1 00:00:14,730 --> 00:00:21,990 Good afternoon and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on the political life of a negative epidemic. 2 00:00:21,990 --> 00:00:29,340 Cholera Crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Written by Professor Cemre Kai to go to. 3 00:00:29,340 --> 00:00:36,180 My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch, where Medical Humanities is one of our headline programmes. 4 00:00:36,180 --> 00:00:41,130 So it's an extra special pleasure to be introducing this event today. 5 00:00:41,130 --> 00:00:45,450 I'm delighted to welcome Professor Chegutu today to speak about this book. 6 00:00:45,450 --> 00:00:53,150 Also on the panel are Dr John Schubert and Professor Sloane Mahoney, who will be chairing the discussion. 7 00:00:53,150 --> 00:00:59,720 In a moment, I will hand over to Professor Mohun, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel. 8 00:00:59,720 --> 00:01:06,230 This will be. I'm sorry. I clearly covered my camera. I hope you can see me now. 9 00:01:06,230 --> 00:01:11,840 In a moment, then I will hand over to Professor Millhone, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel. 10 00:01:11,840 --> 00:01:15,620 This will be followed by a brief reading by Professor Chegutu. 11 00:01:15,620 --> 00:01:22,760 And afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on the book coming at it from their particular disciplines. 12 00:01:22,760 --> 00:01:27,620 We will then give them a kind of chance to respond to some of the points raised before interest, 13 00:01:27,620 --> 00:01:31,790 before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion. 14 00:01:31,790 --> 00:01:36,020 The event will then conclude in the last quarter of an hour or so with questions from you. 15 00:01:36,020 --> 00:01:43,820 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, 16 00:01:43,820 --> 00:01:49,520 and I will pick them up and feed them back into the discussion at the end of today. 17 00:01:49,520 --> 00:01:53,900 It's a great pleasure then to be here to introduce this first book at lunch time of term. 18 00:01:53,900 --> 00:01:58,610 Look at lunchtime is his regulars will know Torture's flagship event series, 19 00:01:58,610 --> 00:02:02,240 taking the form of fortnightly bite sized book discussions with a range of 20 00:02:02,240 --> 00:02:07,490 commentators who look at our website for the full programme for the rest of term. 21 00:02:07,490 --> 00:02:14,090 And all that's left for me now is to do to introduce our chair and to thank the rest of you for coming. 22 00:02:14,090 --> 00:02:20,970 Our chair, Professor SlowMo is Associate Professor of the History Medicine at Oxford University. 23 00:02:20,970 --> 00:02:27,890 A specialist in the history of psychiatry and neurology in Africa, as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry globally, 24 00:02:27,890 --> 00:02:34,680 a current research projects funded by the National Institute of Health Research and the James Martin School here in Oxford 25 00:02:34,680 --> 00:02:43,440 involve the implementation of oral history programmes on epilepsy in Africa and in resource poor settings globally. 26 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:52,650 She's a member of Oxford Epilepsy Research Group, and she's also worked extensively in historical research and community development in Zaire, 27 00:02:52,650 --> 00:03:00,410 Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar. 28 00:03:00,410 --> 00:03:06,330 Flown a great welcome to you all now disappeared from the screen and leave proceedings to you. 29 00:03:06,330 --> 00:03:10,170 Thank you. Thank you so much. 30 00:03:10,170 --> 00:03:23,760 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. 31 00:03:23,760 --> 00:03:34,530 And in my role as chair first let me introduce are both my co panellist and also our author. 32 00:03:34,530 --> 00:03:40,890 Let me start with Professor Samukai Chegutu. I've known CIMIC for a number of years now. 33 00:03:40,890 --> 00:03:54,470 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. 34 00:03:54,470 --> 00:04:01,630 Sumika is associate professor of African politics at Oxford and also a fellow of St Antony's College. 35 00:04:01,630 --> 00:04:07,230 Prior to academia, he was a medical doctor in the National Health Service, where he worked for three years. 36 00:04:07,230 --> 00:04:12,150 He is principally interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa, 37 00:04:12,150 --> 00:04:18,960 which examines using disease, public health, violence and social suffering as organising frameworks. 38 00:04:18,960 --> 00:04:24,990 He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, the Gambia, Tanzania and South Africa. 39 00:04:24,990 --> 00:04:34,130 Welcome, CIMIC. Also, I'd like to introduce my co panellists, Dr Yan Schubert. 40 00:04:34,130 --> 00:04:39,430 Dr Schubert is a lever she'll trust. Early career fellow at Brunel University. 41 00:04:39,430 --> 00:04:49,320 Is a political and economic anthropologist working on state institutions, infrastructures and transnational trade in Angola and Mozambique. 42 00:04:49,320 --> 00:04:55,800 He's the author of Working the System of Political Ethnography of the New Angola and has 43 00:04:55,800 --> 00:05:01,860 previously held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Leipzig and Geneva. 44 00:05:01,860 --> 00:05:15,980 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. 45 00:05:15,980 --> 00:05:23,970 Thank you very much, slower for that kind introduction and thank you, Torch, for inviting me to share this book. 46 00:05:23,970 --> 00:05:33,900 In August 2008, the impoverished high density townships of Harare's metropolitan area were engulfed by a devastating cholera outbreak. 47 00:05:33,900 --> 00:05:42,690 The epidemic quickly spread into Perry urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country's borders into South Africa, 48 00:05:42,690 --> 00:05:45,690 Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. 49 00:05:45,690 --> 00:05:55,800 Over the course of 10 months, the disease infected over 98000 people and claimed over 4000 lives with an exceptionally high case fatality rate. 50 00:05:55,800 --> 00:06:07,010 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. 51 00:06:07,010 --> 00:06:15,770 Now, epidemiologically, the outbreak can be explained by the breakdown in cross contamination of the city's water and sanitation systems. 52 00:06:15,770 --> 00:06:20,750 Yet such a reading belies the complex interaction of political, 53 00:06:20,750 --> 00:06:25,400 economic and historical factors that initially gave rise to the dysfunction of 54 00:06:25,400 --> 00:06:30,590 the water systems that delineate the social and spatial pattern of the outbreak. 55 00:06:30,590 --> 00:06:35,810 And that account for the fragmented and inadequate response of the national health system. 56 00:06:35,810 --> 00:06:40,220 And cholera, then, was not only a public health crisis, 57 00:06:40,220 --> 00:06:46,310 it also signalled new dimension to the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008, 58 00:06:46,310 --> 00:06:51,690 which brought into question the capacity and legitimacy of the Zimbabwean state. 59 00:06:51,690 --> 00:07:00,450 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. 60 00:07:00,450 --> 00:07:06,690 Indeed, there already exists a rich epidemiological literature speaking to this very question. 61 00:07:06,690 --> 00:07:11,640 Instead, this book is about the political life of the cholera epidemic. 62 00:07:11,640 --> 00:07:20,010 It examines the epidemic's origins, the patterns of its unfolding, its social impact, official and communal responses to it, 63 00:07:20,010 --> 00:07:25,500 and its aftermath and civic and public life across different institutional settings. 64 00:07:25,500 --> 00:07:35,310 Competing interpretations and experiences of cholera created a series of charged social and political debates about the breakdown of Zimbabwe's public 65 00:07:35,310 --> 00:07:41,130 health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order about the scope and limits 66 00:07:41,130 --> 00:07:45,060 of national and international agencies in the delivery of disaster relief, 67 00:07:45,060 --> 00:07:50,340 and about the country's profound levels of livelihood, poverty and social inequality. 68 00:07:50,340 --> 00:07:56,670 And so, examining the political life of this epidemic offers compelling insights into politics and humanitarianism. 69 00:07:56,670 --> 00:08:04,690 Social inequality, the state and citizenship in Africa. This book sets out to answer three principal questions. 70 00:08:04,690 --> 00:08:13,560 The first. What would the historical and political economic factors that account for the origins and scale of the cholera outbreak? 71 00:08:13,560 --> 00:08:20,430 Through this question, I explore how the cholera outbreak maps onto a dense and complex political history 72 00:08:20,430 --> 00:08:26,610 of the establishment transformation and disruption of urban order in Harare. 73 00:08:26,610 --> 00:08:33,750 Such an analysis sheds new light on changes in Zimbabwe's bureaucracy, on the country's contentious of politics, 74 00:08:33,750 --> 00:08:39,300 but also on the core constitutive entanglement of both the material environment, 75 00:08:39,300 --> 00:08:48,600 such as the capital cities, hydraulic infrastructure with social arrangements such as how people live and manage and negotiate urban space. 76 00:08:48,600 --> 00:08:58,340 Second question I ask is how to different organisational entities, communities and individuals act in response to the cholera outbreak. 77 00:08:58,340 --> 00:09:02,580 Through this question, I explore how one disease, cholera. 78 00:09:02,580 --> 00:09:09,960 Gave rise to many different crises, thereby engendering multiple and often competing experience of the outbreak, 79 00:09:09,960 --> 00:09:14,620 as well as multiple and often competing modes of addressing it. 80 00:09:14,620 --> 00:09:23,160 In effect, cholera took on a variety of forms, depending on where and by whom it was encountered. 81 00:09:23,160 --> 00:09:33,200 Is fraud. Politics emerged from the multiple crises it engendered and from its embeddedness in extant political conflicts and social relations. 82 00:09:33,200 --> 00:09:34,940 Third. 83 00:09:34,940 --> 00:09:44,660 How has the cholera outbreak been committed to historical memory and what political subjectivities has the epidemic generated through this question? 84 00:09:44,660 --> 00:09:51,350 I explored the myriad memories and meanings that cholera has left in civic and public life. 85 00:09:51,350 --> 00:09:56,060 I uncovered these meanings from the stories that people tell about the outbreak. 86 00:09:56,060 --> 00:10:00,140 I consider why these narratives take the form that they do. 87 00:10:00,140 --> 00:10:06,650 And I examine what political subjectivities these stories reveal after such a marked period of social suffering. 88 00:10:06,650 --> 00:10:15,650 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. 89 00:10:15,650 --> 00:10:24,570 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 90 00:10:24,570 --> 00:10:29,070 latter part of the 19th century advocates the study of the disease in this manner. 91 00:10:29,070 --> 00:10:37,970 But rife but rightfully cautions that we need to be very careful and circumspect in handling this way of approaching cholera. 92 00:10:37,970 --> 00:10:44,190 An urban survey of the literature on the great cholera outbreaks of Europe's industrial revolution. 93 00:10:44,190 --> 00:10:52,860 He notes a tendency amongst historians to ascribe to cholera the power to bring social breakdown or to reinforce social stability. 94 00:10:52,860 --> 00:10:58,820 He notes, for instance, historical accounts of the 18 32 cholera outbreak in Britain, 95 00:10:58,820 --> 00:11:07,530 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, 96 00:11:07,530 --> 00:11:11,280 to a series of transformations in the administration of public health, 97 00:11:11,280 --> 00:11:19,530 to the initiation of major US aims of slum clearance, and to long term improvements in housing and living conditions. 98 00:11:19,530 --> 00:11:22,260 While expressing admiration for such studies, 99 00:11:22,260 --> 00:11:28,650 Evans critiques the analytical imprecision with which such terms of social stability and breakdown are invoked. 100 00:11:28,650 --> 00:11:36,090 Moreover, he argues, and I quote, It takes a lot more than an epidemic to cause the destruction of a political and social system, 101 00:11:36,090 --> 00:11:45,800 or, for that matter, to radically transform it. Social transformation, stability or breakdown are always a matter of politics. 102 00:11:45,800 --> 00:11:57,530 OK, I'll leave it there. Thank you so much. 103 00:11:57,530 --> 00:12:15,260 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. 104 00:12:15,260 --> 00:12:24,670 So. When I read the political life of an epidemic, one of the things I did, I'm interested that CIMIC, 105 00:12:24,670 --> 00:12:31,120 I chose to engage with Richard Evans, so quite important medical historian. 106 00:12:31,120 --> 00:12:35,560 I pulled out a couple of quotes that kind of resonated with me. 107 00:12:35,560 --> 00:12:41,890 And I overall, I want to talk a little bit about maybe four different themes that occurred to me throughout the book. 108 00:12:41,890 --> 00:12:51,250 But to start with these first two quotes, one is from another medical historian, Charles Rosenberg, in his book explaining epidemics. 109 00:12:51,250 --> 00:13:00,010 And he writes, quote, Only when the presence of an epidemic becomes unavoidable is there a public admission of its existence. 110 00:13:00,010 --> 00:13:07,060 Bodies must accumulate and the sick must suffer in increasing numbers before officials acknowledge what can no longer be ignored. 111 00:13:07,060 --> 00:13:12,520 The pattern has repeated itself in century after century, end quote. 112 00:13:12,520 --> 00:13:16,450 And then another quote that struck me, Richard, borne from his book Collapse. 113 00:13:16,450 --> 00:13:18,250 What went wrong in Zimbabwe? 114 00:13:18,250 --> 00:13:28,150 He writes, quote, No one in 1980 could have predicted that Zimbabwe would become a failed state on such a monumental and tragic scale. 115 00:13:28,150 --> 00:13:29,860 End quote. Now, 116 00:13:29,860 --> 00:13:41,920 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. 117 00:13:41,920 --> 00:13:50,140 And that is that cholera is, quote, easy to prevent, difficult to spread and simple to treat. 118 00:13:50,140 --> 00:13:51,340 End quote. 119 00:13:51,340 --> 00:14:01,970 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. 120 00:14:01,970 --> 00:14:08,000 The second thing I'd like to note, and historians of medicine, as well as political scientists, medical anthropologists, 121 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:16,010 epidemiologists and so forth, can tell you that disease profiles may have marked characteristics, but they also change. 122 00:14:16,010 --> 00:14:24,380 The Ebola virus was for decades considered catastrophically deadly at nearly 100 percent mortality within outbreaks. 123 00:14:24,380 --> 00:14:31,310 But it's also inefficient in terms of what a virus wants to do, which is to survive its virulence, 124 00:14:31,310 --> 00:14:36,200 causing it to burn itself out before spreading throughout the population. 125 00:14:36,200 --> 00:14:42,410 In recent years, however, this has changed, with outbreaks now occurring outside of Zaire or DRC, 126 00:14:42,410 --> 00:14:47,870 where we first came to know about Ebola and also affecting greater numbers of people. 127 00:14:47,870 --> 00:14:59,840 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. 128 00:14:59,840 --> 00:15:09,790 However, its significant association with stigma has shifted drastically over the last few decades as options to manage the disease have improved. 129 00:15:09,790 --> 00:15:17,560 Historical afflictions such as TB are much less in our consciousness now than when we think of the 19th century. 130 00:15:17,560 --> 00:15:26,680 But the numbers today are staggering. Approximately one quarter of people on the planet are infected with the bacillus and tuberculosis. 131 00:15:26,680 --> 00:15:29,530 We've simply learnt to overlook it. 132 00:15:29,530 --> 00:15:37,690 Diarrhoeal disease is still a major killer of children under five in resource poor countries, including many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. 133 00:15:37,690 --> 00:15:43,240 High levels of infant and child mortality are not bound to a single infectious agent. 134 00:15:43,240 --> 00:15:47,860 They are always associated with much broader structural inequalities. 135 00:15:47,860 --> 00:15:55,570 And taking a cue from Paul Farmer, James Ferguson, Barnett and Whiteside and the study of cholera in 2008. 136 00:15:55,570 --> 00:16:04,320 We see these potential disasters working in tandem with highly specialised but short term quick fix mentalities. 137 00:16:04,320 --> 00:16:11,070 Do mosquitoes cause epidemic or endemic malaria? Or perhaps the parasite within the mosquito? 138 00:16:11,070 --> 00:16:17,080 Well, what about a lack of roads or the failure to send girls to school? 139 00:16:17,080 --> 00:16:25,810 The strength in the political life of an epidemic lies in the multiplicity of ways we may come to know the epidemic of 2008, 140 00:16:25,810 --> 00:16:32,530 even as we grapple with the assertion Sumika rights that it was not inevitable. 141 00:16:32,530 --> 00:16:38,970 Cholera is easy to prevent, difficult to spread and simple to treat. 142 00:16:38,970 --> 00:16:46,380 The third thing that struck me was the ways in which tensions of modernity are also interwoven throughout the book, 143 00:16:46,380 --> 00:16:50,730 and this plays out in a number of ways. And I've pulled out for here. 144 00:16:50,730 --> 00:16:59,220 First, the silencing of a disease that is associated with filth, poverty, a lack of development and backwardness, 145 00:16:59,220 --> 00:17:05,500 cholera lagging behind only worse associations for Africa of famine and genocide. 146 00:17:05,500 --> 00:17:10,080 To this, I might add, leprosy as a list to the list historically. 147 00:17:10,080 --> 00:17:17,160 Secondly, stark assessments of cholera as mediæval and the contrast with how diseases, 148 00:17:17,160 --> 00:17:25,140 quote in this day and age ought to be handled by the state suggests a tendency to period dies epidemiology. 149 00:17:25,140 --> 00:17:34,870 This, I think, is a very unstable notion. How else are we to view global structural inequality as anything other than modern? 150 00:17:34,870 --> 00:17:44,500 Thirdly, modern public health success stories such as O, r, t or oral rehydration therapy are heralded as lifesavers, 151 00:17:44,500 --> 00:17:55,030 obscuring the fact that the necessity for a lati on any large scale is first and foremost a story of neglect, deprivation and injustice. 152 00:17:55,030 --> 00:18:01,420 And lastly, I thought a surprising limitation to the oral history methodology in the book is seen 153 00:18:01,420 --> 00:18:07,200 in an apparent lack of openness about seeking traditional treatments or medicines, 154 00:18:07,200 --> 00:18:11,590 stigmatised in some quarters for being anti modern. 155 00:18:11,590 --> 00:18:18,600 This medical pluralism, which might be the norm and neither modern nor anti modern in neighbouring countries, 156 00:18:18,600 --> 00:18:27,880 was an anathema in Zimbabwe, where the narrative of a post independence model of stability and progress was all too recent. 157 00:18:27,880 --> 00:18:35,860 Ultimately, studies of disease and epidemics illuminate a multiplicity of what we might call at stakes. 158 00:18:35,860 --> 00:18:43,690 And I couldn't help but think back to a film that I love called Rush Amon, which is about Kira Kurosawa film, 159 00:18:43,690 --> 00:18:50,100 about a traumatic event and for different perspectives, remembering this event and recounting what happened. 160 00:18:50,100 --> 00:18:55,540 And of course, they're all wildly divergent versions of the truth. 161 00:18:55,540 --> 00:19:08,500 So what was an at stake in Zimbabwe in 2008 for some national sovereignty, for others claims of authenticity and modernity? 162 00:19:08,500 --> 00:19:13,870 Was it raw power or the sanctity of a welfare role for the state? 163 00:19:13,870 --> 00:19:19,370 Even a wildly competent but zealots approach to intervention becomes an at stake. 164 00:19:19,370 --> 00:19:25,930 And here, I think made sense on Frontier. Frontier does not come off particularly well. 165 00:19:25,930 --> 00:19:34,060 All of these at stakes complicate the failed state narrative that oversimplifies approaches across the complement the continent, 166 00:19:34,060 --> 00:19:36,730 a narrative that simul Chi rejects here. 167 00:19:36,730 --> 00:19:45,280 Perhaps most importantly, while we address the perfect storm of what went wrong, we also come to understand how ordinary Zimbabweans, 168 00:19:45,280 --> 00:19:54,910 quote, staked claims to medical treatment and social welfare, unquote, which in itself is a story of how people enact their citizenship. 169 00:19:54,910 --> 00:20:04,510 The political drift from an ethos of professionalism, education and skills in holding political posts to one of loyalty might sound 170 00:20:04,510 --> 00:20:09,160 familiar to anyone watching American politics during the last four years. 171 00:20:09,160 --> 00:20:14,560 Even as we enact our own rights and responsibilities. 172 00:20:14,560 --> 00:20:22,500 These distances amidst a global health calamity that ought not to have unfolded in the way that it has in this day and age, 173 00:20:22,500 --> 00:20:33,810 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. 174 00:20:33,810 --> 00:20:47,350 Yet deeply close to home. Thank you. And now I'd like to call on my colleague, John Schubert, to give his response. 175 00:20:47,350 --> 00:20:52,330 Thanks, Allan Sloan. Thanks, guy. And thanks to you for having me here. 176 00:20:52,330 --> 00:20:57,820 It's a great pleasure to having the privilege to discuss this great book. 177 00:20:57,820 --> 00:21:03,760 I really enjoyed reading this. It's extremely well and beautifully written and it's very engaging. 178 00:21:03,760 --> 00:21:08,770 And the thing is, I don't work on health. So there's a lot in it. 179 00:21:08,770 --> 00:21:17,180 Obviously, it is essentially about cholera, the disease a it's a political ethnography of a specific moment in reasons involving history. 180 00:21:17,180 --> 00:21:24,520 And there's a lot in it for people interested in the African states in general or in political anthropology. 181 00:21:24,520 --> 00:21:28,740 And, you know, your analytical approach, 182 00:21:28,740 --> 00:21:37,870 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. 183 00:21:37,870 --> 00:21:46,450 In the experience of Angola, for example, the critique of neo patrimonial ism with which I sympathise enormously, of course, 184 00:21:46,450 --> 00:21:55,480 but also the idea of cholera and cholera response as a political terrain upon which competing narratives are played out or negotiated. 185 00:21:55,480 --> 00:22:02,350 And this all revolves around the central question of political subjectivities under conditions of authoritarian is more a dominant party system, 186 00:22:02,350 --> 00:22:10,780 if you will, how these are produced and reconfigured by the experience of dramatic events such as, in your case, this cholera outbreak. 187 00:22:10,780 --> 00:22:15,550 So I myself, a black historian currently working on infrastructure. 188 00:22:15,550 --> 00:22:20,790 And I really appreciated your long delay perspective on infrastructure politics in Harare. 189 00:22:20,790 --> 00:22:28,180 This reveals the contingency in past, the tendency of the formation of specific, differentiated infrastructural publics. 190 00:22:28,180 --> 00:22:34,240 The paradoxical effects of the post-colonial politics of orderliness in urban planning, 191 00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:41,410 as well as the historicity of certain explanations and interpretations of the outbreak that your informants mobilised at the time of research. 192 00:22:41,410 --> 00:22:46,030 The parallels to biological warfare by the colonial regime, for example, 193 00:22:46,030 --> 00:22:51,490 the maintenance of order and the modern town centre, the hostility towards informal settlements. 194 00:22:51,490 --> 00:22:59,110 You then trace in your chapter the Zimbo the decline of the Zimbabwean health system to structural adjustment in the 1990s. 195 00:22:59,110 --> 00:23:03,670 And it's interesting for me to see in your descriptions parallels to Angola, 196 00:23:03,670 --> 00:23:10,690 where similar chronic underfunding results in very comparable shortages of even the most basic supplies gloves, 197 00:23:10,690 --> 00:23:18,010 sterile dressings, needles and even clean water in hospitals. But in the Angolan case, escapee's is not centrally to blame. 198 00:23:18,010 --> 00:23:22,810 Rather, it is more directly the result of elite predation on public funds. 199 00:23:22,810 --> 00:23:32,200 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. 200 00:23:32,200 --> 00:23:41,770 Talk of efficiency, responsibility and the proverbial tightening of the belt is deployed to justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures. 201 00:23:41,770 --> 00:23:47,620 Moments of crisis, as your book shows, also provide a fertile ground to advance through neo liberal rhetoric, 202 00:23:47,620 --> 00:23:53,660 agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of commonsensical, reasonable ness and national solidarity. 203 00:23:53,660 --> 00:24:01,420 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, 204 00:24:01,420 --> 00:24:06,700 but rather to raise questions about agency and complicity in these dynamics of underfunding, 205 00:24:06,700 --> 00:24:13,480 which often go hand in hand with predation, which we can also observe maybe in the dismantling of the NHS in Britain. 206 00:24:13,480 --> 00:24:18,550 All in the name of sensible spending, all of the hidden debt scandal in Mozambique at the moment. 207 00:24:18,550 --> 00:24:29,970 So my first question reading the book is whether your material could also contribute to making a larger argument about austerity. 208 00:24:29,970 --> 00:24:36,970 You like things of this history of underfunding and structural neglect to a time bomb is evocative and also reminded me of Razorfish, 209 00:24:36,970 --> 00:24:40,300 Jack's idea of a hurricane bomb in Puerto Rico. 210 00:24:40,300 --> 00:24:49,280 How a history of U.S. imperialism imposed austerity produced the conditions for disaster when Hurricane Maria struck in 2017. 211 00:24:49,280 --> 00:24:52,530 And one of your key arguments in the book is that what you term, 212 00:24:52,530 --> 00:24:58,460 the multiple ontologies of cholera precluded a shared understanding of the outbreak and its causes. 213 00:24:58,460 --> 00:25:03,550 And this has implications not only for humanitarian assistance in a situation of crises, 214 00:25:03,550 --> 00:25:10,000 but I think more broadly and profoundly for our understanding of the multiple and shifting nature of citizenship and by extension, 215 00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:14,860 of statehood beyond the specific Zimbabwean or generic African case. 216 00:25:14,860 --> 00:25:18,640 This brings me to further questions that we could perhaps discuss afterwards. 217 00:25:18,640 --> 00:25:24,760 Might this idea of multiple political ontologies be a way to apprehend polities that are so deeply 218 00:25:24,760 --> 00:25:34,370 polarised and fractured that they no longer appear to seem that they only seem to share the same reality? 219 00:25:34,370 --> 00:25:41,170 Up to four million jobs. The assemblage of institutions and actors have together forged the response to the humanitarian crisis. 220 00:25:41,170 --> 00:25:46,800 The process, your understanding echoing for me, the idea of arenas developed by Hockman and Bechler, 221 00:25:46,800 --> 00:25:53,590 which allows you to raise questions about the political dynamics that emerge from these negotiations and interactions. 222 00:25:53,590 --> 00:25:59,610 And I was really intrigued by your analysis of how depictions of bodily suffering are very often quite gruesome. 223 00:25:59,610 --> 00:26:05,430 Terms were mobilised as a moral narrative to justify the imperative to do something. 224 00:26:05,430 --> 00:26:14,090 You tell a story about the challenges of coordinating the humanitarian response from crumbling government buildings that haven't been running water, 225 00:26:14,090 --> 00:26:21,020 a stable electricity in years. Moreover, and this is something we know from other situations of emergency, 226 00:26:21,020 --> 00:26:28,820 you show how the immediacy of intervention isn't precluded addressing more fundamental structural and political issues. 227 00:26:28,820 --> 00:26:33,350 And so your material also speaks volumes about the dilemmas faced by national and 228 00:26:33,350 --> 00:26:38,600 international NGOs in the context like as like Zimbabwes or Angola's for that matter, 229 00:26:38,600 --> 00:26:46,010 where a political service delivery to make up for the shortcomings of the state's own services is accepted or even welcomed. 230 00:26:46,010 --> 00:26:50,800 But anything political is suspicious or even actively impeded. 231 00:26:50,800 --> 00:27:00,070 So I wonder also in relation to your final empirical chapter where the anger of citizens is palpable, whether in your assessment, 232 00:27:00,070 --> 00:27:09,040 this kind of ostensibly apolitical activity might not also provide spaces for people to experiment with governance of various local levels, 233 00:27:09,040 --> 00:27:18,040 which could eventually possibly lead to the development of new political subjectivities formulated around the substantive expectations of citizenship. 234 00:27:18,040 --> 00:27:25,360 And perhaps, though that goes beyond the scope of the book and calls for speculation on how these substantive expectations might be changing. 235 00:27:25,360 --> 00:27:36,750 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, 236 00:27:36,750 --> 00:27:40,200 might there be any insights from your book that you see as relevant and 237 00:27:40,200 --> 00:27:44,760 translatable to other contexts in our current situation of the global pandemic? 238 00:27:44,760 --> 00:27:58,770 Thanks very much. Thanks very much, John. 239 00:27:58,770 --> 00:28:09,480 And now I'd like to invite our author to give his comments in response. 240 00:28:09,480 --> 00:28:13,110 Thanks so much, slower million for that. 241 00:28:13,110 --> 00:28:20,370 I mean, that's such rich and generous and thoughtful readings of the book. 242 00:28:20,370 --> 00:28:29,520 And very, very deep engagement with with my arguments. So I'm going to. 243 00:28:29,520 --> 00:28:39,320 Yeah, I'll just comment, I guess, the slightly freewheeling way on some of the things that just stood out to me slowly. 244 00:28:39,320 --> 00:28:48,720 I really loved your kind of emphasis on the tensions of modernity that play out throughout the book. 245 00:28:48,720 --> 00:28:54,690 And in some ways, you've captured it more precisely than that. 246 00:28:54,690 --> 00:29:06,270 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. 247 00:29:06,270 --> 00:29:16,200 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. 248 00:29:16,200 --> 00:29:18,930 Questions about the colonial past, 249 00:29:18,930 --> 00:29:28,860 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, 250 00:29:28,860 --> 00:29:35,640 you know, in my lifetime at that stage, unprecedented uncertainty about the nature of daily life. 251 00:29:35,640 --> 00:29:46,380 So to kind of concretise that idea, you know, growing up, we lived a pretty comfortable Middle-Class Life. 252 00:29:46,380 --> 00:29:50,760 And there was a kind of sense that the only country in Africa that was more 253 00:29:50,760 --> 00:29:57,390 developed than us were our colleagues south of the Limpopo and South Africa. 254 00:29:57,390 --> 00:30:03,480 And there was this kind of period almost of a reversal or of change that happened 255 00:30:03,480 --> 00:30:08,370 in 2000 as the kind of confrontations that I detail in the book began to play out. 256 00:30:08,370 --> 00:30:19,770 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 257 00:30:19,770 --> 00:30:25,410 disorienting shift in the nature of history and in the trajectory of the country, 258 00:30:25,410 --> 00:30:28,170 one that we struggled to articulate at the time. 259 00:30:28,170 --> 00:30:36,750 And it was very experienced initially as a sense of Stacie's that somehow Zimbabwe had been on an inexorable march towards progress, 260 00:30:36,750 --> 00:30:45,930 development and modernity, that then, for various political reasons, was briefly put on pause but would eventually resume. 261 00:30:45,930 --> 00:30:53,010 That, of course, is not quite what happened. The conflicts and the economic crisis continue to play out. 262 00:30:53,010 --> 00:30:59,070 And then as a young man watching the cholera outbreak unfold while at medical school, 263 00:30:59,070 --> 00:31:05,640 I was met with this jarring image of how could a country that I had grown up in that had 264 00:31:05,640 --> 00:31:10,980 prided itself on its sense of being developments to come to such a basic infection. 265 00:31:10,980 --> 00:31:15,690 And so that that tension of modernity was, for me, had a kind of narrative. 266 00:31:15,690 --> 00:31:24,780 Even phenomenological quality was very much a part of how I understood the country and my relationship to it. 267 00:31:24,780 --> 00:31:29,220 And I was trying to translate that because I think I saw that mirrored as I was doing the 268 00:31:29,220 --> 00:31:36,360 research in the range of social metaphors and discourses that we used to talk about the country. 269 00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:46,340 You encounter it in schools, you encounter it in hospitals, you encounter it with activists, and you also encounter it in government bureaucracies, 270 00:31:46,340 --> 00:31:58,190 a constant and relentless sense that time has been suspended, but that this is an impermanent, an influx state of affairs. 271 00:31:58,190 --> 00:32:06,260 Looping that kind of observation from when I was writing the book to a comment that Yanmei towards the end about the 272 00:32:06,260 --> 00:32:17,120 post Mugabe era is that it kind of felt when Mugabe was ousted from power through military coup in November 2017, 273 00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:23,740 that this protracted period of crisis and status was coming to an end, at least superficially. 274 00:32:23,740 --> 00:32:30,200 And this kind of signified through a form of social catharsis as people were celebrating and flooding the streets of Harare. 275 00:32:30,200 --> 00:32:37,340 And yet the regime that has followed has been just as bad, if not worse, than what preceded it. 276 00:32:37,340 --> 00:32:40,130 And I think you're kind of telling that story. 277 00:32:40,130 --> 00:32:47,960 One of the things about the kind of cholera outbreak is how cholera both became kind of emblematic of that, an idiomatic sense, 278 00:32:47,960 --> 00:33:00,350 but also how it shows that the kind of sheer biological human character of political economic decisions 279 00:33:00,350 --> 00:33:08,620 and also challenges any taken for granted sense about where we are at any given moment in history. 280 00:33:08,620 --> 00:33:15,920 And I think that that does bear a parallel. That's hard to think through about the present pandemic. 281 00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:23,640 I think it's invited to the sense, you know, for instance, in the U.K. of, you know. 282 00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:32,110 Questioning our sense of normality. Questioning a national narrative and a sense of being within the country about the direction of travel, 283 00:33:32,110 --> 00:33:43,740 the direction of time and of history, to show that actually we are there's nothing inevitable about how history and how politics unfold. 284 00:33:43,740 --> 00:33:49,410 On the one hand. And yet at the same time, when these dramatic outbreaks occur, 285 00:33:49,410 --> 00:33:58,320 we are beholden to a myriad range of structures and infrastructures that condition our response to it. 286 00:33:58,320 --> 00:34:09,750 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, 287 00:34:09,750 --> 00:34:20,430 I think, particularly how economy broadly conceived is so central to shaping both when an epidemic occurs and what response looks like. 288 00:34:20,430 --> 00:34:23,730 And in the book, I do, of course, explore a lot of this. 289 00:34:23,730 --> 00:34:29,160 But I'm also interested in its close relationship with with medicine and public health. 290 00:34:29,160 --> 00:34:38,730 And my thinking increasingly gravitates towards what does this look like, a more global scale in terms of the structuring of our global economy. 291 00:34:38,730 --> 00:34:44,610 So we have the crisis, for instance, of supply chains that marked the early part of the Koven 19 pandemic. 292 00:34:44,610 --> 00:34:51,840 That kind of bears a parallel to the crisis of supply chains that played out on a micro scale during Zimbabwe's outbreak. 293 00:34:51,840 --> 00:34:59,760 But we also have this bigger question about the very nature of global health and how it's being driven. 294 00:34:59,760 --> 00:35:05,820 Coke 19 sort of subordinated to a kind of geopolitics, you know, exemplified, 295 00:35:05,820 --> 00:35:10,860 of course, by the Trump regime withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, 296 00:35:10,860 --> 00:35:20,550 but also around the challenges of Britain in the EU, figuring out how to manage and to deliver vaccines. 297 00:35:20,550 --> 00:35:28,190 The other. Issue that I wanted to kind of reflect on just a little bit more. 298 00:35:28,190 --> 00:35:33,590 I guess. I mean, it's it's it's partly, again, 299 00:35:33,590 --> 00:35:42,410 going back to Sloanes early remark about how the presence of Pollara always tells a 300 00:35:42,410 --> 00:35:52,100 story that it's sheer occurrence ought to alert to alert us to some wider social facts. 301 00:35:52,100 --> 00:35:59,630 And in a sense, this is partly what I argue theoretically, when I conceive of an epidemic as having multiple ontologies, 302 00:35:59,630 --> 00:36:06,800 because I argue that epidemics are biological entities or bio social entities, you know, 303 00:36:06,800 --> 00:36:14,000 they spread through given sorts of populations, an excessive global expectancy in a socially patterned way. 304 00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:18,350 And yet when we think of them as having multiple ontology, that invites us to constantly ask, 305 00:36:18,350 --> 00:36:27,890 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? 306 00:36:27,890 --> 00:36:36,260 Now, something that struck me about the Kofod 19 pandemic is its its presence has been used to tell a story. 307 00:36:36,260 --> 00:36:39,980 It's actually a story that for much of the pandemic I disagree with. 308 00:36:39,980 --> 00:36:53,100 And that story has been that, you know, the arrival of a new or exotic virus of pandemic potential and scale originates, 309 00:36:53,100 --> 00:36:56,900 you know, either from Africa or from Asia. 310 00:36:56,900 --> 00:37:06,050 And it travels through the circuits of global majority trade, finance, tourism and economy when it arrives in Europe, 311 00:37:06,050 --> 00:37:13,010 as it did this time last year, and begins to call unexpected and unconscionable suffering. 312 00:37:13,010 --> 00:37:18,470 This is treated as totally anathema to a kind of euro modern self conception. 313 00:37:18,470 --> 00:37:26,930 And yet, at the same time and a company part of this narrative has been the forecasting of catastrophe to occur in Africa. 314 00:37:26,930 --> 00:37:33,620 So Africa's place in the global story of pandemics is rewritten as being the sort of site of primordial, 315 00:37:33,620 --> 00:37:38,060 primordial origin of disease to being the final frontier of Kofod 19. 316 00:37:38,060 --> 00:37:39,050 So, I mean, creating, you know, 317 00:37:39,050 --> 00:37:46,580 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, 318 00:37:46,580 --> 00:37:51,800 18, is going to reach an African continent, sort of woefully ill equipped to handle it. 319 00:37:51,800 --> 00:37:58,250 And yet I think that the scripting this narrative, much like the scripted narratives around the cholera outbreak, 320 00:37:58,250 --> 00:38:02,390 are kind of disrupted by thinking about them in terms of their multiple modernities. 321 00:38:02,390 --> 00:38:09,370 I think about the contingency of factors that shape the historical and political trajectory of of an outbreak. 322 00:38:09,370 --> 00:38:19,300 Okay. So I'll kind of pause on these reflections here and and allow kind of yarning Sloan to tend to respond. 323 00:38:19,300 --> 00:38:24,730 Well, if I may take chair's prerogative and respond first and then I'll turn over to you on that. 324 00:38:24,730 --> 00:38:29,440 Wonderful. I mean, a couple of points that I will bring out in response, Sumika. 325 00:38:29,440 --> 00:38:35,770 One is talking about, you know, kind of cholera is emblematic, as you say. 326 00:38:35,770 --> 00:38:39,970 And, you know, we haven't explicitly said it yet. 327 00:38:39,970 --> 00:38:49,360 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, 328 00:38:49,360 --> 00:39:00,640 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, 329 00:39:00,640 --> 00:39:09,160 African countries or environments, resource poor environments or anywhere where there is something like this, a disease outbreak. 330 00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:13,390 So these are these are metaphors and symbols used by kind of outsiders. 331 00:39:13,390 --> 00:39:20,530 What I find interesting about one of the perspectives that you bring with this study that's unique, I think, 332 00:39:20,530 --> 00:39:33,620 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. 333 00:39:33,620 --> 00:39:44,050 So before we get to this point of. Internalisation, perhaps internalising kind of national identity. 334 00:39:44,050 --> 00:39:48,520 And, you know, where are these politics going? This is not what was promised. 335 00:39:48,520 --> 00:39:57,250 This is not the trajectory we thought we were on. And it reminds me very much of an experience I had many years ago, 336 00:39:57,250 --> 00:40:02,530 my first African experience, which was a year when I was there for a couple of years. 337 00:40:02,530 --> 00:40:10,990 And one thing that struck me, and this is under the Mobutu regime, was how self critical desire. 338 00:40:10,990 --> 00:40:17,200 What were you also how how critical they were of themselves and of Africa overall. 339 00:40:17,200 --> 00:40:24,550 And they used a lot of this kind of these sort of symbols and the sort of language. 340 00:40:24,550 --> 00:40:38,080 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 341 00:40:38,080 --> 00:40:45,610 the use of these symbols and including the damage that they do beyond the kind of failed state narrative. 342 00:40:45,610 --> 00:40:57,460 And the second thing I'll just briefly comment on is obviously looking at our current situation, the current pandemic and absolutely right. 343 00:40:57,460 --> 00:41:01,930 I mean. And I I have to admit, I worried about this myself. 344 00:41:01,930 --> 00:41:10,030 The idea that what's going to happen in African countries. I was in Kenya in February last year. 345 00:41:10,030 --> 00:41:14,320 So just a couple of weeks before borders started to shut. 346 00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:25,630 And I was worried. I had visited a couple of huge, densely packed slum communities and there were absolutely massive. 347 00:41:25,630 --> 00:41:33,820 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. 348 00:41:33,820 --> 00:41:42,460 Well, the opposite happened just as you remark that the devastation we're seeing right now due to corruption, 349 00:41:42,460 --> 00:41:47,950 due to incompetence, due to a lack of will is in the United States, for one thing. 350 00:41:47,950 --> 00:41:58,090 And this kind of trajectory of that, the the power of these symbols and this internalised, failed state narrative. 351 00:41:58,090 --> 00:42:01,960 Even when it hasn't happened yet, is incredibly powerful. 352 00:42:01,960 --> 00:42:08,620 And I think it's very important that one that people read this very topical book that you've just written, 353 00:42:08,620 --> 00:42:14,980 but also that, yeah, we use history and we pay attention to what we tell our students. 354 00:42:14,980 --> 00:42:21,700 When you read the news, kind of apply the same principles you would apply to critiquing evidence from 355 00:42:21,700 --> 00:42:28,990 the past and kind of rework these narratives and really work with the evidence. 356 00:42:28,990 --> 00:42:36,920 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. 357 00:42:36,920 --> 00:42:44,180 Thanks very much. Yeah. This is also just going to be a slightly free-floating response to what you both just said. 358 00:42:44,180 --> 00:42:48,410 And thanks for also raising this question of the imageries, Sloan. 359 00:42:48,410 --> 00:42:54,410 Because when I heard you respond and also thinking back to the book, I mean, 360 00:42:54,410 --> 00:43:01,220 a this question of the economy being central to how an epidemic or in this case, a pandemic is unfolding. 361 00:43:01,220 --> 00:43:07,760 I think Sloanes, Sloan's remark about the US or the UK, for that matter, is is quite spot on. 362 00:43:07,760 --> 00:43:15,830 And I think it speaks to this persistent representations of Africa as, as you said, the final frontier. 363 00:43:15,830 --> 00:43:23,180 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. 364 00:43:23,180 --> 00:43:25,580 Africa is this final frontier where, you know, 365 00:43:25,580 --> 00:43:32,210 cities and populations are constantly scripted as being at the same time the most exposed and the most vulnerable, 366 00:43:32,210 --> 00:43:36,290 the least well equipped to resist or to deal with the crises. 367 00:43:36,290 --> 00:43:46,250 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. 368 00:43:46,250 --> 00:43:52,790 Why study Africa from Europe? But part of the mission of studying Africa is not, you know, 369 00:43:52,790 --> 00:44:02,420 talking about Africa to people who might not know its reality so well is precisely counteracting contracting those ideas. 370 00:44:02,420 --> 00:44:07,670 And I think what Sloan mentioned that the sort of critical self reflection of your informants about the 371 00:44:07,670 --> 00:44:15,380 state of the Zimbabwean state and the polity is precisely also giving voice to that and the other. 372 00:44:15,380 --> 00:44:18,260 The other thing I found interesting is also when in your response, 373 00:44:18,260 --> 00:44:25,880 you started reminiscing about that you were upbringing and this sense of progress, like there's a sense to history, right? 374 00:44:25,880 --> 00:44:30,990 There's a there's a national destiny. And I think this is something we can observe across southern Africa, 375 00:44:30,990 --> 00:44:35,630 these post liberation regimes that they very strongly work with, that we liberated the nation. 376 00:44:35,630 --> 00:44:37,590 We know there's a sense the history, 377 00:44:37,590 --> 00:44:46,250 there's this there's a direction and the sense of suspension that you that you experienced yourself perhaps from a distance, 378 00:44:46,250 --> 00:44:53,600 but that you that you chronicle so chronicled in your book show is in many ways 379 00:44:53,600 --> 00:44:59,030 how pervasive this narrative is and how it resonates with citizens expectations. 380 00:44:59,030 --> 00:45:10,130 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, 381 00:45:10,130 --> 00:45:14,150 a generational change like we will this narrative, because in your last chapter, 382 00:45:14,150 --> 00:45:20,240 there's one one of your informants is like, no, I you know, I'm married to Mugabe till we die. 383 00:45:20,240 --> 00:45:25,370 Is this only going to change once these old dinosaurs have all died out? 384 00:45:25,370 --> 00:45:34,840 Or is there any is there any scope for an articulation of alternative political terrains outside that framework of national, you know, 385 00:45:34,840 --> 00:45:42,470 a teleology that is shaped by the liberation struggle even now, while while those players, 386 00:45:42,470 --> 00:45:51,130 those political actors are still so, so much very dominant in in the framework former politics. 387 00:45:51,130 --> 00:46:01,290 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. 388 00:46:01,290 --> 00:46:12,330 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. 389 00:46:12,330 --> 00:46:21,630 One is about anticipating catastrophe in Africa and trying to understand an historic sites that a bit more particularly with respect 390 00:46:21,630 --> 00:46:32,070 to two two epidemics and thinking about the machinery that creates these discourses and how they they they they they move around. 391 00:46:32,070 --> 00:46:36,690 And at the same time, because slowly I did share your concern. 392 00:46:36,690 --> 00:46:40,740 I was like, you know, what happens when Kofod 19 hits Zimbabwe, for example? 393 00:46:40,740 --> 00:46:45,000 And to be honest, it is quite disastrous in many ways. 394 00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:54,600 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. 395 00:46:54,600 --> 00:46:59,220 There's something else that's going on socially, demographically, geographically, 396 00:46:59,220 --> 00:47:07,200 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. 397 00:47:07,200 --> 00:47:17,790 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. 398 00:47:17,790 --> 00:47:24,420 And then the kind of iterative, everyday sense of living with crisis and how that reconfigures the ways in which 399 00:47:24,420 --> 00:47:30,060 people make sense of and adapt to these potential moments of catastrophe. 400 00:47:30,060 --> 00:47:34,560 And to me, there's a real kind of puzzle about what all of that kind of looks like. 401 00:47:34,560 --> 00:47:46,650 The other issue is that I'm thinking about kind of quite immediately is about the born free generation in southern Africa, in Zimbabwe. 402 00:47:46,650 --> 00:47:53,040 And in my old life, quite specifically. So with with with my sort of non pandemic's hartshorn, 403 00:47:53,040 --> 00:48:03,330 I have been writing increasingly about the afterlife of colonialism and how it leaves an imprint in in so many spheres of 404 00:48:03,330 --> 00:48:14,790 social life in Zimbabwe and in Britain and schooling our language and our sense of orientation both to time and to history, 405 00:48:14,790 --> 00:48:23,550 and how my generation of Zimbabweans is starting to to rethink the logics of all of that and not quite knowing what 406 00:48:23,550 --> 00:48:31,650 to do with ourselves as we feel a kind of joint frustration being caught in the middle of so many different things. 407 00:48:31,650 --> 00:48:38,990 The recognising the importance of liberation, but seeing the failures of the post liberation dream, 408 00:48:38,990 --> 00:48:48,360 recognising the sinister nature of British imperialism, while at the same time valorising many aspects of liberal democracy in the West. 409 00:48:48,360 --> 00:48:53,490 And so those are kind of the two pillars of things that I'm I'm thinking about. Great. 410 00:48:53,490 --> 00:48:54,300 Thank you. 411 00:48:54,300 --> 00:49:05,790 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. 412 00:49:05,790 --> 00:49:09,500 Thank you. Thank you all. That was a really, 413 00:49:09,500 --> 00:49:20,600 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, 414 00:49:20,600 --> 00:49:26,180 really, which is about, you know, this disease or does some does an epidemic always tell a story? 415 00:49:26,180 --> 00:49:36,590 And what are the kinds of political subjectivity that get generated by these kinds of crises are questions that I think go. 416 00:49:36,590 --> 00:49:40,760 I mean, what's great about today is that you've tied them into a very particular moment, 417 00:49:40,760 --> 00:49:47,900 but they clearly also go in all sorts of different directions and including the one that we're in right now. 418 00:49:47,900 --> 00:49:49,720 But to answer the question, there's a question, 419 00:49:49,720 --> 00:49:54,530 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, 420 00:49:54,530 --> 00:49:59,600 there's a question from Philip Little who asks or who says that we rarely recognise 421 00:49:59,600 --> 00:50:03,860 or acknowledge the reality of an epidemic until we're confronted with sick bodies. 422 00:50:03,860 --> 00:50:08,210 In a way, it goes back to Sloan's point about the imagery of a pandemic. 423 00:50:08,210 --> 00:50:14,210 And clearly a sick body of a certain kind is is part of the the imagery of the pandemic. 424 00:50:14,210 --> 00:50:18,980 The question here is, do you think this is ever going to change? And if so, how? 425 00:50:18,980 --> 00:50:29,150 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? 426 00:50:29,150 --> 00:50:37,610 So the the. That's really it's a really powerful quote that Sloan kind of lifted from Charles Rosenberg, 427 00:50:37,610 --> 00:50:48,080 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. 428 00:50:48,080 --> 00:50:58,330 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. 429 00:50:58,330 --> 00:51:07,150 One of the challenges about writing a book like this was that, you know, the epidemic began in 2008. 430 00:51:07,150 --> 00:51:14,170 A sort of ostensibly ended in 2009. I did the bulk of the research for 2015 in terms of the fieldwork. 431 00:51:14,170 --> 00:51:16,450 And it was published in 2020. 432 00:51:16,450 --> 00:51:25,570 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, 433 00:51:25,570 --> 00:51:32,560 particularly from my expert interviews in the U.N. and the Ministry of Health and so on, you know, 434 00:51:32,560 --> 00:51:38,100 had the screening kind of red flags saying that, you know, this is going to be a disaster. 435 00:51:38,100 --> 00:51:47,010 So what I would say to minister's office, they would tell me quite candidly that this was the information coming through and. 436 00:51:47,010 --> 00:51:52,770 I was like, why did you guys react? I mean, it was so clear that was gonna be a disaster. 437 00:51:52,770 --> 00:52:00,530 And another thing as we came out was, well, you know, when you're receiving that information in real time. 438 00:52:00,530 --> 00:52:09,420 All, you know, more and more cases spreading. You don't at that moment know quite how this is all going to unfold. 439 00:52:09,420 --> 00:52:16,260 And one senior government official insisted to me that, you know, we had had scares like this multiple times. 440 00:52:16,260 --> 00:52:21,570 We had had scares in 2000 and every year since then, before 2008. 441 00:52:21,570 --> 00:52:24,270 And we would get to a few hundred cases of cholera. 442 00:52:24,270 --> 00:52:31,620 We didn't necessarily react because we were quite incapacitated and it never turned into a major outbreak. 443 00:52:31,620 --> 00:52:38,610 And then in 2008, it did. And so there's a kind of a possible logical question, if you like. 444 00:52:38,610 --> 00:52:43,590 You know, how do we know a disaster is occurring when it's occurring? 445 00:52:43,590 --> 00:52:48,690 And in a sense, Rosenberg is suggesting that we know this particular at a political level. 446 00:52:48,690 --> 00:52:53,640 Well, it's undeniable, at which point a lot of harm has already occurred. 447 00:52:53,640 --> 00:52:59,910 So it kind of caught in this logical sort of trap. 448 00:52:59,910 --> 00:53:05,020 All of that said, I think, you know, particularly as has been the case with Cobh, 449 00:53:05,020 --> 00:53:16,260 it but not only we're seeing across the world very different logics about the nature of preparedness and the logics of response. 450 00:53:16,260 --> 00:53:20,830 So, you know, the dilemma that I've kind of outlined is not really an inevitable case. 451 00:53:20,830 --> 00:53:32,580 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. 452 00:53:32,580 --> 00:53:40,650 You know, there was a political kind of negotiation for the formation of a government of national unity after a heavily 453 00:53:40,650 --> 00:53:47,850 disputed election in which the reputation of the ruling party was in tatters to acknowledge an outbreak, 454 00:53:47,850 --> 00:53:57,120 particularly one that that that that potential scale would have desperately undermined their political political legitimacy even further. 455 00:53:57,120 --> 00:54:01,890 And so I think that this Rosenberg's insight needs to be taken that that step further 456 00:54:01,890 --> 00:54:07,920 to say that the recurrence of this pattern is often about the forms of political will. 457 00:54:07,920 --> 00:54:13,350 But really unpacking what are the historical political contingencies that are playing out at that time? 458 00:54:13,350 --> 00:54:24,510 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? 459 00:54:24,510 --> 00:54:32,520 Thank you. I don't know whether your nose slowed, want to add to that particular point or whether we should move on? 460 00:54:32,520 --> 00:54:43,900 Colonial Mutual, if you do, I would just add one, maybe quick counterexample or, you know, thinking about Kenya. 461 00:54:43,900 --> 00:54:53,130 Silico mentioned, you know, the idea of preparedness and how we kind of predict disaster in Africa. 462 00:54:53,130 --> 00:54:58,630 Well, we don't predict it elsewhere. And in the case of Kenya. 463 00:54:58,630 --> 00:55:05,580 You know, one perspective was the youthfulness of the population is one of the reasons why comparatively there seem to be faster deaths, 464 00:55:05,580 --> 00:55:11,280 more deaths in places like the UK or or the U.S. and that that's what was protecting Kenya. 465 00:55:11,280 --> 00:55:19,290 What they didn't mention was Kenya closed their borders. Kenya actually took action before, but we still haven't closed them here entirely. 466 00:55:19,290 --> 00:55:24,240 So, you know, there's also the sense of you don't know what you're missing. 467 00:55:24,240 --> 00:55:29,190 And it's really difficult to kind of cheque those biases. 468 00:55:29,190 --> 00:55:35,640 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. 469 00:55:35,640 --> 00:55:44,270 So, yes, something they can't help. Like the usefulness of the population, but not the actual actions that a state took. 470 00:55:44,270 --> 00:55:55,350 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, 471 00:55:55,350 --> 00:56:01,440 if you like, the body politic and what the signs are as to where where things are wrong and so on. 472 00:56:01,440 --> 00:56:05,300 I'm sure you medical historians have to worry with the like for me saying the body politic all the time. 473 00:56:05,300 --> 00:56:11,460 But it's nonetheless, I think, an interesting way of thinking about where, if you like, 474 00:56:11,460 --> 00:56:17,820 the procedures of medicines or diagnosis and so on and prediction are actually embedded in the problem. 475 00:56:17,820 --> 00:56:27,090 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. 476 00:56:27,090 --> 00:56:35,190 A couple of months ago now, Homi Bhabha was talking about mobilising unpreparedness as a kind of political device. 477 00:56:35,190 --> 00:56:40,020 And I think it's just another way of thinking about this is the degree to which being 478 00:56:40,020 --> 00:56:47,170 unprepared is also a sort of political move in relation to a crisis crisis thinking. 479 00:56:47,170 --> 00:56:52,440 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. 480 00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:59,810 Great. Another question has come in. The book describes different kinds of political subjectivity the outbreak engendered. 481 00:56:59,810 --> 00:57:09,000 Have these subjectivities developed since the outbreak or they've been actively subverted or rejected by Harare's residents since then? 482 00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:14,390 Otherwise, how long does change last? I guess it's partly what that question is asking. 483 00:57:14,390 --> 00:57:27,790 That's a great question. When when I was doing interviews with people in the high density townships that were epicentres of the outbreak, 484 00:57:27,790 --> 00:57:32,260 there was a lot of trial and error and figuring out how you talk about the outbreak. 485 00:57:32,260 --> 00:57:37,390 And my initial strategy was to ask people kind of quite directly about it. 486 00:57:37,390 --> 00:57:42,940 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? 487 00:57:42,940 --> 00:57:48,910 Very quickly, I realised that that did not work well and that what worked better was, you know, 488 00:57:48,910 --> 00:57:57,940 everybody would sort of stop me and say, you know, before we talk about cholera, we need to talk about how hungry we were. 489 00:57:57,940 --> 00:58:02,650 And they want to talk about the food insecurity and malnutrition and so on. 490 00:58:02,650 --> 00:58:08,560 And just even before you get to the more medical sort of side of it, just the sheer, 491 00:58:08,560 --> 00:58:13,600 if you like, social trauma of what it means to go hungry, to watch your family go hungry. 492 00:58:13,600 --> 00:58:19,250 Everyone wanted to stop them. Then they wanted to talk about the violence. And then after they talked about. 493 00:58:19,250 --> 00:58:23,570 The hunger and political violence, then they wanted to talk about the outbreak. 494 00:58:23,570 --> 00:58:33,500 And so. The commonality between these different frames was a kind of diagnosis on the part of citizens, 495 00:58:33,500 --> 00:58:36,680 all things that have gone wrong at the level of the state, 496 00:58:36,680 --> 00:58:44,840 and indeed many people saw Mugabe's government and the ruling party's regime as a kind of sinister entity. 497 00:58:44,840 --> 00:58:54,470 And so the outbreak became this kind of event that both kind of tied together. 498 00:58:54,470 --> 00:59:03,620 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. 499 00:59:03,620 --> 00:59:10,250 And at the same time, it didn't kind of stand apart in anybody's interpretation from the myriad other political, 500 00:59:10,250 --> 00:59:13,730 economic and social changes that had taken place in their lives. 501 00:59:13,730 --> 00:59:22,220 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, 502 00:59:22,220 --> 00:59:26,810 the post liberation ideology that Zimbabwe was developing amongst the path of progress 503 00:59:26,810 --> 00:59:33,160 had shifted in particular ways to a sense that our ruling party is sinister. 504 00:59:33,160 --> 00:59:38,870 You know, at least in that kind of corner of people. And that disasters are necessarily politically produced. 505 00:59:38,870 --> 00:59:48,410 Some of this goes along the lines of a more conspiratorial line, and others are just lay the blame squarely at those who govern. 506 00:59:48,410 --> 00:59:49,700 And that was one of the key shift. 507 00:59:49,700 --> 01:00:04,480 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. 508 01:00:04,480 --> 01:00:09,730 Again, young or Sloane, Jewish, to say anything more to that? 509 01:00:09,730 --> 01:00:21,120 Or have you got questions yourselves that you'd like to pick up on? You're both muted, but. 510 01:00:21,120 --> 01:00:27,680 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. 511 01:00:27,680 --> 01:00:33,390 If there's if there's one more thing to say or one more thing that arises before we stop, before we wind up. 512 01:00:33,390 --> 01:00:37,260 It's not so much. It's not so much a question. 513 01:00:37,260 --> 01:00:43,430 But I was always, um. I was intrigued by what you just mentioned. 514 01:00:43,430 --> 01:00:49,740 Now this conspiratorial mode of thinking and how on the one hand, 515 01:00:49,740 --> 01:00:54,330 it's quite obvious that in such a moment of crisis and we know that also from history. 516 01:00:54,330 --> 01:00:58,400 Right. People people seek to find who is like who's guilty. 517 01:00:58,400 --> 01:01:05,400 Right. They need to find someone to blame. But also from the angle and experience. 518 01:01:05,400 --> 01:01:12,820 I also wonder whether this is not something that is very typical to these post liberation regimes, 519 01:01:12,820 --> 01:01:18,180 the cultivation of paranoia, of suspicion, of the suspecting of internal enemies, 520 01:01:18,180 --> 01:01:27,750 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. 521 01:01:27,750 --> 01:01:33,270 What you actually write in your book is how how difficult it was for the government to even declare an emergency. 522 01:01:33,270 --> 01:01:36,900 And yet I don't know exactly where the question is in this. 523 01:01:36,900 --> 01:01:44,190 But but I think, you know, that there's something in in the area in this conspiratorial mode of thinking that is very typical, 524 01:01:44,190 --> 01:01:50,490 too, to this context that we're that we're observing here. 525 01:01:50,490 --> 01:01:57,480 If I can just add, I also had sort of a question that I initially wrote about distrust and how distrust is played out, 526 01:01:57,480 --> 01:02:00,180 the same as is Yonit brings up throughout the book, 527 01:02:00,180 --> 01:02:13,340 including, yes, manipulation of the truth, kind of the fake news, you know, where the pandemic came from or where the epidemic came from. 528 01:02:13,340 --> 01:02:19,340 So, Shimako, go for it. You know, you kind of lost. You got the stage for the last few minutes. 529 01:02:19,340 --> 01:02:24,950 So what are the tropes that came out? A lot when I ask people where they thought cholera came from. 530 01:02:24,950 --> 01:02:28,470 Was they said that. 531 01:02:28,470 --> 01:02:35,150 How did it come from China? And there were several reasons why they thought this. 532 01:02:35,150 --> 01:02:41,240 The government had initially tried to deflect attention away from itself and blamed it on the British. 533 01:02:41,240 --> 01:02:47,900 They said that cholera was racist, terrorist biological warfare to undermine Zimbabwean sovereignty. 534 01:02:47,900 --> 01:02:55,820 Now, this had been a longstanding trope since 2000 to blame all of the country's internal problems on the history of colonialism. 535 01:02:55,820 --> 01:03:05,900 At the same time, Western investment, the visible presence of Western companies and firms, had been withdrawing from the country, 536 01:03:05,900 --> 01:03:11,870 while more and more Chinese firms and products were flooding the markets and had a more visible presence in the city. 537 01:03:11,870 --> 01:03:20,960 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. 538 01:03:20,960 --> 01:03:31,640 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, 539 01:03:31,640 --> 01:03:36,080 then became reappropriated into kind of daily social metaphors that people were using. 540 01:03:36,080 --> 01:03:42,560 And it was also a way of saying that, look, you know, back to these kind of tensions of modernity. 541 01:03:42,560 --> 01:03:51,320 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. 542 01:03:51,320 --> 01:03:55,490 Our government says it's because of sanctions and an attack on us. 543 01:03:55,490 --> 01:04:02,120 But we think it's because, you know, we have been rejected and they are turning to China to support it. 544 01:04:02,120 --> 01:04:09,560 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. 545 01:04:09,560 --> 01:04:16,460 So, you know, all of these narratives are like swirling around amongst each other and they kind of came out anyway. 546 01:04:16,460 --> 01:04:21,350 Could be the basis of its own discussion. And I, I kind of don't go quite as deeply into it in the book. 547 01:04:21,350 --> 01:04:24,320 But it was definitely a kind of striking feature, essentially, 548 01:04:24,320 --> 01:04:35,870 that the content of conspiracy was very much rooted into competing interpretations of history. 549 01:04:35,870 --> 01:04:41,090 You'd think after all this time, we'd learnt to amuse yourself and also not quit your notes in front of the camera. 550 01:04:41,090 --> 01:04:45,770 But anyway, as you say, we could we could carry on for another hour, I'm sure. 551 01:04:45,770 --> 01:04:53,510 But our time's up. And I just wanted to conclude by thanking you, Sloan, you yon and most of all, 552 01:04:53,510 --> 01:04:58,040 use some account for writing the book that brought us all together here today. 553 01:04:58,040 --> 01:05:07,280 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. 554 01:05:07,280 --> 01:05:39,370 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.