The Big Necessity (13 page)

There is no doubt the MDGs are flawed. Darren Saywell of the IWA calls them “a useful political tool, but not a professional one.” Reducing the number of people who don't have something means knowing how many people don't have something in the first place, but
only 57 out of 163 developing countries have counted the poor more than once since 1990. Ninety-two have never counted them.

The anointing of sanitation as being worthy of UN and MDG attention was important. In the world of development and donors, money was freed and some priorities changed. Two years later, WSSCC capitalized on the revamped MDG by launching probably the best media campaign about sanitation and hand-washing that has been seen since the Lever brothers persuaded a grubby Western world to think of soap as a vital necessity. Their WASH—Water, Sanitation, Hygiene—campaign was sharp and clever. In development terms, it was called advocacy. I call it good advertising. There were posters and postcards with smart slogans, such as “Hurry Up! 2.6 billion people want to use the toilet”; or “One billion people have a drinking problem.” There was poetry, such as:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
After a drink of the water
Jack died of cholera
And Jill died from amoebic dysentery.

Kasrils began to champion WASH. He liked its messages. “Cholera and typhoid,” he tells me, “kill so many million kids a year, which amounts to two jumbo jets full of children crashing every four hours.” In the years after 9/11, this was a powerfully vivid image to use. Kasrils thought the WASH campaign provided him with great soapbox material. “They were giving me gems. I jumped to it.” He describes those heady sanitation times as “tremendous fun. The best period of my life.” It was also busy. When Kasrils took up his post, 18 million South Africans lacked sanitation. The government's target was to eradicate this “backlog” by 2010. By 2003, Kasrils's ministry was delivering 85,000 toilets a year. It would need to deliver 300,000 a year to meet the 2010 target, but it was a start. Also, it meant a lot of toilets to be officially opened.

Kasrils leaps out of his chair at this point. He wants to tell me a story, and because he's a dramatic man—before he became a guerrilla, he did some theater and worked in advertising—he needs to act it out. A village
had installed Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIPs), and Kasrils was invited to open the first one, ceremoniously. Persuading a village to adopt VIPs was already an achievement, because after the end of apartheid, black South Africans reasonably wanted what the whites had. They wanted waterborne sewerage, which was high status. It was also expensive and totally illogical in South Africa, a largely water-stressed country that can't afford, financially or environmentally, to let everyone flush dozens of liters of water down a toilet. The VIP latrine was a version of the Blair latrine, invented in Zimbabwe in 1973 by Peter Morgan, a British-born engineer who was working with the Ministry of Health's Blair Research Laboratory. There are endless ways to build a pit latrine well and endless ways to build them badly. Millions of the people who count in statistics as having access to adequate sanitation actually have a dark and stinking fly-infested box. The VIP innovated with an offset pit that could hold an interior vent pipe, a screen on the pipe to keep out flies, and a semi-dark interior to achieve the same effect. It was definitely ventilated, and definitely improved: a three-month experiment in 1975 found that 179 flies a day were caught in a latrine without a vent pipe, while the daily fly toll in a VIP was two. (If flies can't get into the latrine, they also can't emerge from it with feces-covered feet, ready to infect nearby food.)

In the village of Umzinyathi, near Durban, Kasrils was invited to inaugurate a villager's new VIP. With his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, he's acting the part of the mayor from a film whose title he can't remember, but which involved the inauguration of a urinal (I think he's referring to the French novel
Clochemerle
, made into a BBC series in 1972 and which my mother remembers as being “gripping”). The mayor makes his way with pomp into the new facility. “And it's one of those where you can see the person's head and you hear the urine and people are waiting, and then he comes out.”

In the real-life South African version of this tale, Kasrils duly went into the toilet under the gaze of a crowd of serious onlookers. He shut the door, pretended to use it, and came back out, whereupon the entire crowd began singing the South African national anthem. “And the VIP had been painted in national colors, of course,” he adds. It's a great story, and I've enjoyed the show, because Kasrils is another great
persuader. It's a shame Jack Sim came to toilets after Kasrils had left them, because they would get on.

Kasrils had a lot of persuading to do, on all levels. “You have these mayors and councillors who don't want to know about [the VIP], because in their mind, if you don't have a toilet and wash it away, it's dirty. They think in terms of the long drops they've been in, where there's flies and buzzing and a stink. You have to break down those barriers.” But waterborne sewerage was out of reach of most municipal budgets. One of the new government's most popular measures was to put into writing that water is a human right, and to provide each citizen with 20 free liters a day. After that, everyone must pay. “So you tell them if they have VIPs they won't be spending money, and that it takes ten liters of water to flush a toilet, and that those whites with the toilets, you'll go into their houses and you'll find they're not flushing because they don't want a high water bill.” It's all about psychology, says Kasrils. “You take steps and you make efforts to mobilize and educate and then it clicks.”

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 shabby 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.”