By
Sekoetlane Jacob Phamodi, Amandla Magazine
There
is a big stink in Cape Town. Literally. For some years, now, the
so-called ‘toilet wars’ have been a recurrent feature in the
political battles waged in the Western Cape. The first of these was
highlighted in 2010, when Khayelitsha residents took to the streets
over undignified, uncovered toilet structures the City of Cape Town
had erected along the N1 highway, supposedly to service their
sanitation needs.
More
recently, the serious and still unresolved complaints over toilets
resurfaced when Khayelitsha residents, reportedly led by members of
the ANC Youth League, emptied buckets of human waste on the steps of
the Western Cape Legislature and flung buckets of human waste at
Western Cape Premier, Helen Zille, and the City’s mayor, Patricia
De Lille. The complaint underlying this protest action was the same:
residents were unsatisfied with the unsuitable chemical, container
and portable flush toilet (PFT) facilities that the City had provided
them.
In
their responses, both the Western Cape Premier and City’s Mayor
belaboured the City’s ‘extensive efforts’ to provide the
affected communities with ‘sanitary and dignified’ ablution
facilities. The Mayor outlined the inordinate ‘resistance’ the
City had faced in rolling PFTs out in some communities. The Premier
went as far as dismissing the protest action as no more than
opportunistic political grandstanding by the ANC Youth League
(ANCYL.)
It
bears stating that the Western Cape Premier routinely dismisses
unfavourable civil unrest and protest action by poor and landless
blacks as no more than part of the ANCYL’s campaign to render the
DA-led province ungovernable. Seemingly, poor and landless blacks
lack the agency to cry foul over the appalling and racially
articulated working and living conditions they are systematically
locked into, and often by state power. And true as these assertions
might be in this case, whether in part or in whole, one thing was
been consistently lacking in the City and the Provincial government’s
rhetoric: the fact of the wholly appalling conditions under which
residents are made to relieve themselves.
As
it waxed lyrical about the temporary and fixed toilet structures it
had erected along roadsides and riverbanks, not once was the
indignity of having to use overworked and underserviced communal
ablution facilities acknowledged by the City. Nor was the very real
risk of robbery, assault and rape that came with using these
facilities given a moment’s thought.
about
the flushable, sealable and presumably sanitary PFT solution it had
rolled out in the thousands, little was said by the City about how
the people who must use them often had to do so in their often
single-roomed tin-shack structures. This sanitary and dignified
solution at least meant a convenient place in which people could
relieve themselves: the same room occupied by their intimate
partners, parents, and children, the same room in which they must
sleep and receive their guests and prepare their meals. Crudely put,
these residents were quite simply made to shit where they eat. And
not once was this even acknowledged by the powers that be.
Instead,
residents were positioned as unthinking political pawns in the
service of disruptive ANC upstarts and as ungrateful obstacles in the
City’s valorous attempts in progressively realising their basic
sanitation needs. Their conduct was portrayed as criminal and the
effluent they had cast on State institutions and office bearers as
violence. Of course, in the world of spin and political double-speak,
it is unsurprising that the real violence would be so easily elided.
The
Western Cape provincial government and City of Cape Town have almost
made an art of anti-poor and anti-black rhetoric. The City and the DA
attempt to systematically delegitimise the voices of legitimately
aggrieved residents by weaving it in the narrative of the ANC’s
desperate scramble for the DA-governed Western Cape. They criminalise
the landless and destitute by calling them land invaders, in order to
justify their unlawful exercise of State power in effecting forced
removals through the invocation of obscure and unconstitutional
common-law instruments. They coerce residents to make choices between
the barest of services and no services at all and present these to
the world as realchoices. They annually encourage poor
and landless blacks to prepare for the devastation
that will be left behind by runaway shack fires and
flash-floods instead of eradicating them altogether.
Indeed,
contrary to how they have been framed in the public discourse, the
‘toilet wars’ are not so much about toilets per se.
They signify the structural violence that poor and landless blacks
have been locked in by the State and the institutions of power that
comprise it. They belie the waste in which people have been forced to
live knee-deep in the ghettoes and shanty-towns that they have been
relegated to for generations. They represent 20 years of an assault
on the unassailable right to human dignity promised in that first
compact for freedom after decades of institutionalised State
violence.
While
they make up the overwhelming majority, poor and landless blacks
remain unseen and unacknowledged in this country. The State remains
unresponsive to their needs, only offering the most basic and
palliative solutions to the structural conditions they fight
ceaselessly and, perhaps, even hopelessly, to get through every day.
The war over excrement happening in Cape Town is not simply a war
over what constitutes a dignified toilet, as it has been so narrowly
defined. It is a war over basic sanitation, meaning much more than
being able to shit indoors. It is a war over decent housing. It is a
war over that most essential value among a dispossessed people: land.
It is a war over being seen and being accorded one’s inherent worth
as a human being. It is a war that poor and landless blacks have been
fighting in this country for centuries.
