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).