Sanitation is Dignity

What does dignity mean in the twenty-first century? For many people today, an everyday experience that raises the issue of dignity literally every day is going to the toilet. As the slogan used in campaigns for improved access to toilets has it, ‘Sanitation is dignity’.Footnote ¹ One organisation attached that title to a project in which cut-out images of people crouching as if to use a toilet were set up in public places, next to signs that read ‘Where would you hide? 2,600,000,000 people toiletless’.Footnote ² To be sure, sanitation is also health, hygiene, personal safety, and much else besides. Yet even the most cursory glance at relevant materials will reveal that dignity looms large in the matter of toilet access.

There exist struggles around sanitation in all countries of the world. In this chapter we look at a country where those struggles have been exceptionally fraught, or at any rate exceptionally conspicuous in recent decades: South Africa. An upper-middle-income country in World Bank terms, South Africa combines rich-world living standards with conditions that involve serious development deficits. It is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most unequal societies. This is widely recognised in official circles within the country. For example, a recent report by the national statistical service on inequality trends takes as its starting-point the ‘extremely high’ and ‘remarkably persistent’ character of South African inequality. ‘Despite many efforts by government to reduce inequality since our democratic transition in 1994’, the report comments, ‘progress has been limited’.Footnote ³

Public infrastructure is a domain in which inequality remains particularly stark, and in perhaps no dimension more so than in sanitation. The question of how South Africa’s history of racial segregation bears on its current sanitary realities will be central to our enquiry in the pages to follow. For now, it suffices to note that access to waterborne sanitation was historically a benefit created for, and enjoyed by, the country’s white minority and a limited number of others. Infrastructural investment prioritised white neighbourhoods of cities and towns and some large, white-owned farms. For black South Africans, going to the toilet generally meant the so-called ‘black bucket system’ – buckets with seats provided to communities for use as (notoriously malodorous and unsanitary) dry toilets – or open defecation in fields or bushes.

The post-apartheid period has seen very considerable improvements in the sphere of sanitation. As just mentioned, however, this period has also seen the perpetuation of large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services. Thus, one learns from the statistical service’s general household survey that, in 2021, 64 percent of South African households had access to a flush toilet, whether private or public, and whether connected to a public sewerage system or to a septic tank.Footnote ⁴ Members of the remaining households used a range of facilities, of which pit latrines with or without ventilation pipes were the most common, or they had no facility at all. In just under one percent of cases, corresponding to 151,000 households, the bucket system continued to be used. (The title of an article in the Cape Times – ‘Bucket toilets still deny poor’s dignity’ – signals a recurrent theme in media coverage of that state of affairs.Footnote ⁵) A further 112,000 households had no sanitation facility and hence practised open defecation.Footnote ⁶

The survey breaks down sanitation facilities (or the lack thereof) by population group of the household head. It emerges that pit latrines with or without ventilation pipes, along with chemical toilets, the bucket system and open defecation were entirely confined to households headed by a person classified as black African or coloured. No households headed by a person classified as white did not have access to a flush toilet. Of households headed by a person classified as black African, 47 percent had access to a flush toilet.Footnote ⁷ The survey also breaks down sanitation facilities by type of dwelling. Here the data show that pit latrines with or without ventilation pipes, chemical toilets and the bucket system were overwhelmingly a feature of informal dwellings, by which was meant ‘shacks’ situated in backyards or other kinds of housing in ‘squatter’ settlements.Footnote ⁸ With regard to the distribution of housing types, the survey shows that 12 percent of South African households occupy informal dwellings,Footnote ⁹ and that substantial concentrations of such dwellings are located on the peripheries of the country’s two largest cities: Johannesburg and Cape Town.Footnote ¹⁰

Our discussion in this chapter will take us to both those cities and their peri-urban informal settlements and apartheid-built townships. It will also take us to a third city, Durban, where municipal planners have gained a reputation in recent years for innovation in the delivery of sanitation services. We will follow efforts by poor communities to secure better sanitation through resort to a variety of tactics, including – but not limited to – legal proceedings against public authorities. Such litigation has relied on a raft of legislative enactments and standard-setting policies that have been adopted in the years since 1994 concerning water infrastructure and access to improved sanitation facilities.Footnote ¹¹ The litigation has also relied on the South African Constitution of 1996, with its celebrated protection of socio-economic rights and its celebrated provisions concerning human dignity.

Among the socio-economic rights protected in the South African Constitution are rights relating to water and housing. Section 27(1) provides that ‘[e]veryone has the right to have access to … sufficient … water’. Section 26(1) provides that ‘[e]veryone has the right to have access to adequate housing’. According to section 1 of the Constitution, equality is among the foundational values of the state, and section 9(2) specifies that equality ‘includes the full and equal enjoyment’ of these and other rights. Another of the foundational values proclaimed in section 1 is human dignity. In section 7(1), it is said that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights affirms that value. Section 10 then declares that ‘[e]veryone has inherent dignity, and the right to have their dignity respected and protected’. Together, sections 1, 7(1) and 10 of the Constitution have been understood to bring with them a constitutional set-up in which dignity is both a foundational value to be promoted and a justiciable and enforceable right.Footnote ¹²

In a speech to the United Nations in 1985, Bishop (later Archbishop) Desmond Tutu memorably described how, for black people, apartheid meant that ‘[y]our dignity is not just rubbed in the dust. It is trodden underfoot and spat on.’Footnote ¹³ Ten years later, in an early judgment of the South African Constitutional Court, and using language frequently quoted in subsequent cases and legal commentary, Justice O’Regan wrote that the recognition and protection of dignity is the ‘touchstone of [the country’s] new political order’.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, dignity occupied a prominent place in South Africa’s transitional justice discourse. It was, for example, part of the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Tutu, to restore the ‘human and civil dignity’ of the victims of gross violations of human rights under apartheid ‘by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts’ of what happened to them.Footnote ¹⁵

The question of whether, how, and to what extent this process did in fact, and could, restore dignity to the victims of gross violations of human rights under apartheid – not to mention the victims of apartheid more generally – is, of course, a matter of ongoing debate. Nadine Gordimer seems to have anticipated something of that debate, or rather, something of the difficulty underlying it, in her novel July’s People.Footnote ¹⁶ Published in 1981, the novel is set in a future South Africa. It imagines a violent end to apartheid. As civil war rages, a white couple, Bamford and Maureen Smales, and their children flee Johannesburg with their black servant whom they call July, travelling with him to his village and living there under his protection. The couple are liberal people who believe they have treated their servant with dignity.Footnote ¹⁷

Pertinently to our current topic, we learn that one aspect of this concerns sanitation. In the Smales family house, July had his own bathroom with a ‘bath, white china lavatory, everything’.Footnote ¹⁸ Over the course of the novel, a series of confrontations occur between Maureen and July which eventually compel Maureen to realise that, from July’s perspective, ‘to be dignified for her’ meant nothing; ‘his measure as a man was taken elsewhere’.Footnote ¹⁹ Regarding the lavatory, the point is presumably that sanitation cannot be dignity in conditions of servitude. But if access to a flush toilet could not signify dignity to Mwawate (for we are told that that is his birth name) so long as it depended on his being July, the Smales family’s servant, what view will such a man take once – as in actual post-apartheid South Africa – he becomes a constitutionally equal citizen?

Metrologies of Dignity

Bringing about improvements to sanitation facilities is an important challenge, but in beginning now to go into this dimension of recent South African history a little more deeply, we need to register that sometimes the challenge has been simply to preserve existing levels of access to improved sanitation. That circumstance was brought sharply into focus by the case of Mazibuko and Others v. City of Johannesburg and Others, initiated in 2006.Footnote ²⁰ The applicants – Lindiwe Mazibuko, Grace Munyai, Jennifer Makoatsane, Sophia Malekutu and Vusimuzi Paki – were residents of Phiri, a township in Soweto established in the early years of apartheid and still with an almost entirely black population, and their claim related to certain changes that had been implemented affecting the supply of water to their homes. The respondents were the City of Johannesburg, within the local governance of which Soweto was incorporated in 2002, and two other entities with responsibility for water supply to the area.

Until 2004, the system of water supply in Soweto was that residents received an unlimited amount of water, for which they were charged a flat rate. The flat rate was calculated on the basis of deemed consumption. It seems that this rate was too low to recover the cost of actual consumption and of losses due to leakage and wastage across the various Soweto townships, including Phiri. On top of that, credit control was lax, householders routinely remained in arrears with their payments, and a substantial programme of infrastructural upgrading and repair was needed to stem the leakages. In keeping with global trends, the water authorities decided to move to a more commercially functional system. Residents were presented with two options. Either they could have their in-house water disconnected and thenceforth get their water from an outside standpipe (or from a well, a reservoir, or whatever other external source they could find),Footnote ²¹ or they could maintain their in-house water connection and have a prepayment meter installed.

Apparently, some residents initially took the first – disconnection – option. However, the hardships involved in having to fetch water from an external source led almost all eventually to accept the installation of prepayment meters. Under the pre-existing system of water metering which was used in wealthier and predominantly white parts of Johannesburg, water was provided on credit – that is, bills were sent out for water already supplied – and households were given notice and an opportunity to make representations before supply was cut off. In contrast, the new prepayment metering system delivered a fixed amount of so-called ‘free basic water’ and, when that ran out, the supply of water was automatically cut off until the next month unless additional water credits were purchased. The free basic water allowance was 6,000 litres per household per month. This was reckoned as 25 litres per person per day, based on a household size of eight. In reality, however, the number of people sharing a water connection was often considerably more than eight. Large households, multiple households (i.e. a main house and a number of informal shacks on a single site) and households with a fluctuating membership that at times expanded greatly were common in Phiri.Footnote ²²

At any rate, like many of those affected, the applicants could not survive on 6,000 litres per month. And like many of those affected too, they did not have the money to purchase any or sufficient additional water credits, which were charged according to a relatively steep-rising tariff. As a result, their water supply regularly stopped before the end of the month, and they then had to wait days or, quite commonly, weeks for reconnection. Faced with this situation and in order to put an end to it, the applicants challenged the constitutionality and regulatory legality both of the prepayment metering system and of the amount fixed as the free basic water allowance. They sought a declaration that they and others in Phiri on whose behalf they brought this class action were entitled to 12,000 litres of water per household per month, an amount that corresponded to 50 litres of water per person per day when calculated on the same eight person-household basis as the 6,000-litre allowance which the water authorities had set.

At first instance, Justice Tsoka upheld the applicants’ challenge and made the declaration they sought.Footnote ²³ As well as finding the system of prepayment meters illegal on administrative law grounds, he ruled that the prepayment meters contravened the equality guarantee in the Constitution. Inter alia, he considered it ‘inexplicable why some residents of the City are entitled to water on credit’, while others, who do not live in ‘rich and white areas’, are denied that.Footnote ²⁴ He also ruled that the arrangements put in place in Phiri were inconsistent with the applicants’ constitutional right to have their dignity respected and protected. By his assessment, 50 litres of water per person per day calculated for a household size of eight was indeed the amount necessary for them to maintain a dignified existence. On appeal by the respondents, the Supreme Court of Appeal agreed that 25 litres per person per day was too little. However, having regard to conflicting expert evidence, it reduced the amount fixed by Justice Tsoka to 42 litres per person per day (or 10,000 litres per household per month). The Supreme Court of Appeal also gave the water authorities two years to attempt to legalise the use of prepayment meters.Footnote ²⁵

The applicants then took their case to the Constitutional Court, which dismissed their appeal and set aside any increase in their water entitlement beyond the original 6,000 litres per household per month.Footnote ²⁶ I quoted earlier section 27(1) of the South African Constitution on the right to sufficient water. Along similar lines to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, section 27(2) provides that it is the correlative obligation of the state to ‘take reasonable … measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation’ of that right. Writing for the Constitutional Court, Justice O’Regan emphasised this aspect and summarised its implications in the following terms. ‘If government takes no steps to realise the [right to sufficient water], the courts will require government to take steps. If government’s adopted measures are unreasonable, the courts will similarly require that they be reviewed so as to meet the constitutional standard of reasonableness.’Footnote ²⁷ As she glossed this, it was not for the court to quantify the content of the obligation imposed on the state. Rather, it was for the governing authorities to explain and justify the choices they had made as reasonable measures to achieve the progressive realisation of the right to sufficient water within available resources.Footnote ²⁸

To Justice O’Regan and the other members of the Constitutional Court, the respondents had done this satisfactorily. The prepayment metering system was not unreasonable, and nor was the water authorities’ decision regarding the free basic water allowance unreasonable. Justice O’Regan noted that ‘the obligation in relation to the right of access to sufficient water will vary depending upon circumstance’. For example, ‘what constitutes sufficient water depends on the manner in which water is supplied and the purpose for which it is used’. She went on: ‘Even where the manner in which and the purpose for which it is supplied are clear [and relatively uniform] – as in this case where we know that in Phiri piped water is generally provided to brick houses with water-borne sanitation – the expert evidence on the record provides numerous different answers to the question of what constitutes “sufficient water”, and courts are ill-placed to make these assessments for both institutional and democratic reasons’.Footnote ²⁹ Justice Tsoka and the Supreme Court of Appeal had given inadequate weight to that latter consideration, and to article 27(2) of the Constitution itself. Let us pause at this point to take brief stock of the divergent expert evidence to which Justice O’Regan refers.

The experts on which each side relied more or less agreed on the amount of water required per person per day for drinking, bathing, laundry, house cleaning and meal preparation. Where they differed was on the amount needed for sanitation. As can be gleaned from the passage in Justice O’Regan’s judgment I just quoted, Phiri was connected to mains sewerage. The five applicants were among those South Africans who had access to a flush toilet. According to the expert evidence adduced on their behalf, the basic requirement for waterborne sanitation starts at 20 litres per person per day, but where houses are connected to inefficient sewerage systems, as is commonly the case in South African townships, that rises to more than 75 litres.Footnote ³⁰ According to the evidence adduced on behalf of the respondents, the appropriate figure is instead 15 litres, calculated as 1.5 toilet flushes per person per day. Explaining this, the water authorities’ expert, who was also their civil engineering consultant, said that it ‘is in fact only essential to flush after defecation, which takes place once for a healthy adult … [F]lushing a toilet after urination has no health benefit and is probably done for aesthetic reasons more than anything else.’ It followed that an allowance of 1.5 flushes – the amount for sanitation which could be accommodated within a free basic water allowance of 25 litres per person day or 6,000 litres per household per month – was ‘entirely reasonable’.Footnote ³¹

Those statements appeared in a section of the consultant’s report headed: ‘Quantifying the amount of water needed for health (and human dignity)’.Footnote ³² How many times is it reasonable, necessary and dignified to flush the toilet each day? For the judge at first instance, ‘to expect the applicants to … [limit] the number of toilet flushes [they make] … is to deny them the right … to lead a dignified lifestyle’.Footnote ³³ In reaching this conclusion, he pointed to the country’s history of inequality and indignity which he said was still too fresh in peoples’ minds to ignore.Footnote ³⁴ And just as he pointed to history, so too Justice Tsoka highlighted the significance of geography. I mentioned earlier his ruling that the prepayment metering system contravened the Constitution’s equality guarantee. Specifically, what he said was that the system ‘discriminates between the residents of the City on the basis of geography’, and that the situation was one where ‘geography … [revealed] the true basis of discrimination as colour’.Footnote ³⁵ The Constitutional Court gave short shift to this aspect of the case, fairly quickly dismissing the allegations of inequality. Justice O’Regan observed for the Court that the prepayment metering system was not used in all historically black areas of the city. Moreover, the residents of historically white areas were as restricted as those in Phiri, in that they were compelled to use conventional (credit) meters and could not opt to have prepayment water meters installed in their homes.

Likewise, the Constitutional Court did not dwell on the dignity guarantee. Yet if, as Justice O’Regan writes, it was not for the court to quantify the amount of water sufficient to enable the applicants to lead a dignified life – if, as she observes, courts are ill-placed to make such assessments, and the only relevant issue for judicial determination is whether or not the governing authorities have acted reasonably – from the applicants’ perspective, Phiri residents had a constitutional right to water and a constitutional right to dignity, and the result of the Constitutional Court’s decision was that 6,000 litres of water per household per month, or 1.5 toilet flushes per person per day, were what those rights entitled them to. For them, the Court’s reasonableness standard could not elide the ‘metrologies of dignity’Footnote ³⁶ which, in Antina von Schnitzler’s helpful formulation, were inevitably involved. Von Schnitzler is an anthropologist interested in legal processes and how they relate to lived experience. In a series of interviews with the applicants in this case after the proceedings were over, she posed the question to Jennifer Makoatsane, the third applicant: ‘[s]o, if you were given 50 litres per person per day, would that be fine?’ The answer that came back was: ‘[it is] not for them to tell us’.Footnote ³⁷

Makoatsane’s ‘them’ is presumably a capacious reference to all those with power over water supply – courts (even where they profess themselves not to be the right bodies to ‘tell’ how much water is needed for a dignified life), along with other authorities of various kinds and those consulted by, or influential on, them. As von Schnitzler hears the response, Makoatsane is not objecting to calculation per se. Rather, and here it is material to mention that part of the applicants’ grievance was that the people of Phiri were not consulted before the new prepayment system was introduced, she is objecting to ‘who did these calculations and how’.Footnote ³⁸ Human dignity is declared by philosophers and constitutions and treaties to be inherent and primordial, the fundament upon which the modern state is founded. As we have seen, it is a foundational value of the South African Constitution, and, as we saw in Chapter 2, Kant teaches that it is elevated above any price, and has absolute worth in the sense that it is incapable of being brought under any common standard of measurement.Footnote ³⁹ But to this 35-year-old unemployed woman,Footnote ⁴⁰ nothing could be clearer than that dignity was evaluated, measured out and dispensed in these juridical and administrative procedures. Nothing could be clearer than that, far from being foundational, dignity was an outcome of these determinations by judges, policy-makers, officials, managers and consultants through which authoritative knowledge regarding it was produced. Yet, in her words, ‘they don’t know’.Footnote ⁴¹

Spectacles of Indignity

In a moment we will move from Johannesburg to Cape Town, but just before leaving the Mazibuko case, I want to touch on an episode that occurred shortly before the case was heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal. On 12 February 2009, a group of women staged a march through downtown Johannesburg in support of the five residents’ legal challenge (Figure 5.1). According to a statement by the organiser of the demonstration, ‘Women without water and sanitation are as good as dead and have no dignity. With the prepaid meters our ability to access water will be denied and inability to access water denies human beings the right to life and more with women the right to dignity.’Footnote ⁴² There were banners with messages like ‘Sanitation=Water is Dignity for Women’ and ‘Stop the War on Women’s Bodies’, and it is reported that some of the women wore underwear stained with blood or red dye on top of their clothes. Interviewed by a journalist, one demonstrator said: ‘We are marching because we are dirty.’Footnote ⁴³

Figure 5.1 Women for Water March: March Front, 2009.

Photograph. Anti-Privatisation Forum.

In his judgment for the High Court, Justice Tsoka remarked that ‘South Africa is a patriarchal society. Many domestic chores are performed by women. Many households in poor black areas are headed by women.’ He then noted evidence given by the first applicant to the effect that, before committing to the new system of prepayment meters, she had travelled three kilometres to fetch water on behalf of her household. In this context, he held that the prepayment metering system violated the constitutional guarantee of equality not only for the reasons to which I have already referred, but also because the meters ‘discriminate against women unfairly because of their sex’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Von Schnitzler describes how, at a far more general level, the legal proceedings required the applicants to present to the court the ‘exposed body and its needs’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Making their case entailed setting out the (partly gendered) realities of their indigence, vulnerability and indeed shame – testifying, for example, to the particular problems caused by the prepayment meters and the 6,000-litre allowance when residents menstruated, in that, to quote from the record of evidence, ‘[d]uring this time … I would feel very embarrassed should a male person … use an unflushed toilet behind me’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The demonstration was evidently an attempt to dramatise and politicise that embarrassment. As von Schnitzler comments, ‘[w]hile the formal legal submission implicitly defined “indignity” as the subjection to the urgency and shame of bodily needs’, in the march, ‘activists mobilised this notion outside the courtroom’. Repeating ‘modes of subordination’ for the sake of publicising and subverting them, they ‘performed’ gender-based indignity in a way that resignified shame.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other reflections on the protest, Karen Zivi puts this more strongly still.Footnote ⁴⁸ These demonstrators ‘turned notions of female impropriety against the state’, she writes. ‘The women refused to be shamed, and instead shamed the state’Footnote ⁴⁹ for the class structure and associated inequalities of race and gender of which, to them, the prepayment metering system was an emblem and material component. Activism of something like this kind has played a much-discussed role in disputes with the Cape Town municipal authorities over sanitation arrangements there. Let us turn to that set of issues now, which surfaced at around the same time as the events in Johannesburg I have recounted, as well as in subsequent years.

The township of Khayelitsha was established late in the apartheid era on the sandy, low-lying Cape Flats to the south-east of central Cape Town. Growing rapidly, it encompassed by the 2000s a number of informal settlements.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 2004, a project was launched to upgrade some of these settlements and, as part of the project, to provide waterborne sanitation ahead of new housing. Initially, the plan was to build communal toilets, one for every five households, but the City accepted the community’s contention that this would be unsatisfactory. Under a revised plan, private toilets – one for each household – would be provided. However, no structures would be built around the toilets. That is to say, only the plumbing and fixtures would be installed, and it would be left to individual residents to construct the necessary enclosures for them. The installation of unenclosed toilets took place in 2009. By early 2010, most of the 1,316 toilets had been enclosed by residents, but in the Makhaza section of Khayelitsha, around fifty toilets remained unenclosed.Footnote ⁵¹ Photographs of open toilets circulated widely in the media, along with stories of users having to cover themselves with blankets.

As elsewhere in the world, attacks on women and girls are a concomitant of inadequate sanitation in South Africa, and one evening, Makhaza resident Ntombentsha Beja was stabbed while she was on her way to use a communal toilet ten minutes from her home. Aged seventy-four at the time, Beja was among those whose ‘private’ toilet remained unenclosed. In June 2010, the South African Human Rights Commission issued a report in which it denounced the unenclosed toilets as a violation of the residents’ rights, including in particular their right under section 10 of the Constitution to have their dignity respected and protected.Footnote ⁵² For her part, Beja, along with two others, brought proceedings against the City of Cape Town and other relevant officials and governmental agencies in the Western Cape High Court, asking the Court to declare, similarly, that the respondents had violated their constitutional rights and to order the respondents to enclose all the toilets that formed part of the sanitation project. Delivering judgment for the Court, Justice Erasmus upheld the applicants’ claims and made the declaration and order they sought.Footnote ⁵³

His judgment reports ‘[observing] firsthand the living conditions of the affected community, … [and] in particular the aspects relating to the toilets’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As originally installed, the toilets were ‘completely open and in full view of every person in the community, and mostly situated close to the road’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even where enclosures had subsequently been erected, those enclosures consisted of whatever mixed materials residents without money could find, and were ‘unsatisfactory to satisfy dignity and privacy’. He gave the example of being shown a toilet that was partly screened, but had ‘no door’ and an ‘opening [that] faced a public thoroughfare’. He expressed particular concern at the situation of an elderly and wheelchair-bound resident whose toilet enclosure was constructed out of pieces of wood that made wheelchair access almost impossible and lacked a roof.Footnote ⁵⁶ In outlining these aspects of life in Makhaza, Justice Erasmus remarked that it was ‘disturbing to note from correspondence between the consulting engineers and the municipal managers’ that the unenclosed toilets were jokingly referred to as ‘[loos] with a view’. This terminology ‘is reprehensible’, he said, ‘and fails to afford any regard to the dignity of poor people, compelled to use these toilets in unfortunate circumstances’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Overall, the judge opined that the municipal authorities had ‘lost sight of the needs of the poorest of the poor and their human dignity’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a study of the Beja case and related developments, Steven Robins comments that, prior to this point, ‘the shocking sanitation conditions in [South African] informal settlements seldom made it into the mainstream media or national political discourse’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thanks to the ‘spectacular image of the open toilet’, that public silence was broken, and sanitation came to be framed as a matter of broad public interest, and hence a ‘concern for politicians, activists, journalists, citizens’ – and, as we have seen, human rights commissioners and judges.Footnote ⁶⁰ Or rather, for the sanitation deficits of course had a context, ‘this spectacle of the open toilet came to stand in for the indignities and injustices of daily life under apartheid as well as the limits of transformation after apartheid’.Footnote ⁶¹ With clear implications for post-apartheid policy, the unenclosed toilets of Khayelitsha challenged dominant narratives about ‘transitional justice’, and increased the ‘visibility of everyday realities of structural poverty’ that could ‘only be addressed by long-term state interventions at a systemic level’.Footnote ⁶²

That said, Robins also comments that Justice Erasmus’s language in the Beja case was ‘easily assimilated into an official public script that re-enacted the commitment of the caring, post-revolutionary state’.Footnote ⁶³ The judgment opened with reference to the idea that South Africa’s Constitution ‘has as its primary objective the protection and the restoration of human dignity’, and emphasised that the corollary of this was that ‘[w]e have a duty, more particularly public representatives and government [have a duty,] to promote human dignity’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Constitutionally mandated to see to the dignity and equal worth of all South Africans, the state could not tolerate open toilets, just as it could have no truck with contemptuous engineers and managers disposed to make light of the sufferings of the poor. With regard to the immediate issues of sanitation faced by Ntombentsha Beja and her fellow residents, it seems to have been a result of the judgment, and at any rate of the larger open toilet scandal, to put an end to the installation by city authorities of unenclosed flush toilets. As would soon become clear, however, Cape Town’s ‘toilet wars’ were only just beginning.

A further major episode erupted in 2013. This related to another scheme of sanitation in Khayelitsha informal settlements, involving the provision of portable toilets. Presented as a temporary measure, portable toilets had been placed in some parts of the area for many years. Toilets of that sort have detachable waste tanks which need frequent emptying, but there were problems with the municipal arrangements for collecting the waste tanks, and the portable toilets were commonly in an atrocious state. At best, they suffused residents’ dwellings with the smell of human waste. Efforts to avoid having to go into them included the use of makeshift pits, plastic bags, or toilets belonging to relatives or friends some distance away. To draw attention to this situation, a campaign of direct action was initiated that saw the contents of portable toilets deposited in a number of public places.Footnote ⁶⁵ Faeces was thrown onto the steps of the provincial parliament, onto the entrance of a government building, onto officials’ passing cars, onto a busy motorway, and – the target that seems to have garnered the most publicity – onto the main terminal building of Cape Town International Airport. City centre demonstrations were also held at which protesters came with portable toilets and sat on them, and wore or waved around cardboard cutouts of toilet seats.

As in the Johannesburg women’s march, there thus unfolded on Cape Town’s streets an ironic performance of indignity. These protesters staged a parody of abjection that again resignified shame and threw it – now literally in the form of excrement hurled from portable toilets – back at the state. Writing about the history of the portable toilet, Nadine Botha traces its passage ‘from camping accessory to protest totem’.Footnote ⁶⁶ She explains that the first patent for a portable toilet was filed by the Thetford Corporation of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969. We learn from her that Thetford portable toilets, along with another brand, are those used in the informal settlements of Khayelitsha, though apparently there is no mention in the company’s publicity material of bulk sales to the City of Cape Town. The latest models of Thetford’s portable toilet receive glowing reviews on Amazon from recreational vehicle users, truck drivers, boat owners and campers. As Botha observes, however, occasional use of well-maintained portable toilets by people with access to a conventional toilet in their regular lives is one thing. Daily use of poorly maintained portable toilets over many years by large households whose only other sanitation options are as bad or worse is quite another.Footnote ⁶⁷

Botha proposes that ‘[w]hat makes the [portable toilet] such a potent totem is that … it is “actual poverty” … not just a signifier. Its vulgarity ridicules state power’, puncturing official pretensions to dignity, decency and the pursuit of social justice for all.Footnote ⁶⁸ As she tells it, the portable toilet ‘facilitates the ongoing production of dispensable lives, on which basis the Cape Colony was founded, and it reveals the maintenance of beliefs and behaviors used to validate this production’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Pointing to the ‘simple urgency … of too many South Africans living too close to their own waste’, Shannon Jackson and Steven Robins also remark on the sense in which Khayelitsha portable toilets belong with a pattern of social exclusion that renders residents of informal settlements themselves a kind of waste.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like Botha, they connect this to Cape Town’s longer history of racial and spatial ordering which, from early colonial times, conflated the original inhabitants with contaminating waste and expelled them outside the city limits. Jackson and Robins write of a ‘potent semiotics of waste’, with excrement now functioning as a ‘weapon of political reversal’.Footnote ⁷¹ Through the actions of these toilet warriors, the undignified sights and smells of the periphery were being brought to, flung at, released in, and – crucially – made belongings of the privileged centre.Footnote ⁷²

The Long Walk

Why were prepayment water meters installed in Phiri? Why were toilets provided in Makhaza without walls? Budgetary considerations were clearly important, but I want to mention now another factor, highlighted in a statement by a leading Cape Town official of the time. She said, ‘We have come to the conclusion that the best way to instil a sense of ownership and an ethos of respecting property is for each family to contribute to the construction and maintenance of their own toilet.’ Residents of Makhaza and adjacent informal settlements were being left to build their own enclosures at least in part because this encouraged ‘self-reliance and initiative’.Footnote ⁷³ In reflections on the toilet controversies, Brendon Barnes provides insight into the significance of familiar themes along those lines for infrastructural improvement in South Africa.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Barnes, the ‘post-apartheid state has promoted a version of active citizenship that … acknowledges rights but emphasizes agency, choice, volition, responsibility and participation’. Communities are expected to ‘help build facilities’ and at the least to ‘adopt technologies such as prepaid water meters and [portable toilets] until the state can figure out long term solutions’. Within this discourse, he explains, ‘poor South Africans have a right to be unhappy about the slow progress of South Africa’s development, but they should express their discontent responsibly’, through voting and other recognised political channels.Footnote ⁷⁵

Barnes describes state-sponsored campaigns that also seek to mould behaviour in other ways. In connection with the installation of prepayment water meters, citizens were advised on how to use water responsibly (including how many times to flush the toilet). They were also exhorted to regard payment for water as an act of responsible citizenship, by means of such slogans as ‘your right to services equals your right to pay’ and ‘I’ve paid for my services, have you?’.Footnote ⁷⁶ From this perspective, prepayment water meters, toilets without enclosures, and portable toilets are not just (deficient) modes of sanitation. They are ‘moral pedagogical devices’Footnote ⁷⁷ that provide instruction in what it is to be a good citizen. I indicated at the beginning of this chapter that Durban would be part of my story, and I want now to refer to a final set of toilet-related measures which have provided similar instruction for the racialised poor of that city and surrounds, but which differ in that they are an outcome of efforts in South Africa and elsewhere to ‘innovate’ the state’s way out of the problem of inadequate sanitation. Here, as we will see, the accent is on technological solutions – new objects, better-designed devices for dealing with human waste, to replace the bad, old, undignified ones.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the Durban water authorities rolled out two types of dry toilets for use in peri-urban areas not connected to its sewerage system: Ventilated Improved Pit (‘VIP’) toilets and Urine Diversion (‘UD’) toilets. VIP toilets were originally invented in the 1970s by a research laboratory in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. These are designed to reduce odours and inhibit the breeding of flies – unavoidable issues with the standard form of pit latrine – through the addition of a vertical ventilation pipe. The ventilation pipe enables air to circulate in the latrine, and directs flies and other insects towards the exterior light, where they are trapped by a wire mesh covering. UD toilets are a much newer and more sophisticated technology involving sealed units which divert urine into a separate compartment so that faeces can dry out more quickly and be more readily disposed of. In keeping with the ethos of responsibilisation just mentioned, UD toilets are self-maintained toilets. Once provided with them, householders must dig holes and dispose of the residue of faecal matter at suitable intervals themselves. In August 2010, a workshop was held to discuss the introduction of UD toilets in Durban, and Barbara Penner was among those attending.

Penner recalls that ‘[a]t first glance, the UD toilets appeared to me a relatively straightforward solution to the problem of providing basic sanitation to water-stressed regions’ such as Durban.Footnote ⁷⁸ After all, the ‘developed world’s waterborne model of sanitation, with its reliance on “big system” infrastructure’, needs rethinking, and not only for reasons of cost. Water scarcity is only getting worse due to climate change. But the Durban scheme had encountered considerable community resistance. For while the ‘UD toilet is unquestionably an “improved” form of sanitation if compared to a bucket, pit latrine or [portable toilet]’, it did not look so good to residents when set against the plumbed-in flush toilet. Indeed, the UD toilet’s self-maintained technology ‘contrasts sharply with that in full service areas where householders do not maintain pipes beyond their property line and are able to “flush and forget” their waste’. The key point was that residents needed only to ‘look at the country’s still predominantly white privileged class – whose members … are not expected to use UD toilets – for proof that the distribution of sanitation options largely follows existing race and class lines’. In the end, Penner proposes that a ‘central reason why improvement projects stumble is … asymmetrical provision and resource allocation’. ‘If the effort to achieve social justice and to conserve resources is to be credible’, she writes, ‘the behavior, habits and expectations of full-service users must be reformed alongside those on the bottom rung (who, let us not forget, consume the least)’.

Some years after Penner’s seminar, Noshipo Mkhize and colleagues conducted a study of attitudes to UD toilets by their users in Durban. Among Mkhize and colleagues’ findings was that all of those surveyed ‘aspired to have a flush toilet, which is associated with being a first class citizen’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Peter Redfield and Steven Robins have an illuminating take on the gap here between popular and official thinking.Footnote ⁸⁰ In their analysis, two quite distinct conceptions of first-class citizenship or, in this book’s terms, dignified life can be discerned in this context, corresponding to two quite distinct technopolitical ‘imaginaries’. Starting on the official side, there is a ‘humanitarian design imaginary’. I have been speaking about UD toilets, but in fact this is one of many attempts in recent decades to develop new forms of dry toilet, especially for low- and middle-income countries where infrastructure is scant, and significant proportions of the population lack adequate sanitation. Underpinning these attempts is the claim that the flush toilet, however originally progressive and still valuable, fails to meet global needs. In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched a ‘Reinvent the Toilet Challenge’, and since then, a series of ‘reinvented toilet’ fairs have been held in various parts of the world.Footnote ⁸¹

If you visit the website of a design consultancy called Bridge Factory, you will see pictures and a description of a toilet that won first prize in another humanitarian industrial design competition relating to sanitation.Footnote ⁸² No prizes, however, for guessing the name of that toilet: ‘Dignity’. The Dignity toilet is an attractive lime-green and white moulded plastic object reminiscent of a piece of modernist furniture, and is said to provide ‘sealed sanitary storage for solid waste for three people for approximately seven days’.Footnote ⁸³ After that period, the toilet is removed from its ‘dock’ and taken to a ‘pre-determined, communal area’, where its contents are ‘manually augered’ – bored down – into the soil for decomposition. Bridge Factory’s promotional material bills the Dignity toilet as a ‘product that inspires pride in its owners, not a disposable commodity’. It is this way of approaching things that constitutes what Redfield and Robins term the humanitarian design imaginary. In their words, ‘[f]or the designers, dignity is a question of technology and the aesthetics of individual experience’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Humanitarian designers and their utilities-sector customers conjure ‘dignified living’ through innovative ‘sanitation solutions’ that combine clever engineering with careful attention to design (and marketing).

To this, Redfield and Robins counterpose a quite different ‘social justice imaginary’. Figuring dignity as instead a political issue and problem of social justice, the social justice imaginary is reflected in the events I have mostly been narrating in this chapter and in the findings of Mkhize and colleagues about attitudes to UD toilets in Durban. Central to its way of approaching things is a belief that the question of dignified living cannot be addressed without reference to history and its legacies in the present. Whereas the humanitarian design imaginary largely ‘floats free of any specific legacy of the past’ (except the invention of the water closet itself),Footnote ⁸⁵ the social justice imaginary invokes an intimate history of racial and gender injustice with notable geographical dimensions. To be sure, the intimacy of the toilet and what goes on there also has a history and a geography, not to mention, for some theorists, a psychology.Footnote ⁸⁶ The humanitarian design imaginary and the social justice imaginary co-exist in a world shaped by those developments. Where the social justice imaginary departs is in holding that dignity in the sphere of sanitation is not just a technological challenge (however much it may also be that) and an associated promotional strategy; it is a problem of structural inequality.

In her work on portable toilets, Botha suggests that the passage from camping accessory to protest totem happened precisely because, in the relevant context, portable toilets became problems that could not ‘be solved by replacing’ existing objects with other objects.Footnote ⁸⁷ Khayelitsha’s portable toilets were not simple ‘[designs] to be improved’, and nor was its crisis of sanitation merely a ‘technical equation of users, faeces, grid, and budget’.Footnote ⁸⁸ At stake was an ‘historical narrative about human beings, dignity, spatial justice, and inclusion’.Footnote ⁸⁹ ‘The toilet wars in Cape Town are about far more than sanitation’, she writes, ‘and … sanitation is not just toilets’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Social Justice Coalition, to the activities of which Botha refers in her essay, is a Cape Town-based non-governmental organisation active in the area of sanitation. On 21 March 2010, the organisation staged a protest they called the ‘Long Walk to Human Dignity’.Footnote ⁹¹ The protest involved SJC members forming a long, snaking queue for a public toilet in the wealthy Cape Town district of Sea Point. One reads on the organisation’s website that ‘[i]n this area – as in other affluent suburbs – public toilets are cleaned and maintained regularly by a dedicated caretaker, well lit, and monitored frequently by security personnel. This is in stark contrast to [the] public toilets [in Khayelitsha], which are unsafe, never cleaned or maintained, nor provided with the luxuries of toilet paper or a simple toilet seat.’

The ‘Long Walk to Human Dignity’ alludes, of course, to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. In a much-quoted passage of that book, Mandela writes of how prison and the authorities conspired to rob him of his dignity, and of how that paradoxically assured that he would survive, inasmuch as ‘any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure’.Footnote ⁹² It’s a noble and appealing sentiment, but the Long Walk to Human Dignity refocuses on indignity and its persistence after, and notwithstanding, liberation. At the level of ordinary life, the Long Walk to Human Dignity reminds us of the indignity of being deprived of access to a clean and safe toilet, along with the indignity of being provided with a toilet that preserves your status as a second-class citizen, the indignity of being precluded, when you have a flush toilet, from using the flush with the frequency you deem necessary, and the indignity of knowing that such is the social-systemic order under which you live that privileged South Africans, spared these experiences, rob you of your dignity each and every day.Footnote ⁹³

And Whites Must See It

In the same transitional decade as Long Walk to Freedom came out, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace appeared.Footnote ⁹⁴ It tells the story of David Lurie, a lecturer in English literature at a university in Cape Town, and his adult daughter Lucy, who lives on a farm in the nearby Eastern Cape. After many vicissitudes, David and Lucy have a discussion about Lucy’s future. Something terrible has happened to her, and she has decided that she needs to make a new start, and that, in doing so, there is a particular course of action she must follow which involves humiliation and self-abnegation, and seems completely at odds with her interests and welfare. When David expresses dismay, this is how Lucy responds:

Disgrace is often read as an allegory of post-apartheid South Africa and a critique of the Truth and Reconciliation process that was ongoing at the time it was written. Lucy is a white South African, and here Coetzee is having her express the belief that dignity, at least as she has known and enjoyed it, must be renounced, as part of the same political and social order that brought South Africa ‘cards’, ‘weapons’, ‘property’ and ‘rights’. We might understand that catalogue to imply the intersection of white supremacy (symbolised by the identity ‘cards’ of the apartheid era), violent subjugation (‘weapons’), economic exploitation (‘property’) and legally protected privilege (‘rights’). A fantastically complex novel, Disgrace does not, I think, purport to resolve the unsettling issues it raises. Regarding dignity, one thing it does clearly signal, however, is that confined to the realm of abstract metaphysics the issues are not.

We have seen in this chapter how dignity and indignity have played a part in disputes over inequality and sanitation in post-apartheid South Africa. Starting with Gordimer’s July, of whom Maureen finally learns that being ‘dignified for her’ meant nothing, we have seen how dignity has been variously fought for, measured out, sent up, turned down, thrown back, and finally, in Coetzee’s novel, given away. It has been defended as a constitutional right, and in the process, exposed to view as a product of the decisions of courts, policy-makers, officials and managers. It is what Tutu and other black South Africans had trampled underfoot and spat on during apartheid times, and what Mandela would not part with while he was in prison at any price. It is the touchstone of South Africa’s post-apartheid legal order and the right to 1.5 toilet flushes per day. It is the name of a reinvented toilet which does not allow you to flush and forget, but yet is not a disposable commodity.

There is just one further element I wish to add to the mix that relates to the larger struggle within which these matters find their place. It is well known that the Rhodes Must Fall campaign emerged in early 2015 in connection with a longstanding demand to have a bronze statue of the mining magnate and leading colonial governor and ideologue, Cecil Rhodes, removed from the campus of the University of Cape Town. Erected in 1934, the statue stood on a high plinth at the foot of the steps leading up to the university’s convocation hall where ceremonial occasions are held, and it depicted Rhodes seated and with a contemplative air. The university authorities eventually hired a crane to take it away on 9 April 2015. For its part, Rhodes Must Fall went on to catalyse and energise a project of decolonial activism in higher education, cultural heritage and everything else, both in South Africa and around the world. What may be less well-known is how this great movement began.

On 12 March 2015, one Chumani Maxwele, a 30-year-old fourth-year political science student, stood beneath the statue of Rhodes and, with all his force, flung up at it the contents of a portable toilet which he had carried to the campus in a minibus from his home in Khayelitsha.Footnote ⁹⁶ Addressing the assembled crowd, he is reported to have declared: ‘There is no [black] collective history here – where are our heroes and ancestors?’Footnote ⁹⁷ It was a powerful point about practices of memorialisation and how they may be suffused with the lingering stench of empire. But in a later interview, Maxwele explained that there was also something else he wanted to communicate. He said that he threw faeces at the statue to highlight ‘our shame’. ‘We want white people to know how we live’, he told the interviewer. ‘We live in poo. I am from a very poor family; we are using portaloos [portable toilets] … In order for me to bring evidence, I have to give Cecil John Rhodes a poo shower and whites will have to see it.’Footnote ⁹⁸