The Big Necessity (14 page)

Most of the toilets are broken, so children have used the floor. When that gets too dirty, Trevor says they will go to the nearest available facility, which is usually in a shebeen, a township bar, and they'll stop for a beer while they're there. Or they'll wait and suffer. The consequence is that children hate school. This enrages Trevor. “They know that once they get in the schoolyard they've got no place to pee. You can imagine if you are driving and you want to pee, you can't concentrate anymore. Now how about listening to a teacher when you feel like that?” This is not more Mulaudzi marketing. School attendance and sanitation have been linked in dozens of studies. UNICEF estimates that one in three girls in sub-Saharan Africa drop out of school, either when they're menstruating, or permanently, because of poor sanitation facilities. In Tanzania, India, and Bangladesh, when schools installed decent latrines, school enrollment increased by up to 15 percent.

Trevor is fond of saying that he doesn't promote cleaning toilets but
clean toilets. Cleaning is a one-shot; clean toilets require sustainable effort. He tries to persuade schools to change their habits by doing toilet espionage; he sneaks in and takes photographs, then uses them as moral leverage to shame the staff into action. But it has only worked in his home province of Venda. Ten Venda schools now sell toilet paper to raise cash to keep their toilets clean. They sell it for two rand a roll and get 50 cents profit. The shock and awe of Trevor's naming and shaming technique can be transformed into calm sustainability, with some imagination and effort.

Trevor is a showman, as much as his former Minister for Toilets, but he has a serious cause. His business card carries the slogan “What does your toilet say about you?” He tells me that he is on a divine mission. “If I'm the only one who knows why our black children aren't going to school, what will I do on the day of judgment?”

But his mission is difficult. Over the week we spend together, he seems increasingly frustrated. His method of working now has a name: social entrepreneurship, a concept popularized by the American economist Bill Drayton, who runs a foundation that funds people who want to combine business with charity. Social entrepeneurs have been getting more attention in recent years (Mechai “Mr. Condom” Viravaidya, another social entrepreneur, was recently awarded a prestigious $1 million prize by the Gates Foundation), but their influence has yet to penetrate government offices. Trevor needs access to education planners, but he claims he can't get any. He says that because he's not a charity, there's no place for him in government contracts. So I take Trevor with me on a round of official sanitation appointments. He says, “I'm playing the white woman foreigner card!” and that he would never get through the door otherwise.

In fact, he gets on winningly with Portia Makhanya, Director of Sanitation in Kasrils's former ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry. This is not difficult: she is a warm and chatty woman who used to be a mental health nurse. She is a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape, and when I ask her if she can sing the only Xhosa song I've ever heard of—Miriam Makeba's Click Song, which uses the clicks of the Xhosa language—she does so gracefully and beautifully. She also does a fine impression of a person trying to defecate in the bush with a pig nearby waiting for her to finish. For a while, she and Trevor reminisce. First about the township uprisings in
1970, when a policeman was given a choice of being killed or eating from the nearest latrine. (He chose the toilet option.) Then about their childhood latrines made from corrugated tin. So hot, hot, hot! They talk of the Amabhaca, men from the Bhaca minority tribe who emptied your family bucket latrine and were treated as untouchables. You remember? You stayed out of their way, because they were angry men, with angry scarification on their faces. And you never shook their hands.

A ten-minute appointment with Makhanya turns into a two-hour chat, and it's fun. She is honest about the realities of trying to get sanitation to 15 million people. South Africa's targets are amusingly ambitious. Bucket latrines are to be eradicated by December 2007, though there are 132,000 still in “established settlements,” and at least the same number again in illegally settled areas. Nearly five hundred clinics are supposed to get sanitation by the same date and all schools will be provided with decent latrines. But not a single clinic toilet has been built, the money has yet to be released, and our conversation is taking place six months before deadline.

To be fair, Makhanya's mandate was made more difficult when a decentralization program handed sanitation implementation to local governments. Her ministry was left with deciding norms and setting goals. She says with some weariness that “we try to influence [local governments] but we no longer have teeth.” This is another truth of sanitation; to reform it in most countries, entire systems of governance have to be changed. In South Africa, the situation is worsened by a serious lack of skills and capacity after years of apartheid, and reform seems a distant hope. I think of Ronnie Kasrils and I ask Makhanya whether there's any South African sanitation champion equal to the former Minister for Toilets. She smiles sweetly. “It's still us! With our teeth. With our false teeth.”

 

On my penultimate day in South Africa, Trevor and I fly to Cape Town brain-squeezingly early on Kulula, yet another cheery low-cost airline. I don't know who decided that low-cost airlines had to try to be funny, but they did and they do. The flight attendant says, “We have landed in Cape Town. If that's not where you want to be, that's your problem.”

We do want to be here, partly to meet Trevor's daughter, the presidential
hopeful. We're also here to meet Shoni, an old acquaintance who got in touch after hearing the radio interview. Shoni is a manager at Robben Island, Nelson Mandela's former prison, and gives us free tickets to visit. “I can't accompany you, I'm afraid,” he says over dinner. “I have to take the president of Singapore on a tour.”

The next morning, we arrive at Robben Island as the president is leaving. Trevor tells people that he runs the South African Toilet Organization, though there isn't yet any such thing. But Shoni has told this to the president, who knows Jack Sim and the WTO and wants to meet Trevor. The meeting takes place inside a circle of Singaporean journalists, who exude an urgent keenness to record this momentous event with no seeming distaste or scorn. It is a spectacle of Trevor Mulaudzi marketing, and it is as powerful as ever. We keep the tour bus waiting for ten minutes, and I am embarrassed. I ask Trevor to charm them. He gets on and says, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but that was the president of Singapore and he wanted to talk to me about shit.”

I don't know what to think of Trevor. A week of the Mulaudzi road show is alternately impressive and head-scratching. I don't doubt his enthusiasm for his cause. His plain-speaking is refreshing. But six months after I leave, there's still no official sign of the South African Toilet Organization he had promised me he was about to set up. Portia Makhanya had furnished a list of municipal education contacts, but Trevor has made no new contracts with schools.

Instead, I receive a surprising email from him. He writes that Malaysia's Deputy Minister for Housing, head of the country's toilet association, has invited him to the country to sort out its school toilets. He's going to move to Malaysia. I'm disappointed. What about those photos he shows people of schoolchildren grinning and happy because they have a decent toilet, which he captions “South Africa's Future”? What about Jack Sim's call for more homegrown toilet evangelism? But he is impervious. He's tired. “In South Africa I am not given the opportunity to do what I do best [which is] cleaning toilets. Our government does not even know me. The toilets in Malaysia are very dirty and the government needs help from professionals like me, Dr. Shit. They can't wait for me to get there. They are even giving me Malay citizenship, AMEN.”

 

 

_________________

Mumbai, India

(Author)

 

 

SPADE, BLACK, DUNG, HORSE

____________

 

 

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders, and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

In the beginning, the Original Being created four
varnas
. From his mouth came the Brahmins, who would be the priests, teachers, and intellectuals. From the arms came the Kshatriya, the warriors and rulers. From his thighs came the Vaisya, who were the administrators, the bureaucrats, the merchants; and from his feet the Being formed the Shudra, the farmers and peasants. Inside these
varnas
are thousands of subgroupings, each with a traditional occupation attached. All of it makes up the Hindu caste system, still pervasive and influential in modern India. In its report
Broken People
, Human Rights Watch summed up caste as “the world's longest surviving social hierarchy . . . a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity.” It is indeed
complex, changing from region to region and from one religious interpretation to another. But all over India one thing is common: beneath the castes are the outcastes, the polluted and the untouchable. They are untouchable because they handle human shit.

They used to be known as
bhangi
, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the Scheduled Castes, but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of
bhangi
. Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs anymore. There is more intercaste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before, but the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a
safai karamchari
. This literally means “sweeper” but is generally translated into English as “manual scavenger,” a term popularized by India's British rulers, who did nothing to eradicate the practice and much to keep it going. This scavenging has none of the usefulness of its usual meaning. There is no salvaging of waste, no making good of the discarded. Champaben recycles nothing and gains nothing. She takes filth away and for this she is considered dirt.

There are between 400,000 and 1.2 million manual scavengers in India, depending on who is compiling the figures. They are employed by private families and by municipalities, by army cantonments and railway authorities. Their job is to clean up feces wherever they present themselves: on railway tracks, in clogged sewers. Mostly, they empty India's dry latrines. A latrine is usually defined as a receptacle in the ground that holds human excreta, but dry latrines often don't bother with receptacles. They usually consist of two bricks, placed squatting distance apart on flat ground. There is no pit. There may be a channel or gutter nearby, but that would be luxury. The public ones usually have no doors, no stalls, and no water. There are still up to 10 million dry latrines in India, and they probably only survive because Champaben and others are still prepared to clean them.

I meet Champaben in a village in rural Gujarat. Like every other state in India, Gujarat is bound by the 1993 Employment of Manual
Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, which makes manual scavenging illegal on pain of a year's imprisonment or a 2,000 rupee ($45) fine. On paper, Champaben doesn't exist, and on paper, she is as free as the next villager. Untouchability has been illegal in India since 1949, when it was abolished by means of Article 17 of the Constitution of India.