Although Senegal experienced a single ‘imported’ Ebola case, this epidemiological event was experienced locally as a full outbreak in its first phase. Two imaginaries developed in parallel: the nightmare of an uncontrolled infectious threat bringing social disruption and spreading through Senegal to other continents; and the vision of an efficient mobilization of the national public health system as a model for other West African countries hit by Ebola. Based on field data, the article analyses how these antagonistic imaginaries shaped the national narrative of the epidemic and affected its interpretations on an international level. The health system's capacity to control the epidemic gradually dominated the nightmare fantasy in the national narrative, and has effectively articulated a technical discourse and protective measures rooted in lay perceptions – in particular the physical distancing of risk. Charles Rosenberg's model for analysing the temporality of epidemic narratives, which distinguishes four phases (progressive revelation, agreement on an explanatory model, political and ritual action, and closure), proved to be relevant, provided that two phases were added. These phases – before the beginning and after the end of the epidemiological event – appear significant in terms of the social production of the meaning of epidemics.

By the end of the 1990s, molecular approaches predominated in biomedical science, but, for West African scientists, biology could not have ‘gone molecular’ at a worse time. Resource constraints led to knowledge expiry and many discovery dreams were terminated, exported or at least postponed. Pivotal transitions in methodologies, knowledge and resources temporally overlapped with an emergent imperative to address infectious disease in Africa. This prompted new initiatives from global health programmes in the North, which imported visions, disciplinary focus and equipment for new laboratory spaces. A handful of African researchers, however, have reimagined and reconstructed existing laboratories as a means to weave their own dreams. This article examines three such laboratories. It outlines how their equipment was accumulated, the ad hoc ways in which the laboratories are supplied and maintained, their extraordinary accomplishments and their key role as domestic nodes for research. The picture that emerges is one that extends beyond technological acquisition to an enactment of the scientists’ own dreams. Importantly, it is a record of outcomes from those who continued to dream while others stilled their imaginations or became canvases coloured by the dreams of other people.

This article examines the fiscal and administrative infrastructures underpinning global health research partnerships between the US and Uganda, and the power dynamics they entail. Science studies scholars and anthropologists have argued for the importance of studying so-called ‘boring things’ – standards, bureaucracies, routinization, codes and databases, for example – as a way to bring to the surface the assumptions and power relations that often lie embedded within them. This article focuses on fiscal administration as an understudied ethnographic object within the anthropology of global health. The first part of the article is a case study of the fiscal administration of a US–Uganda research partnership. The second part describes the institutionalization of some of the administrative norms and practices used by this partnership within the ‘global health enabling systems’ employed by US universities working in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. I analyse a case study and ‘enabling systems’ to show how these administrative strategies create parallel infrastructures that avoid direct partnership with Ugandan public institutions and may facilitate the outsourcing of legal and financial risks inherent in international partnerships to Ugandan collaborators. In this way, these strategies act to disable rather than enable (or build) Ugandan research and institutional capacity, and have profound implications for African institutions as well as for the dream of ‘real partnership’ in global health.

This article traces a shift in how hospital workers at a Tanzanian public hospital thought about their workplace. In 2010, for the first time, staff began collectively imagining what they called ‘a real hospital’. This collective dreaming of institutional possibilities emerged due to two transformations: a shift in Tanzanian government policies enabling government institutions to initiate their own ‘public–private partnerships’ (PPPs) with non-state ‘partners’ such as NGOs, private businesses, investors, missionary organizations and others; and the hospital's early successes in attracting (a few) partners. Unlike familiar global PPPs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Tanzania's PPP policy allowed health facilities to initiate their own partnerships in order to improve public services. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research in one government hospital, this article traces successful, failed and fraught partnership initiatives through which public-sector health workers tried to improve hospital infrastructure and capacity. In tracing institutional aspirations and local workers’ efforts to achieve them through homegrown PPPs, this article highlights the contingency and malleability of public and private spheres operating within public health service provision in Tanzania, as well as the opportunities available to health workers and the constraints involved in attempting to improve hospital care.