Excremental mobilities and minimal technopolitics: Toilets, race, and expulsion in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Centreing an everyday form of human expulsion – defecation – this article demonstrates that toilets produced colonial racial orders in colonial Tanzania through the different excremental mobilities their materialities allowed, including both movement and immobility. It specifically argues that colonial pit toilets affixed excrement to African spaces and helped create a form of minimal technopolitics that expelled infrastructural possibilities from subsequent time periods.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• sanitation
• race
• Africa
• mobility

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 As Tasha Rijke-Epstein (2019) demonstrates for Madagascar. A note on terminology: Tanganyika won independence in 1961 and unified with Zanzibar in 1964 to become Tanzania. I use Tanganyika (or colonial Tanzania) to refer to the colonial period and Tanzania to refer to the independent period.

2 See Edward and Hård (2020, 36–38) on the details of maintenance and project deferral for drainage infrastructure in Dar es Salaam more broadly. Frank Edward’s dissertation (2022a) is the must read for the intersection of city planning, infrastructure, and engineering across colonial and national periods.

3 Frank Edward (2022a) provides a detailed analysis of the contradictions and paternalism of post-World War II infrastructural policies in Dar es Salaam (141). A rich literature on ujamaa’s anti-urbanisms includes Ivaska (2011), Brennan (2012), Callaci (2017), Fair (2018), and Brownell (2020).

4 And hence the Kiswahil saying in Mjini Taabu (The City is Trouble) (1985), ‘The toilet of one is another’s sitting room’ (Mloka 1985, 81).

5 This lack of demarcation between spaces of expulsion and spaces of dwelling may have referenced the general distancing of social spaces and toilets in Swahili house designs (Wynne-Jones 2020).

6 More broadly, see Esty 1999 and Mavhunga 2014.

7 Notably in contrast to the emergence of toilets as a technical solution as Redfield (2013) and Redfield and Robins (2016b, 175) establish.

8 On links between mobility and vernacular approaches to human waste, see Mavhunga (2014, 231).

9 As others have noted, one must carefully navigate the idea of infrastructural gaps. There is a tendency to assume the universal desirability of northern infrastructural models, on the one hand, and the equal problematic notion of completeness, on the other.

10 This also builds on the specific observation by Antina von Schnitzler (2016) regarding apartheid and infrastructure as well as a longer thread of work about built worlds and political economy by Walter Rodney (1972), Aimé Césaire (1950) 2001), Laura Fair (2018), Bissell (2011), and Ralph Austen (1987). Mehta’s (1997) observations about the exclusionary nature of liberalism take technological form here, as well.

11 I draw from a fantastic literature on toilets, waste, and cleanliness that includes Anderson (2006; 2010), Esty (1999), Redfield and Robins (2016), and Rijke-Epstein (2019) while, for the sake of space, focusing on materialities and mobilities. A shorter version of this section appears on the website Somatosphere as, ‘Poop’, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

12 For examples of such distancing and safeguarding in Gold Coast, see Amoako-Gyampah’s work (2023, 3–5). Emily Reute, who wrote extensively about Zanzibar, never mentioned the culture of waste Christie’s argument rested upon. After she moved to Germany, she noted cultural differences pertaining to homes, public life, and decorum, but she does not remark upon any clear difference pertaining to pooping or cleanliness between German towns and Zanzibar (Reute 1989).

13 Echoing Packard’s work on health in South African labour compounds (1989).

14 ‘Conversion of Municipal Wastes, Night soil and Bazaar Refuse into Humus’, 4, Tanganyika Secretariat (TS) 22592 Vol. I, Tanzania Nation Archives (TNA).

15 ‘Annual Report Transport Department 1926’, TNA/3046/20. Frank Edward (2022a) provides the deepest analysis of drainage infrastructures in Dar es Salaam. Though Edward also highlights moments of not building or maintaining, he also delves into the cultures of colonial engineering that failed to see or enact infrastructural ‘interconnectedness’ in Dar es Salaam (152). As Nancy Rose Hunt (Hunt 1999) writes of missions in the Congo, such excremental work could be done by African domestic labour using just buckets (146–148).

16 See also, Rijke-Epstein (2019).

17 J.O. Drinkwald, Memo, August 9, 1932, Acc. 33, 86, TNA.

18 Tanganyika Asian Civil Service Association (Tabora Branch), August 26, 1932, Acc. 33, TNA.

19 Provincial Commissioner (Tabora), October 29, 1931, Acc. 33, TNA.

20 Such ‘native paths’ were a source of infrastructural angst for officials who wanted to control migrant mobility. See Grace (2021).

21 Colonial officials struggled to know which paths labourers used let alone draw deep knowledge about the relationship between scat and long-distance walking infrastructure. See Grace (2021), Chapter 1.

22 ‘Report to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Tanganyika Territory, 1926’, AB 8 1733:6, TNA.

23 Minute, L. Watrall, September 14, 1929, TS 10969. See also: Provincial Commissioner, Dodoma, October 15, 1927, TS 10969.

24 W.H. Percival, ‘Handyman Course’, 1936, TS 25735.

25 Office of the Director of Medical and Sanitary Services to the Chief Secretary, ‘Method of Refuse Disposal in Dar es Salaam’, 19 October 1927, TS 11292; Cess Pit Emptying Service in Dodoma, TS 34364.

26 Director of Medical and Sanitation Services (Moshi), April 29, 1930, TS 11292.

27 B.K. Christian to Provincial Commissioner (Kigoma), October 3, 1931, TS 11292.

28 Frank Edward describes a similar situation for drainage infrastructure for colonia Dar es Salaam as the ‘British applied outdated road engineering solutions’ and ‘cheap and sub-standard drainage designs’ (2022b, 37)

29 Frank Edward (2022a) points out that Tanganyika received CDF funds in the wake of flooding at the city’s golf course, a phenomenon which led to increased malaria prevalence. This episode also stemmed from a case of not building recommended drainage (99).

30 R.R. Scott, October 19, 1927, TS 11292.

31 ‘Notes on Camp Hygiene for Employers of Labourers’, TS 22798, TNA.

32 Acting Provincial Commissioner to the Director of Medical and Sanitary Services Dar es Salaam, ‘Latrines and Incinerators at Cotton Markets’, 6 July 1930, TS 11292.

33 District Officer Pike to the Provincial Commissioner, February 9, 1938, 96, ACC 61/14/18/I.

34 For a similar situation in colonial Dar es Salaam, see Frank Edward (2022b) on questions of ‘planned vulnerability’. Césaire (1950) 2001) and Rodney (1972) wrote about such austerities as both ‘pseudo-humanism’ and ‘underdevelopment’. These are also material forms of what Sara Berry has called, ‘hegemony on a shoestring’ (1992) as well as the ways in which Bissell observes that state weakness works (2011).

35 I like the way Hecht’s (2001) definition of technopolitical regime turns decisions not to build into modes of acting, thinking, and framing in colonial bureaucracies. For an application, see: Grace (2021). More recently, Hecht identifies similar forms of minimalism as a core feature of 'residual governance' (Hecht 2023, 29–30) while Livingston describes a hollowed-out, privatized form of technopolitics undergiriding 'the current consumption-based model of public health' (Livingston 2019, 23).

36 No author. No title. BBC Swahili, Facebook video, 10 March 2022.

37 No author. No title. BBC Swahili, Facebook video, 10 March 2022.

38 Mavhunga (2014, 231) describes a similar process. Frank Edward (2022bb) shows that, historically, such issues in Dar es Salaam come from colonial cultures of planning that ignored how land had long been used to avoid residence in flood prone areas.

39 The destruction of housing along new corridors for Dar es Salaam’s Bus Rapid Transit system offers one recent example of the intersection of urban population expulsion and the construction of new infrastructure.

40 This recalls Kimari and Ernstson’s (2020) coinage of the term ‘imperial invitation’ – a condition in which promises of an infrastructural rupture in eras of sovereignty replicate and extend materialities, political economies, and racial myths from the colonial period (833).

41 This extends Furlong’s (2014) observation that disrepair can gain momentum – and thus beyond the infrastructural ideals of the North where theories of momentum have been forged – to minimalist technologies like the latrine, that are not broken but also do not align with modernist infrastructural ideals. Without using this language, Edward and Hård (2020) describe the challenge of designing in a context which required making up for unmaintained systems (36–38).

42 The new areas with piped sewage included the university, one part of Mikocheni, Mgulani, and Lugalo military barracks.

43 For the relationship between time and infrastructure, see Edwards (2003).