As the December holiday season approached, our country was waiting to exhale. Spring came early in Johannesburg, beautiful in bursts of purple hydrangea and pink bougainvillea. The mood was lighter.
Winter had been unspeakable as Johannesburg was gripped by a third wave of Covid. It was a season of loss: two uncles succumbed in hospital; a beloved cousin passed away weeks later; a well-known journalist colleague, Karima Brown; a publisher friend, Nadia Goetham; a chef whose Twitter timeline was my scroll of aspiration, LesDaChef; the national songbird Sibongile Khumalo — lost, not to Covid, but she joined the long toll of the last year.
Now, hope was finally on the horizon. The Covid death burden went down to almost zero as the vaccination drive picked up. The charts flattened and even last week, perusing the daily data, Africa felt like the safest place in the world to have a holiday as we watched the fourth wave pick up in Europe and the US. Covid had flatlined in Africa.
And then hope was shattered on November 24 at a press conference where the leading South African gene detective, Professor Tulio de Oliveira, announced that he and his team had sequenced a new variant of the virus, B.1.1.529.
I listened on my car radio as de Oliveira joined health minister Joe Phaahla to tell the country about the variant, then still of interest, not yet of concern. In the thick Italian accent we have come to recognise, de Oliveira ran through the now well-known history of how Omicron had been detected first in Botswana, then in South Africa and then in Hong Kong. An eagle-eyed pathologist at Lancet Laboratories had noticed a change in gene mutation and reported it up the public health sentinel system for which our country is well-known in the scientific world.
South Africa’s scientific and political communities have practised radical transparency with its people and with the world since coronavirus made landfall here in March 2020. The Delta variant was first sequenced and identified here in December that year, killing our summer vibe and earning the country kneecapping travel bans.
Not even a year later, the same thing has happened again. Hours after the press conference, the UK announced a travel ban. Family, trade and tourism links between South Africa and the UK are significant, so a sigh went up from the tip of Africa and stretched to the UK as plans for holidays and reunions were torn apart by the identification of Omicron.
Hour by hour the world closed us out as news of the variant spread. More European countries followed suit. Then the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where tens of thousands of South Africans work. Iran announced a travel ban. Then the US. We had been sealed off from the world again.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is a gracious and personable leader, not given to authoritarian table-thumping. But even he was angry. South Africa’s transparency and scientific sharing of the virus’s mutations had been met with a ban that was more than a little racist in its assumptions and presumptions about Africa’s scientific abilities. The president called on countries to rescind the ban as news emerged that the Netherlands, in fact, had the first cases.
While China and a few other countries pursue a Covid-zero strategy, most of the world has realised that we have to vaccinate and learn to live with coronavirus until it becomes endemic. This is the strategy South Africa is pursuing along with global best practice of alerting and sharing genomic surveillance results quickly and transparently. The ban has provoked national and international anger for all it says about geopolitical power and of how a small country trying to do its best can be treated like a pariah in the midst of viral fear. The idea of a global village, where we are each other’s carers, lies tattered again.
It’s the little heartbreaks that catch me. My niece in Japan can’t travel back for us to meet her little girl. My WhatsApp is filled with stories like this from friends and family. The tourism industry had been looking forward to visitors, 300,000 from the UK alone. They had booked tickets, accommodation and visits to wine farms, and planned to go shark-diving, to the beaches and game parks.
Cancellations came in faster than you can say Omicron, threatening a sector that could pull South Africa from its Covid doldrums. Part of the reason so many South Africans work around the world is that unemployment is so high at home. Growth in gross domestic product is pegged at an optimistic 5 per cent for the rest of the year but the travel bans put a spanner in the works.
My husband and I got married in December 2019 and our planned honeymoon was to visit China. The identification of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan later that month put paid to it. I was to attend the Perugia journalism festival in March 2020 and so we thought that was as good a replacement celebration as any. The virus found a second epicentre in Italy, so that plan hit the skids too.
By December 2020, we had moderated our ambitions and decided on Cape Town. When de Oliveira and his team sequenced the Delta variant, Ramaphosa locked down the country and imposed internal travel bans. When you’ve had three honeymoons crashed by Corona, you learn to roll with the punches.
Last Sunday, I needed a break from my Omicron doom-scrolling. It was too awful to watch and the din of Africa’s digital anger was deafening. So, we went to walk at The Wilds, an inner-city gem of a nature reserve on Johannesburg’s hilly northern slopes. The artist James Delaney has dotted his metal sculptures across the park. As you walk and climb, you spot a statuesque pink giraffe, a red monkey in a tree, a purple wildebeest. After the weekend rains, the trees and grass were bright lime green. Raindrops still glistened on them. The sun had come out. The shrubs had drunk deeply so their flowers were perky and yellow, pink and purple. It was a spectacular display, a showing of nature’s curative qualities.
At The Wilds, you climb to its highest point and you can see the cityscape. All the markers of Johannesburg’s history as the city where gold was discovered — the buildings, the stately homes of the “randlords”, the skyscrapers. In typical South African humour, the city earned the moniker “Wuhannesburg” after the Chinese city where the virus was first identified, when our numbers climbed higher and faster than the rest of the country’s.
You can impose travel bans but, in no time at all, the Delta variant that was sequenced here had become dominant — like Omicron could shortly be. We have to learn to live with the coronavirus and my “Wuhannesburg” felt like it was not a bad place to be quarantined in by the rest of the world.
Ferial Haffajee is a South African editor and writer
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