*3.5. Suspicion of Post-Imperial White Activity (Part Two)*

This brings us to the consideration of another practical and cultural factor in addressing pandemic control in the developed versus the developing world: are vaccinations in the first place the only, or even best, way to respond to the health threat posed by the pandemic? Do vaccination programs merely serve to feed the capitalist machine in developed countries by exploiting the needs of Africans? Do they, despite other benefits, perpetuate colonialism by another name? In this case, are religious leaders right to oppose vaccination? We have already seen how prominent and influential Christian and Muslim clerics in Nigeria and Kenya are militantly anti-vaccine. As Kaunda (2021) points out, "most churches in Africa today function with a neoliberal capitalist theology", which is, in fact, a kind of "Christocapitalism" because of its appropriation of church spaces in which Jesus Christ (capital good) and believers (consumers) are commodified in such a way that frames much of African Christianity as one which give rise to an alien culture of greed, individualism, and materialism. Christocapitalism, then, can be construed as a kind of "prosperity theology" through which the church's interactions with God are characterized by Christian monopolization and fundamentalist view of society that is not truly advocating for African religionists. As Kaunda observes, "some pastors deploy symbolic violence to threaten their congregants: 'if you don't give your tithes and offering, you'll be cursed. The windows of heaven will completely shut, and God will send a devourer to devour your finances, your relationships, your health and everything in your life'".

In this worldview, Christianity becomes subsumed in the wants and needs of Western capitalist paradigms, something which could explain the appeal to the large number of Africans boycotting COVID-19 vaccinations, especially in contexts where Islam is more native to populations than Christianity. In 9 out of 15 sub-Saharan countries surveyed, Muslim populations have significantly lower full immunization coverage than Christians, and Muslim women are less urbanized, poorer and less well educated than their Christian counterparts (Costa et al. 2020). Costa and colleagues note that "Greater involvement of Muslim leaders in vaccine promotion has proven to be effective in earlier studies", but this immediately begs the question of whether or not involvement of Christian leaders is less significant in breaking down VH/R than it is with Muslim leaders, and if so, why?

There are close parallels between Muslim and Christian behavior and belief when dealing with a pandemic. As Hilmy and Niam (2020) point out, in Islam there are for the most part three principles upon which Muslims base their responses to a plague: "(1) a plague is a heavenly blessing and when Muslims die due to a plague they are considered martyrs while a plague is a punishment for non-Muslims; (2) Muslims shall not enter a plague-affected land (or) leave plague infested regions; and (3) a plague cannot be contagious since all diseases come from Allah". These three principles are a result of the Muslim response to the Tha'un 'Amwas plague of c 638-9CE in Syria, and came to be established as the normative grounds for the Muslim community in its response to a plague. Muslims in general, according to Hilmy and Niam, tend to "be more theologically fatalistic compared to their counterparts in Judaism and Christianity. While ... the Jewish and Christian population believed the theory of contagion, most Muslims did not. As a result, Muslims were not urged to flee from plague-infected lands on the grounds that it was not contagious but a heavenly blessing ... People with viewpoints that deviated from established orthodoxy were judged to be heretics".

Conversely, Christians tend to believe the opposite, namely, that one has to flee from plague-inflicted land because a plague is contagious. However, the realities of the behavior of Muslims in the real world, and the application of such beliefs to the point of *reductio ad absurdum*, show that theological discourse did not and does not prevail without dispute. Even dating back to the great Amwas plague, "Muslims fled from the scene of outbreaks quite as much as Christians, and the idea that Divine rage was behind the Wuhan outbreak is rather undone by the fact that quite as many Muslim countries have been stricken with C-19 as infidel ones (ibid.)". In fact, there is little indication that modern Muslim governments and organizations have taken any different course to dealing with the pandemic than any other types of society. If anything, arguably Christian societies, or the more militant or evangelical sections of them, have displayed greater affinity for the idea of disease being a tool in the Hand of God than any other kind.

Thus, we can see that common threads appear in all societies where vaccination is concerned. Beliefs everywhere persist, quite apart from religious factors, that vaccination is not only unnecessary, but also harmful. These common threads exist in the face of scientific proof that vaccinations work and are not harmful. The situation is made worse where religious opposition to accepting Western assistance with implementing vaccination programs is added to a pre-existing reluctance based upon mistrust of Big Pharma and the other instruments of the capitalistic medical establishment. We may conclude that vaccination programs intended to serve as go-to responses to the health threat posed by the pandemic will need to be taken up in tandem with other approaches that are not as vulnerable to being seen as part of Western exploitation of African resources or Western disregard for African mores and beliefs.
