EAST AFRICA MEDIA LAB COLLAB

Notes from the Beginning of the Plague

A stream-of-consciousness journal from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic

Princely H. Glorious
7 min readFeb 25, 2021

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“They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.” — Albert Camus ~ Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Written: May 13, 2020

This was a public journal entry requested by the East Africa Media Lab Collaboration. It was published here and here. I stumbled upon it again today and found it fascinating to look at the state of my mind almost a year ago with the pandemic in its early days. I am sharing it with you, hoping you too find some value in it. Enjoy!

“No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.”

— Albert Camus, La Peste (The Plague), 1947

The world around me is in a collective pause. The world within brims as usual — with life, with possibility, with verve.

Part 1: The World Around

This virus has forced our world to slow down. It has forced us to live more deliberately, albeit also more precariously. Or perhaps all it has done is expose how precariously we were already living. How unreliable the systems that underpin our daily realities are.

By design, the guiding principles of our social, political, and economic systems maximize money, not life. “Shareholder value” is more sacred to our societies than the humans the system is supposedly designed for. The discontents of globalization are more visible: from the American rage directed at WHO, to the xenophobia against Africans in China. Our systems were crap. Our systems remain crap.

The same people who preach free trade with evangelistic fervor are now asking governments to step in and save Big Business. The ideologies that prioritize saving money over saving human lives are being found out. The age-old problem of African stories being told by non-Africans with crafty (often geopolitical) motives has reared its ugly head more intensely with reporting on Tanzania’s response to the pandemic. A (hopefully uncoordinated) cabal of “Africa experts” on high horses are criticizing Tanzania’s decision not to aggressively lock down its economy. I am yet to see this same criticism aimed at Sweden, despite its similar lack of a lockdown.

“What can we learn from the Swedish approach?” reads one headline.

“Tanzania’s handling of pandemic raises eyebrows” reads another.

“Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy will Soon be the World’s” reads one headline.

“No lockdown: US warns of the high risk of contracting COVID-19 in Tanzania” reads another.

“Sweden deserves praise for its no-lockdown strategy.”

Really?

This is not me saying I agree 100% with either Sweden’s or Tanzania’s strategies… Can we just extend this “benefit of the doubt” to all sovereign nations? Can we afford them their sovereignty, and that of the strategies they decide to use based on their own evaluation? Or can we only do this to the rich ones? One thing we do know about this pandemic is that we don’t yet know how to deal with this pandemic.

“The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.” — Albert Camus ~ Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Part 2: The world within

This will be stream-of-consciousness. Even more so than the previous section. Here we go.

For the seventeenth time in my life, I am learning to meditate and hoping this time I can build a habit out of it. For the first time in my life, the meditations seem effective. Perhaps it is because I read an article by Sam Harris, and listened to a Daniel Goleman BigThink video, expounding on the neurological benefits of meditation. They convinced me. And now that my ENTP brain is convinced this is not wishy-washy woo-woo, I am meditating with more resolve.

I have begun journaling again. The last time I journaled, I was 15.

I have begun setting new goals for myself. Today is exactly six months before my birthday. If you focus, pick some goals and work hard towards them for six months, you will have an incredibly different life than the one you have now. And you will have laid a foundational system that the rest of your life can flow from with less resistance. This is all easier said than done. But I am more motivated to do it. Perhaps because there is a fairly new gnawing inside me that I am getting old.

I am happy. There is a deep-seated joy I notice more often now. I notice my flaws more clearly, and I can more easily accept these flaws while working on them. Like, I need to set clearer boundaries with certain people. I need to clarify my mission and strengthen my frame. And I need to deliver consequences when those around me break that frame. I need to use my phone less. Instant gratification is the monster our society needs to slay perhaps more than any other. And our phones are often the gateway drug to most other forms of instant gratification. Sweet, sweet dopamine.

The social distancing makes you realize what is truly essential in your life — and who is truly essential. I am enjoying more speaking and writing — I have been interviewed on four or so different platforms over the past month alone. I need to monetize this more. This slow-down that the coronavirus has brought our world may end up being good for our souls — if we have souls. The world around me is in a collective pause. The world within brims as usual — with life, with possibility, with verve.

I am reading Camus again. In 1947, he wrote La Peste (The Plague) — a book with cutting insight on how humans deal with pandemics. Plagues.

I have pondered these three quotes from that book so often over the past few weeks. I may revisit them in the future.

“Everybody knows that pandemics have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

“The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.”

“What we learn in times like the pandemic: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

"So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.” — Albert Camus ~ Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Added today — Feb 25, 2021

Here’s another quote from La Peste that seems eerily apt today, what with the plague of the coronavirus still raging on. 74 years ago, Camus wrote:

“We tell ourselves that the pandemic is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.”

With the numbers becoming names and faces of people we know in this second wave, the bad dream seems again unending. But it is hope and action that will free us:

“Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the pandemic was ended.”

— Albert Camus, La Peste (The Plague), 1947

“But, really, they were asleep already; this whole period was, for them, no more than a long night’s slumber.” — Albert Camus ~ Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

What did you just read?

I’d written this bit as an intro but it got too long and unwieldy. I am leaving it here at the end, but may remove it in future edits. Here you go:

Today, I stumbled on a journal entry from May 13, 2020 that was published publically here. I wrote this during the time we can now call the early months of the pandemic. Earlier that month, I had received a request from Tiemo Ehmke at ICEbauhaus to reflect on COVID-19 and the global shifts it brought. As part of the pioneer fellowship cohort of their Media Lab Collaboration, I was one of over 50 collaborators he reached out to from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Their idea was simple: one question — one answer — one picture — to listen to a world in isolation.

Below, I share the unedited, stream-of-consciousness rambling I submitted to the collaboration. I note that part two, the more personal portion of this reflection, was not published due to an error (they published part 1 twice). Reading it, I see the state of my mind during that time. In a quest to live more wholeheartedly, I share this with you today, unfiltered and very slightly edited. (I have taken the liberty to translate Camus references to “pestilence” as the more fitting “pandemic” or “disease” where necessary. I’ve also added photos, formatted the piece, and added some more La Peste quotes at the end.)

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Princely H. Glorious
Princely H. Glorious

Written by Princely H. Glorious

African. Creator. Video essayist. Exploring the intersection of “Africa” “Mobile” “Information” and “Futures” | Bird-of-passage | Follow @onastories everywhere

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