The 2011 Toilet Wars in South Africa: Justice and Transition between the Exceptional and the Everyday after Apartheid

• Published in: Development and change Vol. 45; no. 3; pp. 479 - 501
• Main Author: Robins, Steven
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-05-2014
• Subjects: Apartheid; Citizens; Democratization; Discourse; Elections; Justice; Local elections; Local Government; Media; Political life; Politicians; Racism; Reconciliation; Sanitation; Scandals; Social justice; South Africa; Studies; Toilet facilities; Transitional justice; Tribunals & commissions
• ISSN: 0012-155X; 1467-7660
• DOI: 10.1111/dech.12091

ABSTRACT
This article analyses the media images and public discourses that surrounded the 2011 ‘open toilet scandal’ or what came to be known as the ‘2011 Toilet Elections’ and the ‘Toilet Wars’. Widely circulated media images of unenclosed modern, porcelain toilets struck a raw nerve as the nation was preparing to vote in local government elections, and produced responses of shock from politicians and ordinary citizens, partly because these images seemed to condense and congeal long historical processes of racism and apartheid. Whereas the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was understood to be the key transitional justice mechanism in the mid‐1990s, by the late 1990s the TRC was no longer at the centre of political life, and its mythology of national reconciliation and ‘new beginnings’ was being widely contested. What replaced it was a ‘messy’ popular politics that was preoccupied with issues relating to land, housing, sanitation, service delivery, labour conditions and employment equity. The TRC's narrowly conceived conception of transitional justice seemed unable to address these struggles to improve conditions of everyday life. The article concludes that these forms of popular politics reveal the limits and possibilities of engaging with the unfinished business of the 1994 democratic transition by developing a localized politics of transitional social justice.