Abstract
‘We must stop wasting our precious water – and also stop polluting it.’ These are the words of Dr Jo Barnes, Epidemiologist and Senior Lecturer in Community Health at the University of Stellenbosch’s Faculty for Health Sciences. Her research involves the quality of water in rivers and its health impact on communities. It is general knowledge that health services are struggling under the burden of diseases resulting from environmental pollution, particularly water pollution. This potentially avoidable crisis is slowly turning into a disaster. The article draws on a case study done in the informal settlement of Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, Cape Town, with the intent of compiling a descriptive empirical report on the way the community deals with human waste. In a next step, interpretive lenses are used to look with ‘deeper understanding’ at the problem of human waste and pollution. After that, the focus shifts to the problem of a theology of human waste, and the article concludes with suggestions on the role of religious leadership and ways in which leaders can play a constructive role in handling the crisis of a polluted context.Toilets in the modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain … Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. (Milan Kundera, The unbearable lightness of being 1984:132)Water is life, sanitation is dignity. (City of Cape Town, n.d., ‘Water and sanitation services standard’, Preliminary draft 2, March 2008)
Highlights
Eye Witness News reports that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), every 15 seconds a child dies from diarrhoea due to a lack of decent toilet amenities (Fisher 2012)
The indication is that a history of economic and political exploitation as well as underlying psychological and social factors played a role in the self-definition of the residents of this settlement
These complex situations caused a deterioration in the living conditions of the people in this settlement whilst they continue witnessing how others in neighbouring settlements do better and have more success
Summary
United Nations documentation regarding access to sanitation facilities reports that 1.1 billion people worldwide practise ‘public defecation’.1 Eye Witness News reports that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), every 15 seconds a child dies from diarrhoea due to a lack of decent toilet amenities (Fisher 2012). As a further result of these poor conditions, people residing in Sweet Home are marginalised by their friends and employers living in other communities because they are said to be ‘filthy’.4 The problem of human-waste disposal in Sweet Home Farm apparently coincides with the management history of the
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