful—what some might otherwise call a coloniality of truth
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(Mignolo & Walsh 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Contestations of truths
during the COVID-19 pandemic in East Africa are also responses to this
neo/colonial political economy of power and the epistemic inequities upon
which it rests.
Refusing a coloniality of truth—whereby African narratives and experi-
ences are assumed to require authentication by public health experts or
social scientists in the global North—we examine the methods, commit-
ments, and stakes of different purveyors of truth and their situated episte-
mological practices. As scholars located on three different continents and in
three diverse disciplines, our approach is situated at the crossroads of several
different academic literatures, including medical anthropology, feminist,
decolonial, and anti-racist science and technology studies (STS), postcolonial
theory, and Black and African studies. Scholars from these ﬁelds have moved
beyond binaries of fakes and truths by showing how bodies, cures, and
afﬂictions are multiply understood and enacted (Hastings 2016; Whyte
1997). Scholarship in Africa, in particular, has challenged Eurocentric def-
initions of illness and treatment, and the ways in which knowledge on the
continent has been made invisible even as it is extracted (Mavhunga 2018;
Osseo-Asare 2014). This piece extends this analysis to understand health and
healing beyond biomedicine, focusing on the social construction of illnesses
in Africa (Feierman 1985; Janzen 2014). Such attention to medical pluralism
destabilizes the totalizing and homogenizing narrative of biomedicine by
seriously considering those forms of healing whose knowledges and practices
exceed and, at times, unsettle those grounded in science (Langwick 2007;
Neely & Meek 2022).
Our article participates in ongoing discussions about the suitability of
implementing lockdown policies in Africa, which many social scientists have
argued is potentially more devastating to Africans’ economic livelihoods and
access to healthcare than is COVID-19 itself (Broadbent & Streicher 2022;
Green & Fazi 2023). Instead, researchers have advocated for “street-level”
public health interventions (Carlitz et al. 2021; see also Afolabi & Ilesanmi
2021) that focus on the agency, needs, and interests of people who are trying
to cope with the bodily, economic, and social interruptions wrought by the
COVID-19 pandemic. We similarly approach COVID-19 denialism, alterna-
tive therapies, and protests against social distancing in East Africa by addres-
sing why and how African actors challenge certain hegemonic claims. Our
article is inspired by critical interventions from previous work on Ebola and
HIV/AIDS in Africa and elsewhere (Briggs 2005; Charles 2022; Mulwo et al.
2012; Richardson 2020; Wang 2008). Aligned with these works, we seek to
bring decolonial and anti-racist approaches to the fore of African Studies, in
order to scrutinize processes by which truths are produced and contested in
science and medicine without reifying colonial and white supremacist dis-
tinctions between knowledge and belief, science and superstition, modernity
and tradition (Mavhunga 2017; McKittrick 2021; Mignolo & Walsh 2018;
Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; p’Bitek 1984).
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Understanding contested truths in this way—as fundamentally questions
of political action, agency, and transformation—helps us to envision possi-
bilities for health and healing beyond the limiting binaries that have consti-
tuted the global health project (Cousins et al. 2021), such as true versus fake
news, biomedical or alternative therapies, information and disinformation,
and reality opposed to conspiracies in an era that some are calling “post-
truth” (Boukari & Philipps 2023; Lynch 2017; Prasad 2022). We follow both
politicized and quotidian practices through which medical care and knowl-
edge production are deftly choreographed in everyday practices (Biruk 2018;
Livingston 2012; McKay 2018) and insist that contested truths around
COVID-19 in Africa, as elsewhere, are complex, multifarious, and often
ambivalent—refusing
to
be
encapsulated
within
a
“single
story”
(Mkhwanazi 2016). Such an analytic orientation can lead to better informed
and more effective public health policies formulated around actors’ different
social positions with regard to scientiﬁc (un)certainty, public health advice,
state control, and their entwining with histories of oppression, inequity,
counter-knowledge, and suspicion in the African context (Abimbola & Pai
2020).
COVID-19 Denialism and Authoritarian Anti-Imperialism in Tanzania
In March 2021, Tanzanian President John Magufuli passed away from what
many believe was COVID-19, despite his own insistence that the disease was
not present in the country (Busari & Princewill 2021; Dahir 2021b). Magufuli
claimed that COVID-19 was “satanic,” and that it could be—and indeed had
been—defeated through prayer. Although the ofﬁcial account is that the
president died from complications of heart disease, there are many within
and beyond Tanzania who doubt the veracity of this claim (Dahir 2021a).
Other high-ranking government ofﬁcials in Tanzania, such as Zanzibar’s Vice
President Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad, died from COVID-19 while Magufuli
was censoring any mention of it in the press (Rajab 2021).
In response to the pandemic, President Magufuli (elected in 2015 and
re-elected in 2020) made the controversial decision not to impose wide-
spread lockdowns, nor even to encourage mask wearing or social distancing.
Instead, in April 2020, he suggested that citizens engage in three days of
national prayer to defeat the disease (VOA News 2020). Shortly after, in May
2020, Tanzanian authorities stopped regularly releasing ﬁgures regarding
rates of COVID-19 infection in the country, and what minimal ﬁgures they
did provide appeared highly suspect (Mwai & Giles 2020). Although Presi-
dent Magufuli was praised by some Tanzanians for his handling of the
pandemic, the international response was summarily critical. Western media
excoriated the president for his promotion of Christian and Islamic faiths as
more efﬁcacious than laboratory testing or biomedical treatment. In April
2020, the president was described by the Canadian national newspaper The
Globe and Mail as one of the “notorious nine” worst leaders in the world for his
pandemic response (York et al. 2020). The same month, the Wall Street Journal
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reported that Tanzania was the only country in the world to “actively recom-
mend its citizens attend religious services as a method to combat the virus”
(Bariyo & Parkinson 2020). A Roman Catholic with Pentecostal and Charis-
matic ties, Magufuli was reported to have told a congregation in Dodoma that
“You haven’t seen me fearing to take communion, because corona[virus] is
satanic and can’t survive in Jesus’ body. It will be destroyed” (AllAfrica 2020).
International criticism of Magufuli’s pandemic response extended
beyond the president himself. International news stories reporting high rates
of church attendance in the country often employed not-so-subtle colonial
and racist overtones in describing Tanzanians. This is evident, for instance, in
the use of terms such as “throngs” and “hordes” (Bariyo & Parkinson 2020;
Roussi 2021). Such portrayals invoke an uncivilized, nonmodern mass driven
by irrational beliefs not (yet) properly eradicated by the supposed gifts of
European Enlightenment and reason. One passage in a Wall Street Journal
article claimed that “Historians say the arguments advanced by Mr. Magufuli
and some pastors in the U.S. and elsewhere that faith should be mobilized to
defeat the virus shows the endurance of ideas that can be traced back to
medieval Europe” (Bariyo & Parkinson 2020). Here contemporary Africa is
compared to Europe’s pre-Enlightenment past. It is against this “denial of
coevalness” (Fabian 1983)—the tendency to render subjects outside a shared
temporal frame—and its imperialist overtones that President Magufuli aimed
his later critiques of COVID-19 laboratory tests.
President Magufuli had a PhD in chemistry and was trained as a scientist,
making it all the more surprising that he advocated the “true healing of God”
(uponyaji wa kweli wa Mungu) while belittling biomedical treatments for
COVID-19. Even more scandalously, though, Magufuli called the epistemo-
logical authority of science into question by testing the COVID-19 diagnostic
test itself. He submitted several nonhuman samples to the National Health
Laboratory for COVID-19 testing, labelling them with human names to
disguise the experiment. The laboratory returned positive results for samples
from a goat, quail, and pawpaw fruit, seemingly proving the inefﬁcacy of this
diagnostic technology (AllAfrica 2020). On national television, Magufuli used
this ﬁnding to insinuate that both laboratory staff and (opposition) politi-
cians who were calling for COVID-19 lockdowns were secretly “on the payroll
of imperialists” (The Citizen 2020). These moves were consistent with Magu-
fuli’s political stance toward the global North more generally; he refused to
attend the UN General Assembly and he revived the independence-era term
beberu (literally, “male goat”) to refer to such groups as “Western imperialists”
(Awami 2020).
Additionally, in a move that harkened back to an earlier era of socialist
nonalignment in Tanzania (Langwick 2010), Magufuli made waves by
announcing that he would import an artemisia herbal tonic from Madagas-
car, whose President Andry Rajoelina claimed that the tonic cured COVID-19
(Ioussouf 2020). As Madagascar’s herbal therapy was exported to the Com-
oros, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Tanzania, and other nations, supporters saw
this as a resurgence of pan-African innovation (Shaban 2020). The
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president’s promotion of vernacular African healing practices rekindled
independence-era narratives of African self-sufﬁciency, reminding many
Tanzanians of their ﬁrst president, Julius Nyerere, the “father of the nation”
(baba wa taifa), who frequently ignored “advice” from Western nations,
ﬁghting against the imposition of structural adjustment policies until the
very end of his presidency (Thiong’o 2021). Magufuli’s refusal to impose
widespread lockdowns was also interpreted within a longstanding political
praxis whereby leaders are expected to care materially for their people, much
as President Nyerere had done. Indeed, Nyerere was a frequent point of
reference for Magufuli, who explained his refusal to issue lockdowns by
saying that “Our founding father [Nyerere] was not someone to be directed
to be told what to do…Those who devise these kinds of rules [lockdown] are
used to making these directives that our founding father refused” (BBC News
2021). Magufuli instead prioritized the need to keep the economy open,
arguing that lockdowns, too, would cost lives (see Green & Fazi 2023).
Meanwhile, Magufuli’s references to Pentecostal notions of spiritual
warfare suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was not merely a secular
threat (Meek 2023). When laboratory testing for COVID-19 proved faulty,
Magufuli commented, “So many times, I have insisted that not everything that
you are given is good. There could be people being used, that equipment
could be used… but it could also be sabotage because this is warfare” (Awami
2020, emphasis added). While Western media outlets such as BBC News
interpreted that statement as “lurching towards a conspiracy theory”
(Awami 2020), others heard echoes of the pervasive Pentecostal discourses
on religious “warfare” against Satanic forces threatening the nation and its
citizens. Indeed, political practices of religious mediation—via “efforts to
keep God on the side of the nation” (Haynes 2018)—are playing an increas-
ingly central role in national leadership in and beyond East Africa. Pente-
costal pastors also played a key role in protests challenging the Ugandan
government’s lockdown and quarantine measures (as elaborated below).
While one could dismiss President Magufuli’s actions as irresponsible
public health interventions or self-serving political maneuverings, such cen-
sure will not get us very far toward explaining their widespread popularity
(which enabled his re-election in the midst of the pandemic). Rather, inter-
preted within the anti-imperialist frameworks that Magufuli deployed, his
actions sought to untangle Tanzania and Africa from the knot of unequal
global power relations and to work toward an emerging pan-African political
project. Magufuli was not alone in this vision; other prominent ﬁgures, such
as the Nigerian Pentecostal preacher and televangelist prophet T. B. Joshua,
also sought to make aligned epistemic, political, and spiritual interventions
(Meek 2023). In so doing, these actors profoundly destabilized truth-making
processes dominated by Western institutions, often in order to reclaim the
ability to control the narrative of the pandemic. The narrative that emerged
from Magufuli and Joshua’s visions challenged colonialist tropes of global
health predictions that Africa would be devastated by the pandemic, inept in
its response, and dependent upon philanthropy from the global North for
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survival (Anna 2020; Bavier 2020). They contested “the business of Black
death” and the (erroneous) predictions that COVID-19 would ravage the
African continent (Harper-Shipman & Bako 2021; see also Smith 2006).
At the same time, African contestations over truths are diverse, both
within and between nations. President Magufuli’s rhetoric and (lack of)
public health policies faced harsh criticism from some sectors within the
country, particularly youth and leaders of opposition political parties
(Kombe 2020a). Internationally, his pan-African aspirations were under-
mined by the fact that several other African leaders openly disagreed with
his approach (Patterson & Balogun 2021), and local sources suggested that
many deaths went unreported (Buguzi 2021). Some of his most outspoken
critics were journalists, such as Khalifa Said, who was ﬁred from The Citizen
newspaper in March 2020 after postings he made on Twitter (now X) calling
for protests against Magufuli’s policies (Said 2020). The authoritative-leaning
government responded a few days later by threatening to arrest and prose-
cute anyone posting so-called “fake news” or “misinformation” on social
media (Mhagama 2020). As these developments attest, discrediting epistemic
labels (such as “fake news”) can be used to shore up concentrations of power
and inequalities within African countries, even while those same nations are
ﬁghting against colonial power imbalances. As the following section explores
further, social media has been at the forefront of much of this debate.
Through media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, public health discourses
are directly engaged and contested by a wide range of actors, including not
only political elites and medical personnel (see Patterson & Balogun 2021),
but also critical digital publics in Africa who participate in epistemological
debates via such technologies.
Steam Inhalation as Alternative Therapeutic for COVID-19
Ordinary Tanzanians followed the controversy surrounding Magufuli’s dis-
missal of COVID-19 closely, and many exchanged views and participated in
heated debates on social media. President Magufuli’s actions and speeches
about the disease were distributed and discussed through countless What-
sApp messages, thousands of comments on Instagram, and thousands of
Twitter posts in the early months of the pandemic. In one of Magufuli’s
widely watched speeches, given in his hometown of Chato on April 22, 2020,
the president assured Tanzanians that the country need not go into lockdown
(East Africa TV 2020). He instead encouraged Tanzanians to inhale steam,
claiming that the therapy “disintegrates” the lipid (mafuta) outer layer of the
virus and thus kills it. In the days following this speech, social media users
posted over a thousand tweets discussing steam therapy in Kiswahili (see
Figure 1).
In this section, we focus on the ways that “digital publics” (Omanga 2019)
among the middle- and upper-class in Tanzania have engaged with steam
inhalation as a COVID-19 therapeutic. We track debates on the social media
platform Twitter (now X) about steam therapy and its proper techniques,
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potential effects, and contested legitimacy, demonstrating how Tanzanians
actively discussed and critically evaluated the evidence presented by state
ofﬁcials. The fact that many Tanzanians who have access to smartphones
and digital applications such as Twitter talk about steaming online also under-
scores social media as a crucial site where people evaluate facts and collectively
produce knowledge outside of the conﬁnes of institutionalized spaces like
scientiﬁc laboratories, incorporated media outlets, and state ofﬁces such as the
Ministry of Health (Cross 2021; Fuh 2021; Lamoureaux & Sureau 2019).
Steam inhalation (kujifukiza/kupiga nyungu) is usually practiced in Tan-
zania by boiling a large pot of water with herbs—such as neem, eucalyptus,
tulsi, lime, ginger, and/or lemongrass—and then inhaling the steam pro-
duced by the mixture. A cloth (shuka or kanga) is sometimes placed over the
user’s head and the pot to create a temporary steam chamber. Steam
inhalation is widely practiced as a therapeutic for respiratory ailments,
headaches, stress, and insomnia; during the COVID-19 pandemic, our
Figure 1. Number of global tweets per day mentioning “-piga nyungu” or
“-jifukiza” (“steam therapy” in Kiswahili) during the month of April 2020. Note
the spike in tweets on April 23 following Magufuli’s speech.
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colleagues shared with us examples of steam inhalation being discussed on
social media in Uganda, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka,
and India. But by April 2020, the WHO along with international news outlets
such as BBC News Swahili (2020) and Reuters (2021) began issuing warnings
about steam inhalation for treating COVID-19 (see also Africa Check 2021).
These news sites cautioned that inhaling steam can cause burns to the
respiratory system and that handling ﬁre and large boiling pots of water
increases the risk of accidents. For many Tanzanians on social media, these
warnings were bafﬂing and smacked of the coloniality of global health
(Richardson 2020).
We obtained 4,992 tweets in Kiswahili posted during the month of April
2020 (the ﬁrst full month after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic)
using the Twitter application programming interface (API). We then ana-
lyzed 500 randomly selected tweets via a close reading. Our analysis is
informed by the work of scholars such as Melanie Walsh (2021) and other
data feminists who combine computational analysis with an awareness of the
extractive, reductive, and spectacular risks of data science (D’Ignazio & Klein
2020; Hatch 2022). We have thus refrained from identifying any users or
tweet IDs in this study except for those of public ﬁgures. Posts are also quoted
here as English translations of Kiswahili so that the exact post cannot be easily
traced back to its user.
The practice of steaming began attracting public attention in Tanzania
when it was discussed in a speech made by a Member of Parliament, Anna
Tibaijuka, who is also the former Executive Director of the United Nations
Program on Human Settlements (UN-HABITAT).4 Tibaijuka ﬁrst raised the
question of steaming in the early days of the pandemic. Before Magufuli’s
widely discussed speech, Tibaijuka had addressed Parliament, proclaiming
that given the scientiﬁc uncertainty over COVID-19, Tanzanians would not
just “wait for death” (“Hakuna jamii itakayokaa na kusubiri kifo”). Instead, she
insisted that “we [Tanzanians] have our own alternative ways [njia za mba-
dala], so why are we not using our traditional ways [njia za asilia]?” She
concluded her speech by advocating steam inhalation in addition to wearing
masks, washing hands, and social distancing (Mtanzania Digital 2020). After
this speech, Tanzanians began to share more information on Twitter about
the practice, including recommending which herbs to boil.
Twitter users in Tanzania who posted encouraging information about
steam inhalation generally echoed Tibaijuka’s comments by advocating that
steaming should be practiced in concert with social distancing and hand-
washing. Early on during the COVID-19 pandemic, steaming was also seen as
a viable alternative therapy for the disease in the absence of available vaccines
or treatments. Some commentators framed the availability of alternatives
(mbadala) as beneﬁcial because Tanzania could thus assume some degree of
self-reliance and independence in the face of a lack of information about the
virus and the eventual difﬁculties of gaining access to vaccines. As one user
put it: “Tanzanians should try to use steaming as an alternative for now as it
would help prevent COVID-19 infection [and] because there are still no
other ways to prevent the disease.”
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At the same time, a signiﬁcant number of users posting about steaming
actively sought out more information. These individuals—having seen steam
therapy on WhatsApp and/or Facebook messaging platforms or having
heard about it from discussions in town—responded by asking for more
evidence by which to critically evaluate such claims. “When I was recently
in town, someone said that steaming is a good way to treat COVID-19. Is this
[also] safe for children??” one user asked. “Can you let me know the risks
[madhara] of steaming please?” asked another. These posts pointed to the
lack of clarity in the guidance from ofﬁcial sources about steaming, demon-
strating the potential for social media platforms to act as robust epistemo-
logical forums in contrast to the more dire laments about such spaces as
incubators of falsities and misinformation. Dr. Joseph Otieno, Director of the
Institute of Traditional Medicine at the Muhimbili University of Health and
Allied Sciences, tried to clarify the situation by making public statements
cautioning that steaming does not actually prevent COVID-19 but that it can
still alleviate symptoms.5 This led to yet more posts requesting conﬁrmation
about the effects and efﬁcacy of steaming. “In Tanzania, steaming to kill the
coronavirus seems to be an acceptable cure but the WHO and the BBC deny
this, saying that it is dangerous for health. Who do we believe now, fellow
Tanzanians?” pleaded one user.
Meanwhile, another sizable portion of Twitter users in Tanzania con-
demned steaming, referring to the practice with terms such as “upuuzi”
(nonsense) and “ujinga” (ignorance). These users pointed to reports of city
councilors who steamed and later died from ﬂu-like symptoms as evidence of
the ineffectiveness or dangers of steaming as a COVID-19 therapeutic. At
times, this condemnation took the form of “humor as a tool of agency”
(Patterson & Balogun 2021:152). Some tweets jokingly referred to steaming
as a form of witchcraft. Using the “rolling on the ﬂoor laughing” emoji, they
posted that steam therapy was recommended by expert witchdoctors of
Gamboshi, a place rumored to be the headquarters of witchcraft in Tanzania.
Some of those who ridiculed steaming as witchcraft framed the practice as
ignorant or primitive (nyuma), calling upon Tanzanians to disregard the
advice to use steam. In a particularly harsh condemnation of Tanzanians who
practice steaming, one user wrote in Kiswahili that “The whites need only to
use a small part of their brains to colonize Africans.” For this user, steaming
was an ignorant practice, and the president’s endorsement of steam therapy
only further conﬁrmed this perceived national ignorance. Other users
expressed embarrassment, with one well-known commentator, Kigogo
(@kigogo2014), writing “be prepared to be laughed at as a country by the
world!”6
For these commentators, steam therapy, especially justiﬁed as indige-
nous knowledge, threatened to reinforce a colonial stereotype of Africa as a
space of deﬁciency or primitivity. They saw the assurance and legitimacy
proffered by biomedical science as tied to a promise of Tanzania’s full and
perhaps equal membership among the world’s nations. Notably, those com-
mentators who drew upon tradition to encourage steaming often relied on
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similar concerns about the place of Tanzanian knowledge in a postcolonial
world. For example, in mid-April 2020, the deputy minister of health,
Dr. Faustine Ndugulile, told reporters that steaming does not treat COVID-
19 or kill the coronavirus.7 Questioning this advice, one user countered,
“Then how do you explain the fact that steaming has been used since the
olden days as a form of indigenous treatment? Are we to assume that before
Europeans arrived, Africans were not able to treat their own illnesses?”
A close reading of these posts about steaming in Tanzania suggests that
the practice and the discourses surrounding steaming should not be sum-
marily dismissed as forms of mis- or disinformation (see Kombe 2020b).
Instead, Tanzania’s digital publics approached steaming critically, appraised
its effectiveness, compared it to biomedical practices, and weighed its risks
and possible therapeutic beneﬁts within a global context of unequal access to
biomedical knowledge and healthcare. Among those who encouraged steam-
ing, many advocated its use in addition to social distancing and mask wearing.
At a time when so much about COVID-19 was not yet known, when there were
no vaccines, cures, or effective medical interventions to reduce mortality,
steaming offered a positive way to cope with the uncertainty of death. Further,
the fact that steaming is a recognizably local, autochthonous practice—seen
by many as “African”—also offered people in (and beyond) Tanzania a
chance to participate in a global conversation about what could be done to
confront a global pandemic. For the most ardent steamers, steaming glim-
mered with therapeutic hopes and the promise of pan-African self-
determination. Our analysis insists that such social media discussions in East
Africa do not approach public health advice as a true/false binary. These
social media evaluations of various alternatives are in fact key interventions
into global discussions about public health responses to pandemics. They
respond to and disrupt Tanzania’s marginalized position in global medical
research, distributions of care, and public health resources.
Public Refusal Toward COVID-19 Safety Measures in Uganda
As Tanzanian digital publics avidly discussed COVID-19 and considered
possible therapeutics for the disease, many Ugandans protested safety mea-
sures that were being unilaterally and hypocritically imposed by state institu-
tions. As in Tanzania, the most vocal critique of COVID-19 policies initially
came from the Pentecostal movement in Uganda. The state closed religious
institutions to control mass gatherings that may have increased the risk of
spreading COVID-19. Ironically, the government continued breaking the
same rules it imposed. Political campaigns for the general elections in
January 2021 were held, despite social distancing guidelines; these rallies
even included events headlined by the Minister of Health (NTV Uganda
2020).
Under their umbrella body, the National Pastors Platform, clerics spear-
headed a campaign to resist COVID-19 policies by reopening places of
worship. Some religious leaders even claimed the power to heal COVID-19,
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and the government warned them against uttering reckless and “misleading”
statements (Emmanuel 2020). In March 2020, Pastor Augustine Yiga of
Revival Christian Church Kawala was arrested and imprisoned for proclaim-
ing that COVID-19 was not a cause for concern in Uganda. Pastor Yiga had
used his television network to promote the idea that COVID-19 was “just ﬂu,”
which had long existed on the continent (Monitor 2020). Rather than taking
these statements literally, at face value, many on the ground in Uganda saw
them as an indirect form of political resistance to the hypocrisy and injustice
of authoritarian state power.
This dissent further manifested in institutions of higher learning. As a
graduate student in Uganda, Jacob Katumusiime (2021) observed under-
graduate students refusing to comply with safety measures despite being fully
aware of the dangers of COVID-19. And, in February 2022, Makerere Uni-
versity students led a strike against online instruction (Opio 2022). This was
not the ﬁrst strike against remote learning by students and others in Uganda’s
universities: students at Mbarara University of Science and Technology also
held a strike in March 2021, in which they demanded in-person lectures
regardless of the COVID-19 health threat. Their demonstrations were met
with tear gas and arrests by the police, who accused student protestors of
inciting violence (Kinene 2021). In May 2021, students of another govern-
ment institution, Kyambogo University, also mounted protests against online
classes, arguing that they could not afford the data costs necessary for internet
access (The Independent 2021). In this section, we consider how contested
truths as an analytical framework helps to explain civil society’s apparent
antagonism to public health measures, focusing on cases in which Ugandan
students, teachers, artists, and publics refused or ignored the state’s efforts to
manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of asking what individual actors
“believed” to be true, we investigate what the effects of their speech and
actions were; we foreground what truth claims do in the world, attending to
their performative power rather than just their descriptive content.
Contrary to the view that public indifference to COVID-19 policies is
nothing more than a form of blatant denialism, as some Ugandan media
outlets claimed (BigEye 2020), we contend that Ugandan actors deployed
grassroots strategies of refusal in order to contest the authoritarian entrench-
ment of state power and its hegemony over manufacturing and distributing
information about the pandemic. In the case of student strikes, for instance,
the protesters were of course not ignorant of the risks of in-person learning.
Instead, they were challenging the opportunistic use of the health crisis to
justify their ﬁnancial exploitation and the further neoliberalization of the
country’s educational institutions. For example, the protests at Makerere
University, a government institution where one of the authors is based, need
to be read not only as a complaint against the increasing costs of access to
education but also as a critique of the excesses of power. Students wondered
how the government had opened the economy yet still insisted that they stay
home and study online. Many missed online examinations due to techno-
logical lapses, but the university remained unwilling to listen. Among the
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most affected students were those with visual impairments, for whom online
studying presented an exclusionary barrier. The president of the students’
guild, Shamim Nambasa, expressed dismay at the university administration’s
failure to dialogue with students (The Independent 2022). As we elaborate
below, other Ugandans similarly refused to follow health mandates as a way to
register their objection to government corruption, the differential treatment
of elites, institutionalized hypocrisy, and state control over public access to
information regarding COVID-19. These myriad injustices perpetrated by
state actors served to brew deep mistrust among many Ugandans, transform-
ing their subsequent acts of refusal and (seeming) indifference into agential
forms of protest rather than forms of ignorance, hesitancy, or denialism (see
also Ssentongo 2021).
Across Uganda, citizens who were being forced to quarantine, shut down
their businesses, and stay at home during the pandemic watched with irony
and frustration as state ofﬁcials breached those very same COVID-19 pro-
tocols. For instance, the Ugandan Minister of Health Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng
violated her own ministry’s health guidelines when she led an election
campaign procession in Lira City in November 2020 (The Observer 2020).
Citizens refused to allow the state to “preach water but drink wine,” especially
given the deep sacriﬁces that many Ugandans had to make during the
pandemic. The restrictions had, for example, decimated the nighttime
economy and deprived people of many of their most cherished pastimes.
Markets and shops were forced to close and—in cases where individuals
found these restrictions insurmountable—economic and social desperation
often set in. At the extreme end of this desperation, Hussein Walugembe, a
boda-boda (taxi) driver, fatally set himself ablaze when police ofﬁcers pressed
him for a bribe at Masaka Central Police station (Aljazeera 2020).
The Ugandan state’s hypocrisy—itself a legacy of colonial-era policies—
accelerated popular demands for explanations and justice. For instance, the
Ugandan musician Eric Opoka, a.k.a. EeZzy, released “Tumbiza Sound,” a
song that criticized the severity of government public health measures. Lyrics
in the song called for outright deﬁance of COVID-19 mandates and encour-
aged people to go drink at bars during the pandemic. One of the song’s lines
articulated this widespread refusal: “Ssi ka Corona / Tetujja kwetta twetuge mbu ki
/ Mbu olwo Corona!” (It can’t be for Corona / We won’t commit suicide / Just
because of Corona!). With verses such as these, EeZzy channeled the frus-
trations of many Ugandans who were suffering from the extreme and differ-
entially enforced measures imposed by the state (see also Pier & Mutagubya
2023 for other Ugandan COVID-19 songs). This song was later banned by the
government for misleading the public—a move that not only exacerbated
popular resentment but also further promoted the song itself. Realizing this,
the Ministry of Health, under the guidance of the Permanent Secretary
Dr. Diana K. Atwine, reversed course and “invited” EeZzy to rewrite certain
lyrics of the song so that it would better inform listeners about the dangers of
COVID-19 and encourage the public to practice social distancing (NTV
Uganda 2020). EeZzy’s subsequent interaction with the Ministry of Health
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and resultant compromises highlight the power of Ugandan civil society to
successfully contest the epistemic and political legitimacy of public health
measures.
A contested truths framework recognizes the ability of Uganda’s civil
society to redirect the state’s public health measures from a place of coercion
to one of conversation. In challenging the government’s harsh public health
measures, refusing to accept their authoritarian and differential imposition,
and illuminating the suffering that citizens were being forced to endure,
Ugandans mobilized their refusal of COVID-19 mandates to enact social and
policy change. Seen in this way, the student protests and EeZzy’s music were
not uncaring or selﬁsh in their deﬁance of remote learning and social
distancing. Rather, these are actions aimed at challenging the government’s
monopoly over public health expertise and truth. Through protest and song,
Ugandans demanded agency and transparency in government decision-
making processes that endangered both their livelihoods and lives.
Thus, these contestations about COVID-19 in Uganda were primarily
challenges to state power, where certain truths are wielded by state actors to
further the government’s ability to restrict freedoms and harm public and
personal welfare in ways that will last well beyond the pandemic. To interpret
protests against lockdowns and remote learning as “reckless,” as in the words
of the Uganda Police Force (Katumusiime 2021), is to overlook their com-
plexity as forms of Ugandan social movement building. Such grassroots and
civil society contestations of state public health directives became sites
through which disenfranchised East Africans could challenge the hegemony
and hypocrisy of authoritarian state power.
As the Ugandan case also demonstrates, COVID-19 did not suspend the
crisis of neoliberalism but further entrenched it; the pandemic did not impede
repressive neocolonial political establishments but rather enhanced them. In
Uganda, as in other East African nations, the ruling government’s mismanage-
ment of the health crisis and the continued operationalization of neoliberal
and neocolonial policies inspired forms of grassroots anger and deﬁance.
Nanjala Nyabola has described similarly violent police enforcement of pan-
demic lockdowns in Kenya and governmental corruption in the mismanage-
ment of public health funds, as well as global vaccine inequality, calling the
anger and dissent they foment a “necessary, righteous rage” (2022:147).
Recalling Mahmood Mamdani’s (1996) continued insistence on examining
phenomena in their local contexts, we show that Ugandan resistance to the
state’s COVID-19 truth claims challenged necropolitical public health direc-
tives in order to change them. When the state wields truth as a weapon,
contesting it becomes a political (and epistemic) site of resistance.
Conclusion
The Ugandan and Tanzanian predicaments have not been exceptional
compared to other postcolonial African states. Across the continent, there
has been widespread contestation of states’ and global health actors’
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strategies to alleviate the threat of COVID-19. Understanding the social and
political contexts within which these epistemic disputes unfold is central to
navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and future global health crises. For
instance, in Nigeria, citizens voiced their distrust in the political establish-
ment through claims that COVID-19 was a Chinese biological weapon or a
plague caused by sins (Olatunji et al. 2020). These theories, like others,
counter state and international institutional claims about the origins and
transmission of COVID-19 (Simon et al. 2020). They are aimed at challenging
the purveyors of such truths and revealing the potentially powerful (ab)uses
to which these claims are put (Afolabi & Ilesanmi 2021; Banjwa 2021; Nyalile
& Loo 2021).
Our interpretive framework has involved paying close attention to con-
tested truths in East Africa, their force and impact, their oblique and partial
aspects, and the conditions that make them so compelling to so many.
Contested truths call attention to a geopolitical context shaped by ongoing
forms of coloniality, understood as the relationship between former coloniz-
ing powers in Euro-America and postcolonial African countries. The frame-
work also attends to the ongoing efforts of decolonization by digital, religious,
student, and creative actors on the ground who work to unsettle hegemonic
public health knowledge and other forms of social control that are authored
and authorized by international organizations, corporate news media, and
corrupt national governments. Some of the actors we have written about
here, such as the Ugandan student strikers or Tanzanians tweeting about
steaming, can be seen as apprehending and engaging with the state in just
this manner. Indeed, truths are not self-evident entities; they can be and are
wielded with political intent, particularly in the context of neo/colonial
power relations, where the authority to govern needs to be justiﬁed in the
absence of popular consent.
We have argued against dismissing contested truths as either “conspiracy
theories” or as forms of indifference or ignorance (see also West & Sanders
2003). Such approaches invisibilize the discursive and epistemological chal-
lenges these contestations present to necropolitical, neoliberal, and neoco-
lonial deployments of “truth” that maintain socio-economic and political
inequities. As Justin Haruyama (2023:172) notes, “the discursive work per-
formed by the invocation of the category of ‘conspiracy theory’ is to consign
the very suspicion that there might be a malicious conspiracy to a domain of
primordial irrationality, treating the suspicion of conspiracy as a paranoid
one whose epistemological bases bear no serious consideration or
engagement.” Similarly in our cases, the impulse to dismiss President Magu-
fuli’s Afrocentric rhetoric as ignorant or the Ugandan students’ protests as
uninformed would be to refuse to take seriously what is at stake in these
actions. In proposing contested truths as an analytical framework, we call
attention to the social, political, and epistemological stakes that shape knowl-
edge’s processes of production, legitimation, and distribution in and beyond
East Africa. Knowledge, seen through this transdisciplinary and action-
oriented lens, is less an object of truth and more a product of knotted and
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uneven epistemological practices, tied to structures of power that have been
reﬁned and reproduced from colonialism to neoliberal deregulation.
A keen attention to the process of truth-making is particularly important
for addressing the critical limitations of global health projects that have been
recently exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. One key limitation has been
the eroding of trust that many people in and beyond Africa have for public
health information and institutions. Locked out of decision-making pro-
cesses that result in billion-dollar projects whose effects are difﬁcult to
discern, grassroots actors and postcolonial elites alike have come to believe,
for instance, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation instrumentalized
COVID-19 for population control, particularly of Africans (Haruyama 2023;
Prasad 2022). Given the increasing complexity of data science and the
accompanying opacity that surrounds processes of scientiﬁc knowledge-
making, many of the world’s publics have unsurprisingly come to view global
health institutions with increased hesitancy and suspicion.
In East Africa, the Tanzanian state’s denial of COVID-19, heated digital
public debates, and grassroots protests in Uganda against public health
measures are moments in which local actors challenged deeply entrenched
injustices by calling into question the truths that global and national institu-
tions deploy to justify not just interventions, but also their authority and
legitimacy to act in ways that profoundly delimit livelihoods and life chances.
The contestation of truths, we contend, is thus also an act of contesting
epistemic hierarchies and prevalent asymmetries of power in today’s neoco-
lonial and neoliberal political economy of knowledge-making. These con-
tested truths highlight quotidian ideas and practices wielded by people who
nonetheless have the power to interrupt the coloniality of knowledge, or at
least to call into question normative processes of truth making. In many ways,
Africans have been at the forefront of these processes, which could explain
why the dire global health predictions about Africa’s pandemic (un)pre-
paredness turned out to be so wrong. African actors—from state leaders to
civil society to the grassroots—are grappling with the power and performa-
tivity of truth in ways that the rest of the world would do well to learn from.
Acknowledgements
This piece grew out of an earlier collaboration editing a Somatosphere series on
Contested Truths, and we thank our contributing authors for their incisive
and thought-provoking pieces, each of which helped to strengthen this
article: Adventino Banjwa, Justin Haruyama, Leanne Loo, Bettina Ng’weno,
Tom Nyalile, Hagan Sibiri, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, and Ignatius G. D. Suglo.
We are also grateful for the lively conversations about this material with our
fellow presenters at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Associ-
ation: Nicholas Abrams, Abimbola Adelakun, Mongezi Bolofo, Queeny José,
Allen Kiconco, Neely Myers, Sarah Staub, Leona Vaughn, and Anika Wilson.
The section on Twitter (now X) beneﬁted from suggestions made by Melanie
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Walsh and Crystal Lee. Peter Masue, Lúisa Reis-Castro, and Asaf Augusto
helped ensure that our translations were accurate. Feedback from ASR
Editor Cajetan Iheka and from our three anonymous reviewers was critical
to honing our argument. Finally, we owe our gratitude to Joschka Philipps for
originally encouraging us to write this piece and for his engaging and detailed
feedback on an earlier draft.
Notes
1. Except in the Ugandan case, our analysis focuses on early experiences of the
pandemic in East Africa, and as such, does not address contested truths around
COVID-19 vaccination here. Nonetheless, our analytic framework—contested
truths—may be useful for future scholars seeking to understand vaccine hesitancy,
skepticism, and suspicion. COVID-19 is also not the ﬁrst disease that has brought
contested truths to light in the region (see, for example, Leach et al. 2022). Our
analysis is deeply indebted to previous scholarly work on HIV/AIDS and Ebola,
where contested truths signiﬁcantly shaped understandings of the diseases, their
origins, and access to care in and beyond Africa (McNeill 2009; Mulwo et al. 2012;
Ouattara & Århem 2021; Richardson et al. 2019).
2. All local terms from Tanzania are in Kiswahili. We keep all references to the social
media platform Twitter (now known as X) because these posts were authored,
shared, and collected before 2023.
3. Andayi et al.’s (2019) paper on the 1918 inﬂuenza pandemic in coastal Kenya is an
exception.
4. Anna Tibaijuka was ﬁred in 2014 by then-President Jakaya Kikwete from her post as
Land and Housing Minister for her alleged involvement in taking $1 million as
part of a large corruption scheme. She was re-elected in 2015 and remains a
Member of Parliament.
5. Dr. Joseph Otieno’s interview clarifying that steam therapy does not cure or
prevent COVID-19 was tweeted and retweeted widely. See https://twitter.com/
koncept_tv/status/1255394007863250944.
6. Part of the tweet reads: “tujiandae kuchekwa dunia nzima kama taifa! Habari toka ndani
ya kamati ya kitaifa ya kupambana na corona ni kuwa imeundwa timu ya kitaifa ya
mitishamba na kuhamasisha kujifukiza!” @kigogo2014 is a well-known Twitter account
that shares information about Tanzania’s political elite. The tweets are sometimes
critical of the Tanzanian government, which, in turn, has threatened to arrest the
individual(s) behind the account. See https://twitter.com/kigogo2014/status/
1254318206782767104.
7. In an interview reported by Kwanza TV (an online newspaper that was later banned
by the Tanzanian government) the then-Deputy Health Minister Dr. Faustine
Ndugulile said “Steam therapy is not a valid way to treat or kill the coronavirus.” See
https://twitter.com/kwanza_tv/status/1250353523096576001.
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Subjects

Keywords: COVID-19; Epistemology; Global Health; Tanzania; Uganda; digital publics; decoloniality; Truth; civil society; Protest

People & roles

Author(s): Lee, Jia Hui; Meek, Laura; Katumusiime, Jacob

Origins & context

Title: Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa : Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda
Publication type: Article
Language: English
Journal: African Studies Review
Year: 2023
volume: 66
issue: 4
Page start: 873
Page end: 898
Status: Peer reviewed

Identifiers & sources

Source ID (eref-/epub-): eref-88332
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2023.69
ISSN: 1555-2462
Repository URL: https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/88332/; https://epub.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/7658/; urn:nbn:de:bvb:703-epub-7658-0

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Cite this record

Lee, Jia Hui, Laura Meek, and Jacob Katumusiime. “Contested Truths Over COVID-19 in East Africa : Examining Opposition to Public Health Measures in Tanzania and Uganda.” African Studies Review 66, no. 4 (2023): 873-898. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2023.69.

DOI: 10.1017/asr.2023.69
Permalink: https://data.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/s/amira/item/30082

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