The potential impact of COVID 19 on poor and conflict-ridden communities in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA): A conceptual paper

The first cases of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), previously known as 2019-nCoV, were reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China (Wu, Zhao, Yu B, et al 2020). The virus then spread to Malaysia and Thailand and eventually to the Americas, Europe, Australia and Africa. On the 11thof March 2020 the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 a global pandemic. This concept paper explores the potential impact of COVID-19 on poverty stricken and conflict-ridden communities in Sub-Sahara Africa. In doing so, the paper also explored the implications for public health professionals working with these communities, including recommendation for future policy development.

Breaking the Reputation of Female Rule in China: Daoism and the Rewriting of the History of the Reign of Wu Zhao (624-705)

Usurpation by a woman made the reign of Wu Zhao a problem in the history writing of the restored Tang dynasty (618-907; interregnum 690-705) and thereafter that has often attracted the epithet ‘Confucian’. An examination of the rewriting of history to change the meaning of two miracles reported during her reign – the appearance of a new (though small) mountain and of Laozi, supposed ancestor of the Tang imperial line – shows that among those keen to repurpose these events were later Daoists, who were engaged in a long term struggle with the Buddhists, the main beneficiaries of her rule. This suggests that we need a more nuanced approach than simply designating all retrospective criticism of her as ‘Confucian’, even if the ultimate origins of the attempts at historical revision are as yet hard to discern.

Severing Grandma’s Phallus

In 695, at the peak of her Zhou 周 dynasty (690-705), Wu Zhao 武曌 (624-705), China’s first and only female emperor, erected the Axis of the Sky (Tianshu 天樞), a hundred-foot tall octagonal Buddhist pillar topped with a quartet of dragons holding aloft a scintillating fire pearl, a monument that, according to Song Confucians “exalted the Zhou and disparaged the Tang.” In 714, her grandson Li Longji 李隆基 (685-762), emperor Tang Xuanzong 唐玄宗 (r.712-56), ordered this phallic pillar razed, and smelted its bronze and iron into weapons. This reactionary public political act played an important symbolic role in a wider campaign to re-institute a Confucian moral order that placed Han Chinese above non-Han subjects in the restored Tang 唐 (618-90, 705-907) realm, re-installed a normative patriarchal order that placed men over women, and re-situated Confucianism over Buddhism. Building on the work of Antonino Forte and Zhang Naizhu, in a triptych portraying erection, ejaculation, and castration, respectively, this article examines the dynamic, fluid political and ideological contexts in which Wu Zhao erected her magnificent phallic pillar and Xuanzong destroyed it.