In 2008–9, a devastating cholera epidemic spread quickly and aggressively across Zimbabwe. Faced with reports of illness and death, Robert Mugabe’s ZANU(PF) government equivocated as it tried to deny the reality of the disease, thereby deepening and extending the epidemic. In The Political Life of an Epidemic, Simukai Chigudu provides an illuminating and compelling account of the origins, patterns, social impact, and official and communal responses to this epidemic.

The book is organized around three broad questions. What historical and political-economic factors explain the emergence and scale of the 2008 cholera outbreak? How did different organizations, communities, and individuals act in response? And how is the cholera outbreak remembered, and what political subjectivities did it generate? To address each of these questions, Chigudu eschews the all-too-common impulse to blame the cholera epidemic on the “weak capacity” of the Zimbabwean state or the equally slippery idea of “state failure.” The book is persuasive in its insistence that a focus on the state alone is inadequate for fully appreciating the origin, progression, and aftermath of the cholera epidemic. Beyond a focus on the state, Chigudu draws insights from the sociology of disasters, critical medical anthropology, and the anthropology of citizenship to develop an illuminating configurational explanation in which “cholera was … indexed by access to public services and emergency relief, and violated by anachronistic structures, such as the outdated waterworks in their community, or by the arbitrary demolition exercises of the state” (p. 17).

From these disparate perspectives, Chigudu develops a three-pronged explanation of the origin, experience, and aftermath of the cholera epidemic. On its origin, The Political Life of an Epidemic persuasively demonstrates that cholera was not an isolated shock event but the culmination of a “drawn-out, contingent processes rooted in questions of political economy such as the inadequate delivery of public goods, failing livelihood strategies, and profound social inequalities” (p. 29). According to Chigudu, the epidemic was a human-made and path-dependent outcome produced by the trajectory of Zimbabwe’s post-2000 crisis. However, while noting that a proximate factor behind the outbreak of cholera was that Mugabe and ZANU(PF) responded to renewed challenges and real political competition in the late 1990s by unmaking the bureaucracy and rendering it incapable of coherent policy-making, Chigudu is quick to stress that the epidemic’s structural origin lay in Harare’s colonial and postcolonial infrastructural development and the related (unsuccessful) endeavors to bring legibility to urban spaces. Critically, Harare’s townships, created during the colonial period when Africans were seen as temporary residents in cities, were predisposed to the outbreak of a diarrheal disease because of their “poor sanitation facilities, inadequate clean water provision and other public amenities, and overcrowded housing” (p. 37). Also clear in the book is that the postcolonial state, notwithstanding its modernizing developmental agenda, never addressed the water, sanitation, and wider infrastructural deficiencies of the townships, even as the population tripled between 1982 and 2002.

Once the epidemic started, why did it take months before a concerted effort to arrest it was launched? Chigudu’s second argument, adeptly constructed in chapter 3, suggests that although it involved only one disease, the cholera epidemic engendered divergent (and often contentious) experiences precluding the emergence of a singular, shared, and unified understanding of the country’s health, economic, social, and political vulnerabilities. Thus, the book reveals how the multiple and contradictory ontologies around the epidemic—what ZANU(PF), the main opposition MDC, the donor community, and the wider population understood to be happening on the ground—contributed to and deepened Zimbabwe’s impasse and polarization, foreclosing the possibility of a timely response to an epidemic that ultimately killed nearly five thousand people and afflicted hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans. In this way, the scale and impact of the cholera outbreak were aided and abetted by Zimbabwe’s post-2000 polarization.

With respect to the epidemic’s aftermath, the third argument (developed in chapter 5) draws insights from the historical memory and political subjectivity of residents across Harare’s townships. Here Chigudu contends that the epidemic and the attendant suffering it produced “became an important site of evaluating the legitimacy of the state, of venting anger at ZANU(PF)’s manifest failings and of making do” (p. 30). In this context, Chigudu sees evidence of enduring claims to substantive citizenship by those who endured the epidemic in the face of a state that was unwilling or unable to deliver relief.

Individually illuminating and collectively compelling, these arguments offer a nuanced account of the cholera outbreak of 2008–9. However, one aspect of Chigudu’s argument that is far from persuasive is the book’s characterization of the bureaucracy. First, the analysis is too generous in its rendering of the Rhodesian and early postcolonial bureaucratic apparatus as somehow less politicized or captured compared with the post–2000 crisis years. Specifically, attestations of the Rhodesian bureaucracy as highly technocratic, centralized, and powerful downplay the fact that this was a bureaucracy whose main raison d’etre was serving and supporting a racially exclusive settler colonial project in which Africans were not viewed as citizens. In addition, the notion of a competent colonial bureaucracy contradicts the main points of chapter 1: that urban planning during the colonial period was not only atrociously bad—siting the city of Salisbury upstream of its main water supply and therefore condemning future residents to drinking their own recycled wastewater—but was subservient to the successive self-government regimes and their imposition of segregation in the country.

I agree with Chigudu that the early postcolonial modernizing developmental agenda aspired to have notable technocratic competencies and autonomy within the bureaucracy. However, that vision, such as it was, was not achieved. One reason for this failure was that recruitment into the bureaucracy could not be liberated from a “jobs for comrades” model. Thus, the separation of party in power from the bureaucracy has never really been a reality.

All told, this is a superb book. By creatively considering the political life of the cholera epidemic that devastated Zimbabwe in 2008–9, Chigudu offers an account filled with significant insights about politics, humanitarianism, inequality, the state, and citizenship amidst Zimbabwe’s unending post-2000 political and economic crises. The Political Life of an Epidemic will appeal to readers from disparate disciplines who will find it thoroughly engaging and informative.