Book Review: Pieter Fourie and Guy Lamb, Edited. The South African Response to COVID-19: Early Years, London: Routledge, 2023.

The South African Response to COVID-19 edited by Pieter Fourie and Guy Lamb provides an alternative perspective on the epidemic. Alternative in the sense that the book shifts the narrative away from the Western perspectives that dominated the COVID-19 discourse. The book in its entirety provides readers with a realist South African perspectives, positions, and understanding of an event so momentous that it will be long remembered as a defining moment in human history. Pieter Fourie introduces us to the book with a poignant quote from Louis Pasteur; ‘the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything.’ In the case of South Africa this could not apply more.