We have heard allegations that the Chinese eat anything and everything, including animals that are considered taboo in many cultures, especially in Senegambia – Bats? Cockroaches? Rats? Snakes? Millipedes and centipedes? Monkeys? (“Goolo, Kuto, Moouse, Jankalarr, and Sindah”)?
Outbreaks of the Ebola virus in the Congo Basin and Gabon in the 1990s have been associated with the butchering and consumption of chimpanzees and bonobos. Bushmeat hunters in Central Africa infected with the “human T-lymphotropic virus were carefully exposed to wild primates.”
It is said that the Chinese have brought this latest biological dissonance upon humanity because of their unusual culinary taste. I know people who have opted to stay away from anything Chinese in the meantime until there is some certainty about what exactly is going on.
I wanted to order food from a Chinese restaurant in Downtown Manhattan in New York City the other day. I was quietly reminded of Corona Virus. I had no option but to restrain my palate.
Furthermore, again, I wanted Chinese balm, a popular product in Canal street in Manhattan in New York as well in the Gambia, a few days later. Again, I was also advised to be careful. I ignored that advice.
The labeling of everything Chinese as an item crowned by a virus is exaggerated and overblown. This stereotyping of the Chinese and China as the epicenter of the coronavirus is probably why every country and institution are taking precautions.
The United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, and New Zealand have had cause to evacuate their citizens from China. Airlines including Finnair, American Airlines, United, Cathay Pacific, Air India, Ethiopian Airlines, British Airways, Air Asia, and Lufthansa have either stopped flights to China or reduced their Chinese operations by 90%. The effect is that supply chains have been disrupted with consequences for trade performance.
The global economy is bound to slow down in the long run if this situation persists. Nevertheless, what is perhaps more relevant to us should be this: How prepared is Africa and particularly the Gambia?
Globalization turned the world into a small village, technology erased distances, but in the face of a global scourge like the new Corona Virus, the world has turned into a much lower village.
Most of the people and countries that are taking precautions against Corona Virus do not even know where Wuhan is on the map. Some people ate snake meat and bat meat in Wuhan, and they got infected with a virus – animal to man transmission, which has now spread globally and mutated as a deadly human-to-human communicable disease.
China, which is ordinarily regarded as a significant superpower, has suddenly become a pariah nation. Countries have issued travel alerts to their citizens: do not go to China, and those who are in China are being evacuated, and whoever arrives from China is immediately quarantined for two weeks.
This is the mighty China that only recently engaged the United States in a trade war. Same China is now the diseased nation that nobody wants to touch. Imports from China have been suspended. Trips to China have been put on hold. China’s tourism industry is bound to suffer. Who wants to go to a country where a virus is on a rampage, and the air is polluted?
It is not for nothing that the media in Europe has dubbed the Corona Virus, the China Virus – an average Chinese citizen would not like that – but the truth is that the new Corona Virus wears the toga of a nationality.
