JONNY STEINBERG: How many tears in the fabric will Covid have caused?

When looked at in retrospect, great pandemics seem eerily strange. Everyone agrees that their consequences were significant. But precisely what those consequences were nobody knows.

In 1918, a great war ended and a great pandemic began. The repercussions of that war may be subject to rival interpretations, but the parameters are clear. Empires fell; a host of nation states were born. A new financial order rendered the world increasingly unstable until the onset of another cataclysmic war. One can contest the details, but the narrative line is clear.

Not so the great pandemic of 1918-1919. Somewhere in the order of one in 36 human beings died. No war or famine before or since has come close to felling as great a proportion of our species. In Africa’s great cities, mines and factories lay idle for weeks as illness crippled the workforce. Fields across the continent lay fallow. Upwards of 10-million African children were suddenly orphaned. These scenes were as apocalyptic as any the modern world has known.

But precisely how the flu pandemic altered the course of history is uncertain. Across Africa, the historian Terence Ranger once argued, a crisis of religious belief ensued. Christian, Islamic and traditional African religious authorities lost credibility as none could explain or act against the flu. Millenarian cults swept the continent; there was a Pentecostal surge. The very structure of religious belief was altered forever.

But Ranger closes his article with the concession that these changes may have happened anyway; it is impossible to know. The world may well look back on Covid-19 with the same puzzlement. We will know its consequences were huge, but we will be uncertain precisely what they were.

In the early stages of SA’s epidemic, it took hard graft to detect the force with which Covid was reshaping everyday life. In this newspaper, Carol Paton reported that a surge in land invasions in Cape Town may well have been triggered by the mass eviction of backyarders who could no longer pay their rent (“Fight for land spills out of Cape Town’s backyards”, April 12).

Also in Cape Town, organised-crime researcher Peter Gastrow found that when night-time entertainment shut down, protection rackets spread across the economy as the city’s mafia searched for new income.

These tears in the fabric of life were profound. But they were largely invisible in national discourse until people with the smarts and voice did the hard work of bringing them to public attention.

On a broader scale, that of the destiny of nations and the world, things become even foggier. Would the mass violence in July have happened in the absence of Covid? Quite possibly not, but it is impossible to know. And if the ANC falters in November’s local government elections, weakening Cyril Ramaphosa’s position as the ANC’s elective conference looms, will this have been the result of Covid? It may well have been, but who is to say for sure?

What about at the global level? The failure to manufacture enough vaccines, and to distribute what we do have with equity, is a scandal of epic proportions. It is in the vital interests of every human being, from the most powerful to the weakest, that each last soul on the planet receives a jab. Faced with an obvious and urgent need to act on behalf of the species, humanity has been unable to take collective action.

The geopolitical consequences have barely begun to play themselves out. But it is fair to speculate that this failure to act collectively now will damage our capacity to act collectively in  future.

Three decades hence, when climate refugees are to be counted in their millions, when food supplies are constantly disrupted, when large urban settlements perennially run out of water, will it be said that our failure to react adequately to Covid presaged our failure to keep temperatures down?

It almost certainly will, but whether it is true will be anyone’s guess.

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.