ABSTRACT
South Africa’s governmental responses to COVID-19 by means of hard lockdowns and other public health interventions occurred in a time and climate of political instability, uncertainty, and multiple other crises such as forced displacements, gender-based violence, security force brutality, chronic inequality, and massive unemployment. By exploring the drastic and urgent government responses to COVID-19, and their embeddedness within these other crises, the authors seek to highlight the contingent and conjunctural relationship between slow, structural, and endemic crises – as well as the spectacular, episodic, and seemingly singular, eruptions of ‘crisis’, along with their ‘blind spots’ and tendencies towards restoring social and political stasis. In this chapter, the authors interrogate the crisis concept anew by introducing the term ‘slow crises’. ‘Slow crises’, in the plural, express the convergences, amplifications, and alternating and competing visibilities and temporalities of multiple crises in the South African context, for instance, the July 2021 unrests in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and the TB and HIV/AIDS epidemics. This chapter also discusses South Africa’s COVID-19 responses within the context of global lockdown models and pandemic preparedness strategies. By emphasising that crises cannot be singularised, the authors conclude that COVID-19 served to both surface and submerge the multiple, and nested, crises of our ‘self-devouring’ capitalist system.
