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By Jake Krol and Kyli Singh2018-09-27 20:14:10 UTC

Harare, Zimbabwe – The rate of new cholera infections has decreased in Zimbabwe after a flurry of public warnings to wash hands and radio jingles warning the public of its symptoms.

Zimbabwe, though, remains on high alert with the death toll rising to at least 45 in the last three weeks.

Thousands in the capital Harare have been infected by the water-borne disease, but the crisis is an all-too-familiar reality among many others in the Southern African nation.

In a bid to contain the contagious disease, police have tried to clear Harare’s streets of vendors selling fresh fruit and vegetables. But the daring and desperate ones defy the orders, despite facing the wrath of law enforcers. 

Sekai Tawenga, 43, a vendor selling cabbages, potatoes and bananas, sits directly across from the gates of the Glenview PolyClinic in a neighbourhood that has been the epicentre of the outbreak.

The clinic is a cholera treatment site set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) and local authorities. Tawenga is one of the few vendors who stayed put and continued selling produce, despite the public health restriction on fresh food vendors.

She told Al Jazeera the need to feed her family will not move her from her stall. The risk of starvation, she said, was greater than being harassed by police. 

“I’m right here on the doorstep of cholera, but I’m going nowhere. My troubles are greater than this disease and even if the police come to remove me, I’ll come back because I need to survive. Nobody knows the hardships I face,” said Tawenga. 

Battling a liquidity crisis that has led to cash and fuel shortages, and a significant rise in basic commodity prices in recent years, many Zimbabweans have resorted to street vending.

While some fear the widespread clampdown on the sale of fresh produce is too harsh, Michael Chideme, public relations manager for Harare City Council, said containing the outbreak was the government’s top priority.

“The major thrust of our work right now is to contain cholera so we have to do what is necessary. If vending must be controlled, that is what we will do,” said Chideme.

The rise in prices of basic goods, coupled with persistent fuel shortages, has revived fears of economic collapse from hyperinflation that occurred in 2008.

A disputed and violent presidential runoff vote in June 2008 declared then president Robert Mugabe the winner.

Months later, deaths of more than 4,000 people from cholera was one of the key factors that pushed Mugabe to accept a pact to form a government of national unity with several opposition parties. The Movement for Democratic Change – led by Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s biggest rival – was appointed prime minister in February 2009.

A decade later, Zimbabwe seems to be back at a familiar crossroads.

Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s successor, narrowly won the presidential vote held in July against his younger, charismatic competitor Nelson Chamisa.

Unplanned urbanisation

Despite losing a constitutional court challenge last month, Chamisa claims he won the popular vote and has vowed to install himself as the “people’s president”, but because of the cholera outbreak, the inauguration was postponed.

In a similar vein, mass gatherings have been restricted by police leading to music concerts and festivals being re-scheduled.

According to WHO, an oral vaccination campaign will be rolled out shortly targeting 450,000 people living in the worst-affected areas of the capital.

Anderson Chimusoro, WHO Zimbabwe’s disease prevention and control officer, attributes cholera’s recurrence in Zimbabwe due to rapid urban expansion.

“There are some areas in the country with poor access to clean water,” Chimusoro said in an email. “This was caused by rapid and unplanned urbanisation with limited access to clean water and sanitation. This has also led to overcrowding and poor hygiene among the population.”

Historically, the lack of a strong city management in Harare has led to the rise of unplanned suburbs, sprawling rubbish sites, and poor water treatment forcing the growing city population to resort to its own means of housing, water and refuse disposal.

Recently, Mnangagwa acknowledged Harare’s water is contaminated with raw sewage.

“In the area of sanitation, which has caused cholera in Zimbabwe, we now understand that the system is over 60 years old,” Mnangagwa said recently in an address to Zimbabweans living in the United States.

“Sewage and water pipes leak and interexchange quantities resulting in cholera.”

The president is currently in the US attending the UN General Assembly and soliciting international support, but so far the post-Mugabe regime has received a lukewarm response particularly from the US, which recently renewed targeted sanctions until there is significant change in Zimbabwe’s human-rights situation.

Without US support, the chances of Zimbabwe accessing a bailout from international financiers could be difficult, dashing hopes for a speedy economic turnaround for the country.

While Mugabe’s former ally struggles to gain credibility abroad, at home authorities are battling to address a problem with long roots.

As part of its long-term solution strategy, Chideme said the city council was replacing blocked sewer lines.

“We are mobilising all available resources to replace the piping system to make sure that we get this problem under control. As city council, we aren’t really able to say how long the programme will go on, but it depends on how best we can mobilise funding and manage the situation.”

Little hope

Agatha Muzembe, a 69-year-old housewife in Glen View, said she feels encouraged by the cleaning of the pipes but feared her low supply of water purification tablets might put her at risk.

“For so many years, we were used to the sewage running through our street because of the blocked toilets. For the first time, since Tuesday, I can see it’s improved. 

“Although the sewage is now moving, I don’t have any more tablets to clean our drinking water and nobody seems to have answers for us,” she said. 

The government has launched an appeal to local and international donors for $63m in order to support its health and sanitation response. However, limited donor support for Zimbabwe, as well as the economic uncertainty, could stall the realisation of Mnangagwa’s victory promise of a new dawn.

By the continuing of hardship, disease and poverty, Muzembe has little hope of a quick fix to Zimbabwe’s bigger crisis, and it may be sometime before the country moves past it’s chronic cycle of “medieval disease” and economic crisis.

“Things were bad before in the 2000s, but then they quietened down. Now I haven’t yet seen a sign to believe that this situation could improve. In fact, things just seem to be getting worse and worse, I really can’t see things getting better anytime soon,” said Muzembe.

Follow Tendai Marima on Twitter: @i_amten

Americans seem to be holding an awkward and dehumanising national conversation on race on a regular basis. News and social media are constantly drawing attention to racist statements and incidents involving whites and people of colour, in which the former deny that the episode was racist, or declare that they themselves aren’t racists.

Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ “monkey this up” racist nod towards his black opponent Andrew Gillum being downplayed is just one example of so many in which white people deny, deflect, or defend racism.

This dynamic is why the idea of any government-driven public conversation about racism is just a farce, whether it’s President Donald Trump’s proposal of a preposterous race summit with Colin Kaepernick and Kanye West, or President Barack Obama’s 2009 “beer summit” with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the police officer who arrested him, James Crowley.

Even the most well-meaning of leaders tend to feed Americans milquetoast statements about how much racial progress the US has made, if only to appease the white majority uncomfortable with the mere mention of American racism.

Usually, this happens in the language of “things have gotten better” since the days before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but “we still have a long way to go”. As sociologist Crystal Marie Fleming points out in her book “How to Be Less Stupid About Race”, stereotypes and self-serving statements on racial progress are the result of “living in a racist society,” one that “socializes us to be stupid about race.”

For some, though, the stupidity is of the willful kind, one steeped in me-first thinking.

Bill Clinton was the last US president who attempted to open a national dialogue on racism. He officially launched his Initiative on Race during a commencement speech at the University of California, San Diego on June 14, 1997. It started with his promise to complete “the unfinished work of our time, to lift the burden of race and redeem the promise of America” and established an advisory board of experts who were supposed to come up with “best practices” for racial reconciliation and dialogue.

But the board’s final report, One America in the 21st Century, was dead on arrival when the White House released it to the public on September 18, 1998.

This wasn’t just because Clinton was in the middle of a scandal for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was because the president and his Initiative on Race followed the well-worn patterns of typical American conversations on racism. It declared “victory” on racial reconciliation, despite the mountains of data pointing to an intricate web of systemic and everyday racism entangling the lives of Americans of colour.

As the late John Hope Franklin wrote in his presentation of the Advisory Board’s final report to President Clinton: Many Americans held a widespread belief that “there was no crisis, and therefore, no reason to raise issues related to race”.

My path to understanding the folly of conversations on American racism initiated by Clinton and other leaders began two weeks before his election in 1992. I was a second-year graduate student in a US history seminar at the University of Pittsburgh. The topic for discussion that day was, “Why has black economic mobility, political assimilation and cultural identity differed from other ethnic groups?”

For two-and-a-half hours, my white classmates contended that poor blacks weren’t trying hard enough to rise out of poverty. Or, they believed that capitalism’s sowing of economic inequality, and not systemic racism, was to blame for the disproportionately more pervasive black poverty.

I countered that white people expecting black people to make significant socioeconomic progress after generations of slavery and Jim Crow was really a justification for their racism, for clinging to racial stereotypes like “black laziness and intellectual inferiority”.

One of my classmates, a middle-aged white male, decided to cut off my final point. “You should be grateful, to be able to go to an esteemed institution like the University of Pittsburgh, to be able to sit in that chair and get a PhD. If it were 30 years ago, we couldn’t stand in the same Dairy Queen line, right here in Pittsburgh,” he said, pointing at me as if I was a five-year-old throwing a tantrum.

The professor ended class right then and there, cutting off my attempt to respond. I stopped by his office the next afternoon to find out why he interfered. “You’re going to have to deal with this anyway,” he said while shrugging his shoulders as if, prior to 1992, I somehow hadn’t seen or dealt with systemic racism or the racist slights of older white males.

As the lone African American in the classroom, no one understood my discomfort with white evaluations of blacks living with poverty because they were effectively assessing me and my upbringing in the process. And given the reactions of my professor and my older classmate, I was sure they didn’t care to understand, either.

Like them, many white Americans only want dialogue on racism that will make them feel more comfortable with their racial privilege. Really, the racism discussion many Americans crave is one in which whites can pat themselves on the back for being good people without the need to do any anti-racist work at all.

That’s why the press focuses more on “racial progress” statistics like whites marrying blacks and the decline of overt racism among younger Americans, and less on how redlining has led to material inequality for many Americans of colour.

That’s why the American press tends to frame each instance of white people calling the police on unsuspecting people of colour for merely existing as isolated and not part of the larger continuum of virulent, everyday racism.

Denying and deflecting from attempts to call out systemic and individual racism, all while reinforcing racial stereotypes and inflicting additional pain, was also typical of President Clinton. His policy approaches to dealing with poverty and race made this all too clear.

Watching President Clinton crusadefor his legacy-defining Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was what helped convince me that his eventual Initiative on Race would be a sideshow.

“It’s not racist for whites to assert that the culture of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock pregnancy and absent fatherhood cannot be broken by social programmes unless there is first more personal responsibility,” Clinton said in an October 1995 speech at the University of Texas-Austin.

He delivered that speech on the day of the Million Man March in Washington, DC. The White House presumably scheduled this event as a way for Clinton to distance himself from Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, who organised the march and who was considered by some to hold anti-white and anti-Jewish views. 

Clinton used the racist stereotype of lazy blacks on the government dole as justification for morphing social welfare into the welfare-to-work programme known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, even though the majority of welfare recipients were and remain white.

He did that all while also promising a mostly white audience a national chitchat on racism and triangulating on racial reconciliation, knowing that registered black Democrats like me had little choice but to support his allegedly pragmatic efforts in the voting booth in 1996.

Clinton’s own words within the Initiative on Race Advisory Board’s report 20 years ago, though, revealed to me the impossibility of any US president taking even baby steps to diminish racism’s impact.

“I am a Scotch-Irish Southern Baptist and I’m proud of it. But […] I have felt indescribable joy and peace in Black and Pentecostal churches. I have come to love the intensity and selflessness of my Hispanic fellow Americans toward la familia […] I have also revelled in the festivals and the food, the music and the art and the culture of Native Americans…”

Clinton’s narcissism and racism entitled him to see Americans of colour and their diverse cultures as simply food, song, reproduction and prayer, as mere sources of enjoyment and curiosity.

As his words and actions proved two decades ago, it’s easier to point to superficial racial progress than it is to admit that American greatness has always been contingent on the material and emotional suffering of Americans of colour: on Trayvon Martins and Sandra Blands, on Ferguson and Charleston, on imprisoned and humiliated black and brown migrants, on Puerto Ricans left to drown.

We are more likely to see the world arriving at a solution to climate change before there’s ever a Rwandan or South African-style Truth and Reconciliation process in the US on its historical and present-day racism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.