Toby Green joins Frank Armstrong for a wide-ranging discussion based on his new book The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles Over Life in a Seventeenth-Cenury West African Port. The book exhumes the records of a Portuguese Inquisitorial trial from 1665 into apparently deviant conduct of a half-African, female slave-trader Cacheu – the first African region to be drawn by the Portuguese systematically into the transatlantic slave trade. It also explores the role of the djabakós – traditional healers with knowledge of local herbs and their properties.

Frank and Toby discuss parallels between what occurred during this colonial period and what happened on the African continent during the Covid-19 pandemic, where a range of inappropriate policies have caused lasting harm.

They also discuss heretical ideas about the health of the body and the spirit being integrated that have an application to our own time, especially in the context of excess deaths in many countries increasing since 2021; and the ongoing relevance of the idea that those who diagnose any condition are generally empowered to claim the authority to heal it.

Our recent photography competition winner Ross Novie joins Frank Armstrong to discuss his winning entry, featuring his masked daughter on a family outing to Yellowstone National Park in Montana.

Ross is a TV producer living in Los Angelas who grew increasingly concerned at the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on his children. In response to his two teenagers being kept out of school for almost a year-and-a-half he founded an organisation called LA Uprising to campaign on their behalf.

This podcast explores how political polarisation and groupthink led to the imposition of some of the United States’ most stringent controls in the state of California, and how a ‘priestly’ caste of experts were deferred to throughout the period, as politicians relied on fear to engineer consent.

In this episode of CG Podcasts, Professor Toby Green (King's College, London) discusses the new book 'In Covid's Wake' with authors Stephen Macedo and Frances E. Lee of the Politics Department of Princeton University.

They discuss the economic and political fallout, the connections between the Covid policies and Trump's election in 2024, and the future for academic and public discussions around the impacts of the Covid years.