My labour of love is the development of a digital museum of great figures and unsung heroes of African history called The Wall of Great Africans.
On June 9, at the writing of this column, the total number of reported Covid-19 cases in Africa since the pandemic began stood at 4,946,536. The total deaths were 132,983.
That was a smidgen of the cumulative 174,136,688 cases reported globally on the same day, with a horrific 3,750,423 deaths.
Second and third waves of the virus have broken out in at least nine African countries, and Africa’s vaccination score is nothing to write home about (of the nearly 2.3 billion doses administered globally by Tuesday, just over 30 million of them had been given in Africa), so the worst might just lie, but the gods have not yet deserted us.
The deaths of all the 132,983 people killed by Covid-19 in Africa — and the nearly 3.8 million in the world — are tragic. Yet there is an added blow to Africa. We are a continent where many countries have talented people across many fields, and therefore, compared to others, we are the continent that can least afford to lose them. However, we have lost many.
My labour of love is the development of a digital museum of great figures and unsung heroes of African history called The Wall of Great Africans. We just posted a profile of Linah Kelebogile Mohohlo, a Botswana economist who was Governor of the Bank of Botswana from 1999 to 2016. She succumbed to Covid-19.
Going back to March 24, 2020 with the death of the iconic Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango, the Covid toll on our finest, has been high:
These are a handful of the more than 200 we have recorded and/or profiled. In 2023/2024, or possibly even 2026, when we reckon with what else Africa lost other than their lives, there could be a lot of red.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3