While my previous post outlines the issues associated with inadequate sanitation facilities, this post addresses rights-based solutions in South Africa.
In South Africa, there is a unique expectation for WASH related problems to be remedied by the state. Access to adequate sanitation infrastructure is considered a fundamental civilian right, embodied within the post-apartheid commitment to transitional justice and inclusive development. However, these promises routinely run up against limitations and barriers that result from a lack of financial resources and institutional capacity. In the WASH sector, a juxtaposition between entrenched national programmes, funding the provision of toilets through the government, and deepening sanitation inequality is evident.
The top-down approaches through which the toilets are inappropriately implemented illustrates this, paralleling a previously mentioned example in Kenya cautioning against non-consultative project funding.Tied to enriching political campaigns, rather than the community in need, building toilets have increasingly framed WASH-related issues in South Africa, as they are perceived to yield fast, visible results.
However, the 2011 ‘toilet wars’ in the Western Cape exemplified the reality of this, with black civilians protesting against the installation of inadequate, unenclosed toilets in their townships. Brought to the public sphere, the open toilet symbolised not only a sanitation concern, but a disturbing return of racism, injustice and indignity, that the post-Mandela era of democratic politics promised to transform.
An alternate gendered reading of the ‘toilet wars’ opposes Hannah Ardent’s masculinist argument, that everything within the female dominated private domain is not a political matter of concern, by bringing household matters such as defecation, toilets and sanitation to the fore.
Considering how the unenclosed toilets encouraged ‘improvised solutions’ in their stead, the ‘toilet wars’ were threaded with gender politics, regarding how open defecation disproportionally impacts women. To expand upon my previous post, this is because culturally and religiously informed expectations to protect female privacy, combined with the lack of household toilet facilities means women travel long distances to find private places to openly defecate and manage their menstrual needs. This significantly endangers them to sexual assault and evokes feelings of shame and helplessness when exposed, decreasing psychological health. Physically, the act of squatting to urinate disproportionally endangers women to soil-transmitted infections and diarrhoeal diseases.
For these reasons, I would maintain that the unenclosed toilet is not only a symbol of sanitation and apartheid, but also of gender injustice, which the literature analysing the ‘toilet wars’ seems to overlook.
While the ‘toilet wars’ subsided after the next election, limitations to the state’s slow transitional justice model and dissatisfaction with foreign development facilitators remain, giving rise to community based solutions which my next posts will interrogate.
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