Africa Is a Coronavirus Success Story So Far, If Only the World Would Notice

From the moment the novel coronavirus burst out of China and began to spread around the world, many commentators quickly took for granted that Africa would become the pandemic’s biggest and deadliest target. Yet the continent has so far dodged those dire predictions. In retrospect, few things were more predictable. For decades, the convention in Western media coverage has been to treat Africa with a casual scorn that plays up its problems—pretending wrongly, for example, that its wars are unusually brutal by the standards of our times, or that its politicians, sneeringly dismissed as “Big Men,” are uniquely power hungry […]