“The Truth Is Not Known”

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

“…Such approaches invisibilize the discursive and epistemological challenges these contestations present to necropolitical, neoliberal, and neocolonial deployments of “truth” that maintain socio-economic and political inequities. As Justin Haruyama (2023:172) notes, “the discursive work performed 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 Magufuli’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 knowledge’s processes of production, legitimation, and distribution in and beyond East Africa.…”

“…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 processes 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.…”