By Terry Leahy, 2015
Below is the introduction for the “Composting Toilets in Africa” article by Terry Leahy.
Please download the full article in PDF form here. (Diagrams are included.)
How it used to be
A wonderful study by Fairhead and Leach (1996) looks at traditional patterns of land use in Africa, comparing different points of time over a series of decades of aerial photos of the landscape. They match this information to information gathered on the ground, relating to agricultural practices and settlement patterns. Their argument is that in traditional African societies, villages never stayed in the one place for more than a few decades. The soils of the cropping fields that were being used by villagers would become exhausted and villagers would shift their location to another nearby area where soil fertility was stronger. Their time comparisons suggested that these new sites were often in fact the areas which had previously surrounded a village which had been abandoned. They also found that the areas surrounding villages were far from the degraded landscape that one might have predicted. Villages were not in fact destroying their landscapes through over grazing and tree clearing for fuel wood. In fact the reverse. It was the areas that surrounded villages that showed the most intense vegetation in an environment that was generally dry and sparsely vegetated. The ring of woodland surrounding a village was actually the most productive in terms of natural vegetation. This was because this was exactly the area where villagers went to defecate and urinate and where their small livestock deposited manure. This woodland belt around a village was actually building up soil fertility for the whole period of occupancy of the village. It was the cropping fields further out from the village that were being depleted of nutrients. When a village moved and re-occupied an old site, the villagers would clear the area of woodland that had previously been fertilised by a previous occupation. This cycle had been repeated endlessly, with at least 20 years in which soils were left fallow between occupations.
How it can be now
When I was staying at the Kai NGO centre in Zambia I was lucky enough to be living really close to a village that was structured in exactly the way Fairhead and Leach have described. The residential area of the village was a set of closely packed mud rondavel houses with thatched rooves. In the middle was a well that had been installed by an NGO and a hand pump, meaning that villagers did not have to walk for hours to collect water. Surrounding the village in all directions was a ring of woodland, about 500 metres deep. Beyond that, the cropping fields of the villagers had been laid out. Soil fertility was a huge problem. The cropping fields of villagers had been exhausted. Villagers were hoping that the government would restore generous subsidies so they could buy fertiliser, but this seemed unlikely. Another problem in the village was epidemics of diaorrhea, which were killing off some infants and laying adults low for days at a time.
The Kai NGO centre believed the reason for these epidemics was very clear. Villagers were just going and defecating in the nearby woodland. Flies would then spread diseases from one person to another via this source of infection. The NGO solution was to install pit toilets in the village. In most cases the pits had been dug and a concrete squat plate placed over the hole. These toilets were located around the village in spots that were in clear view for all the villagers as they went about their daily chores around their houses. They were meant as public toilets available to all villagers. However the money to pay villagers to complete these toilets had not been forthcoming. What was intended was a basket weave screen around the toilet, for privacy, with a galvanized iron roof over the structure to prevent the hole from filling up with water. It had been years and none of these had been completed. I found this very puzzling. Villagers in this area commonly constructed huge basket weave structures to store maize crops. To protect the cobs from rain they built little conical hats of thatch. I could not figure out why villagers had not finished off these pit toilets themselves. The situation struck me as typical of the project designs in which all the work which villagers were doing to improve their own lives was being paid for by the NGO. So villagers would happily do the paid work but did not necessarily have any commitment to the project. But surely villagers were aware of what a scourge diaorrhea was in their community and had been told how it was spread? Why was their little commitment to this project?
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