The Portable Flush Toilet: From Camping Accessory to Protest Totem

Abstract

In Cape Town, the sanitation shortage has become politicized through the ongoing protests and legal advocacy known as the toilet wars. Portable flush toilets (PFT), originally designed for the leisure market in the 1960s but now touted as an urban infrastructure solution by the Cape Town municipality, are central to the rallying cry for safe, dignified, and adequate sanitation. By comparing the origins of the full flush toilet (FFT) and how it has designed people’s behavior and beliefs since colonialism, the paper argues that a toilet has come to represent the humanizing rights to privacy, dignity, safety, legitimation, inclusion, and health, which a PFT cannot offer. Tracing the urban design of Cape Town back to nineteenth-century sanitation policy, this paper shows how violation of these rights is built into the city’s urban planning and infrastructure. This urban system, which relies on certain humans being classified as expedient, continues to be replicated to this day through neoliberal urban policy. The PFT has become a powerful totem of power relations, and is used by protestors, students, artists, and satirists to bring the unseen outskirts of Cape Town to the center of public discourse.