Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2019
This article tracks the historical processes that shaped human waste management practices in Majunga, Madagascar from the city's founding in the mid-eighteenth century to contemporary times. Moving beyond colonial urban histories of sanitation, this article charts the meanings, strategies, and work practices Majunga residents employed to deal with predicaments of waste in everyday life. I argue that the particular material configuration of the colonial sanitation infrastructure in Majunga required new forms of labor — especially maintenance work — which city dwellers evaluated through existing moral norms. With the construction of French colonial sanitation infrastructures and the new labor regimes they necessitated, waste management became a key vector through which notions of difference were negotiated over the early- to mid-twentieth century. Shifting emphasis away from colonial infrastructure as disparity and onto moments of reception can contribute fresh insights not only on the histories of African cities, but also to histories of technology in the Global South.
Acknowledgements: Research for this article was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship, the University of Michigan, and the Foreign Language Enhancement Program Fellowship. The author gratefully acknowledges Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Gabrielle Hecht, Pier Larson, Pedro Monaville, Moses Ochonu, Derek Peterson, Keith Breckenridge, and anonymous reviewers for The Journal of African History who provided invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. All maps were produced by Daniel Tanner. My greatest debts are to David Epstein, Ben Houssen, Battouli Benti, and Ben-Taoaby and residents in Mahajanga who contributed their insightful perspectives. Author's email: tasha.rijke-epstein@vanderbilt.edu.
1 Majunga is the colonial name for the city, which was changed to Mahajanga in the independence era. Throughout this article, I employ ‘Majunga’ when referring to colonial era and ‘Mahajanga’ for post-independence times.
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4 Dromigny et al, ‘Emergence and rapid spread’, 2002. Some, however maintained that these efforts at ‘prevention’ inadvertently hastened the spread of cholera. The routine and extensive administration of doxycycline at the sanitation border, as well as in hospitals and clinics, had the unforeseen and grave consequence of triggering the spread of tetracycline-resistant strains of cholera. See also K. Ahmad, ‘Anger over handling of Madagascar's cholera epidemic’, The Lancet, 4 March 2000: 817.
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7 Fieldnotes, March 2013. Interview, P.T. 29 March 2013, Mahajanga, Madagascar. Owing to the sensitive and stigmatized nature of sanitation labor and practices, and per interviewee request, all interviews are anonymous. In some cases, individuals chose their pseudonyms.
8 More detail on the history and explanations for this ancestral taboo will be addressed later in this article. But it is useful to note that similar prohibition practices abounded in southeast Madagascar during the exact cholera epidemic, see H. L. Marqui, 2014 ‘Lutte Ccontre le cholera, ou contre la culture?’, Health, Culture and Society, suppl. Madagascar: Past, Present, and Future, 7:1, 61–65.
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73 Ibid. ‘Hafahafa’ also has the sense of something ‘different, unseemingly, improper… peculiar’, depending on the context, Richardson, A New Malagasy-English Dictionary, 217.
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79 ANRDM/F44, Procès-verbaux, 23 Feb. 1934, “à bon marché qui seront louées par la Commune et constitueront l'embryon du future village indigène de Mahabibo construit avec toutes les conditions d'hygiène désireables à l'extension du réseau de distribution d'eau de la ville, à l'assainissement, par le comblément d'une partie des marais.”
80 ANRDM/F43, Procès-verbaux 26 Feb. 1927.
81 ANRDM/VIIJ 391, letter from Chief of Public Works to Chief of the Subdivision of Public Works in Majunga city 1 Dec 1932. Note that of the 21,172, the European population accounted for 2,936.
82 ANRDM/F44, Procès-verbaux 7 Nov. 1934.
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90 It is not clear whether all prisoners were required to carry out this work or only select prisoners.
91 Interview, Mahajanga, 25 Jan. 2014.
92 Interview with P.T., Mahajanga, 9 Dec. 2013.
93 Interview with P. K. Mahajanga, 9 Dec. 2013. Note folaka razana literally means ‘broken ancestors’, signaling a rupture in ancestral well-being.
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100 Interview with H.D., Mahajanga, 26 Apr. 2013.
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106 The period under Tsiranana was, however, widely understood as a ‘neo-colonial’ moment which maintained the political and economic configurations of colonialism and the dominance of French interests was deeply contested by activists in the early 1970s.
107 ‘Taloha, manadio ny lalana, manadio rehetra a grace de Comorians…’ Interview with P.K., Mahajanga, 29 Oct. 2012. Interview with J.R., Mahajanga, 22 Oct. 2014.
108 ANDRM/IK 2214, Arrondissement de Majunga, Rapport Annuel Travaux Publics, 1925; Deschamps, Les migrations intérieures, 45.
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112 Their work practices were described in detail in a research report conducted in 2010 by the multinational development organization Institut Régional de Coopération Développement (IRCOD), as part of a larger sanitation initiative, which suggested that the sanitation workers were primarily male, in their thirties and forties, and from a wide range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. See A. Larvido and P-H Dodan, 2011 ‘Assainissement des matières fécales de la ville de Mahajanga: caracterisation du secteur informel de la vidange des latrines dans la ville’, IRCOD, 27.
113 Interview with ‘Tsiavono’, Mahajanga, 15 Jan. 2014.
114 Van Der Geest, ‘The night-soil collector’, 203.
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116 This changed around 2010–15, when several non-governmental organizations enacted new programs to address the issue of sanitation in the city.
