The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  During his tenure, the Minister of Toilets accomplished great things. He persuaded President Mbeki to open toilets, a considerable achievement when South Africa’s head of state is rumored to be prudish. South Africa may be the only country in the world where sanitation was properly addressed, and HIV—given Mbeki’s notorious inability to countenance it—was not.

  The president moved Kasrils to the National Intelligence Ministry in 2004 and the sanitation world is poorer for it. His successors have held the title of Minister for Water Affairs, but they have never really been Ministers for Toilets. People refer to Kasrils as “a glimmer of hope” in the sanitation world, but a glimmer doesn’t last. I admired Kasrils’s efforts, but he was the political exception in a world that hasn’t figured out what the rule is. At least for now, the battle for better sanitation isn’t happening in cabinet meetings. As Jack Sim says, the evangelism comes first, the political process will follow. The evangelism is being spread outside powerful corridors and under the political radar, by the ground troops of sanitation. They are foot soldiers who don’t mind wearing filthy boots to tramp through possibly the most unappealing public health crisis in the world. Into these ranks, Trevor Mulaudzi—a South African geologist who prefers the nom de guerre of Dr. Shit—is fully conscripted.

  One day Mulaudzi was driving as usual through the gold-mining areas north of Johannesburg. He worked then as a geologist for Anglo-American, an enormous mining company whose salary provided him with a large house, two cars, and a pleasant lifestyle. As he drove, he saw a group of children on the street. High school age. “I stopped them and said, ‘Please go back to school.’ The children were amazed, and said they could not go back to school because they were looking for a toilet.” Now it was Trevor’s turn to be astonished. “There’s no toilet in your school?” and he went to have a look, marching into the high school gates and to the ablution block, handily—for an interloper’s purposes—set apart from the school buildings. The toilets were a disgrace. “Shit everywhere! Shit piled up behind the door! Filthy! There were no doors on the stalls. There was even poo in the hand-basins.” He finally understood, he says, “why our children hate going to school. It starts in the toilet.”

  The headmaster then received a visit from a strange man who told him his school toilets were disgusting. “He was astonished. Then he said, ‘But the children are unruly. They do not clean.’” Okay, said Trevor, “I will do it for you.” Then, wearing a suit and tie, he found a wheelbarrow and a shovel and set about cleaning the block with children and teachers looking on at “this madman who is cleaning our toilets.” He says, “It was an amazing feeling.” So amazing that he went home, quit his job and nice lifestyle, and the next day set up a cleaning company whose mission was to ensure that South Africa’s schoolchildren had clean toilets.

  That’s the tale. I hear it several times over the course of our acquaintance; first during a presentation at a WTO event, where Trevor’s infectious laugh and trilby kept the audience rapt. Then on a radio interview that Trevor plays as we drive through the streets of Johannesburg on the way to his home. The presenter is suave, but he has the sound of most media people who deign to look at sanitation. Indulgent. Trevor says he is a “toilet activist,” and that he is lobbying for clean toilets in the country. And what do people say? asks the presenter.

  “They say I’m mad.”

  “Well,” says the smooth voice. “It certainly sounds like it.”

  Trevor is not mad, but he employs exaggeration deliberately. His wife, Audrey, an assured and brisk medical doctor, amends the story when I ask her about it. “It wasn’t twenty-four hours,” she tells me one afternoon at their house in Linden, a previously white suburb, where the Mulaudzis live with two of their three beautiful and smart daughters (the third is studying in Cape Town and preparing to be South Africa’s first female president). “Trevor was very unhappy at his job. It’s true that he came home and said he wanted to quit but it wasn’t so cut and dried.” They considered business opportunities and decided on cleaning. “It was so difficult for five years. The cars were nearly impounded. But the twenty-four-hour thing? That’s Trevor.”

  When I question him on the epiphany story, he laughs, a lot. “That’s marketing! It’s the same reason I go to WTO events.” Promotion helps business, and his business helps to improve South Africa’s toilets. He told the Moscow audience that his profits were $30,000 a month. It got a round of applause, but it was more massaging of the truth. In fact, his wife says, he takes money from his regular cleaning business—which cleans supermarkets and mining hostels—to do the school work. It’s rarely enough, and they are not rich.

  The day after I arrive, Trevor takes me to Khutsong. He used to live in nearby Fochville, a town that seems very white and very blond, even now. I wonder how it was to live here and be neither of those things. Oh, it was fine, says Trevor, except for the time he tried to retrieve a tree branch from his neighbor’s garden and she called the police to report a trespasser, though she knew Trevor well. “What can you do? We have to live with these people.”

  Khutsong is a dusty, dull, poor township. (When I ask someone to explain the difference between town and township, he thinks, then says, “A township is where black people live.”) Khutsong has a reputation these days because of riots that began in 2006. The rioters punched out the traffic lights and burned down councillors’ houses and the town library. They were protesting poor municipal services. As usual, sanitation was not mentioned, though when I see what Khutsong’s facilities consist of, I wonder that its residents didn’t riot years ago.

  I’ve asked Trevor to show me a bucket toilet. I can’t believe it’s actually just a bucket. He knows his old maid in Khutsong had one, but when we stop to look, she’s upgraded to a brick-walled latrine. Good for her, says Trevor, and tries the house next door because he’s sure she’s an exception. An old man arrives and says he’s the grandfather of the three children who live here alone because their parents have died of AIDS. “Children are bringing up children all around here,” the old man says, his tone flat. At the primary school nearby, half the 1,000 pupils are AIDS orphans. I begin to see that people have other things to think about than toilets, and why the three children have a bucket toilet that is smelly and horrible, and rarely emptied as it should be. Sometimes the municipality trucks come, sometimes they don’t. No one tells me what happens when they don’t, but the field opposite says it all.

  “That’s nothing,” says Trevor. “Let me show you what schoolchildren have to live with.” We detour up to a nearby school to meet a friend of his. Victor is deputy headmaster of Wedela, a primary school for the children of mine employees. He is a gentle man who grew up in Soweto in a house with two rooms and eleven children. Perhaps the harsh circumstances made him more receptive to Trevor, now a close friend, but once a man who just turned up one day and bothered him about the toilets.

  In Victor’s memory, the state of things wasn’t so bad, but Trevor says he has pictures. There was filth and excrement everywhere. It wasn’t the worst Trevor has seen: he carries a photograph of a school latrine made from a metal car chassis, its edges lethal. But it was bad enough to require several days of cleaning and the use of a heavy-duty pump. How did they get so bad? Victor is phlegmatic. “Everyone thought it was normal. No one knew any different. Then Trevor came and I realized how important it was.”

  Now the toilets are pristine, partly because one pupil’s mother has become a volunteer toilet attendant. Susan tells us it’s a tolerable job and better than nothing. Sometimes she gets tips. We compliment her on her cleanliness and give her 200 rand, an average monthly salary. (Afterward, Victor tells me that Susan had gone straight to the headmistress after we left and told her that I drank out of the sinks because the place was so clean. He thinks this is hilarious.)

  _______

  Trevor wants me to see what he usually deals with. We go to the Khutsong high school. It looks in good enough condition from afar, but inside it is sh
abby and missing things. We step over a drain and Trevor makes a sound of disgust or maybe despair. “Look,” he says, kicking the air where a grate should be. “They’ve stolen it! They steal everything.” He is angry. Of course Khutsong is poor, but poverty doesn’t excuse everything. He tells me about his grandparents, who walked to the diamond-mining town of Kimberley, miles from their village in Venda, to get some education, then came back and founded the village school. His father is also fastidious and proud. “He puts on a suit and tie every day to go nowhere.” From his father, Trevor gets a love of old-fashioned values and hats. He won’t find either in this school block, where we wander around hunting for filth. It’s easy to find. In the girls’ section on the second floor, there are stalls with no doors, toilets that clearly haven’t flushed in months, and maggots. There are plastic bags on the floor, which Trevor says are used for wiping, and condoms. A cardboard box on the floor serves as a “she-bin,” as South Africans call it, for sanitary towels and tampons, and on it someone hopeful has written, “Fold your pad nicely and put it in this box, please beautiful children.”

  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 w
ith 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)

  GOING TO THE SULABH

  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.