Good afternoon and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on the political life of a negative epidemic.
Cholera Crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Written by Professor Cemre Kai to go to.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch, where Medical Humanities is one of our headline programmes.
So it's an extra special pleasure to be introducing this event today.
I'm delighted to welcome Professor Chegutu today to speak about this book.
Also on the panel are Dr John Schubert and Professor Sloane Mahoney, who will be chairing the discussion.
In a moment, I will hand over to Professor Mohun, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel.
This will be. I'm sorry. I clearly covered my camera. I hope you can see me now.
In a moment, then I will hand over to Professor Millhone, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel.
This will be followed by a brief reading by Professor Chegutu.
And afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on the book coming at it from their particular disciplines.
We will then give them a kind of chance to respond to some of the points raised before interest,
before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
The event will then conclude in the last quarter of an hour or so with questions from you.
The audience will try and wrap things up by two o'clock, but do put in your questions into the chat box as we go through,
and I will pick them up and feed them back into the discussion at the end of today.
It's a great pleasure then to be here to introduce this first book at lunch time of term.
Look at lunchtime is his regulars will know Torture's flagship event series,
taking the form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of
commentators who look at our website for the full programme for the rest of term.
And all that's left for me now is to do to introduce our chair and to thank the rest of you for coming.
Our chair, Professor SlowMo is Associate Professor of the History Medicine at Oxford University.
A specialist in the history of psychiatry and neurology in Africa, as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry globally,
a current research projects funded by the National Institute of Health Research and the James Martin School here in Oxford
involve the implementation of oral history programmes on epilepsy in Africa and in resource poor settings globally.
She's a member of Oxford Epilepsy Research Group, and she's also worked extensively in historical research and community development in Zaire,
Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar.
Flown a great welcome to you all now disappeared from the screen and leave proceedings to you.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
And I'm very pleased to be invited to chair and to invite you to take part in introducing this wonderful book and launching it, I suppose.
And in my role as chair first let me introduce are both my co panellist and also our author.
Let me start with Professor Samukai Chegutu. I've known CIMIC for a number of years now.
And as he was mentioning a little bit earlier, I have seen the sort of development of this project in this book as it's come along over the years.
Sumika is associate professor of African politics at Oxford and also a fellow of St Antony's College.
Prior to academia, he was a medical doctor in the National Health Service, where he worked for three years.
He is principally interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa,
which examines using disease, public health, violence and social suffering as organising frameworks.
He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, the Gambia, Tanzania and South Africa.
Welcome, CIMIC. Also, I'd like to introduce my co panellists, Dr Yan Schubert.
Dr Schubert is a lever she'll trust. Early career fellow at Brunel University.
Is a political and economic anthropologist working on state institutions, infrastructures and transnational trade in Angola and Mozambique.
He's the author of Working the System of Political Ethnography of the New Angola and has
previously held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Leipzig and Geneva.
Welcome to you as well. And now, without further ado, I will turn over to our author, who will start a reading from his book.
Thank you very much, slower for that kind introduction and thank you, Torch, for inviting me to share this book.
In August 2008, the impoverished high density townships of Harare's metropolitan area were engulfed by a devastating cholera outbreak.
The epidemic quickly spread into Perry urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country's borders into South Africa,
Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique.
Over the course of 10 months, the disease infected over 98000 people and claimed over 4000 lives with an exceptionally high case fatality rate.
At the peak of the epidemic, and thus Zimbabwe's 2008 cholera outbreak has been deemed the largest and most extensive and recorded African history.
Now, epidemiologically, the outbreak can be explained by the breakdown in cross contamination of the city's water and sanitation systems.
Yet such a reading belies the complex interaction of political,
economic and historical factors that initially gave rise to the dysfunction of
the water systems that delineate the social and spatial pattern of the outbreak.
And that account for the fragmented and inadequate response of the national health system.
And cholera, then, was not only a public health crisis,
it also signalled new dimension to the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008,
which brought into question the capacity and legitimacy of the Zimbabwean state.
In this book, I'm not seeking to address the cholera outbreak as a technical problem, to be solved or to be prevented in future.
Indeed, there already exists a rich epidemiological literature speaking to this very question.
Instead, this book is about the political life of the cholera epidemic.
It examines the epidemic's origins, the patterns of its unfolding, its social impact, official and communal responses to it,
and its aftermath and civic and public life across different institutional settings.
Competing interpretations and experiences of cholera created a series of charged social and political debates about the breakdown of Zimbabwe's public
health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order about the scope and limits
of national and international agencies in the delivery of disaster relief,
and about the country's profound levels of livelihood, poverty and social inequality.
And so, examining the political life of this epidemic offers compelling insights into politics and humanitarianism.
Social inequality, the state and citizenship in Africa. This book sets out to answer three principal questions.
The first. What would the historical and political economic factors that account for the origins and scale of the cholera outbreak?
Through this question, I explore how the cholera outbreak maps onto a dense and complex political history
of the establishment transformation and disruption of urban order in Harare.
Such an analysis sheds new light on changes in Zimbabwe's bureaucracy, on the country's contentious of politics,
but also on the core constitutive entanglement of both the material environment,
such as the capital cities, hydraulic infrastructure with social arrangements such as how people live and manage and negotiate urban space.
Second question I ask is how to different organisational entities, communities and individuals act in response to the cholera outbreak.
Through this question, I explore how one disease, cholera.
Gave rise to many different crises, thereby engendering multiple and often competing experience of the outbreak,
as well as multiple and often competing modes of addressing it.
In effect, cholera took on a variety of forms, depending on where and by whom it was encountered.
Is fraud. Politics emerged from the multiple crises it engendered and from its embeddedness in extant political conflicts and social relations.
Third.
How has the cholera outbreak been committed to historical memory and what political subjectivities has the epidemic generated through this question?
I explored the myriad memories and meanings that cholera has left in civic and public life.
I uncovered these meanings from the stories that people tell about the outbreak.
I consider why these narratives take the form that they do.
And I examine what political subjectivities these stories reveal after such a marked period of social suffering.
Cholera, as an indicator and a test of social and political systems, has occupied a central place in much of the nonmedical literature on the subject.
And it provides a guiding thread that runs through the book. The historian Richard Evans and his groundbreaking history of colour in Hamburg in the
latter part of the 19th century advocates the study of the disease in this manner.
But rife but rightfully cautions that we need to be very careful and circumspect in handling this way of approaching cholera.
An urban survey of the literature on the great cholera outbreaks of Europe's industrial revolution.
He notes a tendency amongst historians to ascribe to cholera the power to bring social breakdown or to reinforce social stability.
He notes, for instance, historical accounts of the 18 32 cholera outbreak in Britain,
in which it is argued that cholera did not usher in social breakdown, but instead act as a stimulus to a whole range of sanitary reforms,
to a series of transformations in the administration of public health,
to the initiation of major US aims of slum clearance, and to long term improvements in housing and living conditions.
While expressing admiration for such studies,
Evans critiques the analytical imprecision with which such terms of social stability and breakdown are invoked.
Moreover, he argues, and I quote, It takes a lot more than an epidemic to cause the destruction of a political and social system,
or, for that matter, to radically transform it. Social transformation, stability or breakdown are always a matter of politics.
OK, I'll leave it there. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Simek. And now I will respond and then I'll call on John Schubert to give his response as well, followed by more commentary by CIMIC.
So. When I read the political life of an epidemic, one of the things I did, I'm interested that CIMIC,
I chose to engage with Richard Evans, so quite important medical historian.
I pulled out a couple of quotes that kind of resonated with me.
And I overall, I want to talk a little bit about maybe four different themes that occurred to me throughout the book.
But to start with these first two quotes, one is from another medical historian, Charles Rosenberg, in his book explaining epidemics.
And he writes, quote, Only when the presence of an epidemic becomes unavoidable is there a public admission of its existence.
Bodies must accumulate and the sick must suffer in increasing numbers before officials acknowledge what can no longer be ignored.
The pattern has repeated itself in century after century, end quote.
And then another quote that struck me, Richard, borne from his book Collapse.
What went wrong in Zimbabwe?
He writes, quote, No one in 1980 could have predicted that Zimbabwe would become a failed state on such a monumental and tragic scale.
End quote. Now,
I thought that these two statements sit in interesting parallel to a third very simple sentiment from the preface of a political life of an epidemic.
And that is that cholera is, quote, easy to prevent, difficult to spread and simple to treat.
End quote.
The implication here and throughout this book is that cholera is a parent's and most certainly when it sets scale is always about something else.
The second thing I'd like to note, and historians of medicine, as well as political scientists, medical anthropologists,
epidemiologists and so forth, can tell you that disease profiles may have marked characteristics, but they also change.
The Ebola virus was for decades considered catastrophically deadly at nearly 100 percent mortality within outbreaks.
But it's also inefficient in terms of what a virus wants to do, which is to survive its virulence,
causing it to burn itself out before spreading throughout the population.
In recent years, however, this has changed, with outbreaks now occurring outside of Zaire or DRC,
where we first came to know about Ebola and also affecting greater numbers of people.
We also started to see some people survive it. HIV AIDS, while devastating to pandemic scale, is slow acting in an individual and is often invisible.
However, its significant association with stigma has shifted drastically over the last few decades as options to manage the disease have improved.
Historical afflictions such as TB are much less in our consciousness now than when we think of the 19th century.
But the numbers today are staggering. Approximately one quarter of people on the planet are infected with the bacillus and tuberculosis.
We've simply learnt to overlook it.
Diarrhoeal disease is still a major killer of children under five in resource poor countries, including many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
High levels of infant and child mortality are not bound to a single infectious agent.
They are always associated with much broader structural inequalities.
And taking a cue from Paul Farmer, James Ferguson, Barnett and Whiteside and the study of cholera in 2008.
We see these potential disasters working in tandem with highly specialised but short term quick fix mentalities.
Do mosquitoes cause epidemic or endemic malaria? Or perhaps the parasite within the mosquito?
Well, what about a lack of roads or the failure to send girls to school?
The strength in the political life of an epidemic lies in the multiplicity of ways we may come to know the epidemic of 2008,
even as we grapple with the assertion Sumika rights that it was not inevitable.
Cholera is easy to prevent, difficult to spread and simple to treat.
The third thing that struck me was the ways in which tensions of modernity are also interwoven throughout the book,
and this plays out in a number of ways. And I've pulled out for here.
First, the silencing of a disease that is associated with filth, poverty, a lack of development and backwardness,
cholera lagging behind only worse associations for Africa of famine and genocide.
To this, I might add, leprosy as a list to the list historically.
Secondly, stark assessments of cholera as mediæval and the contrast with how diseases,
quote in this day and age ought to be handled by the state suggests a tendency to period dies epidemiology.
This, I think, is a very unstable notion. How else are we to view global structural inequality as anything other than modern?
Thirdly, modern public health success stories such as O, r, t or oral rehydration therapy are heralded as lifesavers,
obscuring the fact that the necessity for a lati on any large scale is first and foremost a story of neglect, deprivation and injustice.
And lastly, I thought a surprising limitation to the oral history methodology in the book is seen
in an apparent lack of openness about seeking traditional treatments or medicines,
stigmatised in some quarters for being anti modern.
This medical pluralism, which might be the norm and neither modern nor anti modern in neighbouring countries,
was an anathema in Zimbabwe, where the narrative of a post independence model of stability and progress was all too recent.
Ultimately, studies of disease and epidemics illuminate a multiplicity of what we might call at stakes.
And I couldn't help but think back to a film that I love called Rush Amon, which is about Kira Kurosawa film,
about a traumatic event and for different perspectives, remembering this event and recounting what happened.
And of course, they're all wildly divergent versions of the truth.
So what was an at stake in Zimbabwe in 2008 for some national sovereignty, for others claims of authenticity and modernity?
Was it raw power or the sanctity of a welfare role for the state?
Even a wildly competent but zealots approach to intervention becomes an at stake.
And here, I think made sense on Frontier. Frontier does not come off particularly well.
All of these at stakes complicate the failed state narrative that oversimplifies approaches across the complement the continent,
a narrative that simul Chi rejects here.
Perhaps most importantly, while we address the perfect storm of what went wrong, we also come to understand how ordinary Zimbabweans,
quote, staked claims to medical treatment and social welfare, unquote, which in itself is a story of how people enact their citizenship.
The political drift from an ethos of professionalism, education and skills in holding political posts to one of loyalty might sound
familiar to anyone watching American politics during the last four years.
Even as we enact our own rights and responsibilities.
These distances amidst a global health calamity that ought not to have unfolded in the way that it has in this day and age,
the political life of an epidemic is both a macro and a micro history of high politics and deeply intimate stories, a way of explaining epidemics.
Yet deeply close to home. Thank you. And now I'd like to call on my colleague, John Schubert, to give his response.
Thanks, Allan Sloan. Thanks, guy. And thanks to you for having me here.
It's a great pleasure to having the privilege to discuss this great book.
I really enjoyed reading this. It's extremely well and beautifully written and it's very engaging.
And the thing is, I don't work on health. So there's a lot in it.
Obviously, it is essentially about cholera, the disease a it's a political ethnography of a specific moment in reasons involving history.
And there's a lot in it for people interested in the African states in general or in political anthropology.
And, you know, your analytical approach,
the political stance with which you approach this and the critical conceptual vocabulary you deploy in the book will resonate a lot with my own work.
In the experience of Angola, for example, the critique of neo patrimonial ism with which I sympathise enormously, of course,
but also the idea of cholera and cholera response as a political terrain upon which competing narratives are played out or negotiated.
And this all revolves around the central question of political subjectivities under conditions of authoritarian is more a dominant party system,
if you will, how these are produced and reconfigured by the experience of dramatic events such as, in your case, this cholera outbreak.
So I myself, a black historian currently working on infrastructure.
And I really appreciated your long delay perspective on infrastructure politics in Harare.
This reveals the contingency in past, the tendency of the formation of specific, differentiated infrastructural publics.
The paradoxical effects of the post-colonial politics of orderliness in urban planning,
as well as the historicity of certain explanations and interpretations of the outbreak that your informants mobilised at the time of research.
The parallels to biological warfare by the colonial regime, for example,
the maintenance of order and the modern town centre, the hostility towards informal settlements.
You then trace in your chapter the Zimbo the decline of the Zimbabwean health system to structural adjustment in the 1990s.
And it's interesting for me to see in your descriptions parallels to Angola,
where similar chronic underfunding results in very comparable shortages of even the most basic supplies gloves,
sterile dressings, needles and even clean water in hospitals. But in the Angolan case, escapee's is not centrally to blame.
Rather, it is more directly the result of elite predation on public funds.
So for the Angolan case, I'm currently working on a piece working my way towards an argument about how the moralising language of neo liberalism.
Talk of efficiency, responsibility and the proverbial tightening of the belt is deployed to justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures.
Moments of crisis, as your book shows, also provide a fertile ground to advance through neo liberal rhetoric,
agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of commonsensical, reasonable ness and national solidarity.
I'm not saying this to let the IMF of the off of the hook or brush under the table reapplied problems such as hyper inflation,
but rather to raise questions about agency and complicity in these dynamics of underfunding,
which often go hand in hand with predation, which we can also observe maybe in the dismantling of the NHS in Britain.
All in the name of sensible spending, all of the hidden debt scandal in Mozambique at the moment.
So my first question reading the book is whether your material could also contribute to making a larger argument about austerity.
You like things of this history of underfunding and structural neglect to a time bomb is evocative and also reminded me of Razorfish,
Jack's idea of a hurricane bomb in Puerto Rico.
How a history of U.S. imperialism imposed austerity produced the conditions for disaster when Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.
And one of your key arguments in the book is that what you term,
the multiple ontologies of cholera precluded a shared understanding of the outbreak and its causes.
And this has implications not only for humanitarian assistance in a situation of crises,
but I think more broadly and profoundly for our understanding of the multiple and shifting nature of citizenship and by extension,
of statehood beyond the specific Zimbabwean or generic African case.
This brings me to further questions that we could perhaps discuss afterwards.
Might this idea of multiple political ontologies be a way to apprehend polities that are so deeply
polarised and fractured that they no longer appear to seem that they only seem to share the same reality?
Up to four million jobs. The assemblage of institutions and actors have together forged the response to the humanitarian crisis.
The process, your understanding echoing for me, the idea of arenas developed by Hockman and Bechler,
which allows you to raise questions about the political dynamics that emerge from these negotiations and interactions.
And I was really intrigued by your analysis of how depictions of bodily suffering are very often quite gruesome.
Terms were mobilised as a moral narrative to justify the imperative to do something.
You tell a story about the challenges of coordinating the humanitarian response from crumbling government buildings that haven't been running water,
a stable electricity in years. Moreover, and this is something we know from other situations of emergency,
you show how the immediacy of intervention isn't precluded addressing more fundamental structural and political issues.
And so your material also speaks volumes about the dilemmas faced by national and
international NGOs in the context like as like Zimbabwes or Angola's for that matter,
where a political service delivery to make up for the shortcomings of the state's own services is accepted or even welcomed.
But anything political is suspicious or even actively impeded.
So I wonder also in relation to your final empirical chapter where the anger of citizens is palpable, whether in your assessment,
this kind of ostensibly apolitical activity might not also provide spaces for people to experiment with governance of various local levels,
which could eventually possibly lead to the development of new political subjectivities formulated around the substantive expectations of citizenship.
And perhaps, though that goes beyond the scope of the book and calls for speculation on how these substantive expectations might be changing.
Now in the post, Mugabe and. Finally, in your conclusion, you open up two parallel with the 2013 16 Ebola epidemic, and the obvious question is now,
might there be any insights from your book that you see as relevant and
translatable to other contexts in our current situation of the global pandemic?
Thanks very much. Thanks very much, John.
And now I'd like to invite our author to give his comments in response.
Thanks so much, slower million for that.
I mean, that's such rich and generous and thoughtful readings of the book.
And very, very deep engagement with with my arguments. So I'm going to.
Yeah, I'll just comment, I guess, the slightly freewheeling way on some of the things that just stood out to me slowly.
I really loved your kind of emphasis on the tensions of modernity that play out throughout the book.
And in some ways, you've captured it more precisely than that.
Then I was fully able to I kept thinking as I was researching and writing the book, reflecting on my own background as a Zimbabwean.
I was born in Zimbabwe and I grew up there. But I left the country at age 16 at around the time that the country's politics were convulsing.
Questions about the colonial past,
about the one what the de facto one party state about the rise of an opposition all collided with each other to create a period of,
you know, in my lifetime at that stage, unprecedented uncertainty about the nature of daily life.
So to kind of concretise that idea, you know, growing up, we lived a pretty comfortable Middle-Class Life.
And there was a kind of sense that the only country in Africa that was more
developed than us were our colleagues south of the Limpopo and South Africa.
And there was this kind of period almost of a reversal or of change that happened
in 2000 as the kind of confrontations that I detail in the book began to play out.
And they kind of touched on everyday life in many different ways. One of them was through this intimate sense that we were experiencing a
disorienting shift in the nature of history and in the trajectory of the country,
one that we struggled to articulate at the time.
And it was very experienced initially as a sense of Stacie's that somehow Zimbabwe had been on an inexorable march towards progress,
development and modernity, that then, for various political reasons, was briefly put on pause but would eventually resume.
That, of course, is not quite what happened. The conflicts and the economic crisis continue to play out.
And then as a young man watching the cholera outbreak unfold while at medical school,
I was met with this jarring image of how could a country that I had grown up in that had
prided itself on its sense of being developments to come to such a basic infection.
And so that that tension of modernity was, for me, had a kind of narrative.
Even phenomenological quality was very much a part of how I understood the country and my relationship to it.
And I was trying to translate that because I think I saw that mirrored as I was doing the
research in the range of social metaphors and discourses that we used to talk about the country.
You encounter it in schools, you encounter it in hospitals, you encounter it with activists, and you also encounter it in government bureaucracies,
a constant and relentless sense that time has been suspended, but that this is an impermanent, an influx state of affairs.
Looping that kind of observation from when I was writing the book to a comment that Yanmei towards the end about the
post Mugabe era is that it kind of felt when Mugabe was ousted from power through military coup in November 2017,
that this protracted period of crisis and status was coming to an end, at least superficially.
And this kind of signified through a form of social catharsis as people were celebrating and flooding the streets of Harare.
And yet the regime that has followed has been just as bad, if not worse, than what preceded it.
And I think you're kind of telling that story.
One of the things about the kind of cholera outbreak is how cholera both became kind of emblematic of that, an idiomatic sense,
but also how it shows that the kind of sheer biological human character of political economic decisions
and also challenges any taken for granted sense about where we are at any given moment in history.
And I think that that does bear a parallel. That's hard to think through about the present pandemic.
I think it's invited to the sense, you know, for instance, in the U.K. of, you know.
Questioning our sense of normality. Questioning a national narrative and a sense of being within the country about the direction of travel,
the direction of time and of history, to show that actually we are there's nothing inevitable about how history and how politics unfold.
On the one hand. And yet at the same time, when these dramatic outbreaks occur,
we are beholden to a myriad range of structures and infrastructures that condition our response to it.
And so if I were to expand some of the analysis that I developed here into something larger than it does occasion this deep thinking about,
I think, particularly how economy broadly conceived is so central to shaping both when an epidemic occurs and what response looks like.
And in the book, I do, of course, explore a lot of this.
But I'm also interested in its close relationship with with medicine and public health.
And my thinking increasingly gravitates towards what does this look like, a more global scale in terms of the structuring of our global economy.
So we have the crisis, for instance, of supply chains that marked the early part of the Koven 19 pandemic.
That kind of bears a parallel to the crisis of supply chains that played out on a micro scale during Zimbabwe's outbreak.
But we also have this bigger question about the very nature of global health and how it's being driven.
Coke 19 sort of subordinated to a kind of geopolitics, you know, exemplified,
of course, by the Trump regime withdrawing from the World Health Organisation,
but also around the challenges of Britain in the EU, figuring out how to manage and to deliver vaccines.
The other. Issue that I wanted to kind of reflect on just a little bit more.
I guess. I mean, it's it's it's partly, again,
going back to Sloanes early remark about how the presence of Pollara always tells a
story that it's sheer occurrence ought to alert to alert us to some wider social facts.
And in a sense, this is partly what I argue theoretically, when I conceive of an epidemic as having multiple ontologies,
because I argue that epidemics are biological entities or bio social entities, you know,
they spread through given sorts of populations, an excessive global expectancy in a socially patterned way.
And yet when we think of them as having multiple ontology, that invites us to constantly ask,
what does this epidemic tell us about the moment of history that we're in or about the nature of a host of political and economic arrangements?
Now, something that struck me about the Kofod 19 pandemic is its its presence has been used to tell a story.
It's actually a story that for much of the pandemic I disagree with.
And that story has been that, you know, the arrival of a new or exotic virus of pandemic potential and scale originates,
you know, either from Africa or from Asia.
And it travels through the circuits of global majority trade, finance, tourism and economy when it arrives in Europe,
as it did this time last year, and begins to call unexpected and unconscionable suffering.
This is treated as totally anathema to a kind of euro modern self conception.
And yet, at the same time and a company part of this narrative has been the forecasting of catastrophe to occur in Africa.
So Africa's place in the global story of pandemics is rewritten as being the sort of site of primordial,
primordial origin of disease to being the final frontier of Kofod 19.
So, I mean, creating, you know,
curating a host of headlines from the first sort of three to six months of the outbreak that have all been predicting how much damage Cauvin,
18, is going to reach an African continent, sort of woefully ill equipped to handle it.
And yet I think that the scripting this narrative, much like the scripted narratives around the cholera outbreak,
are kind of disrupted by thinking about them in terms of their multiple modernities.
I think about the contingency of factors that shape the historical and political trajectory of of an outbreak.
Okay. So I'll kind of pause on these reflections here and and allow kind of yarning Sloan to tend to respond.
Well, if I may take chair's prerogative and respond first and then I'll turn over to you on that.
Wonderful. I mean, a couple of points that I will bring out in response, Sumika.
One is talking about, you know, kind of cholera is emblematic, as you say.
And, you know, we haven't explicitly said it yet.
But, you know, imagery is something I kind of refer to in the examples you bring out of the idea of what cholera represents in terms of imagery,
in the sense of kind of backwardness. And so many of these things are are the kinds of images, commentary's symbols that outsiders put on too often,
African countries or environments, resource poor environments or anywhere where there is something like this, a disease outbreak.
So these are these are metaphors and symbols used by kind of outsiders.
What I find interesting about one of the perspectives that you bring with this study that's unique, I think,
is this sense of the self reflection of a nation of Zimbabwe having to, you know, even starting with the kind of post 2000 politics.
So before we get to this point of. Internalisation, perhaps internalising kind of national identity.
And, you know, where are these politics going? This is not what was promised.
This is not the trajectory we thought we were on. And it reminds me very much of an experience I had many years ago,
my first African experience, which was a year when I was there for a couple of years.
And one thing that struck me, and this is under the Mobutu regime, was how self critical desire.
What were you also how how critical they were of themselves and of Africa overall.
And they used a lot of this kind of these sort of symbols and the sort of language.
And there is this. So what strikes me is that you are able to kind of bring in a multilayered sort of approach or vision to
the use of these symbols and including the damage that they do beyond the kind of failed state narrative.
And the second thing I'll just briefly comment on is obviously looking at our current situation, the current pandemic and absolutely right.
I mean. And I I have to admit, I worried about this myself.
The idea that what's going to happen in African countries. I was in Kenya in February last year.
So just a couple of weeks before borders started to shut.
And I was worried. I had visited a couple of huge, densely packed slum communities and there were absolutely massive.
And, you know, with infrastructure problems and so forth. And I couldn't help but think about those communities and think what is going to happen.
Well, the opposite happened just as you remark that the devastation we're seeing right now due to corruption,
due to incompetence, due to a lack of will is in the United States, for one thing.
And this kind of trajectory of that, the the power of these symbols and this internalised, failed state narrative.
Even when it hasn't happened yet, is incredibly powerful.
And I think it's very important that one that people read this very topical book that you've just written,
but also that, yeah, we use history and we pay attention to what we tell our students.
When you read the news, kind of apply the same principles you would apply to critiquing evidence from
the past and kind of rework these narratives and really work with the evidence.
So that's quite important work. I think that you're doing right now. But let me turn over to John for his commentary as well.
Thanks very much. Yeah. This is also just going to be a slightly free-floating response to what you both just said.
And thanks for also raising this question of the imageries, Sloan.
Because when I heard you respond and also thinking back to the book, I mean,
a this question of the economy being central to how an epidemic or in this case, a pandemic is unfolding.
I think Sloanes, Sloan's remark about the US or the UK, for that matter, is is quite spot on.
And I think it speaks to this persistent representations of Africa as, as you said, the final frontier.
And I think this is something we see not only in medicine, but also generally when we think, for example, about climate change and climate risk.
Africa is this final frontier where, you know,
cities and populations are constantly scripted as being at the same time the most exposed and the most vulnerable,
the least well equipped to resist or to deal with the crises.
And I think if, you know, I think generally African African studies as area studies and as a discipline always has a bit of a problem of legitimacy.
Why study Africa from Europe? But part of the mission of studying Africa is not, you know,
talking about Africa to people who might not know its reality so well is precisely counteracting contracting those ideas.
And I think what Sloan mentioned that the sort of critical self reflection of your informants about the
state of the Zimbabwean state and the polity is precisely also giving voice to that and the other.
The other thing I found interesting is also when in your response,
you started reminiscing about that you were upbringing and this sense of progress, like there's a sense to history, right?
There's a there's a national destiny. And I think this is something we can observe across southern Africa,
these post liberation regimes that they very strongly work with, that we liberated the nation.
We know there's a sense the history,
there's this there's a direction and the sense of suspension that you that you experienced yourself perhaps from a distance,
but that you that you chronicle so chronicled in your book show is in many ways
how pervasive this narrative is and how it resonates with citizens expectations.
And it does make me wonder, and not just for Zimbabwe, you know, what is is our only chance to sort of step out of this dominant narrative,
a generational change like we will this narrative, because in your last chapter,
there's one one of your informants is like, no, I you know, I'm married to Mugabe till we die.
Is this only going to change once these old dinosaurs have all died out?
Or is there any is there any scope for an articulation of alternative political terrains outside that framework of national, you know,
a teleology that is shaped by the liberation struggle even now, while while those players,
those political actors are still so, so much very dominant in in the framework former politics.
Sumika, why don't you give a brief response and then we're gonna open up to a Q&A with the audience and I'll bring Professor Weemes back.
Yeah, I'll I'll keep it very, very brief. I mean, I think that the two big ideas that I'm I'm sort of thinking about now in terms of my future work.
One is about anticipating catastrophe in Africa and trying to understand an historic sites that a bit more particularly with respect
to two two epidemics and thinking about the machinery that creates these discourses and how they they they they they move around.
And at the same time, because slowly I did share your concern.
I was like, you know, what happens when Kofod 19 hits Zimbabwe, for example?
And to be honest, it is quite disastrous in many ways.
I mean, the people in our hospitals are so ill equipped that when people do get sick and are at that level, it's more or less a death sentence.
There's something else that's going on socially, demographically, geographically,
that is mitigating this as well as a degree of noose and kind of seeing what was happening in Europe and putting certain kinds of measures in place.
And so there's a tension between the anticipating catastrophe as a kind of forward projected, you know, event in a future that may or may not come.
And then the kind of iterative, everyday sense of living with crisis and how that reconfigures the ways in which
people make sense of and adapt to these potential moments of catastrophe.
And to me, there's a real kind of puzzle about what all of that kind of looks like.
The other issue is that I'm thinking about kind of quite immediately is about the born free generation in southern Africa, in Zimbabwe.
And in my old life, quite specifically. So with with with my sort of non pandemic's hartshorn,
I have been writing increasingly about the afterlife of colonialism and how it leaves an imprint in in so many spheres of
social life in Zimbabwe and in Britain and schooling our language and our sense of orientation both to time and to history,
and how my generation of Zimbabweans is starting to to rethink the logics of all of that and not quite knowing what
to do with ourselves as we feel a kind of joint frustration being caught in the middle of so many different things.
The recognising the importance of liberation, but seeing the failures of the post liberation dream,
recognising the sinister nature of British imperialism, while at the same time valorising many aspects of liberal democracy in the West.
And so those are kind of the two pillars of things that I'm I'm thinking about. Great.
Thank you.
I think we have to we a bit of time, but I'm going to ask Professor Williams to rejoin us and he is going to handle questions from the audience.
Thank you. Thank you all. That was a really,
really interesting discussion and quite a few of the questions I had as a non Africa specialist and actually as an early modernist have come up here,
really, which is about, you know, this disease or does some does an epidemic always tell a story?
And what are the kinds of political subjectivity that get generated by these kinds of crises are questions that I think go.
I mean, what's great about today is that you've tied them into a very particular moment,
but they clearly also go in all sorts of different directions and including the one that we're in right now.
But to answer the question, there's a question,
and I don't know if you can see the questions as well or whether are looking at the chart, but to save you doing so,
there's a question from Philip Little who asks or who says that we rarely recognise
or acknowledge the reality of an epidemic until we're confronted with sick bodies.
In a way, it goes back to Sloan's point about the imagery of a pandemic.
And clearly a sick body of a certain kind is is part of the the imagery of the pandemic.
The question here is, do you think this is ever going to change? And if so, how?
In other words, imagery as opposed to causes? I think what the question is, why can't we see causes until we see the bodies?
So the the. That's really it's a really powerful quote that Sloan kind of lifted from Charles Rosenberg,
which I which I put in the book about political authorities kind of reacting to epidemics at that point where the sheer scale of horror is undeniable.
Now, I think this is a very particular answer to this from the Zimbabwean context, which I think is kind of illuminating of wider context.
One of the challenges about writing a book like this was that, you know, the epidemic began in 2008.
A sort of ostensibly ended in 2009. I did the bulk of the research for 2015 in terms of the fieldwork.
And it was published in 2020.
Now, what I was doing, the research, it was very hard not to have the bias of retrospect because, you know, every testimony I gathered,
particularly from my expert interviews in the U.N. and the Ministry of Health and so on, you know,
had the screening kind of red flags saying that, you know, this is going to be a disaster.
So what I would say to minister's office, they would tell me quite candidly that this was the information coming through and.
I was like, why did you guys react? I mean, it was so clear that was gonna be a disaster.
And another thing as we came out was, well, you know, when you're receiving that information in real time.
All, you know, more and more cases spreading. You don't at that moment know quite how this is all going to unfold.
And one senior government official insisted to me that, you know, we had had scares like this multiple times.
We had had scares in 2000 and every year since then, before 2008.
And we would get to a few hundred cases of cholera.
We didn't necessarily react because we were quite incapacitated and it never turned into a major outbreak.
And then in 2008, it did. And so there's a kind of a possible logical question, if you like.
You know, how do we know a disaster is occurring when it's occurring?
And in a sense, Rosenberg is suggesting that we know this particular at a political level.
Well, it's undeniable, at which point a lot of harm has already occurred.
So it kind of caught in this logical sort of trap.
All of that said, I think, you know, particularly as has been the case with Cobh,
it but not only we're seeing across the world very different logics about the nature of preparedness and the logics of response.
So, you know, the dilemma that I've kind of outlined is not really an inevitable case.
But we in government. There was the fact of cholera was, you know, to be touched, to kind of misappropriate Al Gore with An Inconvenient Truth.
You know, there was a political kind of negotiation for the formation of a government of national unity after a heavily
disputed election in which the reputation of the ruling party was in tatters to acknowledge an outbreak,
particularly one that that that that potential scale would have desperately undermined their political political legitimacy even further.
And so I think that this Rosenberg's insight needs to be taken that that step further
to say that the recurrence of this pattern is often about the forms of political will.
But really unpacking what are the historical political contingencies that are playing out at that time?
And what can we also learn from the cases where radical preparedness is is kind of mobilised instead of waiting to see how it unfolds?
Thank you. I don't know whether your nose slowed, want to add to that particular point or whether we should move on?
Colonial Mutual, if you do, I would just add one, maybe quick counterexample or, you know, thinking about Kenya.
Silico mentioned, you know, the idea of preparedness and how we kind of predict disaster in Africa.
Well, we don't predict it elsewhere. And in the case of Kenya.
You know, one perspective was the youthfulness of the population is one of the reasons why comparatively there seem to be faster deaths,
more deaths in places like the UK or or the U.S. and that that's what was protecting Kenya.
What they didn't mention was Kenya closed their borders. Kenya actually took action before, but we still haven't closed them here entirely.
So, you know, there's also the sense of you don't know what you're missing.
And it's really difficult to kind of cheque those biases.
And that's where I think where history helps us, where anthropology helps us to cheque those biases so that you're asking the right questions.
So, yes, something they can't help. Like the usefulness of the population, but not the actual actions that a state took.
Mm hmm. I'm struck that these are you call them logical questions, but in a way, they are also medical questions in terms of diagnosing,
if you like, the body politic and what the signs are as to where where things are wrong and so on.
I'm sure you medical historians have to worry with the like for me saying the body politic all the time.
But it's nonetheless, I think, an interesting way of thinking about where, if you like,
the procedures of medicines or diagnosis and so on and prediction are actually embedded in the problem.
It seems to me one other question, because, I mean, this is me thinking about some other discussions that were going on underneath that same umbrella.
A couple of months ago now, Homi Bhabha was talking about mobilising unpreparedness as a kind of political device.
And I think it's just another way of thinking about this is the degree to which being
unprepared is also a sort of political move in relation to a crisis crisis thinking.
And I'll do a little plug if anybody wants to hear that. See that it's on the website, too, as I've done that.
Great. Another question has come in. The book describes different kinds of political subjectivity the outbreak engendered.
Have these subjectivities developed since the outbreak or they've been actively subverted or rejected by Harare's residents since then?
Otherwise, how long does change last? I guess it's partly what that question is asking.
That's a great question. When when I was doing interviews with people in the high density townships that were epicentres of the outbreak,
there was a lot of trial and error and figuring out how you talk about the outbreak.
And my initial strategy was to ask people kind of quite directly about it.
So I tell them who I was and say, you know, this is the thing I'm researching. Can you tell me about your experience of that?
Very quickly, I realised that that did not work well and that what worked better was, you know,
everybody would sort of stop me and say, you know, before we talk about cholera, we need to talk about how hungry we were.
And they want to talk about the food insecurity and malnutrition and so on.
And just even before you get to the more medical sort of side of it, just the sheer,
if you like, social trauma of what it means to go hungry, to watch your family go hungry.
Everyone wanted to stop them. Then they wanted to talk about the violence. And then after they talked about.
The hunger and political violence, then they wanted to talk about the outbreak.
And so. The commonality between these different frames was a kind of diagnosis on the part of citizens,
all things that have gone wrong at the level of the state,
and indeed many people saw Mugabe's government and the ruling party's regime as a kind of sinister entity.
And so the outbreak became this kind of event that both kind of tied together.
All of these different phenomenon became a kind of easy way of saying, you know, this outbreak shows us all of the things that were were wrong.
And at the same time, it didn't kind of stand apart in anybody's interpretation from the myriad other political,
economic and social changes that had taken place in their lives.
And so the subjectivity as such a way of thinking about politics, that it really shifted from one that we kind of talked about earlier,
the post liberation ideology that Zimbabwe was developing amongst the path of progress
had shifted in particular ways to a sense that our ruling party is sinister.
You know, at least in that kind of corner of people. And that disasters are necessarily politically produced.
Some of this goes along the lines of a more conspiratorial line, and others are just lay the blame squarely at those who govern.
And that was one of the key shift.
And that hasn't really changed since then, I think, because people read it against the party and less so against Robert Mugabe, per say.
Again, young or Sloane, Jewish, to say anything more to that?
Or have you got questions yourselves that you'd like to pick up on? You're both muted, but.
Well, I don't want to die young. Do you have. Would you like to keep up with an equation was not three or four more minutes.
If there's if there's one more thing to say or one more thing that arises before we stop, before we wind up.
It's not so much. It's not so much a question.
But I was always, um. I was intrigued by what you just mentioned.
Now this conspiratorial mode of thinking and how on the one hand,
it's quite obvious that in such a moment of crisis and we know that also from history.
Right. People people seek to find who is like who's guilty.
Right. They need to find someone to blame. But also from the angle and experience.
I also wonder whether this is not something that is very typical to these post liberation regimes,
the cultivation of paranoia, of suspicion, of the suspecting of internal enemies,
and how that then in such a moment of crises also makes the, you know, responding to the crisis, acknowledging the crisis so much more difficult.
What you actually write in your book is how how difficult it was for the government to even declare an emergency.
And yet I don't know exactly where the question is in this.
But but I think, you know, that there's something in in the area in this conspiratorial mode of thinking that is very typical,
too, to this context that we're that we're observing here.
If I can just add, I also had sort of a question that I initially wrote about distrust and how distrust is played out,
the same as is Yonit brings up throughout the book,
including, yes, manipulation of the truth, kind of the fake news, you know, where the pandemic came from or where the epidemic came from.
So, Shimako, go for it. You know, you kind of lost. You got the stage for the last few minutes.
So what are the tropes that came out? A lot when I ask people where they thought cholera came from.
Was they said that.
How did it come from China? And there were several reasons why they thought this.
The government had initially tried to deflect attention away from itself and blamed it on the British.
They said that cholera was racist, terrorist biological warfare to undermine Zimbabwean sovereignty.
Now, this had been a longstanding trope since 2000 to blame all of the country's internal problems on the history of colonialism.
At the same time, Western investment, the visible presence of Western companies and firms, had been withdrawing from the country,
while more and more Chinese firms and products were flooding the markets and had a more visible presence in the city.
And people know that there is a deeper history of the liberation struggle in which the ruling party had received arms and support from the Chinese.
And so this sense that and the the the globalised nature of our history of struggle has always been in tension between East and West,
then became reappropriated into kind of daily social metaphors that people were using.
And it was also a way of saying that, look, you know, back to these kind of tensions of modernity.
The clear sign that we are no longer modern, that we're no longer making progress is that we've been rejected by the West.
Our government says it's because of sanctions and an attack on us.
But we think it's because, you know, we have been rejected and they are turning to China to support it.
But everybody knows that China can't possibly be as good as Britain in terms of the provision of clean water or whatever it is.
So, you know, all of these narratives are like swirling around amongst each other and they kind of came out anyway.
Could be the basis of its own discussion. And I, I kind of don't go quite as deeply into it in the book.
But it was definitely a kind of striking feature, essentially,
that the content of conspiracy was very much rooted into competing interpretations of history.
You'd think after all this time, we'd learnt to amuse yourself and also not quit your notes in front of the camera.
But anyway, as you say, we could we could carry on for another hour, I'm sure.
But our time's up. And I just wanted to conclude by thanking you, Sloan, you yon and most of all,
use some account for writing the book that brought us all together here today.
Thank you also for all those you who've been listening, posting questions or just plain listening and I'm sure thinking along with us.
Let's hope to see you again at the next book at lunch time. And I won't go into details there all on the Web site.