My modest aim when I began this project as a doctoral student eight years ago was to write a detailed account of a particular province of Zimbabwe’s contemporary history: a post-mortem, to use Luisa Enria’s fitting characterization, of the country’s 2008–09 cholera outbreak. In the longue durée history of cholera, spanning over two centuries, the world has experienced seven pandemics of the disease. While the first six, all before 1947, were truly global events, the seventh pandemic has largely but not exclusively been an African phenomenon.

Cholera – a bacterial infection of the intestine that is easy to prevent but deadly when left untreated – emerges and thrives where modern water and sanitation services have broken down, where people live in squalid and overcrowded conditions, where immune systems are weakened by malnutrition or concomitant infection. For these reasons, cholera has most commonly occurred in the parts of Africa, such as South Sudan and Mozambique, afflicted by war and environmental calamity. The same is true outside Africa: earthquakes in Haiti, floods in Pakistan, civil war in Yemen. But Zimbabwe’s 2008–09 cholera outbreak is unusual in this grim history: it was associated neither with open conflict nor with ecological destruction. Explaining how this simple infection could become a national disaster in a country that once boasted the best healthcare system in Africa was the first task I undertook in The Political Life of an Epidemic. Through the course of the research, two other questions loomed large in my thinking: why was it so difficult for the Zimbabwean government to forge a coherent alliance with various non-governmental and international agencies in response to the outbreak? And how have my fellow Zimbabwean citizens, those who lived in the urban townships where cholera wrought most devastation, come to think about or make sense of this period of social suffering? It seemed to me that answering these questions might add a new dimension to scholarship on Zimbabwe’s state transformation and might thus speak to ongoing debates among Africanists about how we study the state, how we explain disastrous epidemics on the continent without falling into Afro-pessimistic despair, and how we make analytical claims from in-depth case studies.

The Political Life of an Epidemic was published only a month before the first wave of public health lockdowns in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. If, as Catherine Boone and Jake Batsell wrote in 2001, epidemics have historically failed to capture the intellectual imagination of political scientists because they are ‘too private, too biological, too microlevel and sociological’,Footnote ¹ then Covid-19 violently upended this trend. I welcome the increased and long overdue attention to the study of epidemics across the social sciences, although I am aware that the current global pandemic has shifted the angle of vision on my work. The Political Life of an Epidemic is now unavoidably interrogated according to the exigencies of our present planetary predicament – but this is a much loftier bar than I had set myself when I wrote the book!

I am thus delighted by and grateful for the thoughtful, probing, even demanding reviews of my work by Luisa Enria, Jacinta Muinde and Michelle Reddy. It is an honour to think with these scholars as they weigh up my contributions with generosity and consider the shortcomings of my book with a critical eye.

Enria lays down the gauntlet. She wrestles with my most ambitious theoretical claim that epidemics have ‘multiple ontologies’. I write:

Enria sees the value in my claim; she recognizes how epidemics become sites of interpretive struggle, and the battle over the meaning of epidemics – as well as the crises they foment – determines what possible pathways for action and remediation exist. She then asks, rightly in my view, what may be the most difficult question of our time: can or should the ‘multiple ontologies’ of epidemics be reconciled, and is a ‘common ground’ even possible when radically different realities confront each other? I have no easy response as epidemics always invite competing narratives and responses. During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, we have seen a familiar and contradictory array of reactions about the obsolescence and tenacity of borders, the threat and benevolence of strangers, the resurgence of nationalist impulses and weakening of global cooperation, the exaltation of expertise and the rise of conspiracy theories, the failures and the redemptive potential of medical science. If any common ground is possible, it can only be born out of the exacting political work of forging solidarity on the basis of shared struggle – for our communities, for our species, for our planet – more so than on coercing consensus about what an epidemic is. And, as with all politics, the project of changing the world continues in perpetuity.

Thinking about changing the world takes me to the theme of humanitarianism and institutions that runs through the middle parts of the book. Reddy, a scholar of international organizations and the aid industrial complex in Africa, accepts albeit guardedly my critique of the humanitarian operations in Zimbabwe during the 2008–09 cholera outbreak. I argue that, while the making of the cholera crisis was overdetermined by a combination of long-term structural inequalities in urban governance, Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown in the 2000s and the collapse of all parts of the health system, the humanitarian response focused narrowly on ‘saving lives’. This has left intact the upstream determinants of the outbreak; all the ingredients are in place for another major epidemic. For Reddy, this argument underplays the limits of humanitarian responses to achieve more development-oriented transformation. Moreover, she points out that I don’t give quite enough analysis to the historical role that international organizations have played in Zimbabwe. My argument here, in her reckoning, echoes a well-established corpus of work on humanitarian affairs in Africa. Fair enough.

I made a conscious choice to treat international organizations as one category of players among others in Zimbabwe’s manifold crisis. On this note, I would push back against Reddy’s suggestion that I depict communities and individuals in Zimbabwe as passive and lacking in agency during the cholera outbreak. As I see it, agency runs through every level of analysis in the book: from sex workers such as Chido and Audrey in Harare’s high-density townships who found ways of ‘hustling’ to ‘get by’ in the ruins of the economy; to young medical students like Tunga who came of age during the epidemic as they left home and volunteered in makeshift cholera clinics; to bureaucrats such as Portia Manangazira who upheld a technocratic ideal in the beleaguered Ministry of Health and worked around a politically polarized environment to help coordinate a public health response; to political leaders in the ruling party whose choices over time co-created the crisis.

For Muinde, my book shows how the cholera epidemic shaped new experiences of citizenship among Harare’s urban poor: it tapped into historical expectations of public service delivery, it provided an avenue for township residents to air outrage at the structural inequality in the city and at their political abjection, and it channelled fears about an increasingly fragile future. If all this was so, Muinde asks why I read any optimism into this maelstrom of upheaval and crisis and end the book on a hopeful note. This is an important question. Perhaps I am looking for solace where little exists. At the time of researching and writing the book, I was struck by just how often my interlocutors conceived of cholera as a symptom of Zimbabwe’s deeper political pathologies. Yet they coupled this diagnosis with a stubborn belief that the body politic could be healed, that all the years of crisis were a deviation from Zimbabwe’s political path to development and modernity. Of course, as I note in the book, such beliefs mapped on to generational lines – younger people were decidedly less hopeful than their forebears. Now, I am not so sure where I stand. Optimism and pessimism about Zimbabwe continue to tussle for pre-eminence in the public imagination. The country’s crisis has become intractable and is now compounded by the global pandemic. At the same time, I was moved by the ingenuity and creativity with which Zimbabweans in the diaspora allied with medical professionals on the ground to develop clinical and public health strategies for pandemic response in March 2020. This must surely be an iteration of the new social solidarities that Muinde has seen elsewhere. Isn’t that enough reason for hope?