Abstract:
On 27 March 2020, South Africa officially entered a 21-day lockdown to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease, which had first been detected in China towards the end of the previous year. There was much talk at the time about the public health and economic implications of the restrictions, which aimed to limit human contact to ‘essentials’. It was clear that the lockdown would have important short-, medium- and possibly even long-term consequences for the lives and livelihoods of the community of South African historians. In recognition of this fact, on the day that the lockdown came into effect, I began emailing historian colleagues regarding their willingness to offer reflection pieces ‘focusing on an aspect of the lockdown of your choice – it could be teaching, research, community engagement or any other aspect of your life as a historian’ – and how it was impacted by the restrictions. As I write this abstract more than a year later, we are still in lockdown, albeit at varying ‘risk-adjusted’ levels, and it has long since become clear that at least some of the adjustments of the past year will become permanent. The retrospectives that follow were all completed in 2020. Though we cannot reflect with any distance from the events concerned, it may be timely to commit these early perspectives on the new normality to publication, in order to capture the jarring experience of the sudden transition from one world of academic practice to another.
