Five years since lockdown: The best and worst of times in South Africa

South Africa went into lockdown five years ago at midnight tomorrow night.

It was, in the immortal words of Charles Dickens, the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was a time of childlike innocence, fireside chats from Uncle Cyril, masks, working from home, Zoom calls, hand sanitiser.

It was also a time of banned Woolies chicken and open toed sandals, of suburban grannies panhandling for illegal smokes on garage forecourts and WhatsApp groups rivalling underground cells to get illicit booze.

It was a time of corruption, this time of personal protective equipment – and within the Union Buildings.

It was a time of some ministers flaunting their privilege and ennui as the rest of us stewed behind closed doors.

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It was a time of conspiracy theories and sheep dip trumping getting a Bill Gates implanted microchip via the vaccine.

Covid was a turning point, it’s no coincidence that the populists and climate denialists occupy the positions they do across the world.

We are still wrestling about the efficiency and the speed that the vaccines were developed, ignoring the fact that it was South Africa’s work fighting TB and HIV/Aids that made us the world leaders in medical research that we are.

We obeyed until it was time to push back whether against heavy handed Big Brother law enforcement or absurd regulations.

The fake news and the tin foil hat brigade got weaponised, the Karens got more vexed than usual.

What did we learn? Are we better?

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I think we learnt a lot and I think we are a lot better than we give ourselves credit for.

When you look around the rest of the world and you see how fast people have given in to new circumstances and now new power dynamics, we might have had the hardest lockdown imaginable – and the most surreal – but we never lost our sense of humour – nor our ungovernability.

We never stopped giving either.

Covid was a time when the penguins walked the streets in Cape Town, the canals in Venice cleaned themselves up and the better off dug deep for those who had nothing.

Dickens’s famous beginning to A Tale of Two Cities published 161 years ago ends: “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.”

He could just have well written that today.

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