Decolonising 'man', resituating pandemic: an intervention in the pathogenesis of colonial capitalism.

This paper brings together fifth-wave public health theory and a decolonised approach to the human informed by the Caribbean thinker, Sylvia Wynter, and the primary exponent of African Humanism, Es'kia Mpahlele. Sub-Saharan indigenous ways of thinking the human as co-constitutive in a subject we might call human-animal-'environment', in conjunction with the subcontinent's experiences of colonial damage in disease 'prevention' and 'treatment', demonstrate the lack of genuine engagement with Indigenous wisdom in Western medical practice.The paper offers a decolonial reading of pandemic history, focused primarily on the human immunodefiency virus (HIV), the severe acute respiratory syndrome of 2003 caused by the SARS Covid 1 virus (SARS-CoV1) and COVID-19, caused by the SARS COVID 2 virus (SARS-CoV2) to demonstrate the importance of the co-constitutive subject in understanding the genesis of these pandemics as driven by colonial-capitalism. I emphasise that prevention will indeed take the kinds of massive changes proposed by fifth-wave public health theory. However, I differ from the proponents of that theory in an insistence that the new kind of thinking of the human Hanlon