Rumors thrive in authoritarian contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an explosion of new rumors regarding sources of infection (e.g., travelers, migrants, and returning migrants), forms of treatment (e.g., hydroxychloroquine), access to care (e.g., being turned away, jumping the line), and treatment of the dead (e.g., quick disposal of corpses covers up illicit hospital trade in body parts). These sociomedical rumors intersect with political ones viewing pandemic containment measures as assaults on civil liberties, suggesting that the virus is a cover for the powerful to amass government or foreign aid through graft, and doubting that authoritarian heads of state are healthy or even alive. We see an infodemic-a pandemic of misinformation about the current pandemic-spread globally but adapted to local conditions. As memory scholars, we understand that these local conditions include memory genealogies, path-dependent collective memories that respond to stressors such as regime change, mass violence, or public health concerns. Thus, the "short-term enthusiasms" of rumor (Best) are rooted in deeper layers of memory.
This paper builds on previous work on the genealogy of collective memory and public health rumors in the West-Central nation of Cameroon, wedding this work with an examination of rumors surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in Cameroon and in its many diasporas in Europe (Germany, France, Finland), the United States, and South Africa. It is based on data collected since the 1980s through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, and most recently in collaboration with Dr. Rogers Orock, University of the Witwatersrand and Dr. Flavien Ndonko, GIZ (Cameroon/Togo). At times of particular political stress in post-colonial Cameroon (regime change in the 1980s, constitutional change in the 1990s, incursions from Boko Haram since 2009, and armed conflict in the Anglophone regions since 2016), collective memories of repression from the early colonial period (forced labor, head tax) and the struggle for independence (UPC Rebellion from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s) fed rumors regarding public health. Each previous rumor became part of the collective memory of the nation or of select regions and ethnic groups, making each subsequent rumor more plausible. For example, current rumors that hospitals and government inflate COVID cases to access-and embezzle-foreign aid feel more credible to their believers because they echo prior rumors regarding the "invention" of HIV/AIDS to access foreign wealth. Likewise, initial panic that diasporic Cameroonians returning from France would carry the virus (Le Monde, March 21, 2020) built upon the memory of earlier rumors of HIV invading from foreign shores through container ships filled with virus-impregnated condoms.
Tracing these rumors and their pathways between Cameroon and Cameroon's many diasporas demonstrates the role that social memory plays in responses to a public health crisis. If rumors are alternate forms of knowledge emerging in situations of historically-based mistrust, genealogies of rumor and memory help us understand the lifeworlds of others in a simultaneously hyper-segmented and hyper-connected world.
