Power and Shit: Sanitation, Status and Segregation

Sanitation infrastructure and its labour regimes are a key vector through which division, difference and power are negotiated and made visible. Access to WASH or lack thereof has a history of widening and creating divisions in African societies. This is famously seen in South Africa, where the 1903 Land act forcibly relocated Black people, pushing them into informal housing (townships) away from the old town(Barnes, 2018). Water infrastructure was absent in these townships, with very limited supply and no waste management, whereas the white communities had the most sophisticated sanitation infrastructure on the continent. This was a situation termed “water apartheid”(Jegede,2021).. Despite legislative reforms and new investments in recent years, the legacy of the apartheid period remains, 20% of black South Africans don't have access to improved sanitation compared to just 0.2% of white people.

 Additionally, discourses around sanitation were used by colonial administrators to justify the racist segregationist policies in South Africa, as argued in Maynard Swanson's(1977) seminal paper with a process he termed “sanitation syndrome”, where black people were viewed as harbingers of disease that should be kept separate. Figure 1 shows the stark inequalities in South Africa, illustrated in the built environment, a legacy of sanitation syndrome.

 Figure 1: Majority white neighbourhood Primrose (left) and majority black township Makause(right) Johannesburg: source 

In Mombasa, Kenya the city sewer system and sanitation infrastructure was well developed by the 1960s, but was restricted to European enclaves in the city and industrial facilities: access to clean water and sewage systems “was skewed towards the master and money”(Kithiia, 2020). The pre-independence racist sanitation infrastructure division in Mombasa transitioned to a classist infrastructure whereby Mombasa’s wealthy elite have taken up the residences of the old colonists and the city’s working class lived in informal residences without sanitation or water access (Willis, 1995). Despite reforms in the 2000s, the poor residents of the city still lack access. Given the way poor sanitation causes disease and holds women back, inequitable sanitation is debilitating for social mobility, exacerbating and solidifying social divides(Kithiia, 2020). This is a repeated story in many African cities, Africa’s urban rich are 227 percent more likely to have access to improved sanitation vs the urban poor(Armah.et al, 2018) .

Researching for my last post on taboos led me to discover the ethnic/caste divisions in Madagascar and how taboos around the management of human waste were central to the demarcation of a rigid caste hierarchy on the island. The Sakalava ethnic group see waste management occupations as polluted and taboo, jobs that are beneath them and should be left to the lowest of society. Thus groups like the Tandroy, (who predominantly do waste management) are stigmatised and made to feel inferior, the association of their jobs with faeces is deemed impure. Consequently, it's taboo for Sakalava to eat or associate with Tandroy people(Rijke-Epstein, 2019). 

The stigmatisation of those communities doing sanitation is multi-generational, creating a poverty trap that critically reduces social mobility. This is an acute issue of social exclusion, with the labour regimes of sanitation acting as a vehicle for regressive conceptions of status and difference between groups(Rijke-Epstein, 2019). The crystallisation of social hierarchy and difference around waste and sanitation is not exclusive to Madagascar but is seen in several different societies in Africa, including Mali, Somalia and the Amhara in Ethiopia(Freeman,2003). 

Shame, Secrecy and Sanitation- A note on taboos.

The gendered nature of sanitation described in my last post can not be fully addressed without recognising the power of taboos. In general sanitation issues are not simply infrastructural but relate to the universe of social norms and customs that govern people's behaviour(Akpabio, 2014). This blogs sees how cultural norms and taboos influence sanitation practice rendering behaviours as moral or immoral and why this should be acknowledged when pursuing successful/sustainable sanitation projects In many communities the taboo surrounding menstruation means it is rarely discussed or publicly acknowledged(Aidara and Mbaye, 2020), resulting in a lack of awareness/understanding of the challenges faced by women and girls and leading to negative sanitation outcomes(Sommer, 2013). For example, a study of rural schools in Ghana found a culture “of secrecy driven by fears and avoidance of social ridicule and shaming”(Rheinlander et al., 2017) meaning girls couldn't talk about menstruation related problems. All waste bins were in public spaces with no place for girls to privately dispose of used pads(no bins in the school toilet) this means open garbage piles were used and bushy outdoor areas aggravating sanitation problems and the potential spread of diseases. Given the shame associated with menstruation, those that used reusable pads/cloths often hide them in unhygienic areas, which further exposes girls to infection(Anaba, 2022). 

                                       Photo of The outskirts of Tamatave, Madagascar: source 

In Tamatave, Eastern Madagascar, there is a taboo against toilets. Taboos in Madagascar are called “fady” and are more than just cultural norms but the symbolic materialisation of deep seated beliefs. Communities there view digging toilets and depositing faeces underground as a grave insult to ancestors (Albuquerque, 2019), so when a swath of toilets were built by NGOs in 1999 after a cholera epidemic, they were left unused as people continued to practise open defecation. Clearly, not recognizing the cultural context around WASH seriously undermines the success of any initiatives(Rijke-Epstein, 2019). 

The Community Led Total Sanitation approach (CLTS)has proved a successful way of dealing with this kind of problem(Metha and Movik, 2011, p.271). With participatory techniques, it aims to force communities to see the linkages between open defecation and disease, and "trigger" them to change their behaviour. Frère St Gabriel, a NGO went to Tamtave, they went to the villagers “and offered them water with excrement in it to drink. When they refuse, they take them to the river and show them that this is what they drink every day.” Soon after the community started using toilets. 

Sometimes, local sanitation practices and taboos held by certain communities can actually aid the success of CLTS projects (Zakiya, 2014). In Kilifi,Kenya it is a profound taboo for a father in law's faeces to mix with those of his daughter-in-law, with strictly enforced gender segregation at open sanitation sites(Bwire, 2011). The Plan Kenya NGO took community leaders on walks in the village showing how not only was their food being contaminated by their faeces but that the nature of open defecation meant that the faeces of fathers-in-law were freely mixing with those of daughters in law. This triggered the community to construct toilets of its own accord and now Kilifi has got one of the lowest open defecation rates in Kenya.