The coronavirus has rattled humanity, tested resolve and determination, and redefined normalcy. This compelling collection of 29 short stories and essays brings together the lived experiences of covid19 through a diversity of voices from across the African continent. The stories highlight challenges, new opportunities, and ultimately the deep resilience of Africans and their communities. Bringing into conversation the perspectives of laypeople, academics, professionals, domestic workers, youth, and children, the volume is a window into the myriad ways in which people have confronted, adapted to, and sought to tackle the coronavirus and its trail of problems. The experiences of the most vulnerable are specifically explored, and systemic changes and preliminary shifts towards a new global order are addressed. Laughter as a coping mechanism is a thread throughout.

The coronavirus has rattled humanity, tested resolve and determination, and redefined normalcy. This compelling collection of 29 short stories and essays brings together the lived experiences of covid19 through a diversity of voices from across the African continent. The stories highlight challenges, new opportunities, and ultimately the deep resilience of Africans and their communities. Bringing into conversation the perspectives of laypeople, academics, professionals, domestic workers, youth, and children, the volume is a window into the myriad ways in which people have confronted, adapted to, and sought to tackle the coronavirus and its trail of problems. The experiences of the most vulnerable are specifically explored, and systemic changes and preliminary shifts towards a new global order are addressed. Laughter as a coping mechanism is a thread throughout.

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.

This collection explores the communicative dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, redressing the absence of perspectives from Africa and the Global South in pandemic discourses and highlighting the importance of considering the impact of local contexts in global crises. The volume critically reflects on the significance of communicative dimensions, understood here as the effects of communication on bidirectional flows between senders and receivers, on many different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Grounded in transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives and drawing on data from the Ghanian experience, the book showcases how important it is for local factors to be taken into account by governments, medical professionals, social commentators, and everyday people in communicating during a pandemic, when local cultures, histories, and infrastructures all play a role in shaping communication and the dissemination of knowledge. Chapter examines such topics as the role of metaphor, the use of social media in disinformation, and the range of strategies and channels employed by stakeholders. This volume centers the pandemic experience in a Global South context, demonstrating the importance of a greater focus on local contexts in understanding communication in a time of pandemic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, crisis communication, health communication, discourse analysis, and African studies.

"Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera-- one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens-- and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today"--

The prevalence of global pandemics has been timeless and universal. In 1918, the Spanish Flue grounded Spain and her neighbours. In 1997, 2014 and 2020, the Ebola virus wreaked havoc in West Africa in the same manner that polio had ravaged the globe. Since 2019, the Coronavirus has forced most economies onto a downward spiral. Despite concerted global attempts at observing World Health Organization guidelines, the Coronavirus has been changing peoples' lives, forcing most economies onto their knees, endangering lives and livelihoods, making a mockery of global medicine and causing the widespread despair and helplessness that has come to be known as 'the new normal'. Unlike the other pandemics, the mayhem, complexities and dialectics caused by Covid-19 have been matchless, requiring a systematic study and necessitating a volume like this one. The volume's 16 well-researched chapters argue that despite Covid-19's enormous lessons and predictions about even greater future pandemics, humanity can ill-afford to relent in its determination to conquer the pandemic in the same way that human resolve has defeated past pandemic. As such, the volume provides hope and direction to the global community on how best to deal with Covid-19 and pandemics of similar or even higher magnitude in the future.

The advent of Coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) pandemic has caused much distress, despondence, fear and pandemonium across all nations of the world. In Zimbabwe, the emergence of the virus sent a chilling message of insecurity and need for conscientiousness and diligence, as the virus decimated humankind amid untold suffering. The pandemic came as a litmus test for the integrity and meticulousness of all the so-called professionals and institutions of integrity across the country, challenging them to stand equal to their tasks, titles and claimed astuteness. For Zimbabwe and Africa in general, the manifestation and ramifications of COVID-19, has raised so many questions around issues of people's welfare and innovative research, especially amid the reality that the country is dependent on charity and donations from well-wishers for the vaccines it needs, over and above the modest amount it can purchase. This reality and related challenges pose interesting research questions addressed in this volume. A central question on the possibility and extent of home-grown solutions inspired by and tailored to the needs and predicaments of Zimbabwe and the African continent. The richness of the book is in the firsthand eyewitness accounts of scholars caught up in the COVID-19 challenge. The researchers in this volume have sought to capture developments, insights and evolutions as they unfold and progress. The book is handy for scholars in policy studies, risk and disaster management, social anthropology, political science, development studies, African studies and decolonial fields of studies.