‘This shit is political; shit is real.’ The politics of sanitation, protest, and the neoliberal, post-apartheid city

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors discuss the use of shit in a series of protests between 2011 and 2017 in the City of Cape Town, South Africa. They specifically interrogate with how these protests mobilised the abject body as a tactical site of political performance, and employ performance as an organising metaphor and conceptual language for interrogating the politics and implications of the act of throwing shit as a tool of protest. In addition, they consider the modes of activism implicit in a ‘politics of shit’, and compare a case study from India with that of Khayelitsha in South Africa in order to engage with Steven Robins’ understanding of ‘slow activism’ and the ‘politics of the ordinary’ as more sustainable and generative models of resistance to neoliberal statehood.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• protest
• township
• abjection
• neoliberalism
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article uses the term ‘shit’, in keeping with Arjun Appadurai’s ‘politics of shit’ (2001, 37) as discussed later in the article.

2. For another example in Venezuela, see The Guardian, Wed 10 May 2017.

3. The Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of income distribution among a population, is commonly used to represent income inequality (see Gini 1912).

4. Protests around caste, poverty and the lack of sanitation in India are ongoing. A United Nations study (Al Jazeera 2010) shows that more Indian people have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet.

5. See, for example, Madison (2010), Gunner (2009), Cohen-Cruz (1998), and Schechner (1993) (pp, 45–93).

6. The ‘bucket’ system consists of a dry toilet (a bucket). The bucket toilets are unhygienic but still prevalent. The buckets are collected by sanitation trucks.

7. Abahlali baseMjondolo is a South African social justice movement that advocates for informal shack dwellers, and mobilises communities around issues related to housing, service delivery and other challenges. The name, Abahlali baseMjondolo, is the Zulu term for people who dwell in shacks or informal settlements and translates literally to ‘shack dwellers’ in English.

8. Although many activists were arrested and charged, the outcome of this is beyond the scope of discussion in this article.

9. The Defiance campaign was led by the Congress Alliance comprising inter alia, the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress and the Congress of Democrats. The campaigning resulted in the drawing up of the Freedom Charter in 1955.

10. In 2018 the crisis of sanitation in India has erupted again, specifically by the Dalits, the cast of people who are untouchable because of their labour removing human and other waste.

11. NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Veronica Baxter

Veronica Baxter (Ph.D.) has taught at South African and UK universities over the past thirty years, and currently teaches and supervises students in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, University of Cape Town. Her research is mainly concerned with applied/social theatre in health, education and social justice contexts. Her most recent publications are Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing, (co-edited and written with Katharine E Low, Bloomsbury 2017), chapters in Methuen Drama Guide to South African Theatre (Middeke, Schnierer and Homann, 2015) and New Territories: Reconfiguring Theatre and Drama in post-apartheid South Africa (Maufort and Homann, 2015).

Mbongeni N. Mtshali

Mbongeni N. Mtshali holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and currently teaches in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. His work explores black queer and feminist performance, modernity and post-apartheid nationalism in South Africa. Mtshali is also founder and creative director of The Shortened Tongue Contemporary Art+Lab, an experimental interdisciplinary performance company based in Cape Town, South Africa.