In May 2026, the World Health Organisation declared Ebola in DR Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern.” To date, this outbreak has killed around 177 people, with more than 750 suspected cases reported.
My book, Decolonising Disease: Pandemics, Public Health and Pathogenic Novels, is now out. Among other things, it draws parallels between Covid-19 and outbreaks of Ebola, first in Congo/Zaire and Sudan in 1976 and then, more extensively, in West Africa in 2014–16.
I hope the book makes a meaningful intervention by centring transnational perspectives on the ways colonialism and imperialism are bound up with medicine and epidemic disease. I examine the devastating and long-lasting consequences of that entwinement for people, communities and the planet.
My book argues that epidemics are never simply medical occurrences. During the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians across the world repeatedly insisted they were “following the science.” Yet this reverence for data, graphs, tables and charts could only ever have been one part of the response to that terrible crisis — or to any outbreak. Science alone cannot fully confront the deeper roots of infection.
Thus, Decolonising Disease does not stop at describing the effects of contagion. It also asks where those effects come from, showing that inequalities in public health can’t be understood without attending to the historical and social conditions that produce them.
One of the book’s central findings is that the uneven impact of communicable disease can only be grasped by looking closely at what I call pre-existing conditions: entrenched socio-economic inequalities that leave minoritised communities more exposed to the harms of illness.
Outbreaks are the result of human actions and human decisions. I explore the manmade systems that generate the conditions in which outbreaks can take hold. These include colonialism and neocolonialism, and related forces such as globalisation, extractivism, consumerism and climate mismanagement. I ponder epidemics and pandemics through what I call interlocking crises and, drawing on Pallavi Rastogi’s work, the intersectionality of disaster.
Readers are encouraged to join the dots between seemingly separate calamities. My claim, developed in two ways, is that we need a more integrated way of understanding of how epidemics are knitted together with inequalities. First is the book’s historical reach, which begins with the 1918 Spanish flu and continues through to the pandemic we recently lived through. Second is the source material.
My primary texts are not quantitative, but the qualitative material furnished by literature. Literary texts offer writers from different cultures and historical moments the space to think through outbreaks in imaginative and revealing ways. They make connections that might otherwise go unseen, and ensure silenced voices are heard.
Pandemics transform bodies and reshape societies. That is why we turn to literature, history, psychology and languages when we try to understand and survive moments of crisis. In turbulent times, the humanities offer interpretation, relation and consolation.
Since 2020, the inventive plots and characterisations of a steady stream of literary works have begun helping us make sense of epidemiological crises. The texts I research in Decolonising Disease represent illness while also probing its many entanglements — with race, with empire, and with biopolitical power.
My close readings showcase the pivotal role the arts and humanities can play within the interdisciplinary field of disease studies. These fields are not decorative or instrumental; they take cultural and literary expertise seriously and treat it as essential to any joined-up response to a global health crisis.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part considers 20th-century novel pathogens (AIDS, Ebola and the Spanish flu) from 21st-century perspectives. In the second, I not only place the seemingly unprecedented nature of Covid-19 in context but also think through how the colonial past and planetary futures are tightly interlaced.
The scope of the book is also broad, spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Of the 15 writers included, eight are women, all but two are writers of colour, three identify as LGBTQ+ and one is disabled.
In the first chapter, I read HIV as a marginalised disease that was initially said to affect only homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians — the so-called four Hs. There is a stark contrast between the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines and the awful fact that, nearly 50 years into the AIDS crisis, there is still neither an HIV vaccine nor a cure.
Chapter 2 concerns representations of viruses in general, and the personification of Ebola in particular, via the work of two African writers: Amir Tag Elsir of Sudan and Véronique Tadjo of Côte d’Ivoire. This chapter contends that we need a new language for representing viruses.
The third chapter zooms in on the intersectionality of disaster idea. Focusing on depictions of the 1918 flu pandemic by two women novelists, Emma Donoghue and Isabel Allende, I discuss how multiple disasters intersect with sedimented privilege and subjugation.
Chapter 4 analyses pre-Covid speculative fiction through the lens of capitalism’s business-as-usual ethos during crises. In the fifth chapter, I scrutinise the way in which much recent fiction responds to the twinned, inextricable catastrophes of pandemics and climate change. The final chapter is titled ‘Breaking Down Walls in Post-Pandemic Fables: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man.’ It includes consideration of form, borders, migration, and the only Pakistani writer in the book.
I wanted to stress literature’s refusal of simplistic slogans and neat fixes in relation to viruses. Rather than talking of a war on AIDS, a battle against Covid, or frontline heroes, the works discussed in this book remind us that disease is not an enemy to be defeated. What is needed is a more textured understanding of disease outbreaks as complex socio-biological phenomena that demand ethical, historical, collective and literary perspectives, if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Decolonising Disease enters a world gripped by renewed health fears – not only Ebola but also hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship. The book shows that writing moulds how we think about and respond to present and future health disasters.
The columnist is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York in the UK, and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, 31st, 2026