5 - Dignity and Indignity in the South African Toilet Wars

Summary

This is the third and final of the book’s mini-studies of dignity. Jumping forward in time again to twenty-first-century South Africa, this chapter revolves around an object that bears on an important aspect of what many people today understand by dignity: the toilet. As one campaigning slogan has it, ‘sanitation is dignity’. South Africa is a country in which there exist large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services, with black South Africans considerably less well served than white South Africans. The chapter follows the efforts of poor black communities to secure or defend sanitary dignity through litigation and public protest.