Health is political: setting an African agenda for the right to health

When I (TM) began my mandate as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, the world was already in crisis, as it often is. The COVID-19 pandemic was beginning in earnest, yet it had not created the crisis - in many ways it had simply exposed it. For many communities across the African continent, the pandemic served as another chapter in a much longer history rooted in deprivation, extraction, colonialism, racialized hierarchies, gendered violence, and sociopolitical abandonment both internally and from the rest of the world.