A profession is an organic system that evolves one’s mental faculties, expanding and opening horizons in time and space. But these horizons can guide you into ever narrower and darker enclaves that explain the deeper dimensions of discriminatory practices.
The past week was filled with controversy of the validity or otherwise of Census 2022. But this distraction from the census would not take me away from another curiosity that took me into the nooks and crannies of relieving oneself. So I used this precious moment to write about the political economy of toilets.
Last week I was in the Middle East on a census mission after a decade and a half. While the main menu of the mission was census, the time machine of nations, the side dish I introduced for my curiosity was toilet seats, the narrower and darker enclave of societal privacy. I have in recent months been intrigued by metrology — the science of measurement. Quite unsurprising, being a statistician, metrology comes naturally. Some years back I argued that women like travelling and in fact travel more than men. This was confirmed by a travel survey of Stats SA that showed that women go to social gatherings such as funerals and church gatherings as a predominant reason for travel, and more of them than men in absolute numbers and in proportion.
But my assertion of women travelling more than men was based on the observation of queues at places of relieving the burdens of nature — toilets. Be it on the toilet facilities along national roads, shopping complexes, airports and public facilities such as stadiums, women’s queues are endless. Men do not queue relative to women. And this is almost in all these instances. What could be the cause? My curiosity took me into architectural designs of toilet facilities where it is observed that for every unit of relief in women facilities there are twice available, for different purposes, in male toilets.
Do not bring equity by reducing advantage, enlarge the cake by removing disadvantage.
If the designers of the facilities had been to West Africa, they would have been aware that women are just as deserving of not only a toilet seat but a urinal too as is found in men’s toilets. My classmate and I travelling to Ghana from Lesotho, as was the case with all southerner students, were rudely shocked by how women from West Africa relieved their bodies of liquids, “standing just like men”. In short deserving of not only a toilet seat but a urinal for relief. But this discovery seems to be one of a subculture that has not permeated the main culture of construction of facilities, including in West Africa. If architects and quantity surveyors of West Africa listened to Fela’s song of African Woman, they would have long known that “African woman fit do what African man do, African woman no gree” to be discriminated. So while the travel survey proved that women travel more than men, the long queues that I witnessed in women’s toilets were not the basis for concluding that women are predominant in public spaces of travel and shopping but rather the queues emanate from women being left behind when nature calls.
Slow lounges at airports have solved this dilemma by providing unisex facilities, but in their maximisation of equity, they have removed the urinal. This is an equivalent of holding back the advantage of the advantaged to reach equity instead of removing disadvantage from the disadvantaged — an oft quoted text in South Africa’s deep economic and social inequities. In short, leave the men with their twice-as-many toilets and increase women’s facilities. Do not bring equity by reducing advantage, enlarge the cake by removing disadvantage. What slow facilities have demonstrated though is equity can be brought about by halting undue advantage and thereby redistribution can be achieved without pushing an outcome of equal misery.
My recent curiosity in the discipline of toilets has been about skewness, not of advantage, but of the physical toilet seat itself. I made this startling discovery of why the toilet seat has to be replaced. It suffers no wear and tear like a tyre, but it’s skewed, and sitting on a roller skate in an awkward moment of nature calling can only be hilariously embarrassing.
Which direction are they skewed towards? As we dealt with toilet facility inequity, the question is whether the skewness displays inequity. Do they skew to the left or to the right? My answer initially was that in a natural setting they almost invariably skew to the left unless disrupted by a rail against which one can hold on to, which is usually available for the toilets of the disabled. The reason of skewness to the left is because most people are right-handed. As a way of soft-landing, the right hand is deployed for this purpose, and for a poor toilet seat, a repeated pressure from the right side of the seat increasingly pushes the seat to the left. Once paved in that direction the body weight accelerates the skew to the left.
I had made a conclusive observation, but on my trip to the Middle East I thought my Eureka moment was about to come, only to be terribly disappointed. I discovered a different skew — one to the right. Which reminded me of my experience in Ghana. There was a disposal bucket of used toilet paper, which was located on the left of the toilet seat. Now more research and rethinking of why we as human beings are mostly right-handed. Is it because the heart is on the left and the brain has a left and a right lobe designed for different functions, or is it because of social conditioning? Children under the age of three show ambidexterity, using both hands equally. But they get socialised into using the right hand, almost exclusively. The left hand has traditionally been assigned the task of wiping the backside after relieving oneself. The waste bucket located on the left in the toilets of Ghana are conveniently so for use of the left hand for disposing of the toilet paper after use. Society does not greet with the left hand even between two people who are left-handed. They have to greet with the right hand. In the Bantu languages the right hand is called the eating hand (letsoho la moja) in contradistinction to the left hand. In this region of the world, it is obvious that the landing hand for sitting on a toilet seat is the left, causing the toilet seat to skew to the right.
My trip last week was thus monumental in being conclusive on the science of discriminatory practices against women and against hands. What a wonderful world we live in.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of SA.
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