Johannesburg’s shitty little river: faecal discourse and discontent regarding the Jukskei

ABSTRACT

This paper theorises the discursive construction of sewerage and sewage in relation to Johannesburg’s Jukskei river. In the context of failing national and local water infrastructures, rivers in South Africa are filthier than ever and public trust in politicians is similarly polluted. We explore key moments in public discourse about sewage in the Jukskei, to consider how the visible and affective traces of faecal matter in the river speak to a broader sense of post-colonial collapse of both infrastructure and trust in those responsible for it. We argue that as both material and metaphor, shit-in-the-river serves to expose maladministration and corruption on the part of the government. But it also highlights the fragility of modernity itself as a project. In the context of massive looming water crises, huge shifts in both culture and infrastructure will be required to de-faecalise rivers specifically, and water supplies in general, in South Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• River
• shit
• discourse
• Johannesburg
• infrastructure
• inequality

Introduction: river pollution in South Africa

Rivers and other freshwater bodies in South Africa are highly polluted. As reported in the press, the nation produces “over five billion litres of raw sewage every day,” with the huge majority of that (4.2 billion litres) “being discharged daily into our rivers in an untreated format” (Turton 2022). Although environmental reporting in general is underresourced and marginalised due to the political economy of the national media industry (Daniels 2020), from time to time, extremely high levels of river toxicity and the consequent threat to human wellbeing do receive some attention in the press. For example, in August 2019 the Citizen newspaper reported that the Hennops River which runs through the city of Tshwane, “is so severely polluted that life in these waters no longer exists” (Nelles 2019).

An April 2017 article in the Mail & Guardian on the Olifants River, which flows through the platinum belt, calls it a “river of shit, chemicals, metals” (Kings 2017b). Another Mail & Guardian article just a couple months later in 2017 reports that “50,000 litres of sewerage flows into SA’s rivers every second” (Kings 2017a). In 2007, Independent Newspapers was reporting that Gauteng’s rivers had E. coli levels of “240 times the acceptable level of 10 000 per 100 ml” (Louw and Cox 2007), and, in 2020, GroundUp reported similarly unacceptable levels of E. coli in the Umbilo river in KwaZulu-Natal (Majola 2020). According to a report released by the South African Human Rights Commission in February 2021 (Sibanyoni 2021), which undertook a formal inquiry into pollution of the Vaal River (the main source of drinking water in greater Johannesburg), it is being polluted by raw sewerage, which constitutes “a prima facie violation of human rights” of the 19 million people who depend on the Vaal for water, for drinking and for domestic and commercial use.¹

Cape Town’s sewerage works are under pressure, too, with raw waste contaminating marshlands, river tributaries and the ocean, rendering these spaces unusable for recreation (“recreation” in Johannesburg’s rivers, meanwhile, being a far-off concept) and causing illness in sea- and human-life alike (Green et al. 2018; Kretzmann 2022; Ngcuka 2023). In fact, despite various political, legislative and municipal differences between Johannesburg and Cape Town’s local governance and citizen-led activism, we argue that failing infrastructure in both key metropolises renders a lens on discourse around sewerage as a concept that leaks across both local and international borders.²

In this paper, we explore certain underlying assumptions bridging psyche and sewage pipes in South African collective imaginaries; a condition, we argue, running analogous to the condition of South Africa’s sewerage infrastructure. Through a critical discussion of media narratives about polluted rivers, we term the implicit and explicit entanglement between politics, plumbing and the market, “faecal discourse.” Faecal discourse is constructed by the political and material rhetoric characterising sewerage in South Africa. But the discursive element of infrastructure is hardly unique to South Africa: its physical function in society has been well-theorised as at once steeped in ideological undercurrents of “desire” and “promise” (Larkin 2013), as infrastructure’s contemporary forms of collapse in numerous countries and provinces is viewed as itself a perverse “form of life” conditioning the “patterning of social form” (Berlant 2016, 393). Indeed, the notion of infrastructure embedding the forms of political struggle and even modalities of violence against the state is theorised in South Africa as a form of “infrastructural citizenship” defining political and social identities (Lemanski 2020, 590). We argue, however, that insofar as sewerage in South Africa is informed by the history of prejudice and political struggle, and inasmuch as the materiality of pathogenic rot is mobilised by various forms of activism we reference below, its current condition remains, in the main, as a discursive concept in media communication between state and social bodies.³ Moreover, it is a concept which leaks: both the origin of, and onus for, the sewage deluge is under perpetual deviation from its physical repair and renovation.

Faecality in South Africa tout large is a messy signifier suffering under the weight of political trauma and desire. Our focus thus lies in the elision and suspension of sewage and its infrastructures, its past and potential futures functioning as a gap between discourse and materiality – a gap informed by the sheer weight of faecal discourse and its leaking vicissitudes of political imagination and media-based rhetoric.

The Jukskei: a sewer

Our approach is prompted in view of a specific polluted river, the Jukskei, in a specific city, Johannesburg – the economic heart of South Africa– an extremely water-scarce metropolis for both geological and political reasons and the metaphorical antithesis of “social connectivity” rivers should otherwise provide for (Kondolf and Pinto 2017; Turton et al. 2006). Unlike other cities which have strong relations to “their” rivers (Fortier 2022; Weightman 2005; Zhao et al. 2021), Johannesburg’s Jukskei is quite marginal in the public imagination. Running under the city of Johannesburg for many blocks, the Jukskei River first sees daylight in Bertrams, a deprived neighbourhood with high unemployment, poor services, large migrant communities and limited economic opportunity. The waters run in concrete culverts above and below ground through semi-industrial areas before joining a neglected green corridor that stretches through Bruma. From there, the river turns north-east to flow – gathering pace, trash and flooding potential – through communities both very poor (for example, Alexandra, the oldest township in the city) and very rich (for example, golf estates such as Dainfern and Steyn City), past those who have chosen to surround themselves with security walls and those involuntarily incarcerated (Leeuwkop Prison also sits on its banks), and traversing the increasingly less built-up quasi-farmlands of Lanseria, it’s water carrying with it smells, toxins, litter and other jetsam, before it merges with the Crocodile River around 50 kilometres away from greater Johannesburg to spill into the Hartebeespoort Dam. The path of the river, along its meandering route, portrays the material conditions of diverse socio-economic layers of the city, as well as the complex social relationships that continue to define Johannesburg life.

The Jukskei, Johannesburg’s perennial river, is terribly polluted (Matowanyika 2010; Van Veelen and Van Zyl 1995). To a large extent, the Jukskei is practically synonymous with sewerage infrastructure, functioning simply as a drain (Day 2018). Media reports on its sorry condition highlight the main cause as a neglected, broken, leaky infrastructure. In a key Sunday Times piece (Christie 2021), a senior City of Johannesburg official explains,

The big problem is the system’s age […] We have a century-old system that was only built to last 50 years. The storm-water drains are eroded, the sewerage pipes are degraded, and because the one system sits directly above the other, constituting what is known as a superimposed system, you get sewage entering the stormwater drains, and vice versa.

The result of the breakdown of the pipes is that the “system simply cannot handle all the shit, and so it spills out into the streets, or into building basements, and mostly ends up in the rivers via the storm-water drains” (Christie 2021). Instead of serving as a modern, developed infrastructure removing shit from sight – thereby proclaiming the civility of the city (Laporte 2000; Njoh 2013) – the sewerage system becomes a site of shame, evidence of both bigoted design by colonial and apartheid urban planners and the failure of the democratic state to fix, upgrade or save it. The failure of the pipes, and those who govern them, is also highlighted in a Bloomberg piece: “Johannesburg Water said that it lacks the funding for a backlog of infrastructure renewal projects that it places at R20.4 billion ($1.4 billion), and it says upgrade and renewal projects for the coming years are also underfunded” (Walsh 2021).

River rejuvenation presents a field of political, social and scientific complexities (Palmer and Bernhardt 2006; Palmer et al. 2005; Petts 2007; Wohl et al. 2005; Wohl, Lane, and Wilcox 2015) linked to broader urban issues in negotiating green space in cities (Chung, Zhang, and Wu 2018). Key challenges that have been identified by experts in the science of river restoration are:

a lack of scientific knowledge of watershed-scale process dynamics, institutional structures that are poorly suited to large-scale adaptive management, and a lack of political support to re-establish delivery of the ecosystem amenities lost through river degradation. (Wohl et al. 2005, 1)

Research further shows that “visions of sustainability” are often dislocated from material conditions of poor and lacking infrastructure (Mguni et al. 2022). Where restoration is successful, evidence from around the world shows that rivers can add significant value to the urban economy (Bakker 2007; Gayathri Devi et al. 2009; Kauffman 2016). Public engagement and the forging of a deliberative process are thus arguably central to effective river rejuvenation attempts, as communities living with, and along rivers need to have the chance to learn through engagement and have their own perspectives integrated into policy-making and the implementation of the scientific recommendations (Amzat and Amzat 2020; Bakker 2007; Petts 2007).

Rivers and the lands alongside them were captured in various colonial projects. In the Cape, indigenous people are demanding restitution (Curley 2021; Dirks 2022; Levy 2022). Where the Jukskei is concerned, however, collective demands for rights to a clean river are as few as strategic plans for practical implementation (Muller 2022; Turton 2022). Instead, anger, inequality and infrastructural collapse seem metonymically linked to a pervasive pathos reflected in media discourse and impotence of leadership; analysable in certain moments we describe below.

Faecal matter: purity and pathos in subterranean waterways

One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. (Shepherd 1977)

The complexity and anxiety linked to Johannesburg (Falkof 2020) appear in key ways in media narratives about the Jukskei. It seems impossible for any journalist to write a story about the Jukskei – at source or anywhere along its route – without descriptions of the waste it contains. Indicative is the feature by Joe Walsh published in Bloomberg, which includes the memorable headline that calls the Jukskei “Johannesburg’s Dirty Little River” (Walsh 2021) (a phrase we have borrowed and adapted for the title of this paper).

We contend that human waste in the river cannot reasonably construct dystopian imaginaries of Johannesburg as “strangely glamorous, not despite its many problems, but because of them” (Van Staden 2020). The Jukskei won’t be found composing the “abject allure” of Johannesburg also produced in film and photography (Raubenheimer 2021).

For all its near-disappearance from cultural or social identifications, the Jukskei may yet be framed via the material rhetoric defining much sanitation and political activism in the Cape. One potent example referenced by Peter Redfield and Steven Robins (2016, 155) was the upending of informal settlement portaloo containers in the Cape Town International Airport arrivals section. The demonstration of inadequate sanitation bestowed on the poor, in marked distinction to the pristine loos of Cape tourist centres, pre-empted student Maxwell Chumani’s “poo protest,” where contents of a township portaloo cartridge were flung at the erstwhile Rhodes statue on the University of Cape Town’ campus (Bosch 2017; Holmes and Loehwing 2016). Here, shit becomes a metaphor of reciprocal disgust at unfair economic distribution, racism in academic institutions, and tacit veneration of history and its icons:

… we use human excrement that runs exposed through Khayelitsha so that we could speak to the urgent need for human dignity for the black people living in shacks in Khayelitsha in inhumane conditions and indignity … by throwing poo at the statue of Rhodes, we … symbolise the filthy way in which Rhodes mistreated our people in the past. Equally, we … show disgust at the manner in which UCT, as a leading South African institution of learning, celebrates the genocidal Rhodes. In short, the poo [is] an institutional appraisal of UCT. (Maxwele in Wingfield, Giblin, and King 2020, 2)

At least one art writer has described Chumani’s act as constituting an “iconoclasm” (Wingfield, Giblin, and King 2020). Could it be that, comparatively, faecal matter in the Jukskei holds the kind of iconoclastic function that shit does when draped and flung on statues? While responsibility for waste in the river is a diffuse question, the agential force of faeces in and of itself negates the river’s aesthetic and symbolic function, and therefore the river’s social, public reason for being. With its toxicity, faeces can physically destroy social and environmental ecologies. And the level of disgust this putrid meander evokes, as it makes its way through city ruins, informal settlements and affluent suburbs, functions as a counter-indictment of the perpetual elision of waste management across Gauteng.

Writers regarding the river agree that “the water is foul” with a “faecal odour” (Christie 2021). It teems “with life, just not the sort of life you want to find in a river: […] 35 different types of bacteria, mostly dangerous” (Christie 2021). The Jukskei is strewn with trash and laden with coliform bacteria and “has posed health hazards for decades” (Walsh 2021). “E. coli levels of more than 2 million plaque-forming units (PFU) have been documented per 100 ml of water, exceeding by thousands of times or more international norms for fresh or drinking water” (Walsh 2021). Because “E. coli is released into the environment through deposition of faecal material, this bacterium is widely used as an indicator of faecal contamination of waterways” (Ishii and Sadowsky 2008). In short, a river such as the Jukskei, which is laden with E. coli, is literally full of shit. It is quite remarkable, therefore, that within the broad acceptance of the state of the river as shitty, that one key narrative that emerges in media coverage is a search for an uncontaminated source.

Journalist Sean Christie writes about the “adventure” of getting into the tunnels under the city, along with city officials and the artist Hannelie Coetzee, to “search for the source” of the Jukskei (Christie 2021). Normally, when explorers want to find the source of a river, they head upstream into increasingly wild and more beautiful natural landscapes, perhaps finding many small streams, glaciers, perhaps debating which is the source, perhaps claiming fame for “discovering” it (Finkelstein 1996), perhaps earning ridicule for claiming they could (Humphries 2013). In the Sunday Times piece, the journey to find the source of the Jukskei is narrated as an “expedition” and uses an adventure vocabulary. To find the Jukskei’s headwaters, the explorers had to enter underground tunnels and hike through dark, swampy and polluted sewerage and stormwater systems underneath the city, facing many possible risks: “fast-flowing sewage, exposure to toxic gases, possible encounters with sewage miners” and hordes of “disturbed cockroaches” (Christie 2021).

As if emerging from Lauren Beukes’ science fiction novel Zoo City (2016), the image of Johannesburg as a dangerous and scary city, a concrete jungle of creaturely life, the “quest” for the “source” of the river is framed as the ultimate adventure, full of perils and alien encounters. The quest for the source is framed as a hopeful journey to discover pure water, something unadulterated by the chaos of the city infrastructure that was built on top of the river, and the effluence of its millions of inhabitants: some H₂O without the E. coli. Water scientist Stuart Dunsmore is part of the expedition and tasked with testing the water at various points on the journey under the city. And indeed, the expedition reaps something of the desired object: fresh, clean spring water pouring from the lip of one single pipe, alone amongst a snarl in the underground tunnels. They take samples: “Two weeks later, Dunsmore e-mailed our group the water analysis report. The storm drain sample was bad – E. coli at over 150 counts per 100 ml, but, incredibly, no E. coli had been detected in the pipe flow” (Christie 2021). Although the Jukskei is, correctly and factually, narrated by most journalistic coverage as being soaked in shit, the subterranean expedition found one pure spring of water uncontaminated by the pollution seeping into the river’s source from thousands of broken, leaking and neglected city sewerage pipes.

Although the expedition was a success in that one pure spring of water was discovered buried under the concrete jungle of Johannesburg, deep within its toxic network of sewerage canals, the pathos that accompanies this discovery is unmistakeable. How pitiful, indeed, that where once there was a wetland of multiple freshwater springs coalescing into a rocky headwater cascade, now there is only one sorry little pipe of purity. The city leaks toxicity into the river immediately and directly. This reveals the first key dimension of what we call “faecal discourse:” the literal, real and toxic presence of effluent and faecal matter in the water of the Jukskei (as a stand-in for all the bodies of fresh water in the country), the real and toxic presence of sewage in the lived experiences, and traumas, of too many South Africans (as described in more detail below). More than a presence, the faecal has entirely overwhelmed the original purity of the Jukskei’s source waters, running with them throughout the long journey to the Indian ocean at Xai Xai, Mozambique. As such, the Jukskei doesn’t exist in the collective imaginary and raw sewage is in excess of any aesthetic dimension. The river falls short of public perception, the shit exceeds our symbolic sphere in its excess subjectivity of filth, collapse, trauma and death. The ramparted, piped, botched river and its faecal passengers problematise discursive framing and thus collective action. As Charlotte Lemanski writes, “citizens’ everyday access to, and use of, public infrastructure in the city affect, and are affected by, their citizenship identity and practices” (2020, 590). Susan Honig goes so far as to problematise the existence of democracy itself where infrastructure disappears, invoking the “loss of a language of publicness, [and] a loss of citizenship as such … ” (2017, 32).

Talking shit: the contested politics of sewage

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theatre. What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 334)

As with other rivers elsewhere in global south cities such as Jakarta (Prabaharyaka 2020), in Johannesburg shit appears to be everywhere in the Jukskei. Yet while the Jukskei simmers in relative silence and conjured adventures, political discourse in the Cape, for various reasons, tends to take centre stage. We see certain moments borne in the Cape as indicative of the “entanglements” which “interlace boundaries,” especially insofar as national governance by a majority party, up to this point, has determined both the cessation and continuation of apartheid infrastructural legacies (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004, 351).

In respect of the extent of faecal matter in rivers across South Africa, it is further no surprise that the faecal has also made significant inroads to political discourses which are treated by media as relevant to all of South Africa’s poor communities and middle classes. It bears pausing to consider why it is that the material conditions of waste water in the country bears such close resemblance to the quality of political accountability by elected officials.

Consider this example taking placing in the Western Cape. On a Tuesday in July 2022, police minister Bheki Cele was addressing an audience at a community forum in Gugulethu. A member of the audience, Ian Cameron, spoke up to complain about police inaction against the rising murder rate in Cape townships. Cameron, whose past membership in Afriforum (an Afrikaans civil rights organisation with questionable interests in issues with white nationalist flavours) concluded his remarks with a provocative statement linking Cele’s own lack of political accountability to “the slaughter” of citizens in the streets and the sewage running in the same streets: sewage being a municipal matter outside of Cele’s own remit, but a problem he will realistically encounter on the streets of Gugulethu.

The framing of crime and police ineptitude with reference to sewage is telling of general frustration with countrywide problems. Cameron’s inclusion of sewage in the litany of complaints about government neglect of the people was a potent rhetorical flourish which triggered an exposure revealing much about South Africa’s collective unconscious. The presence of human waste is invoked not just because it is a ghastly reality oozing throughout the roads and footpaths of many townships (and increasingly towns and cities) in South Africa, but because its presence signifies a manifest abandonment of safety and protection for the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens, where a near-uninhibited “slaughter” of citizens is apportioned to the extent that sewage runs “amok” in the streets (Cameron in Mtembu 2022).

However, the relation of crime to faeces has a deep historical antecedent. In contrast to the shared notions about the public leavings of faeces in certain Hindu areas of India (Doron and Raja 2015, 194), in South Africa, the matter of human waste in public is by and large viewed as a repugnant, abject. In South Africa, a Eurocentric semiology of the faecal is cast in the realm of the profane (Laporte 2000); an impure union of human waste and murder is recorded in Medieval European literature as “symbolising the abject humiliation of murder with waste from living human bodies” (Morrison 2008). Indeed, abjection is deeply embedded in colonial imaginaries (Mupotsa, Moji, and Himmelman 2021), where Africa was framed as a “wellspring of enthusiastic, orgiastic violence” linked to “the excitability of primitive vitality to the unpredictable but catastrophic expenditure of waste or disposable life” (Nyong’o 2012). As Redfield and Robins’ (2016) comprehensive “indexing” of waste details, racial hierarchies under apartheid designated hierarchies of sanitation services based on skin colour, ranging from provision for interior toilets to no toilets at all, forcing Black citizens to make do with “notorious” bucket-systems and self-dug pit latrines (150). The socio-political values imparted by historical designation are sustained in post-apartheid South Africa democracy, not only in the collective imaginaries of poverty linked with filth, but in the existing contemporary practice of national and provincial government who provide extremely limited forms of sanitation in the poorest townships and informal squatter camps – such as plastic portaloos, or basic cisterns and building materials that communities have to erect themselves (Redfield and Robins 2016, 149).⁴ Based in the legislation and physical construction of racial exclusion from public services and public life, this embodied relation between racial exclusion and sewage waste is echoed in the socio-political conflict between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai, where a “process of abjection” identifies Muslims “as a repulsive, disgusting and abject ‘other’” (Tayob 2019, 3). Through the instrumentalisation of relations enacted by apartheid, an embodied relation between susceptibility to criminality and exposure to sewage is explicitly identified with non-white citizenry (Baderoon 2018).

Thus the spectre of human waste in South Africa, for citizens with toilets as well as those without, may be framed as the ultimate stuff of the abject: “one of those violent and obscure revolts of being against that which threatens it and which seems to it to come from an outside or an exorbitant inside” (Kristeva 1982). In post-apartheid South Africa, class-based hierarchies of proximity and distance sustain instrumental divisions of race: the further away from the horrific grimacing of its goo and hum, the better off one’s social, political and economic position. Mapping proximity to or distance from excreta is the ultimate map, an almost universal geology. “The indignity of absent services” (Redfield and Robins 2016) – that is sewerage infrastructure – puts township dwellers in intimate and unwanted contact with raw sewage.

The psychology of broken infrastructure, particularly that which is supposed to dispose of our own effluent, is unsurprisingly going to feature where effects are so traumatic: like the most recent report of a little boy falling into a sewage pipeline in Dlamini, Soweto, never to be found (Ka Canham 2022).⁵ As argued in Hugo ka Canham’s (2022) impassioned call to bear ethical witness to the child’s death: “We should demur when the blame is deferred to faceless thieves who steal manholes for their steel. What economy and legislative framework enable a thriving trade in copper and recycled steel?”

Indeed, the bridging element between sewage pipes and trust is understood by media and the public writ large as having to do with the economic burden of corruption, apparent lack of resources and lack of basic services, themselves a condition of historical racism and contemporary neoliberalism.

Sewage in South Africa is intensely politicised to the point that it’s presence or absence is “a national concern and a direct measure of citizenship. Any sign of inequality [can] appear as a regressive return to the racialised indignities of the past” (Redfield and Robins 2016, 150). And yet the return of the trauma, a return of the real-as-sewage, is already being repeated in microcosmic enclosures of “anodyne,” “anaesthetic” gated communities proliferating in South Africa, where the stench of working classes, crime and decay is ostensibly distanced from middle-class inhabitants, with dubious degrees of reason, ethics or success (Raidoo 2020).

In Johannesburg, in particular, discourses from critical urban studies to cultural anthropology explore the city’s peculiarly gripping dystopian aesthetics, where interplays of surface and decay represent South Africa’s chasms of injustice. There is a wealth of critical urban and cultural studies literature on Johannesburg (perhaps best summarised by Harrison et al. 2014). This literature explores various aspects of this compelling city, from its social inequalities (Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell 2013; Murray 2011) to its branded skyline (Baro 2017; Iqani and Baro 2017), its gated communities (Hook and Vrdoljak 2002; Jürgens and Gnad 2002; Murray 2015), townships (Bonner and Segal 1998; Briedenhann and Ramchander 2006; Krige 2011) and luxury malls (Aceska and Heer 2019; Kenny 2019; Mbembe 2004), from its architecture (Chipkin 1993; Garner 2010) to its archival fragmentation (Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt 2013), even to the anxieties it produces and hosts (Falkof 2020).

So familiar are these tropes with the real visual experience of “Joburg,” it is demonstrable that the arts reproduce Joburg’s dystopia as a form of nostalgia (Raubenheimer 2021). As dystopia has seductive force, the relationship to abjection can similarly be theorised as holding performative value beyond the impure/pure binary. Cobus van Staden (2020) frames South Africa’s national identity as crucially dependent on a paradoxical glamourisation of its abject features, so that our performance in the global media partakes of “a highly visual oscillation between pride and abjection:”

South Africa is more than the cliché of a global south country traumatised by its past and hindered by a lack of local capacity in the global race towards development. Aspects of this narrative are certainly true in South Africa, but one of the fundamental ways in which it differs from this stereotype is its striking history of melding pride and abjection into a new source of visuality […] it is a result of South Africa’s long history of mediation as a form of political struggle, one which dates back to the liberation forces’ sophisticated wielding of international coverage against the apartheid regime. (Van Staden 2020)

Nowhere has this visual oscillation of pride and abjection been more corporeal than in Bheki Cele’s highly-meme-ified retort to Ian Cameron’s outrage at the Gugulethu community policing forum. Cele’s enraged outburst related his personal suffering and exile during the struggle, as well as the shame of his parent’s roles as “kitchen girl” and “garden boy” in apartheid. However, we argue that Cele’s evocation of his past only seemed to elide Cameron’s demand to “get the sewage on your shoes.” As Cele bellowed, “I have lived this African life!,” we may pause here to consider what was meant by this phrase. Why should an “African life” be a life of children having to defaecate in the street, or falling into sewage, or walking through sewage or dying from diseases carried by it? Is it a life that, by definition, is lived “against that which threatens it” (Kristeva 1982, 125)? And at the point where Cele is always already deeply in touch with a wound where crime and waste share headspace with racial identity, emotion overcame his speech to degenerate into a bawling rage. To the audible shock of the crowd, Cele’s (famously shmaltzy) veneer was pierced as he repetitively screamed at Cameron to “shut up” and then “get out.” Perhaps in this moment, a real source of humiliation came too close to the well-oiled oscillation of its political imaginary. As we argue, this humiliation comprised “shit” being flung on to the political theatre. Rhetoric no longer suffices where infrastructure has been left to crumble, and children have been, despicably, allowed to drown in rivers of shit (Ka Canham 2022; Ncwane 2022; Seleka 2021; Washinyira 2021).

Parallel to the breakdown of Johannesburg’s sewerage system, the effect of Cele’s breakdown is paradoxical – which is why the moment significantly reflects on the “entanglements” of provincial and national South Africa, as well as cross-border politics of waste management at large. To explain: against the overwhelming horror elicited by Cameron’s double deployment, Cele’s speech – his elicitation of heroism in struggle, the pride of South African liberation – registered as no more than a pale incubus of the intended impassioned politik. The veil dropped. His pants were down. Otherwise fractured political commentators seemed to agree that the moment, for Cele, was overall embarrassing. As journalist Chris Roper (2022) argues, the moment was made of “two types of fragility:” “The first, which we can deride, is a consequence of government ministers realising they can no longer ride the coattails of the struggle heroes of the past.” The second has to do with a lived history of trauma, understandably triggered by a scornful lecture from a white man (who hectored and humiliated Cele). But the field of inquiry for working through this shared trauma, in this instance, and as a viewing and reading democracy, is foreclosed by the nature of the first fragility. The point at which we are able to offhandedly deride the past is indicative. It is a marker of the sober failure of “political aesthetics” to reproduce a relied-upon effect (Pauwels 2022). Its failure in such strained and public circumstances may mark, then, the collapse of a structure of oscillating visibility between pride and abjection that Van Staden (2020, 33) analyses as undergirding foreign interest and investment in the country – a dystopian dialectic which is supposed to produce a national identity.

If an aesthetics of abjection/pride ultimately supported the country’s foreign investment potential, what now will take its place? Arguably, a full-frontal confrontation with abjection as such, in all its morbidity, is becoming a cause of new imaginaries of hopeless despair and often blatant Afropessimism (Friedman 2019; Mupotsa, Moji, and Himmelman 2021). Cele’s wound is suppurating and, still, the infrastructure crumbles, shit is smeared on the walls of political theatre – we throw our hands up in collective disgust. Here, faecal discourse operates at the level of rhetoric and enters public debate and discontent in relation to broader failures of governance and citizenry. The presence of sewage, and it’s being flung into various political arguments, becomes a shorthand for not only a lack of trust in government, but an exposé of the scarily offhanded necropolitical depths to which government delivery has sunk.

Faecal discourse and fecund possibilities

Faecal discourse describes the curious way the material and rhetorical intersect at the level of social problems, infrastructure and the environment. Like shit in the river, the public are benumbed to the curious admixture these forces exert on collective imaginaries. While activism in both Johannesburg and the Cape have had some success associating waste pollution with unequal service delivery and sanitation services (Redfield and Robins 2016), these demonstrations remain largely acts of representation rather than mobilising concrete shifts in the necessary relationship between communities and government, if not also being blamed for perpetuating hostility between impoverished communities and government (Green et al. 2019; Human 2022; Lemanski 2020; Limberg 2019; Storey 2020).

In addition, we argue that neither the paradoxical impact of political rhetoric nor even the most responsible media reportage meet the need for forms and modes of social and material connectivity that are becoming a matter of survival. To illuminate these operations, we have contextualised the social and material state of the Jukskei with reference to media discourse that is current and centre stage in South Africa. Often within the same news article, apocalyptic accounts of sewerage breakdown are discussed not just in terms of municipal organisational failings – imprudent management and rusty pipes – but as reflecting on an equally apocalyptic perception of South Africa’s political leadership. In turn, the matter of water pollution is approached in view of the threatening spectre of climate change; sewerage both rehearsing its own collapse and punching holes in an already torn and damaged social fabric.

Leaking as it does between past traumas, political conflict and class privilege, faecal discourse functions to veil the specific and immediate material conditions and dire social experience of those closest to open pipes and drainage ditches. This veiling, both inadvertent and manipulative, may well be both cause of inaction on the Jukskei as well as acts of destruction of sanitation pipes in the Cape discussed in depth by Lemanski (2020). Indeed, like Cele’s outburst signifies in nuanced and paradoxical terms, we are caught in the gap between “fragilities:” South Africa’s well-earned pride and continued traumatic abjection is caught on the pales of immemorable pasts and unimaginable futures.

Indeed, much current journalism suggests that it is unclear whether the country, from the political to the social and much of the urban and rural environment, can cope with or survive further adversity. As Anthony Turton (2022) points out, achieving “consensus” on solutions are vexed by a “deficit of trust in government,” “a growing mistrust in science” as well as an increasing “sense of helplessness” on the part of the public. It is further pointed out that an overlooked concern “is that young scientific and technical graduates are not inspired to build their careers in the water and sanitation sector that generally exudes failure” (Winter and Carden 2022). Cause and consequence of sewerage failure are thus framed in close relationship to questions of trust and motivation, of emotional distress and discouraged youth. Conflations of matter and spirit are understandable against the backdrop of South Africa’s dark past and difficult present, the untold suffering of which remains to be disclosed (Adebayo 2022). But to approach public discourse about human and environmental wellbeing with care in faecal conditions, it is necessary to move beyond dialectics of panic and paternalistic values of trust.

The realities of inequality in South Africa mean that the well-off and middle classes can flush their shit away, with clean, potable water (an increasingly scarce resource), into sewerage infrastructure that leaks into the rivers. This project is directly linked to colonial attitudes to shit (Anderson 1995). Meanwhile, the poor suffer the indignities of bucket toilets, pit latrines and unshielded public lavatories and, rightly so, aspire to flushing toilets in their homes. The rich are unwilling to consider waterless toilet technologies, and so, too, do the poor resist having such technologies foisted upon them (Redfield and Robins 2016). Solutions available – besides using rivers and oceans as sewers – require massive recalibration of multi-sector organisation and function, which presents new complexities in sources of authority, coalition and governance (Avelino and Wittmayer 2016; Mguni et al. 2022; Mulligan et al. 2020). One solution, though not seen as aspirational by the poor, are dry compost toilets (Redfield and Robins 2016), though their efficacy in African contexts has been contested (Nakyagaba et al. 2021). Faecal matter represents a potential resource that could produce fertiliser and even biogas (Chalfin 2017) – both commodities of value that could be traded and support livelihoods. Currently, the primacy of the water-flush toilet is uncritically accepted by the public, both wealthy and marginalised.

The problems of sewage and sewerage and sanitation activism (Barnes 2018) are therefore likely to intensify for future generations who will inherit these systems. Solutions which turn towards privatising and deregulating procurement of various sectors of water and sanitation are better than Afropessimist narratives of water-borne collapse (Bakker 2007; Friedman 2019). Most significantly, we argue, sewers are part of a public contract in which infrastructure is understood as to be provided by government, and as part of a nation-building project (Honig 2017, 24). When sewerage fails, the democratic ideal is polluted. Thus, when the connection is made between failing infrastructure, toxic rivers and modes of discourse, new alternatives require new efforts at public involvement. Precisely because of the risks to health associated with E. coli-infested river water, it is imperative that faecal matter becomes a topic of public discourse and more than a metaphor for expressing rage at colonial oppression or postcolonial rule, or both. The problem of mismanaged sewage and inadequate sewerage infrastructure not only affects rivers, but also the ocean, not only from the rivers running into them, but from city-(mis)managed pumping of raw sewage.

In a discussion of the raw sewage entering the ocean, Lesley Green (2020, 176) argues that “a science has not yet emerged that is able to work integratively – that is able to address the anthropogenics of the situation as more than something that has ‘social dimensions’ that require ‘regulation,’ ‘compliance’ and ‘enforcement’.” Just as oceans cannot be conceptualised as existing outside of society, so, too, must rivers be understood as both social and ecological entities. Johannesburg’s Jukskei, changed so fundamentally by the city built atop its course, is a pressing example of an urban-riparian interface (we borrow from Green’s notion of an urban-marine interface) (Green 2020, 176).

The Jukskei offers an opportunity to consider what water-sensitive infrastructures and power transitions will be needed to address Johannesburg’s (and by extension South Africa’s and any nation’s facing similar political and infrastructural challenges) sewage/sewerage problem.

Thus, while Green argues for an “ocean regime shift,” we can likewise argue for a “river regime shift:” science needs to play a politicised role in enabling Johannesburgers to “live well together” with the river (Green 2020, 176). Living well with the river requires addressing the material traumas that it produces (faecal odours, faecal drownings, faecal infections) as well as the discursive traumas that all the shittiness of life in a broken polity signal. This requires massive political commitment to solving infrastructure collapse. It calls for an ongoing struggle for an environmental commons (Yaka 2019), even in dense urban areas. It requires a government to do what it was elected to do: provide a safe infrastructure that can remove the dangers of shit from the lives of the citizens that produce it. It requires a new mode of faecal discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Webster

Jessica Webster (PhD Wits) has a long-term professional practice in contemporary painting and is a research fellow with the South African Chair of Science Communication at Stellenbosch University. She has keenly observed the evolution of threats that cause intense suffering to South Africa’s disadvantaged majority and natural ecologies. Her writing and art are engaged with the poetics of agency in the face of climate change and trauma.

Mehita Iqani

Mehita Iqani is Professor and Chairholder of the SARChI Science Communication at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research focuses on the links between consumer society, quality of life (happiness) and environmental and planetary sustainability. She is the author and editor of several books and articles on media, consumer culture, luxury, waste and the Global South, and is Co-Editor of the International Journal for Cultural Studies.

Notes

1. See for instance, reportage on cholera outbreaks in the hamlet of Hammanskraal, where local rivers and dams were found to contain high levels of E. coli (Mitchley 2023).

2. This paper invokes Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall’s (Mbembe 2004, 351) appeal to resist stasis in predominantly anthropological readings on lived experience in Africa by considering social geographies in respect of “their flows” and “circuits.”

One strategy is to constitute an argument that relies less on difference – or even originality – than on a fundamental connection to an elsewhere. Though the work of difference has performed important functions in the scholarly practice that sought to undercut imperial paradigms, it is clearly time, in the case of Africa, to revisit the frontiers of commonality and the potential of sameness-as-worldliness (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004, 352, 351).

While the authors of this paper are sensitive to differences between and particularities within South Africa’s provinces, this paper attempts to address a notion of faecal discourse which finds commonality at the root of experience of human waste, conjoining aesthetics, empirical and media analyses to initiate understanding of the Jukskei river, and by extension Johannesburg, as connected to and even representative of broader stakes of global social and environmental justice. This, in resistance to viewing Johannesburg as a singular sign or spectacular example of conflict and collapse as described by Mbembe and Nuttall (2004, 356).

3. Our emphasis on the discursivity of waste infrastructure is an alternative to Redfield and Robin’s (Redfield and Robins 2016) reading of human waste as forming a material “index” across anthropological subjects of class, race and gender. As foci on materiality tend to, however, their paper significantly serves to buttress our own attempt to explore collective imaginaries of faecality, providing important particularity or indeed, indexicality, to our framing discourse on waste in contemporary South African media and academia.

4. Specific forms of exclusion arising from (these now) class-designated services are also gendered and ableist – necessary excursions to external toilet facilities expose the vulnerable to sexual violence and infectious disease due to dirty public facilities and, often, avoiding using the toilet altogether (Enwereji and Uwizeyimana 2021; Sweetman and Medland 2017).

5. The phenomenon of children drowning in pit toilets and open drains in South Africa is epidemic (see also Fihlane 2018; McCain 2023; Ryan 2017; Sgqolana 2023).