How lockdowns through history have led to revolt and misinformation

Few people like to be confined, and even fewer like to be captive when there is an outbreak. In the spring of 2020, people in lockdown worldwide slid into paralysis when the threat of a new virus halted society. Glossing over the necessity to document the early stages of the Covid pandemic from Wuhan, the author Fang Fang noted: “If authors have any responsibilities in the face of disaster, the greatest of them is to bear witness. I’ve always cared about how the weak survive great upheavals. The individuals who are left out – they’ve always been my chief concern.”

Fang Fang’s lockdown diary, which was widely circulated in China, sounded the alarm about the pandemic through a series of terse reflections. She illustrated how people endure long stretches of captivity during a time when disease, and by extension, death have taken hold. Like writers such as Virginia Woolf, who experienced the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Fang Fang explores the complexities of illness confinement with a bold narrative. The story of how people cope with their illness during periods of captivity is both familiar and unequivocal, especially when the prosaic safety of free movement vanishes like water on a hot summer day. 

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A History of the World in Six Plagues explores the historical, philosophical and psychological events that arise when people endure an epidemic. Lockdowns intended to maintain health, along with people’s responses, have led to revolt and misinformation, but they have also prompted moments of contemplation. In some instances, campaigns that aimed to ensure the health of a nation also generated a subclass of people, scapegoats who were the most vulnerable. 

My book is structured Janus-faced. On one side, most of the world is unaware of microorganisms, even as novel sciences emerge. As such, people’s understanding of disease transmission and treatment remains narrow. On the other side is the post-mass vaccination age. Microbiology has become a well- established field that people in the global north generally understand, but medication and health are not evenly distributed. In my chapters on HIV and Ebola, I illustrate how behind the walls of prison or in the postcolonial city, access to healthcare is not a given.

Moreover, A History of the World in Six Plagues explores how scientific racism also shaped who was perceived to be susceptible to cholera and what treatment entailed. Cholera posed a global threat throughout the 19th century. By mid-century, public health officials began to address the disease by improving water quality and sewage systems. However, in plantations, prevention and treatment took on a more pseudoscientific flair, such as the use of camphor or castor oil. I examine how formerly enslaved people in the United States wrote about illness, forced confinement, and black physicians during the 19th century.

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The ethical muddiness of early scientific research is also explored in the book. Sleeping sickness was a condition that plagued people throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Congruent with its name, the illness could result in perpetual lethargy or even death, if left untreated, which propelled colonial administrators to seek a treatment. I show how European scientists, who were stationed in East Africa, set up medical concentration camps to isolate sleeping sickness patients. During this period of colonial expansion, scientific research and notions of consent evolved, creating thorny situations whereby some African patients were confined against their will in the name of progress. 

In the last section of the book, I focus on how Black women coped with Covid-related lockdowns in Germany. Through a series of interviews conducted over 18 months, these women demonstrated how their ethnicity, immigration status and preexisting health conditions shaped their ability to cope with the lockdown. We find that even in this period of vulnerability, they were able to discover ways to survive.

In history and life, I’m drawn to states of exception and how people respond to disease, illness and care. Of course, illness makes the body feel less whole. Even without knowledge of microbiology, or when people didn’t have access to medication, they figured out a way to isolate themselves from harm, write about their suffering, or aid their comrades. In the uncertainty of confinement, one’s bodily rhythms are recalibrated. 

More than anything, my book shows how an immeasurable substratum of people – the enslaved, the colonised, the incarcerated – can exert their agency during an outbreak. Even when an epidemic fuels a social tremor, people’s collective strength may not be severed.

A History of the World in Six Plagues by Edna Bonhomme is out now (Dialogue Books, £25). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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