4 - The Salvation Agenda

Summary

This chapter looks at the functioning, politics and experiences of the extraordinary assemblage of institutions and individuals that ultimately constituted the emergency response to cholera. The process of coordinating a large-scale humanitarian relief effort was riven with competing claims to leadership, authority and legitimacy within and between different government and humanitarian bodies. However, as I argue in this chapter, these heterogeneous positions converged on the ineluctable and morally unimpeachable logic of ‘saving lives’. I call this logic ‘the salvation agenda’. The salvation agenda represented a bottom-line agreement that reconciled competing experiences of and viewpoints about the crisis to offer necessary and vital palliation in the face of cholera. Nevertheless, the exigency of saving lives did not, and could not, address the background socio-economic conditions that led to the epidemic. As such, I suggest that the salvation agenda inadvertently helped to perpetuate and, in some ways, exacerbate existing social hierarchies in Zimbabwe while ceding ‘moral ownership’ of the outbreak to a technical, internationalised, ostensibly ethical and apolitical humanitarian apparatus.