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Thank you very much. So it is a great pleasure to be here, but I kind of feel like I have to start by saying I feel like a complete interloper.

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I am in no way ethicist or philosopher and so forth that I'm coming at this talk from essentially what is a politics perspective.

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But I do hope that aspects of what I'll be talking about might get into the realm of applied ethics,

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at least as insofar as I'm thinking about it from, as I said, a political and sociological perspective.

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The other thing I wanted to say at the beginning was on Tuesday this week,

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my colleague Jocelyn Alexander and I were invited to speak at a parliamentary hearing at the House of Commons,

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where we were expert witnesses to talk about UK foreign policy and the role of deferred in Zimbabwe's present political and humanitarian crisis.

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Now a 45 minute session getting grilled by a parliamentary committee and trying to explain

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the formidably complex politics of Zimbabwe in a way that's short and sharp and snappy,

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and that communicates to policymakers what they may or may not be able to do.

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Needless to say, we failed catastrophically in this task.

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But one of the key points that kept coming out was whether the British government should continue to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe.

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Myself, Jocelyn and Stephen Chang, professor of international politics.

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And so US were absolutely adamant that sanctions do more harm than good and that despite claims to condemning the Zimbabwean government,

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sanctions were really being used as a political weapon to justify various forms of internal repression within the country.

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After we spoke, the Minister of State for Africa, Harriett Baldwin, was gave her testimony.

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When asked about the sanctions issue, she insisted that Britain was going to continue placing sanctions on Zimbabwe.

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When pushed on this by the parliamentary committee who had said, well,

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we have this countervailing evidence from academics who are saying this is a bad idea.

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She was like, Yeah, no, no, we're still going to do that because it's kind of completely implausible for

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us to be seen not to be punishing Zimbabwe for its human rights violations,

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even if the measure and the instruments that we're using doesn't work.

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The second thing that came up was whether or not Defence could work through ministries within Zimbabwe.

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I argued quite adamantly that DFID should engage certain key ministries in the country and

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that it is a mistake to either assume that a country's politics come down to one individual,

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i.e. the president, or even when we use a term like government, that it's this kind of total, homogenous,

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single minded entity that in fact belies a considerable degree of complexity about how these things work on the ground.

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I talked about the ways in which civil servants and bureaucrats in the Ministry of

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Health and the Ministries of Education actually do tremendous technocratic work

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and would be willing to work with a number of donor agencies and have considerable

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social legitimacy when trying to implement health and education programs.

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When Harriet Baldwin was asked about this, she said, No, it's still going to channel the money through NGOs and through U.N. agencies,

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and that we can't be seen to work with the government because it will be seen as bailing them out of a crisis that they've caused.

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So I thought these two observations off in a way to set up this talk,

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because what I'm going to be presenting this evening is taken from my forthcoming book,

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which is called The Political Life of an Epidemic, Cholera Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe.

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And this book is about the 2008 and 2009 cholera outbreak.

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But it's also more generally about the politics of the country, the politics of states,

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and how international communities engage with African states in crisis.

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So cholera is really functioning as a heuristic device to show all the multifarious ways in which crisis occurs.

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And a number of the themes that emerged from the parliamentary hearing are actually based on this material.

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And I think it was quite instructive. And in this, I, I perhaps say humbling, maybe, but I mean, if that's quite the right word.

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But to see the disconnects that might exist between academic knowledge and the world of policy and politics,

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so just bad those themes in mind as I as I present this work.

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Okay. On the 11th of December 2008, the New York Times published an evocative article entitled Cholera Epidemic Sweeping Across Crumbling Zimbabwe.

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The piece began by recounting how the disease had claimed the lives of the five youngest members of the good family with cruel and bewildering haste.

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The children had been playing in the sewage flooded streets of a Harare township, gleefully unaware of the deadly bacteria lurking therein.

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It was only a matter of hours before all five children began purging and vomiting.

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Within less than a day, there were limp and hollow white as life seeped out of their desiccated bodies.

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Then they started to die. Said their brother love God. Prisca was first, second Sammi, then Shantel, Cleophas and Aisha.

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The littlest one lost The New York Times, along with numerous other media agencies, as well as regional and international organisations,

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reported that this outbreak was indisputable evidence that Zimbabwe's most fundamental public services,

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including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals, had shut down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.

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The spread and lethality of the disease did not abate.

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The country's public health systems floundered in response to a straightforward bacterial infection,

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one that is easy to prevent, difficult to spread, and simple to treat.

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Over the course of ten months,

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Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak reached catastrophic proportions that are almost unrivalled in the modern history of the disease.

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Now, the outbreak had begun in August of that year, initially erupting in the high density townships of Harare's metropolitan area.

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The epidemic quickly spread into peri urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe before crossing the country's borders into South Africa,

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Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique, with over 98,000 suspected cases.

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Over 4000 confirmed deaths and an exceptionally high case fatality rate at the peak of the epidemic.

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Zimbabwe's 2008 cholera outbreak has been deemed the largest and most extensive in recorded African history.

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Now, epidemiologically, the outbreak can be can be explained by the breakdown and cross-contamination of the city's water and sanitation systems.

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Yet such a reading belies the complex interaction of political,

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economic and historical factors that initially gave rise to the dysfunction of

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the water systems that delineate the socio spatial pattern of the outbreak,

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and that account for the fragmented and inadequate response of the national health system.

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So in this way, cholera was not only a public health crisis,

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it also signalled a new dimension to the country's deepening political and economic crisis in 2008,

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which brought into question the capacity and legitimacy of the Zimbabwean state.

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While it was unhappy that government was receiving widespread international opprobrium for the multifaceted crisis in the country,

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and while ad hominem attacks were launched at President Robert Mugabe,

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the regime ultimately refused to acknowledge the overwhelming extent and devastation of the cholera outbreak.

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For the first three months. Inevitably, however, such political quiescence in the face of accumulating cadavers was impossible to maintain.

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On the 4th of December 2008, under considerable political and bureaucratic pressure.

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The Minister of Health at the time, Dr. David Pringle, proclaimed that the cholera epidemic was a national disaster,

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and he pleaded for international relief and medical humanitarian assistance.

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What appeared to be a positive development in the cholera saga was abandoned only a week later on the 11th of December.

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In a televised address to the nation from from Hero's Acre, President Mugabe shocked many involved in the cholera response when he stated,

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I am happy that we are being assisted by others and we have arrested cholera.

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The controversy did not stop there, however.

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The following day, the 12th of December, the former and now deceased minister of information, Dr. Sikhanyiso Blow,

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who seized upon the cholera outbreak to launch a daring and vitriolic attack on the West and accused

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it of being the source of cholera in charge is harking back to the liberation struggle of the 1970s,

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during which the Rhodesian army had used biological warfare by spreading anthrax pathogens in weaponized form against guerrillas and rural civilians.

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Global accuses the West of deploying similar tactics in 2008.

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He claimed that British secret agents had clandestinely entered the country to spread

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cholera and anthrax as a biological weapon to bring about regime change in the country.

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Now, amidst all the recriminations of the for the cholera outbreak and the deaths left in its wake,

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a humanitarian response to the disease was slowly forged by an extraordinary assemblage of institutions and actors.

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The patchwork of agencies involved in this response galvanised around wide

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ranging moral and political discourses and imperatives to deliver public health.

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So in writing about humanitarianism, it's far too tempting,

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but also far too limiting to adopt either a posture of hagiography or of relentless critique in characterising

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how relief workers of various descriptions tend to those struck by a disaster such as the cholera outbreak.

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Perhaps I'd like to suggest a more interesting question is what political dynamics emerge from such circumstances?

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Responses to the outbreak came in a variety of forms, from disparate actors motivated by different forms of responsibility and civic commitment and

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predicated on multiple yet often competing understandings of the very nature of the cholera crisis.

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However, as I argue in this paper, these heterogeneous positions converged on the ineluctable and morally unimpeachable logic of saving lives.

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I call this logic the Salvation Agenda. I borrowed the term from writer Alex Duvall, who defined the Salvation Agenda as, and I quote,

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a belief that a combination of money, technology and goodwill can solve any problem.

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To this definition. I add that the very notion of salvation as the preservation of deliverance from ruined,

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horrible loss became the tea lost the ultimate endpoint of the humanitarian response to cholera.

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Now, crucially, the salvation agenda results,

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not salvation agendas command over the underlying structural and political factors that led to the cholera outbreak was ever precarious and unsure.

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So in this paper I'll illustrate the salvation agenda in the following ways.

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First, I want to discuss how such an agenda came to be seen as imperative.

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I'll do so by detailing eyewitness accounts of the bloody experience of cholera and

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the pathetic medical care available in Zimbabwe's failing health system at that time.

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Disturbing bodily experiences of faecal incontinence and unrestrained vomiting and horrific images of dead bodies

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piled on top of each other in makeshift mortuaries were foundational to the moral imagination of relief workers,

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development professionals and bureaucrats who insisted that something must be done to end the suffering.

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Second, I argue that the life or death immediacy of such experiences attenuated a more political and structural response to the outbreak.

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It focussed attention on addressing the clinical needs of patients with cholera and removing the most proximal causes of the outbreak.

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In other words, the necessary short term delivery of intravenous fluids and clinics and the distribution of water purification tablets in

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the community eclipsed the needs to attend to the long term and multi-scale political economic determinants of the crisis.

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And I'll demonstrate the motive of action by looking at the formation and politics of the health cluster approach in Zimbabwe.

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The medical outreach work of the Evangelical Church, celebration health and the disaster relief provided by international humanitarian organisations.

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I argue that what we see in the Salvation Agenda is something akin to the not

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identical to what anthropologist James Ferguson calls the anti-politics machine.

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For Ferguson, development interventions and discourses entail, among other things, a representation of social and economic life which denies politics.

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This development apparatus is an anti-politics machine.

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Its de-politicize politicises, in Ferguson's words, everything it touches everywhere, whisking political realities out of sight,

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all the while performing almost unnoticed its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding bureaucratic state power.

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Now, the salvation agenda in this case did not deny the political per say,

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but rather it knowingly and often explicitly bypassed the political in favour of the technical and the ethical.

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And unlike Ferguson's anti-politics machine, the salvation agenda did not surreptitiously expand bureaucratic state power in Zimbabwe.

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Instead, I argue, the Salvation Agenda undermined Zimbabwe's bureaucracies by yielding much command of the medical humanitarian response to cholera,

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to non-state entities, with the justification that something had to be done to stop the emergency and

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that Zimbabwe state bureaucracies were incapacitated and ill equipped to deliver.

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As I hope will become clear through the paper,

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the Salvation Agenda clashed with local pre-existing views and normative expectations of the Zimbabwean state as the primary vehicle for the delivery,

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for the delivery of development.

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And it also clashed with the hopes of more enduring solutions to the country's multifaceted crisis, of which cholera was only a part.

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Ultimately, then,

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the Salvation Agenda represented a bottom line agreement to offer the necessary and vital palliation in the face of a deadly disease.

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And it's here.

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I suggest that we see a striking similarity between the salvation agenda and the anti-politics machine insofar as the exigency of saving lives,

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depoliticised cholera and its socio economic conditions through the operation of a technical,

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ostensibly ethical and apolitical humanitarian apparatus.

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And so the remainder of the presentation will unfold in full punch, as I as I demonstrate this argument.

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I begin by talking about the kind of moral witnessing, the idea of being present and attentive to human suffering,

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and how that shapes a kind of moral and political imagination.

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I'll then look at the organisational politics around the formation of the sea, for which is the cholera command and control centre.

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Before turning my attention to church actors who are quite literally seeking salvation for cholera victims,

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and then I'll discuss the possibilities, pitfalls and paradoxes of the salvation agenda.

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The existential stakes of Zimbabwe's political economic meltdown were thrown

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into intense relief of the colour at the sites where cholera was being treated.

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Now, this is a picture of a ward and the Beatrice Road Infectious Disease Hospital.

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This is a major referral hospital that sits on the outskirts of Harare and almost marks a boundary between

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the central business district and the high density townships that were epicentres of the cholera outbreak.

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What you can see is a number of bodies wrapped in blankets.

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These were people who are being treated for cholera. But adjacent to them are a number of bodies that are wrapped in black bin Laden.

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And these are the bodies of people who had already died from cholera but couldn't

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be moved outside of the hospital because there wasn't the capacity to do so.

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Perhaps the tone to show and charismatic, if not conceited,

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preacher in central Harare and the head of the evangelical church celebration held describes to me

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the harrowing scenes at Beatrice Road when he went there as part of a missionary outreach project.

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He described it as follows. I visited Beatrice Road Infectious Disease Hospital and could not believe what I saw.

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There were about 300 people outside with drips that were hanging from trees or from the fence.

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I became angry and indignant. I wanted to know why they were not in the hospital being treated on the wards.

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We went into the hospital itself. The whole place was covered in vomit and diarrhoea.

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We had to wear gumboots to walk through the mess, which was several inches deep.

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The smell was the blood, vomit, diarrhoea and urine that were bodies piled on top of bodies piled on top of bodies.

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There weren't enough beds, not enough buckets and not enough medicines in the paediatric ward.

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We saw four young children. One of them had his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

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I asked why the kids were not on drips, and I was told that they only had adult drips and that these kids would be dead in the morning.

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We saw the mortuary, which was just a room with stacks of dead bodies in it.

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They ran out of body bags and they wrapped children in disposable plastic bags from supermarkets.

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And the bodies were sliding and falling off of each other. I had never seen anything like that.

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This is no way to run a country. And I was pissed off.

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Similar things were unfolding throughout the country as Brits also happened to travel around around Zimbabwe, setting up cholera treatment facilities.

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The organisation documented the experiences of people living with the scourge of cholera.

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For example, outside a clinic in the small town of Bindura lay 71 cholera patients.

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These patients were prevented from entering the building, which had become a cesspool of diarrhoea and vomiting.

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The open air tents where MSF delivered treatment were quickly overcrowded and filthy.

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Accounts from health care workers in my interviews and in public documents are in doubt.

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The act of caregiving within a special moral agency largely founded on the sense that imminent human

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harm could be avoided and existing pain could be mitigated with a concerted humanitarian effort.

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I gathered similar testimonies from journalists, from doctors, from nurses, students, from civil servants,

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and from politicians who had all stepped into the treatment centres at that time through stories of agony and of healing,

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accounts of terrible needs and altruistic volunteerism and reflections on the pain wrought by an ugly and avoidable disease.

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The treatment centres concentrated collective attention on the critical need to set aside partisan differences that had so badly torn apart

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the country's ruling party and its opposition to embrace the common sense of purpose and act on bodies affected by or at risk of cholera.

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In other words, these testimonies speak of the sheer necessity and urgent possibility of salvation.

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Now the declaration of the cholera outbreak as a national disaster marked a watershed in the trajectory of the epidemic.

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So this week, these data were provided to me by the Ministry of Health and derived from a joint report

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that the Ministry of Health and the W.H.O. had produced in the aftermath of the outbreak.

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Week 36 on the on the horizontal axis represents August of 2008.

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And as you can see, there is a conspicuous lack of data for what is effectively the first three months of the outbreak.

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In part, this is because the Zimbabwean government, the ruling party,

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had lost an election earlier in 2008 and a runoff was called to determine more definitively who the president would be.

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That interregnum was marked by the worst political violence that the country had

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witnessed since the massacres of the 1980s that were tantamount to a genocide.

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The violence was so bad that Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of the runoff election in July of that year.

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And so from August, there was a serious crisis of political legitimacy.

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Nobody knew who was governing the country. And the the ruling party, with its opposition,

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entered into protracted negotiations to form a government of national unity to bolster its bargaining position.

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The ruling party at that time zone, APF, insisted that no data could be published indicating how badly you are managing the crisis.

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As one of my informants put it, cholera was just one crisis, too many.

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And so public health agencies could actually publish data on what was going on at that time until it became a national disaster.

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Health the gap that we see happening here, because in a manner of speaking,

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or at least official documents, cholera didn't really exist until December of that year.

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Now, according to a joint report by the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation,

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the declaration led to the establishment of a multi-sectoral task force under the leadership of the Zimbabwean government.

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The report states that the Ministry of Health took time to ship and coordination across all sectors,

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including a wide range of government ministries, international partners, private donors, NGOs and so forth.

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Meanwhile, the United Nations activated its humanitarian cluster system, a new entity, the C4, i.e. the Cholera Command and Control Centre,

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was established and this was co-chaired between the Ministry of Health and the W.H.O.,

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and it was led by Dr. Stephen Malpass, who was specifically tasked with coordinating these different agencies.

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In reality, of course, sitting behind the proclamations of these documents of an organised multisectoral response,

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the response was actually intense competition over leadership in the management of the response to the cholera and contested ideas

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of authority and legitimacy in coordinating the different government and humanitarian bodies that had been assembled at the outset.

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For instance, there was intense disagreement over where physically to locate the sea.

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For now, the obvious site, which is the Ministry of Health offices in a government building called Kagwe House in downtown Harare,

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was kind of ruled out in part because the Ministry of Health's own building didn't have any

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clean water facilities to keep water flowing through it or any adequate sanitation facilities.

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Now in Zimbabwe, a building in that state should be shut down and condemned by order of the Public Health Act.

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And the Minister of Health could not bring himself to shut down his own building in the name of public health.

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This only serves to undermine this credibility and the standing of the Zimbabwean government,

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who are still insisting on taking ownership and leadership over the management of the cholera crisis as a compromise.

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The seafood was eventually situated in a W.H.O. annexe at Patagonia to a hospital.

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Now, an NGO worker from ActionAid was part of the National Task Force Against Cholera, representing civil society organisations.

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And he describes to me meeting at the sea for the following way.

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Government could only provide the buildings and the space, but they couldn't even serve us tea, let alone logistical support.

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And then, of course, in operations it was UNICEF that coordinated everything in Times Square.

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A prominent health activist and executive director of the Community Working Group on Health,

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as well as Bambara, another Zimbabwean but works for the International Organisation of Migration.

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While also interviewed were regular participants in these multi-stakeholder meetings for humanitarian relief.

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Both told me that the Ministry of Health was so severely under-resourced in terms of materials and workforce that it

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couldn't exercise any meaningful leadership over the multitude of international agencies operating in the country.

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GOLDMAN Word from the Ministry of Health at the time, the director of Environmental Health insisted that the problem wasn't with the government,

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but it was with the donors who come in and think that they can run the show and that they can run the government of Zimbabwe,

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setting their own organisation, their own structures and their own reporting systems.

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It's crucial to state that all the while that this is going on, people are quite literally arguing over who can serve,

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which toilets they can use and who is in charge of taking minutes in these in these meetings,

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all the while that this cholera outbreak is unfolding now, push them along to zero.

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The director of Disease Control in Epidemiology provided a more evenhanded assessment, noting that a number of stakeholders were doing excellent work.

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But by and large, all sides were found wanting, in her words.

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From her perspective,

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the ministry could only provide loose coordination because of its incapacitation in terms of material resources and its limited available workforce.

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But at the same time, the partners some partners came and did a good job.

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While many added to the chaos, the most important rift, according to many of my informants, occurred between the government and MSF.

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The strength working relationship between the government and MSF kind of illustrates two very competing conceptions of the state.

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The image of a developmental and bureaucratic state, albeit one in acute crisis,

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was aspired to and held by Zimbabwean civil servants, local NGOs and many ordinary people.

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And this jarred with MSF model of humanitarian rescue.

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For the former,

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the cholera crisis signified a profound rupture in the historical trajectory of state led delivery of public health and authority in Zimbabwe,

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and that should be exercised over non-state actors. And it was this rupture that needed to be repaired.

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By contrast, as Peter Redfield argues,

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MSF operates oriented toward emergency in a highly targeted way and justifies its actions through more legitimacy.

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And so the tension between Zimbabwe's bureaucratic state model and MSF humanitarian rescue sharply reveals how different actors,

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based on their different histories, ideologies and institutional ambitions, responded to the outbreak and clashed while doing so.

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I made numerous and repeated attempts to secure an interview with someone from MSF and failed.

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After multiple inquiries with the organisation,

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I eventually received an email saying Unfortunately we have to abstain from participating in the study.

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The issue is still felt as politically charged and participation might therefore affect our current

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good standing with medical authorities and the prolongation of our current medical activities.

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I later learned after considerable degree of investigation, that once the cholera outbreak was done,

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MSF had so badly offended members of the government that they were threatened

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with immediate expulsion were they not to cooperate in any future efforts?

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So institutional responses to the outbreak were permeated by these multifaceted disputes and intersecting critiques.

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So how would such differences and oppositions overcome to mount what ultimately was a successful operation in terms of stopping the outbreak?

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The Ministry of Health and W.H.O. report formally states that in spite of the challenges,

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the coordination and the many different perspectives on what needed to be done,

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all stakeholders were united in a commonality of purpose and determination to

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stop the avoidable loss of life from cholera that was afflicting the nation.

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And so here we see the salvation agenda as a rhetorical driver of action and a

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justification for bypassing the political in favour of the technical and the ethical.

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I delved into these issues with Persimmon and Jazeera as I sought to understand her views on if and

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how the Ministry of Health forged alliances with international and local non-governmental agencies.

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Given the divisive politics that I've just outlined, and she reinforced the salvation agenda in the following way.

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I remember talking to some of our partners and saying, Look here, your government is fighting with my government,

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but that doesn't mean that you and I should stop working together.

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You think about the person out there in the rural area who has lost a child and is about to lose another child.

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They just want good health for their children. They don't care which government which government is fighting.

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Which government. The views of multiple development organisations working through the Si4 are captured by AJ Poole of German Agro Action,

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who said to me there wasn't the breathing space to go through the political dimensions of this cholera outbreak or indeed the the account,

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but accountability mechanisms.

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Agencies have got different roles to play and our role certainly wasn't to do anything other than immediate response, lifesaving response.

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We were too busy with that. Now, having given some insights, some of the intricate politics of this and of the formation of the C for.

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I'm going to shift focus in this next section and and talk a bit about what was happening

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on the ground and the work taken by volunteers who are trained to campaign against cholera.

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So after after talking to Shell and his team that visited Beatrice Road Infectious

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Disease Hospital as part of their outreach trip to Celebration Ministries,

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he initiated a massive philanthropic drive into Shell's account.

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He met prominent Zimbabwean businessmen and several American churches to help channelling philanthropic donations.

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Celebration Ministries proceeded to pay the salaries of Harare based doctors and nurses for the month of December,

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January and February, the peak of the epidemic, doctors received a per diem of 19 USD, while nurses been awarded $45.

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The Capstone Project of Celebration Ministries was Operation Outstretched Hand.

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The operation entailed the mass mobilisation of junior doctors, medical students, nurses,

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pharmacists, logisticians, drivers through the church's network to respond to the outbreak.

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The team established large cholera treatment centres in Djibouti, Koroma and Chinhoyi,

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where they offered clinical care and run health promotion campaigns in surrounding areas.

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So I'm going to describe the experiences of working in these settings by drawing heavily on one particular interview with Dr. Mohammed.

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When I grew up known as Tonga, at the time, Tonga was a 22 year old medical student, and he's now a junior doctor specialising in internal medicine.

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Throughout to his narrative, I will interweave the perspectives of several of my informants and go to this account as an individual one.

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It is situated in the collective experience of coming of age for many despondent young

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people who had been left feeling idle and redundant during Zimbabwe's economic crisis,

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but who rose to the epic challenge of giving life saving treatment in the most unfavourable of circumstances.

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And in truth, his narrative, we see a political awakening. As I will discuss to his own self-professed faith in Zimbabwe's nationalist project,

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with its claims to liberation and development was shaken to the poor in 2008 and 2009.

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He was confronted by the vulnerability and suffering brought about by the country's political economic meltdown in ways previously unimagined.

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And so to the story, this illustrates the larger claims of the paper,

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where politics offered little possibility of transforming a dire social situation.

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The self salvation agenda allowed individuals to exercise some modicum of agency,

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justified through the morally compelling work of saving lives, and took his own words.

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The first thing I heard was would it hero and good to cholera is that big time to.

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The studies had been interrupted at the University of Zimbabwe once the medical school had been suspended,

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since there was no money to pay, the teaching staff and the wards in the public hospital were closed.

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The medical profession was seized with discontent over low pay for doctors and poor working conditions in the hospitals.

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Nevertheless, to me, as parents have forbade him from participating in the doctors strike at the time,

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arguing that he needed to focus on his studies even though he wasn't able to go to medical school.

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All the while the situation was deteriorating and rumours of the cholera outbreak were were propagating.

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As to he says it was basically weeks of sitting around and hearing all of this coming in and not knowing what was what.

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Because there was this suppression of information to the then was recording at this point the uncertainty about

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the outbreak before it was officially acknowledged as a national disaster and after several weeks of mutterings,

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it eventually became evident that Zimbabwe was in the throes of a big outbreak, and that's when we knew we were in trouble, he says.

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People knew by that time the country was in no position to respond.

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Fortunately, at that time there were a lot of NGOs with interest in health that were that.

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One of the NGOs that to the West was referring to was Celebration Health, the outreach arm of Celebration Ministries.

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There'd been an epic escalation of cholera cases in late December, and that was when to join the humanitarian relief effort.

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His first deployment was in the town of Djibouti, and he was astonished by the scenes he saw at the clinics.

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Patients were dying at a phenomenal rate as the numbers of cholera cases continue to rise,

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compounded by delays in replenishing stocks of necessary medications such as antibiotics and intravenous fluid after the camp got set up, he says.

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It was just an explosion from late December.

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I remember I spent New Year's away from home for the first time in my life because we normally spend years together as a family.

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But this time I was out there in the boondocks. So in December and January, I was barely home, he describes.

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You'd come home for two weeks and then you go back to find that it's just getting worse and worse and worse.

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It was just an explosion in December and January. When you go online and see the stats.

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You're like, What is going on? It was a really scary time for us.

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At the same time, Sugar says, we were excited because we were doing clinical work away from our consultants and no one was shouting at us.

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We were actually doing work and getting things done. That was exciting, but at the same time, we were scared.

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We were like, This is real. This cholera. This is real. It was mixed emotion.

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Tunga and other volunteers worked indefatigably.

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Further assistance came from MSF and together the organisations brought the situation in Djibouti under control.

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From that celebration, Health moved to Cordoba to work in concert with MSF and UNICEF.

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The team arrived to find cholera cases rising at a seemingly exponential rate again.

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One night in early February, Tula recalls that the number of cases exploded, as he says, from 100 people to 600 or 700.

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Overnight, it exploded. The volume of cases exceeded the capacity of the local and treatment setup at the hospital,

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and instead the three organisations migrated to treat cholera cases in an ad hoc treatment site in a football pitch in the middle of the city.

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Different organisations gelled together and their combined effort started making a difference as deaths began to drop.

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Two men.

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I talked extensively about his emotional reactions to being part of this effort and to being and and and to witnessing both the crisis unfolding,

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but the convergence of different organisations in response to the outbreak.

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He, like several others who I interviewed in Celebration Health,

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commented on the speed with which the medical charity was able to respond to desperate need.

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He also stressed the flexibility that Celebration Health exercised its protocols on practices,

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especially compared to the sclerotic and cash strapped government bureaucracies.

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On a more personal level, the responsibility and industriousness demanded of tugger,

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combined with the remuneration earned, became a means of attaining a certain form of social adulthood.

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Responding to the outbreak marked transition from being a medical student who felt

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acutely cast aside and dismissed when the country's medical institutions had collapsed.

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To being a medical humanitarian.

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A professional caregiver during the audience work of saving lives in the midst of a public health nightmare, as he put it.

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Being paid was a very new concept to us. We were kids.

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Yes, times were tough, but we were used to asking our parents for help to get like medical.

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Like many medical students came from an average middle class home in Zimbabwe.

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So, he says, we barely suffered from the long queues because of the economic crisis, because we were still very much dependent.

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And then Celebration Health offered to pay us per day.

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They would pay us when we came back from the field. Then you'd spend a week at home and go back into the field.

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We didn't even really have time to use that money.

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We used to buy groceries for home, get airtime for our cell phones, buy a pair of jeans, and then go back into the field.

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It was actually quite exciting. We were helping people as students who were almost finishing their training.

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We felt relevant. That was another big thing we actually felt relevant for.

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To get the experience was life changing and it transformed them into what he described as a different political animal.

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And he put it this way. I think from high school, I have always been a conformist.

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I always went with the system. I followed the rules.

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By that time, though, in 2008, I began to question those in power for the first time in my life.

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I had never done that before.

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The cholera outbreak then raised deeper and more profound social and political questions for him about justice and equality.

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Moreover, it diminished his faith in the country's political system and stirred a new political and historical consciousness.

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One much more critical of the group's patriotic history and its claims to modernising development, as he puts it.

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I had supported the fast track land reform and the taking back of our land from the white farmers.

377
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In fact, I thought that should have happened much earlier.

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But when I got to the University of Zimbabwe, I got more exposure to what's happening in our country.

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That's when I began to see the corruption and failure of our leadership.

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We saw the real life of what this cholera outbreak was like. It was scary and it was an eye opener.

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I used to have a lot of trust in the system, and I don't have trust in the system anymore at all because it failed.

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I now started questioning a lot of things. From that time onwards, it changed what I was.

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I would no longer blindly follow or blindly believe. I learned to ask a lot more questions.

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I also learned that I deserve better. That was a real shift for me at the time.

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Leadership failed us and 2008 proved that beyond all doubt.

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Now to that went on to lament and our discussion the kind of internecine blame game that unfolded between the ruling party and its opposition.

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For him, the country's elites were distracted from urgent matters on the ground and ordinary people were left to deal with the crisis on their own.

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Indeed, Tonga insisted that to be effective in the cholera response, it was vital to, and I quote,

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turn a deaf ear to politics and to suppress whatever anger, indignation, fear or regret that he and others had felt about the country's crisis.

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As he put it to me. We were born into a functional and good country.

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And then there was just this decay that happened, a gradual decay of governance and the economy that led to this final scenario we were in.

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People were angry, but they were also afraid. Remember, we had just come from that oh eight election.

393
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People were angry, but no one articulated it in that way.

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There was this fear. There was this fear. People were angry, but they stayed quiet and reserved.

395
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They didn't voice it out loud, but there was definite anger.

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There was a feeling of being let down, especially for us as medical students who are unsure of our futures.

397
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We were very angry. We were very disappointed. But at the same time, we had we had a lot to do.

398
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In the end, we just ignored that and focussed on the work at hand.

399
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And we had what we had to face and hope that maybe one day the medical school would open up again.

400
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And that's what we ran with. Finally, I asked Hugo what impact the experience had had on his political allegiances,

401
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having been raised, having himself been raised in a staunch supporting household,

402
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capturing a white sense of paralysis and political pessimism, he simply responded, I am a spoilt ballot until a decent opposition emerges.

403
00:41:49,430 --> 00:41:52,999
Now Tuesday's narrative echoes essential aspects of the salvation agenda.

404
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But it also reveals much more than this, and it allows us to see the political subjectivities that emerged during the cholera crisis.

405
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We see a venting of outrage at the failures of the state under ZANU-PF.

406
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We see a shift in historical consciousness in the country's trajectory in which expectations of the state as the bringer of development are suspended.

407
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But there remains a hope that in due course, Zimbabwe will return to being a functional and good country as well.

408
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But we also see the creative, moral agency of responding to a crisis for the sake of individual and collective survival.

409
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Now back to top to show. Tom commended to me the focussed and high minded work of his own organisation,

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and he denounced NGOs and U.N. agencies from inviting themselves in Zimbabwe's divided politics and thereby undercutting his own effectiveness.

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For him, at least rhetorically, the Church claimed the primary duty toward salvation in all senses of the word,

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and that duty, he said, comes before, above and beyond and after politics.

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Now, undoubtedly, celebrations, celebration, health contribution to the humanitarian relief effort was profound.

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It was clear from my interviews with local and national government figures that Celebration Health,

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along with numerous other humanitarian agencies, played an indispensable role in the medical response to the epidemic.

416
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Nevertheless, medical acts leave a political trace.

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For all that, communities welcomed the largesse of the international relief effort.

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Questions emerged about the more fundamental aspect of socio economic inequality that undergirded the outbreak.

419
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Humanitarians themselves were sharply aware of their limitations in this regard.

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A communications officer with MSF described visiting the high density suburb of one of the areas where it conducted

421
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a lot of work and she and her team were running a water and sanitation and hygiene program in that community,

422
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primarily injecting concentrated solution of chlorine into containers of water to ensure that it was safe to drink.

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The trio also treated local water sources with cholera, with chloride.

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Why can't you fix the whole water system? A man off the May. Another resident joining the conversation asked.

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Is it for life? Is it forever? This treatment you are doing?

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This MSF worker then went on to explain.

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Explain to the two, to her interlocutors that MSF is an emergency organisation that was there to help with the cholera epidemic alone.

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After this exchange, the resident who impose the initial questions refused to have her water chlorinated when the MSF worker authorised it.

429
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If she was afraid that she would fall sick without chemically treated water,

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the woman quipped and retort, But when you stop giving dust, we will be affected even more than before.

431
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Another eavesdropper chimed into this conversation, adding, We are resistant like wild dogs.

432
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We've been drinking unsafe water for a long time.

433
00:44:57,080 --> 00:45:05,870
For James Materazzi, a resident of Chitungwiza, another heavily affected area which is badly hit by cholera and is often a local NGO worker,

434
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and he'd been involved in many facets of the cholera response. He argued that the humanitarian effort came to something of an abrupt end,

435
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forgoing more long term rehabilitation and development work, especially in the high density areas of Harare.

436
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And I quote, Once it was under control, the clinics cleared and everybody went home.

437
00:45:25,820 --> 00:45:31,760
A few guys stayed behind and did and did a few more boreholes, but it was like, Thank goodness it's over.

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We can all go home and rest. And so the Salvation Agenda ultimately achieved its aim.

439
00:45:39,210 --> 00:45:47,070
It galvanised a disparate array of actors and institutions to save tens of thousands of people from ruin or loss because of cholera.

440
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As I've argued in the section and throughout this paper,

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it did so by effectively ignoring the complexities of the cholera outbreak in terms of its historical and political,

442
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economic determinants and dimensions, focusing collective action instead, and pooled resources on the urgent needs that warranted immediate action.

443
00:46:05,880 --> 00:46:08,880
Given the diversity of institutions involved in the response,

444
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each expressing wide ranging views on the true origins of and allocation of culpability for the cholera crisis,

445
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each asserting different claims to legitimacy and response to the disaster,

446
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and each restricted by its operational mandate and its access to donor funds and each accountable to different constituencies.

447
00:46:28,230 --> 00:46:34,770
It is very little surprise that it was in the salvation agenda where a common purpose was found.

448
00:46:35,800 --> 00:46:39,640
But of course, the Salvation Agenda was not without its without its pitfalls.

449
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Most obviously, humanitarian relief came at the expense of longer term action, as anthropologist Miriam Tipton has argued.

450
00:46:47,860 --> 00:46:53,170
Critics of humanitarian action argue that in the absence of other types of long term structural responses,

451
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coordinated or enacted by political movements or even by institutions like the state,

452
00:46:58,450 --> 00:47:05,379
humanitarian and disaster NGOs end up filling gaps resulting in what is ultimately the conservative management

453
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of social and political problems one that works to retain what is already there rather than to change,

454
00:47:12,370 --> 00:47:14,950
rather than to change it, or to plan for a different future.

455
00:47:15,370 --> 00:47:20,740
This, of course, is evidenced by Zimbabwe's contemporary humanitarian and public health crisis.

456
00:47:24,300 --> 00:47:28,710
I began this paper by sharing testimonies of harrowing scenes at the cholera treatment centres.

457
00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:36,810
I argued that witnessing the spine chilling clinical and social effects of cholera ignited the moral imagination of medical professionals,

458
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relief workers, development specialists, religious volunteers and bureaucrats to forge an alliance dedicated to saving the lives

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00:47:44,070 --> 00:47:48,450
of those afflicted by cholera and to remove the most proximal causes of the disease.

460
00:47:49,290 --> 00:47:56,160
The motive, the motivating impulse behind this alliance was to address the force majeure of the dysfunctional Zimbabwean

461
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states through what I have called the Salvation Agenda itself a powerful moral and rhetorical force.

462
00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:07,799
The Salvation Agenda allowed agencies and actors to set aside their multiple interlocking

463
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disputes over the causes of the epidemic and responsibility for its resolution,

464
00:48:12,300 --> 00:48:17,910
and to focus instead on averting imminent death. Like Ferguson's anti-politics machine,

465
00:48:18,120 --> 00:48:27,630
the Salvation Agenda presented a complex political and social and socio economic reality as a defined problem amenable to technical fixes.

466
00:48:28,410 --> 00:48:33,840
Thus, it is unsurprising. When cholera passed, it was it was like, Thank goodness it's over now.

467
00:48:33,840 --> 00:48:43,100
We can all go home and rest. Crucially, unlike the anti-politics machine, the Salvation Agenda did not expand Zimbabwe's bureaucratic state power.

468
00:48:43,970 --> 00:48:52,280
To the contrary, the assemblage of institutions involved in the medical humanitarian response treated the cholera outbreak primarily as an emergency,

469
00:48:52,400 --> 00:49:00,229
and they left behind them and under-resourced and politically divided state that is still struggling to manage the deeply

470
00:49:00,230 --> 00:49:06,500
embedded patterns of socioeconomic inequality and partisan conflicts that initially led to the epidemic in the first place.

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And so as a concluding word, this. Many crises.

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And I look forward to your questions. Thank you.