BRENDA CHALFIN

University of Florida

Public things, excremental politics,

and the infrastructure of bare life
in Ghana’s city of Tema
A B S T R A C T
In Ghana’s planned city of Tema, public toilets and
One of the State’s founding conditions is its application of the cate-
sewerage systems are a formative terrain of urban
gories “public” and “private” to shit. In the discourse of the State, it is
political praxis giving tangible form to what Henri
a contradiction in terms to speak of “public shit.” Shit ceases to be shit
Lefebvre calls “the right to the city.” Revealing the once it has been collected and transmuted, and only exists in the form
political potentials and determinations of both of symbolic equivalents. To “prefer public shit to private shit” is thus to
waste and municipal infrastructure, excreta and the knock down the partition that separates public from private, to deny
systems devised to contain and channel them serve the “totalitarianism of the State” its access to the private through the
as res publicae, or “public things.” At the same time construction of this dialectical division.
they embody the inequities of bare life and
—Dominique Laporte, History of Shit
biopolitical proscription in Tema’s urban margins,
waste management arrangements underwrite The character of the public realm must change in accordance with
collective outlooks and entitlements and wrest a the activities admitted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself
space for urban existence outside the grasp of state changes its own nature too.
bureaucracies and political elites. [Africa, Ghana,
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
urban, infrastructure, sanitation, public sphere, bare
life, toilets] o more free shitting!” The neat block lettering on the wall of a
“

N
just-renovated public toilet alerts residents of Tema Manhean
to the creep of market logics into the most intimate of daily
practices. Brightly painted public toilet compounds punctuate
the streetscape of Manhean at regular intervals (see Figure 1).
Chalked announcements of football and boxing matches and posters
advertising funeral observances and church crusades adorn their façades.
Surrounded by faint odors of human waste and cleaning fluid, male and
female portraits point patrons in the right directions. Manhean’s public
toilets were built circa 1960, on the cusp of Ghanaian independence and
before construction of much of the planned city of Tema; other sections of
the city were slated for self-contained private facilities. Since then, Man-
hean’s toilets have been continuously used and periodically refurbished.
With dependence on them growing in step with the quarter’s expanding
population, their formal rules of operation shifted with national political

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 92–109, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12062

proclivities and economic fortunes. Challenging the latest
government directive mandating the municipal manage-
ment of public toilets through a franchise system, Jedidiah
Laryea, chair of the fledgling Manhean Toilet Operators
Association, insists the facilities should be considered
“compound toilets” since they were built for use of the res-
idents of the surrounding multifamily homes and were in-
tended to be run exclusively by community members with-
out financial obligation to the Metropolitan Assembly.
Focusing on the toilets of Tema Manhean, the found-
ing settlement of the larger planned city of Tema, I look
to infrastructure to probe the politics of public life in ur-
ban Africa. Contributing to an emerging anthropology of
urban public works (Anand 2011; Appadurai 2002; Larkin
2008; Von Schnitzler 2008), evidence from Manhean sug-
gests that public sanitation facilities, despite their mag-
nification of the degradations of bare life, are central to
the public realm. In Tema’s impoverished margins, public
toilets are at once deeply politicized and politically ambigu-
ous. Perpetually enlivened and defiled by users and over-
seers alike yet only intermittently claimed by state author-
ities, the built environments of sewerage and sanitation
offer people an opportunity to wrest a space for urban ex-
istence outside the grasp of political institutions and elites.
The result is a vital public realm enabling collective claims
and entitlements alongside individual bodily renewal and
survival.
Scholarly and technoscientific interventions regard-
ing the proper management of human excreta are found
across disciplines and time periods. Reproducing a deci-
sively modernist script, these treatments reveal common
ideals and end points, fecal management being the arbiter
of civility and incivility, the social and the primal (Douglas
1984; Elias 1978; Freud 1910; Stallybrass and White 1986).
According to this shared frame, the natural disorder of hu-
man waste is expected to give way to the political adminis-
tration of excreta and the eventual sequestering of shit and
shitting as base substance and private act (Morgan 2002).
Interlinking the discipline of individual bodies and popu-
lations, such renderings, as articulated by Laporte (2002)
above, naturalize the paired emergence of self-regulating
private citizens and the overarching apparatus of the mod-
ern state. Despite certain problematic assumptions, this
model of human scatological evolution remains an en-
during preoccupation of urban planning, international de-
velopment, and public health (Barton and Tsourou 2000;
Melosi 2008; Osinde 2008; Rosen 1993; van der Geest and
Obirih-Opareh 2008). Orchestrated by the state or its prox-
ies, all such efforts pose the interiorization of sanitation and
bodily waste as fundamental to individual well-being and to
a broader project of societal improvement (Anderson 2006;
Coburn 2009; McFarlane 2008a, 2008b).1 The World Bank’s
(2011) implementation of its “No Open Defecation” scheme
Public things  American Ethnologist
across Africa and South Asia is one recent example of this
widely accepted scata-logic.
The following account provides an alternative to the
dominant sanitary thesis by putting infrastructure and ma-
terial agency (Latour 2005) at the fore to draw attention
to the status of public shit and shitting as a deeply sedi-
mented medium of social and material copresence and po-
litical possibility. In particular, ethnographic investigation
suggests it is misleading to look at public toilets in the de-
veloping world first and foremost through the optic of in-
adequacy, whether in the form of lack of facilities, of pri-
vacy, or of the political and economic capacity to secure
them.2 This assumption denies the historical experience
of sanitary provisioning within urban locales of the global
South (cf. Anderson 2006; Bouju 2008; McFarlane 2008a). It
equally obscures the vital engagement of social actors with
waste and hygiene in the crafting of urban public space and
political life (cf. Appadurai 2002; Joshi et al. 2011; Molotch
and Noren 2010; Mukhopadhyay 2006) despite the tenuous
position of state and other overseeing bodies in the process.
Indeed, borne out of an entrenched position of biopolitical
exclusion (Foucault 1979), the material integuments of pub-
lic sanitation in Ghana’s urban periphery provide a durable
basis for collective consciousness and entitlement sustain-
ing the political prospects and proscriptions of the urban
underclass.
My effort here is far from the first to explore the poli-
tics of sanitation in postcolonial Africa. Neither is it the first
scholarly depiction of public toilets in urban Ghana (Ayee
and Crook 2003; Pellow 2008; Thrift 2007; van der Geest and
Obirih-Oparah 2008). The scata-logics of the postcolony
have provoked discussion among francophone Africanists
attuned to “the aesthetics of vulgarity”: the expression and
popular derision of authority via symbolic play with bod-
ily functions (Bayart et al. 1992; Mbembe 2001:102). Despite
its suggestiveness, their approach is restricted by a discur-
sive bias that sidesteps the insistent materiality of human
ordure (see also Esty 1999). A reliance on Bakhtinian (e.g.,
Bakhtin 1984) dialogics, moreover, assumes the copresence
of elite and subaltern, overlooking transgressive subjects
who may speak to, of, or for themselves.3
In proposing an alternative perspective, my intent is
not to romanticize urban sanitary regimes. The goal, rather,
is to disinter a realm of political praxis consistently mis-
construed by agendas of infrastructural modernization at a
time when popular solutions for satisfying basic needs in-
creasingly compensate for an incapacitated developmen-
tal state. In this regard, human bodily waste, sewerage,
and sanitation inspire a broader consideration of the po-
litical ascendance of the infrastructures of bare life in
the late-modern public sphere. Evidence from the enclave
of Manhean shows that sanitary infrastructure reflects a
historically dynamic mosaic of inclusion and exclusion,
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
Figure 1. Exterior of toilet compound, Tema Manhean, Ghana. The toilet is raised to permit access to septic tanks. Community notices, campaign material,
and advertisements for evangelical crusades are posted on the front wall. November 19, 2011. Photo by Brenda Chalfin.
provisioning, breakdown, and renewal. In this densely pop-
ulated settlement, public toilets instantiate distinct sociali-
ties, value forms, and political outlooks at the crux of pub-
lic life. Echoing the claims of Mukhopadhyay for Calcutta,
in the West African setting, “Putting shit and filth up for re-
consideration does not mean the passive withdrawal from
activism. On the contrary, it means engaging with popular
or subaltern practices as ethico-political responses and re-
flecting on their source of authority rather than simply den-
igrating them from the vantage point of some absolute wis-
dom” (2006:227).
It is in the crucible of public waste making that Man-
hean residents craft what might be called, with due defer-
ence to Henri Lefebvre’s (1996) notion of “the right to the
city,” “the right to shit.” In Lefebvre’s (1996) rather utopic
conception, “the right to the city” denotes a modality of
94
urban politics emanating from the aspirations and expe-
riences of non-elite urban dwellers. Neither excluding nor
exclusive to the state, such political engagements bear di-
rectly on the terms of individual and collective life in urban
space, countering the privileges of capital and elites. For
Lefebvre, this manner of urban claims making has multi-
ple faces, joining the political right of participation with the
economics of appropriation (Purcell 2002:102). It is most
productively understood, as Matthew Gandy notes, “as a
‘right to urban life’ that combines the practical needs of ev-
eryday life with a substantive rather than abstract concep-
tion of modern citizenship” (2006:388). Turning “matters of
fact” to “matters of concern” (Latour 2005:19), “the right to
shit” in Manhean is similarly composed. It involves, on the
one hand, the right “to shit,” that is, a right to the act of shit-
ting, whether individually or collectively, and, on the other,

the actual right to “shit” as a material resource with both
public and private value.
I begin with a discussion of the centrality of public san-
itary facilities within midcentury urban planning schemes
in Ghana. I then recount how national political struggles
turned Manhean, toilets included, from a place of promise
into a zone of abandonment. Ethnographic analysis reveals
the subsequent reclamation of public toilets by urban resi-
dents, ultimately subverting the renewed exactions of state
agencies, transforming conditions of bare life into political
possibility, and enlarging what is permissible and by whom
within the public realm.
I carried out research in 2009, 2010, and 2011 through
surveys, extended and repeat interviews with toilet man-
agers and attendants, casual conversations with toilet users,
visual documentation of toilet premises, and successive
ethnographic observations conducted within and around
public toilet compounds. These activities were initially part
of a larger study of public space in Manhean; more fo-
cused investigation and the realization that public toilets
warranted their own inquiry came later.
Public toilets and the irregularities of urban
modernism
Manhean is perched on Ghana’s western Atlantic littoral.
Its streets are flanked by the sand and rocks of an eroding
coastline that has already swallowed structures dating from
the town’s mid-20th-century founding (see Figure 2). The
air is filled with the scent of motor vehicle exhaust, charcoal
fires, fish smoking, and waste water running through open
drainage channels. Factories, refineries, and power plants
stand adjacent to the settlement. The fishing harbor and
port complex are a few kilometers west. Beyond the tow-
ering cranes of the port, tankers and container ships wait
to discharge and receive cargo. To the east are remnants of
ships run aground and distant ciphers of wooden fishing ca-
noes. The beach at Manhean’s edge is strewn with boulders
and seaweed and heaps of debris that has washed ashore.
Figures crouch on wet rocks and face the cool sea spray
with their backs to the town to attend to the elimination of
bodily waste—a scene most prevalent in the veiled light of
dawn.
Along with the small portion of Manhean’s population
who enjoy toilet facilities in their own homes, those who
shit at the water’s edge for reasons of preference or penury
avoid the public toilets of this compact urban zone. The rest
of Manhean’s populace of 40,000 makes use of public facil-
ities. Each toilet is divided into male and female sections
and accommodates 16–24 users at a time (see Figure 3).
The long rows of single-sex stalls share a common corridor,
making defecation here as much of a public act as a visit to
the rocky shoreline. Etching graffiti such as “Clean this toi-
let” on the stall walls, users openly comment on the status
Public things  American Ethnologist
of a facility. But there is little shame attached to patronizing
public toilets. This sentiment is not restricted to Manhean,
as noted in the Akan proverb, “If you eat alone, you will also
shit alone,” which poses defecation, like eating, as an ap-
propriate social activity (van der Geest 2002:197).
Claiming and differentiating public space, each toilet
compound is fenced and elevated a few steps above ground
to accommodate subterranean holding tanks and sewage
lines. The compound typically includes an attendant’s of-
fice, water tank, and incinerator for burning toilet tissue.
Often, pay-per-use public showers, bathing rooms, and wa-
ter taps adjoin the toilet premises. The toilets are open to
all who can pay and even some who cannot, such as chil-
dren and the elderly. With the compounds tucked between
the densely packed structures of the quarter, toilet users in-
clude the residents of nearby homes and businesses along
with passersby. Though some public toilets are busier than
others because of comfort, convenience, and cost, all attract
long lines in the early morning, and patrons file in and out
of the facilities throughout the day. The evening rush pe-
ters out by 10 p.m., and the toilet is unlocked through the
night for anyone who might need to make a visit for reasons
of illness or other extremity. Though residents may profess
a desire for self-contained household toilets and showers,
like one newcomer who complained to researchers, “I want
my own bathroom, toilet and kitchen” (Raets and Thijs
2010:315), this option is not available to the working-class
residents of Manhean, whether native or stranger.
A defining element of an expansive, state-led mod-
ernizing scheme, the city of Tema was established in the
1950s under the tutelage of Ghana’s first president and pan-
African statesman, Kwame Nkrumah. Sited 20 miles from
the capital of Accra, the new city was posed as a fresh
start, untarnished by colonial overrule or the social divi-
sions and material deprivations of native lifeways. An ex-
haustively planned urban formation, the city’s totalizing
design was intended to foster national progress and inter-
national attainment through an industrial economy and
cosmopolitan upward mobility for its residents (d’Auria
2010; Elleh 2002). The crafting of Tema’s urban ideal, in line
with other utopian urban agendas, required the displace-
ment of communities already occupying the area.4 A 64-
square-mile parcel was acquisitioned from the traditional
lands of the surrounding ethnically identified Ga peoples.5
Tema Manhean (lit. Tema new town), a six-square-mile plot
hugging the Atlantic shoreline at the eastern edge of the
new township, was designated the primary site of resettle-
ment for the displaced.
Similar to companion urban experiments of the day,
such as Brasilia or India’s Chandigargh, the residential seg-
regation of the new city’s underclass was both prerequi-
site and byproduct of the construction and functioning of
its core (Galantay 1975:15; Holston 1989; Prakash 2002).
95
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
Figure 2. Eroded and debris-ridden Atlantic shoreline of Tema Manhean, Ghana. A boy relaxes in a wheelbarrow while his mate repairs to the nearby rocks
to defecate. March 1, 2009. Photo by Brenda Chalfin.
Involving the complete evacuation of one community and
the building of another from the ground up, Manhean’s set-
tlement was initiated in 1952 but not completed until 1960,
after incurring substantial local resistance, including a long
unresolved chieftaincy dispute. Besides a nominal annuity
promised to the community’s designated chief, or mantse,
housing was the primary form of reparation.
Although the later-completed city of Tema was inter-
nationally lauded for its innovative design, the work of vi-
sionary master planner Constantinos Doxiadis (Bromley
2003; d’Auria 2010; d’Auria and Sanwu 2011; Doxiadis 1968,
1974; Miescher 2012), Manhean equally marked a formative
step in postwar urban design. The lead architects, London-
based Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, were attached to the
renowned International Congresses of Modern Architecture
and were pacesetters of tropical modernism, involved in
projects across West Africa (Crinson 2003; Fry and Drew
1956, 1964; Liscombe 2006; Mumford and Frampton 2002).6
Drew and Fry’s proposal for Manhean included “a village
96
layout, with plans for schools, markets, churches, public
by-ways, and the complete design for the new houses”
(Butcher 1966:55; see also Kulterman 1963:16; Raets and
Thijs 2010; Uduku 2006).7
Combining a base-line concern with sanitary infras-
tructure common to the field of urban planning and a
more targeted preoccupation with tropical hygiene com-
mon to colonial regimes (Anderson 2006; Rabinow 1989;
Wright 1991),8 attention to public health was central to
Drew and Fry’s scheme. Drew herself stated, “The ques-
tion of latrines is a very important one in Africa and
it cannot be shirked . . . The amount of illness occur-
ring from lack of attention to this matter is terrible . . .
One of the great benefits we could give people was a
decent septic tank latrine system in the compound, to-
gether with another great boon, a good water supply”
(1946:59). Here, even at the dawn of national indepen-
dence, as Brian Larkin suggests for other outposts of em-
pire, infrastructure operated as “a mode of address whereby

Figure 3. Sketch. “The best maintained latrine in Tema Manhean,” Ghana. Courtesy of the artist, Valerie Raets.
the . . . state offered development and technological
progress in return for political subjection” (2008:245). In
addition to water supplied by communal standpipes and
dustbins for every household, multiseater public latrines
fitted with pull-chain water closets were installed across
Manhean’s new neighborhoods (Butcher 1966:28).
According to Emmanuel Oko Adjetey, a Ghanaian ar-
chitect who spent his childhood in the pre-Manhean set-
tlement, “Special attention was paid to open spaces, con-
nected by narrow lanes which served as playgrounds and
space for public meetings or social gatherings. Physical
forms thus resulted from cultural patterns but little at-
tention was given to hygienic requirements!” (1964:70). In
the resettlement community, the public latrines were lo-
Public things  American Ethnologist
cated across the road from the compound houses the ar-
chitects designed to mimic the residents’ lost multifamily
dwellings (Butcher 1966:59).9 They were evenly spaced, in
the spirit of health, symmetry, and accessibility. Considered
a feat of midcentury sanitary engineering in the tropics,
the toilets were linked to a central sewerage system—an in-
frastructural development highly unusual in Ghana at the
time and even to this day neither widespread nor widely
operational (Gandy 2006; Thrift 2007; van der Geest and
Obirih 2008).10
Effecting an inscription of biopolitical subjectivity typ-
ical of both the imperial and the neoimperial project
(Anderson 2006; Bashford 2004) in Manhean, the promo-
tion of sanitation and hygiene was key to reckoning the
97
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
relationship between state authorities and residents. Once
resettlement was underway, according to the site’s lead wel-
fare officer, G. W. Amarteifio, “Welfare workers [were hired]
to accustom residents to the new environment. They ad-
vised on house cleaning and tried to instill a spirit of clean-
liness into housekeepers . . . advising owners of fowls and
other domestic animals on how best to keep them and white
wash fish smoking oven to improve appearance” (1966:20).
These interventions and the associated facilities did not
escape the attention of Manhean’s newcomers. In surveys
conducted by resettlement agents not long after the move,
“good sanitation, rubbish removal, latrines and piped wa-
ter” ranked high in people’s lists of “good features of new
houses” (despite the purportedly frequent theft of flushing
chains from public lavatories) and “lack of latrines and poor
water supply” as “undesirable features” of their former liv-
ing quarters (Butcher 1966:61).
Invoking what might be labeled an excremental ap-
proach to citizenship akin to recently identified conven-
tions of biological citizenship (Petryna 2002; Rose and
Novas 2005), toileting habits formed a vivid interface be-
tween governing authorities and the residents of Manhean
as well as among residents themselves. As Amarteifio’s
coworker, social anthropologist David Butcher, notes, “The
gradual filling up of Tema Manhean with people from old
Tema brought new problems with it, such as the need for
instructions on how to use flush latrines properly, and the
use of dust bins” (1966:32). In response, forging a means
to directly and indirectly act on and order the bodies of
Manhean’s new residents,
The resettlement workers set about promoting a pro-
gramme to ease the tension [of resettlement] and
unite the community into a purposeful and harmo-
nious whole. They concentrated first on sanitation; the
sewage system was often blocked by stones and corn
cobs thrown by the people into the new lavatories. A
campaign was started to sell toilet rolls to the villagers.
The welfare workers purchased toilet rolls at wholesale
prices, held demonstration talks with the people and
sold toilet rolls to them. [Amarteifio1966:19]
Giving government agents a place in the daily life of the
community via toilets, the latrines were cleaned and main-
tained by municipal employees, and residents were guaran-
teed access free of charge. As much as toilet facilities were
utilized and appreciated by residents, they were a source of
communal tension. Spurring the recognition of a new social
order afoot, “the forced mixing of families with different al-
legiances within one area has led to friction between them,
which usually flare up in disputes about which families’
children have made a mess in the public latrine” (Butcher
1966:27).
98
Urban undersides: The making of an urban
underclass
Though Manhean was originally conceived as a bucolic
neighbor to the new city and a place where those re-
settled could pursue livelihoods as fishers, farmers, and
traders while upgrading their standard of living, its urban
character—and marginalization—was irrefutable from the
start. Most significant was its inherent overcrowding. The
settlement was initially planned for 5,000 on the basis of
the 1952 census of the earlier community, but when relo-
cation began in 1959, the population seeking residence in
Manhean was over 13,000, with the likelihood of many more
unrecorded inhabitants (Butcher 1966:25). Along with na-
tive sons and daughters claiming a stake in the residences
of the old town to qualify for accommodations in the reset-
tlement zone, migrants from near and far were drawn to the
area in the pursuit of jobs in the harbor and adjoining city.11
Cultivating an urban underclass without adequate ac-
commodations or housing security, government agencies
recalibrated the promised housing allocation. Departing
from the pledged room-for-room provision, “temporary
huts” were constructed by the resettlement authorities
(Amarteifio 1966:17). While those accommodated in the
planned structures garnered bona fide property rights,
the rest were treated as “unentitled householders” and
required to rent their accommodations. Combining the
scripted exclusions of resettlement camps and the un-
scripted ones of zones of abandonment (Agamben 1998;
Malkki 1995), Manhean’s built environment exhibited a
rigid order with a sense of make-shiftness indicative of its
deliberate marginalization. Rapidly adding density to the
settlement’s residential grid, recognized and unrecognized
householders built extensions onto the new structures to
make room for tenants, transients, and family members.12
The long gap between the drafting of the resettlement
plan and its realization heightened the distinctions between
Manhean and the rest of Tema. Toilets contributed to this
divide. Though “state of the art” in terms of efficiency, the
bitumen sewerage pipes used in Manhean were expected
to last only ten years. Public lavatories, moreover, were
deemed inappropriate for the middle-class ideals of other
parts of the new city. Save for an initial group of work-
ers’ quarters with shared “ablution blocks,” all the homes
in those areas had self-contained taps and toilets. Because
building in Manhean cost considerably more than in Tema
township, the disparity cannot easily be attributed to finan-
cial constraints and, instead, signals a more deliberate de-
cision not to provide comparable facilities. “The houses [in
Manhean] were not cheap at 300 per room. At the same
time Tema Manhean was being built, Tema Development
Corporation was building . . . houses with full internal ser-
vices. [T]he total cost of development was about ₤550 per

house, average size two to three rooms with water, electric-
ity, bathroom, and WC in each house, street lighting and
tarred roads” (Butcher and Whitham 1966:68).
Quickly shifting from showcase to space of exclu-
sion and calculated underprovisioning, the infrastructural
production of Manhean as an urban periphery is strik-
ing. Helpful in conceptualizing these arrangements, Willem
Schinkel and Marguerite van den Berg (2011) use Giorgio
Agamben’s (1998) notion of the “state of exception” in a
way that avoids its philosophical extremes. They suggest
that Agamben’s counterposing of bare life and political life
“is active not only in an absolute sense, but also in vari-
ous intermediary forms in which aspects of the exclusive
inclusion of bare life into the community are actualized”
(2011:5). The altered status of Manhean’s residents, their de-
scent from promising new citizens with the dawning of de-
colonization into the abyss of infrastructural incarceration
captures this process of intermediation well. With civic sta-
tus for Manhean’s residents maintained but hinging largely
on the terms of toileting, here we see bare life and political
life fused in the form of a partial exception: a space built and
circumscribed but barely sustained by the sovereign state.
Reminding us that infrastructures can never fully shed
the weight of their functional and historical premises (Star
1999:382), in Manhean, this sort of relational reformatting,
always to some degree haunted by what might have been,
would affect the operation as well as political charge of ur-
ban sewerage. A remnant of a once and future state and a
pragmatic alternative to its failed promise, Manhean’s pub-
lic toilets came to constitute a residual “common wealth”
in terms material and metaphoric. Invoking the logic of La-
tourian “dingpolitiks” (thing-politics), like the public works
of the medieval city-states or ancient sites of public delib-
eration and assembly (Kharkhordin 2005), Manhean’s sani-
tary installations would emerge as formative arenas of pub-
lic political life, practically and symbolically binding public
space, collective experience, and communal interest.
No more free shitting
Spanning the full gamut of urban infrastructure, from roads
and utilities to housing stock and school zones, the uneven
terms of urban provisioning between the city of Tema and
the settlement of Manhean became more graphic as time
progressed. Captured in the res publicae of public toilets,
these distinctions would eventually inspire a reclamation
of urban civility via the realization of the aforementioned
“right(s) to shit,” giving form to Lefebvre’s (1996) double-
sided “right to the city” via the “right to participate” in the
act of shitting and the “right to appropriate” its locus and
substance (Purcell 2002:102).
Despite the fall in 1966 of Kwame Nkrumah, the
promised housing, industrial, and commercial complexes
of the new city materialized under the management of
Public things  American Ethnologist
the profit-turning Tema Development Corporation. In con-
trast, the resettlement area of Manhean experienced fur-
ther withdrawal of the attention and resources of munic-
ipal authorities. Notwithstanding the upward mobility of
a handful of residents, the overarching neglect of public
works—including toilets—in Manhean continued well into
the 1970s, exacerbated by national economic crisis brought
about by agricultural losses, world-market oil and credit
shocks, and a long decade of political instability (Rothschild
1991).
Only with the populist revolution of the early 1980s
did Manhean’s toilets regain a place at the fore of commu-
nity life. Following exhortations by up-and-coming head of
state J. J. Rawlings, toilets in Manhean reemerged as prime
objects of grassroots self-help and popular mobilization.13
Taking a cue from the People’s Militias and Community
Defense Committees of Rawlings’s Armed Forces Revolu-
tionary Council (Nugent 1991), residents of Manhean came
together to clean, renovate, and run public toilets. Through-
out Rawlings’s reign during the 1980s and 1990s, public fa-
cilities were managed by larger and smaller groups of neigh-
bors, kin, and political affiliates. Putting to use the patterns
of proximity scripted in Fry and Drew’s original town plan,
funds were collected from surrounding homes and busi-
nesses to cover the cost of upkeep, and nominal user fees
were introduced.
Fast-forward to 2004. With the succession of the rev-
olutionary legacy of the Rawlings–National Democratic
Congress (NDC) government by the two-term leadership of
John Kufuor and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), any rem-
nants of populism at the state level were firmly supplanted
by neoliberal market-based ideals (Arthur 2006). A new
brand of toilet privatization followed. Based on formally
contracted franchises overseen by the Tema Municipal As-
sembly (TMA), which had replaced the Tema Development
Corporation as Manhean’s official overseer, the new system
relied on the imposition of fixed and mandatory user fees
along with rents and dividends to be paid directly to TMA.
Each franchise was to be formally organized and registered
with the municipal authority and contracts distributed on
a competitive basis. A fertile source of value in neoliberal
times, in a manner similar to the South African water pri-
vatization scheme described by Von Schnitzler (2008), exc-
reta were at once put in the hands of the public yet legally
retained in the grip of the state. Shifting the burden of man-
agement and upkeep to the franchisee while maintaining
municipal ownership and oversight, TMA set standards of
operation and was entitled to collect revenue from con-
cessionaires made responsible for almost all operating ex-
penses.
Good for a duration of three years (“renewable”), the
TMA toilet contracts detailed the division of labor, revenue,
and responsibility between the “Franchisee” and the “As-
sembly”:
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
The Franchisee would undertake: twice daily cleans-
ing of sanitary ware, floors and walls with approved
cleanser . . . cleaning and polishing of pipe work to
a bright finish . . . collect litter, replenish toilet paper,
soaps . . . check operations of cisterns and taps, clean
drains, gutters, clear debris from roofs and entrance
way . . . These duties would be performed with utmost
accountability to the Assembly, as the Franchisee was
expected to: Inform Assembly of any faults and re-
pairs . . . Supply all consumables, brand and type to
be approved by Assembly officer . . . Submit annual fi-
nancial information. Most important, the Franchisee
is obliged to pay: 20% of gross fee payments collected
or a[n agreed-on] fixed sum to the Assembly. The As-
sembly in turn would be responsible for: quality con-
trol and inspecting of cleaning and all other work in-
cluding inspection of records . . . The Assembly also
had the authority to: sanction franchisee or terminate
the contract, as did the Franchisee, if unable to re-
cover costs or if the Assembly does not uphold its end.
[TMA 2009]
The right “to” shit in this case was by law partible, with
the public toilet proceeds shared between concessionaires
and municipal authorities. With minimal investment in up-
keep by government agents and the near-total devolution
of responsibility to the franchisee, TMA’s toilet revenue was
less a tariff for services rendered than a tax on bodily func-
tions.
Foregrounding what is typically unnoticed to generate
the sort of “infrastructural inversion” evinced in the context
of infrastructural breakdown (Star 1999:382), bodily pro-
cesses in Manhean, as Filip De Boeck and Marie-Françoise
Plisaart (2004:236) also note for Kinshasa, take on an infras-
tructural character in their own right. With shitting serv-
ing as private and public utility, in Manhean, human waste
making was simultaneously recrafted as a source of private
profit and recharged by the specter of government control,
as during Manhean’s founding. An irony reflected in the
aforementioned toilet signage—“No more free shitting!”—
under the neoliberal dispensation, toilet users would pay a
political and economic price to shit.
TMA’s toilet concession scheme did not work out as
planned, however. For state actors and residents alike, pub-
lic toilets were too hot a commodity and of too much impor-
tance, too much value, and too long a history to be easily
slotted into a single contractual template. With economic
opportunities such as fishing, factory work, and govern-
ment employment in decline, control of Manhean’s pub-
lic toilets was the most lucrative economic game in town.
Complicating the conceit of development experts that pri-
vatization of sanitation does not work for the urban poor
because of the limited wealth in circulation and awkward fit
between conventional business practices and the complex-
ities of urban life (Ayee and Crook 2003:11; Devas 2001), toi-
100
let franchises were among the few local sources of revenue
producing considerable profit on a consistent basis.
Open 18 hours a day, 365 days a year and attracting 25
customers an hour (and upwards of 100 patrons during the
morning rush), each paying ten pesewa per visit in 2012, a
public toilet could easily generate upwards of 18,000 Ghana
cedi in revenue over the course of a year.14 Toilet clean-
ers’ and attendants’ monthly salaries hardly made a dent
in gross profits, which were consistently doubled through
the sale of additional goods and services such as toilet pa-
per, piped water, and access to shower stalls. Bringing to
life Laporte’s (2002:43, 78) recognition of the equivalence
of shit and money within the early-modern European san-
itary economy, in the neoliberal milieu of Manhean, even
as other accumulative strategies dried up, the regularity of
bodily functions could be relied on and capitalized.
Public potties, parties, and patronage
Just as toilets in the early years of Manhean’s settlement
were a principal point of interaction between residents and
government representatives, political patronage is a com-
ponent of the public toilet business in the era of privatiza-
tion. Yet, rather than primarily a sinecure of political office
and party affiliation, as in urban neighborhoods elsewhere
in Ghana (Ayee and Crook 2003), public toilets in Manhean
exhibit a highly variegated political profile, rendering them
at once a spoil of state access and a rebuff to state and party
politics. A “matter of [public] concern” in their own right
(Latour 2005:41), Manhean’s public toilets acknowledge the
state without deferring to it.
Attesting to the political range of Manhean’s public toi-
lets, the community’s traditional authorities oversee spe-
cific facilities and lay claim to the profits of all. They levy
a 20-cedi toll from each toilet on a monthly basis, contribu-
tions that are nominal in the singular but significant in the
aggregate. In a political system in which intense electoral
competition gives rise to a political field strongly bifurcated
along party lines, party loyalists also share the spoils of pub-
lic potties. One toilet that was turned over to NDC support-
ers with the change of government in 2008 was reopened
after being converted from the older squatting style to what
residents referred to as a “sit on” toilet (see Figure 4). Along
with the fresh coat of paint, the front of the toilet com-
pound was emblazoned with the exhortation, in English
and Ga, “Sit on it! / Ta Nɔ.” Reminiscent of social welfare
officers’ efforts at community toilet education in the early
days of resettlement, the mother and daughter team attend-
ing the toilet told me they went around in the aftermath
of remodeling ensuring customers were sitting rather than
squatting.
Challenging the interests of both local and national po-
litical authorities and despite the investment in refurbish-
ment by NDC loyalists, the transfer was strongly opposed by

Figure 4. Interior view of a “sit on it” toilet in Tema Manhean, Ghana.
Recycled newsprint is used as toilet paper and deposited in wicker baskets
for incineration. June 23, 2013. Photo by Brenda Chalfin.
the previous overseers allied with the NPP. The two groups
finally agreed to share the toilet’s take, each garnering the
proceeds on alternating weeks. A change in toilet oversight
from an established set of managers to supporters of the in-
cumbent party following the election was similarly rebuffed
at another Manhean facility, where NDC affiliates were ru-
mored to be the new franchise holders. Here the refusal of
the proposed change in management was less about inter-
party rivalry than about protecting established communal
claims to public service provisioning. With a strong sense
of ownership and the toilet a primary source of income, the
group claiming the facility could not be upstaged by party
affiliates.
Thus, in Manhean, the tendency for community-based
toilet managers to “take shit into their own hands” is much
more the norm than party sponsorship or patronage. In
this setting, it becomes clear that, in the same way it is
misguided to treat shitting as a fundamentally or desir-
ably private act, it is equally problematic to locate toilets
in the realm of public and political life solely or primarily
in relation to state authorities or elites. Occupying an in-
termediary space (pace Schinkel and van den Berg 2011)
that merges the recurring deprivations of bare life with
the unstable residues of political life, Manhean’s public toi-
lets mark a different sort of political terrain. To paraphrase
Public things  American Ethnologist
Bruno Latour, “As infrastructures that matter,” they are “the
res that creates a public around it” (2005:14).
Taking shit into their own hands
Mapping out a political field that simultaneously exceeds,
subsumes, and rejects the state nexus, the management of
toilets in Manhean is largely a community-based affair with
contracts in the hands of neighborhood associations and
residents. Though the terms and allocation of franchises are
affected to some degree by the agendas of parties, politi-
cians, and municipal authorities, in the era of governmental
retrenchment, state bodies can neither reclaim nor main-
tain the coercive charter of the founding high-modernist
era of public toileting. A function of and counter to the ef-
fective internment of Manhean’s inhabitants via the over-
lapping exclusions of modernist urban planning, neoliberal
capitalist expansion, and uneven forms of state contraction,
public toilets, instead, occupy an insistent space within the
public sphere.
Hannah Arendt’s associational notion of public space
and political life is instructive here (Benhabib 1992:78). Sit-
uating the self within a loose social body, in the words of
Arendt, “the public realm, as the common world . . . gathers
us together and yet prevents our falling over each other . . .
providing a sense of common object while permitting the
expression of multiple perspectives” (1958:57–58; see also
Arendt 1958:52). The infrastructure of public toileting, like
other forms of urban infrastructure that are part of the “sen-
sual life of the city” (Larkin 2008:250), is less a rhetorically
constituted bourgeois public sphere of self-conscious polit-
ical deliberation, as described by Jürgen Habermas (1991),
and more a realm of embodied and quotidian copresence
and practical discourse enabling individual and social life
(Benhabib 1992:87; Frekko 2009:228). But, directly refuting
Arendt’s claims that “it has always been the bodily part
of human existence that needed to be hidden in privacy”
with “public life . . . possible only after the much more ur-
gent needs of life itself had been taken care of” (1958:65,
72), Manhean’s toilets provide a stage for conjoining the
intimacy of bodily functions with the loose affiliations of
the open-ended social body. Here, Arendt’s “distinction be-
tween things that should be shown and things that should
be hidden” (1958:72) is exploded as the most base activi-
ties “connected to sheer survival are permitted to appear
in public” (1958:46) to be “seen and heard by everybody”
(1958:50).15 Providing a foundation for interaction and in-
terest formation, Manhean’s inclusive public arrangement
of intimately embodied acts enables and sustains the sort
of quotidian politics envisioned by Lefebvre (1996).16
The alliance of public toilets and public life is evident
across the range of Manhean’s facilities. A clear manifes-
tation of the aforementioned “right to shit,” combining a
materialized right “to” shit and an ethico-practical right “to
101
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
shit,” Manhean’s Kutsho toilet reveals the deep politics of
public shitting.17 Harking back to the decline of TMA ser-
vicing and the early days of Rawlings’s revolution, Kutsho
fell under community governance in the late 1970s, when
it was run by a five-member committee. After 20 years, dis-
content with the conditions of the toilet mounted, precip-
itating what, Kwate Seth Boi, a longtime toilet manager,
described to me as a “toilet coup d’etat” in 2000. As he
recalled, when asked about the history of the facility, lo-
cal youths, taking advantage of the yearly Ga Kleejo fes-
tival (a traditional rite of reversal in which young people
express their opinions to local “powers that be,” whether
chiefs, elders, or elites; see Field 1937), composed a song
about the stench of the toilet, shaming its overseers. The
youths went further than in most Kleejo protests and locked
the toilet from the inside, militating for a change in man-
agement. As the story goes, they gained the backing of el-
ders from the neighborhood, who accompanied them to
the mantse’s palace in support of their request. With the
franchise system newly in place, the TMA sought to turn
the toilet over to a registered company. Fusing labor, loca-
tion, and money through the common currency of shit (cf.
Laporte 2002:47, 78), individuals from the neighborhood
volunteered their own funds and effort to repair the fa-
cilities and eventually banded together to secure an offi-
cial toilet franchise. The group, 50 persons strong and in-
cluding some better-off residents with toilets in their own
homes, makes decisions with the consent of elders drawn
from nearby residences.
Differing in history and makeup, yet propelling an even
more vivid form of scatological claims making with rights
to place, property, and distinct forms of living at the fore,
is a facility popularly known as Mang toilet.18 In a reversal
of the arrangements of Kutsho, where toilet oversight is a
recent addition to the already established ambit of a corps
of neighborhood leaders and elites, Mang’s management is
an impetus to community mobilization and representation
more broadly. Indeed, Mang’s overseers are the public face
of the neighborhood, providing material and social support
to residents and fostering access to resources and recogni-
tion within a wider political-economic field. In the Mang
case, the right(s) to shit underwrites the pursuit and real-
ization of other rights.
The first toilet built during resettlement, Mang faced a
long decade of decline between the fall of Nkrumah and the
rise of Rawlings. It was “brought back to life,” the caretaker
recalled, during the early years of the Rawlings regime by
individuals active in the local Committee for Defense of the
Revolution. By the late 1990s, both the toilet and the man-
agement group had broken down, and the latter was sup-
planted by an alliance of young men from the surrounding
community. Already connected to the previous overseers
by social, kin, and residential ties, their cross-party politi-
cal allegiances mattered little in the transfer of responsibil-
102
ity. With the franchise system established around the same
time, they submitted bids to the municipal authorities and
were swiftly designated the official overseers of the facility.
In the case of Mang toilet, much more challenging to
the group than political affiliation or TMA recognition was
the actual operation of the toilet. The group’s spokesman,
Mr. Laryea, recounted the details in response to my in-
quiries:
The septic tank was filled to capacity and the water and
electric services were on the verge of suspension due
to a string of unpaid charges and other debts inher-
ited from the former managers. We sought out house to
house contributions to pay the bills to which we added
to our own funds. I visited the Ghana Water Company
to beg for a reprieve and negotiate an installment plan
and sought out reimbursements from the former toi-
let managers. To little avail, the very day the water was
reconnected, the electricity was disconnected and we
had to fight to get it back too.
With infrastructural breakdown serving from the outset as
an impetus to urban social networking, Mang managers
and facilities are now socially and materially well connected
to utilities companies. Because the TMA waste manage-
ment team is rarely present and is reluctant to pay for toi-
let repairs despite the stipulations of the franchise contract,
Mang managers, carrying out the professed obligations of
the state, typically cover the costs with proceeds from toilet
user fees supplemented by household contributions when
the situation demands. They also mobilize the same al-
liances with utilities providers to get help with problems
elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Extending the public influence of toilet-based affili-
ation, this is only one example of what Jean Comaroff,
in her discussion of AIDS activism, identifies as use of a
“counter politics of bare life” (2007:211) to garner resources
and recognition. Mr. Laryea, Mang franchise head, as men-
tioned above, is the executive officer of the larger Manhean
Toilet Operators Association. He is the go-to person when
a dispute is to be adjudicated or another association seeks
advice about hiring. Gaining the notice of Tema’s munici-
pal authority, Laryea was invited by TMA to manage a pub-
lic toilet in a neighboring township. Articulating a sense of
urban territorial identification deriving as much from the
specific matter at hand as from fear of co-optation by state
agents, he explained that he declined because of his ardent
belief that toilets be managed by locals.
In this scenario, we see the catapulting of the public
toilet from a functionally specific public space to a founda-
tion for affecting public life within the wider municipality. A
comparison of Manhean with Arjun Appadurai’s (2002) de-
scription of mass celebrations of public toilet facilities by
the urban poor in Mumbai helps to parse the political con-
tours of public toileting. Similar to the situation in Mumbai,

public mobilization around Manhean toilets is grounded in
a subaltern sense of locality and the intimate proximity of
daily life, driven by what Appadurai calls a “lateral” polit-
ical ethos of “deep democracy” (2002:45). As in Mumbai,
public toilets in Manhean provide a basis for “the poor to
work their way into the public sphere” and, in turn, “over
ride the failed solutions and non-solutions of the state and
elites” (Appadurai 2002:39, 40). The similarities between
the two cases end there. While Manhean’s toilet managers
do forge local networks and alliances, they do not partake
in wider forms of national and transnational affiliation, as
in Mumbai. Though they periodically pursue direct politi-
cal recognition or redress from government authorities and
participate in what Appadurai (2002:39) calls the “transgres-
sive display of fecal politics” (pace the Kutsho toilet Kleejo
protests—or the recent explosion of protests around toilets
in South Africa19 ), toilet management in Manhean is the tip
of a largely submerged political field.
Only occasionally involving self-conscious public ac-
tion, the political work of public toileting is most consis-
tently expressed in the perpetuation of collective forms of
public life only vaguely or partially directed to state bod-
ies or formalized political entities. Rooted in the experi-
ence and perpetuation of the collective right “to shit”—in
public places of shitting—the situation in Manhean repre-
sents a quotidian politics of “participation” (see Lefebvre
1996) rather than a social movement akin to that pursued
by Mumbai’s toilet activists, the midcentury biological cit-
izenship envisioned at Manhean’s founding, or the newer
megaschemes of governance currently operative in Africa
based on individualized self-management (pace Nyugen
2010; Von Schnitzer 2008). Emerging out of a strongly
embodied and localized sense of social connection de-
rived from a shared experience of bare life and marginal
membership within the sovereign polis, management of
Manhean’s toilets substantiates a public realm that may not
pronounce or envision itself as political yet consistently ori-
ents urban collective life. The tactics involved are much
more in line with what Nikhil Anand (2011:547) describes
for do-it-yourself groundwater harvesters in Mumbai, cut
off from the city’s water mains, than echoes of the scaling
up described by Appadurai (2002).
The domestication of public space and public
spaces of domestication
Rather than being singularly determined by state presence
or absence and the self-conscious pursuit of political enti-
tlements, the public life of Manhean’s toilets and the indi-
vidual and collective possibilities they engender are shaped
by the objects and practices they encompass, as the open-
ing epigraph from Arendt (1958:46) suggests. Complement-
ing Arendt’s perspective, Latour’s (2005) thing-centered ap-
proach to politics draws attention to the political work
Public things  American Ethnologist
involved in naturalizing specific associations of persons
and things within the public sphere. From Latour’s stand-
point, “Objects become things when matters of fact give
way to complicated entanglements and become matters of
concern” and thus instantiate a “provisional” or “phantom
public” not “equivalent to the body, leviathan or a State”
(2005:41).
Emanating from such associations of persons, prac-
tices, and fluid and situated things, the political makeup of
Manhean’s public toilets can be best understood as deriv-
ing from a distinct mode of “publicizing private matters.” It
differs from two other means of allying public and private
life claimed to characterize the political scene in postcolo-
nial Africa. They are the privatization of public goods and
services by political elites via “private indirect government”
(Hibou 2004:25; Mbembe 2001:66) and the dually scandaliz-
ing and impressive exposure of the private affairs and bod-
ily functions of political figures that is integral to the “ba-
nality of power” and “intimacy of rule” in the postcolony
(Mbembe 2001:102, 133). Distinct from these forms, which
pose elites as objects or agents of public revelation
and usurpation, the modality of private politicization in
Manhean is largely exclusive to the underclass.
At once domesticating public life and publicizing do-
mestic life, Manhean’s toilets pull a range of assumed re-
productive activities and objects into the public sphere for
the urban poor.20 They are decisive nodes of what Colin
McFarlane (2008a:217), in his discussion of infrastructure of
Mumbai and Lagos, calls urban “life support systems” con-
necting the multiple functions conditional to the social pro-
duction of life itself. Enlarging the public realm through the
inclusion of the so-called private, these operations fill an
existential frame sustained by, rather than prior to, an ex-
pansive arena of public life. Reversing a Habermasian con-
ception of the public sphere, in which actors come to the
public realm as wholly preformed private persons (Calhoun
1992:9), in this case, the private is subtended by the public.
A consideration of these diverse iterations reveals the
insistent bearing of Manhean’s toilets on public life. Along-
side private relief and self-care, Mang toilet draws myriad
facets of social reproduction into its space. The passages
linking the toilets, bathroom, and entryway support the
convergence of people and activities amidst the sight and
odor of waste, damp, and cleaning fluid. Remembering her
visit, my assistant remarked, “I met a lot of people, some
standing and some sitting, chatting and listening to the mu-
sic from the radio of a man on a bench. The facility is very
dirty but lively.” Fostering interaction, the anteroom leading
to the men’s facilities adjoins a washroom equipped with
taps left over from the resettlement era. On a wall painted
black to serve as a notice board, proverbs and lessons are
written in chalk. On one visit, I read the message, apt in its
double entendre, “Whatsoever goes into the mouth of a per-
son does not defile the person but what cometh out.” The
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American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
author, Samuel Odoi, is the nephew of a veteran toilet atten-
dant. A recent high school graduate, Samuel uses his perch
at the facility to drill neighborhood children in the alphabet
and sums between their work filling buckets and scrubbing
laundry. When I expressed my fascination with his peda-
gogic aspirations, he explained he had virtually grown up in
the toilet compound, assisting his uncle and using the elec-
tric light of the anteroom to study.
The female wing of Mang toilet is also a crossroads of
private and public life, fostering social reproduction for its
patrons and attendants alike as they engage in bathing and
bodily functions, child and self-care, clothes washing and
drying, food preparation, rest and relaxation. Differently
configured than the men’s, the female entrance is a com-
bination of courtyard, throughway, storage area, dumping
ground, and domestic space. The entryway, strewn with
plastic and metal drums, old sail masts, toilet seats, spare
parts, washbasins, pots, and dishware, is put to use by a
changing cast of characters. The attendant’s alcove contains
a mattress and bed. It is enclosed by a battered wood and
wire kiosk, where the woman collects user fees and sells
bathing and laundry soap, toilet paper, and a locally pre-
pared douche in recycled bottles.
Peppered with telltale signs of temporary and long-
term habitation—laundry, cookware, sleeping mats—
nearly every public toilet in Manhean serves as makeshift
living quarters. For attendants, the option of residence
within a public toilet compound has its attractions. Though
unofficial and unstated, residential possibilities add value
to the low wages of toilet workers. With guaranteed access
to washing and bathing facilities, the fenced and gated
toilet compounds provide more privacy and security than
residence in an old family house shared with tenants
and offspring or in the wooden shanties that now fill the
neighborhood. Making the most of the availability of water
and open space, toilet attendants raise fowls or cultivate
small stands of flowers or vegetables on the compound’s
perimeter. The middle-aged female attendant at “No More
Free Shitting” toilet explained that, when she permits
someone to sell food there, she gets a free meal in return.
Perhaps responding to the progressive contraction of
public space in the settlement’s increasingly crowded and
compartmentalized compound houses (Raets and Thijs
2010:323), other sectors of Manhean’s population use pub-
lic toilets as a domestic base. Manhean’s population mix
includes a decidedly transient component. The unmoored
include migrant fishermen and women living out a long-
standing pattern of coastwise movement across the fishing
grounds of the western Atlantic (Odotei 2002). There are
migrant laborers who find their way to Manhean in pur-
suit of work at the port and nearby industrial zone along
with the homegrown footloose who lack secure access to
family housing or sufficient funds to obtain reliable ac-
commodations on their own (Ofei-Nkansah 2003, n.d.). The
104
female portion of this diverse yet demographically signif-
icant set is particularly visible. Across a number of toilet
compounds, a recurring network of young women and chil-
dren can be found throughout the day, napping, cooking,
washing clothes, storing their wares, and caring for young
ones in the open air and shaded corners of the premises.
Though geared to social and self-reproduction, the per-
formance of ostensibly private or domestic tasks augments
the public character of Manhean’s toilet facilities: opening
them to a shifting and diverse cast of individuals, drawing a
wider range of reproductive activities into the public realm,
and turning what is provisionally possible in public space
into what is normal and thus socially permissible and de-
fensible. Eluding notice by municipal authorities, the prac-
tices of public domestication can be understood as an in-
stantiation of what Alexei Yurchak, working from Agamben’s
(1998) notion of “zones of indistinction,” labels “the poli-
tics of indistinction” (2008:210). An “alternative biopolitics”
akin to those discussed by Comaroff (2007:208), these prac-
tices confound the political status quo through the mastery
and recalibration of the very terms of exclusion. Emphasiz-
ing bare life in a manner that tacitly challenges state au-
thority via the mobilization of a semantic and social order
discredited by it, the politics of indistinction played out in
Manhean’s public toilets, true to Yurchak’s (2008) concep-
tion, reorders the terms of political life by unsettling the
boundary between the public and the private—political life
and bare life—sought by the state. Here, the very category of
bare life emerges as much more fluid and multivalent than
permitted by Agamben’s (1998) consideration.
Attesting to what Larkin (2008:249–250) calls the “un-
ruliness of infrastructure,” whereby original meanings,
uses, and political intentions are harnessed anew to un-
earth embedded possibilities, here we see a multifaceted
transgression of the ideal-typical terms of the political. Not
only is the private endowment of the public realm enlarged
but, in addition, this move is accomplished by those who,
transient and feminine, are most deeply excluded from the
formal space of policy making. A form of strategic action
essential to social and biological survival yet self-directed
in means and ends, it is not pitched at the powers that
be. Rather, these practices extend the functionality of the
public realm, heightening the ungovernability of public life.
Though anathema to the ideology of the modern state, they
compensate for its gaps and limitations.
Indeed, the practices of public domestication demon-
strate a concerted quest to secure the means of social re-
production by a population prone to extreme exclusion.
While it would be naive to label these capacities “empower-
ment,” for a sector of society that governing authorities care
not to see or hear, Manhean’s sites of shit’s public buildup
and evacuation function as fully “lived space” (Lefebvre
1991:39; Purcell 2002:102), permitting the staging of inti-
mate forms of self-determination. Here we see a compelling

Figure 5. Young men’s social club or “ghetto” near the entrance to a public toilet and bath compound in Tema Manhean, Ghana. In the foreground, toilet
roll, newspaper, and soap are sold by the toilet attendant. December 10, 2010. Photo by Brenda Chalfin.
demonstration of urban dwellers’ “rights to habit and to in-
habit . . . implied in the right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996:174;
see also Purcell 2002:100). Denoting a different side of banal
power than described by Mbembe, they nevertheless add
rigor to his claim that “the postcolony is made up of not one
‘public space,’ but of several, each having its own logic yet
liable to be entangled with other[s]” (2001:104).
Driving home this point, Manhean’s toilet facilities and
the “excremental publics” they enable are in sync with
the character of public space in Manhean more generally.
Among the settlement’s popular forms of infrastructure are
the trees, tsoshishi in Ga, growing in front of nearly ev-
ery compound house, including those built by the mu-
nicipal authorities at Manhean’s founding. Consecrated by
medicines buried near the roots or tied onto upper limbs,
tsoshishi are spots where neighbors, visitors, and fam-
ily members gather to talk, repair fishing nets, take deci-
sions, and partake in celebrations, much as Oko Adjetey
(1964) described for the old town. As a middle ground
Public things  American Ethnologist
between the base functionality of public toilets and the
cultural–historical charge of tsoshishi, Manhean’s inhabi-
tants also craft porticos, called “ghettos,” from the detritus
of zinc roofing, worn canoes, nets, and plastic sheeting (see
Figure 5). Bridging work and leisure, survival and social re-
production, ghettos enable multifunctional congregation.
Built on unoccupied or unclaimed land next to established
structures, they host an array of activities: cooking, eating
and drinking, napping, conversation, singing, Bible study,
and card playing. Most are a stone’s throw from Manhean’s
public toilets. The res publicae of an otherwise dispossessed
urban stratum, these spaces map out an appreciable if dif-
fuse political terrain.
Conclusion: Excreta, infrastructure, and urban
public life
In this article, I affirm the call to take fecal matters se-
riously in social theory. As the excremental rendering of
Manhean’s history makes clear, sanitary practices across
105
American Ethnologist  Volume 41 Number 1 February 2014
space and time take an array of culturally meaningful, so-
cially viable, and politically provocative forms. On practical
grounds alone, Manhean offers an urban development tem-
plate that challenges the standard sanitary script: Could toi-
lets be promoted as sites of competitive enterprise for the
urban underclass and training in toilet management placed
on the human resource docket? Might toilets serve as a lo-
cus for community outreach and be put to use as recog-
nized spaces of public assembly, even voting, like other cen-
ters of civic life?
Beyond a critique of the accepted rubrics of public
health and urban planning, the study of shitting and sanita-
tion challenges received understandings of the relationship
between infrastructure and urban politics. The association
of infrastructure with state-based political authorities, long
the main providers and regulators of public works, is largely
taken for granted. Here I have examined a different set of
concerns regarding infrastructure and public life. Namely,
how does infrastructure—whether or not it achieves its pur-
ported practical ends—enable the “public” as social for-
mation, realm of interaction, and collective consciousness?
And how do these iterations of “publicness” augment, re-
ject, or replace state authority?
Approaching urban public life through the empirics of
infrastructure proves a suggestive starting point for an in-
ductive interrogation of the urban political in an era when
the absolute horizon of the state is rife with fissures and
lacunae. What, to reword Latour (2005:31), do contempo-
rary forms of public assembly look like if the “dome” of the
state is no longer the prime container of the political? In the
context of Manhean, where the state appears a patchwork
of shadows and surfaces, flimsy contracts, false promises,
and financial tolls asserted amidst other agencies and au-
thorities, none holding a solid grip on the direction of po-
litical life, the networked remains of sanitary infrastruc-
ture reveal one possible configuration. Apropos Latour’s call
for a return to “dingpolitiks” (2005:21), the infrastructure
of urban shitting and sewerage—simultaneously dispersed
and connected and marked by flows and bottlenecks in the
movement of matter as well as meanings—is metonym and
metaphor for the loosely articulated political order of the
late-modern urban.
Although Lefebvre’s emancipatory vision of “the right
to the city” has yet to be realized, and may never be (cf.
Harvey 2008), the muffled tones of the double right to shit
can be discerned in Manhean. Recursively enacted rather
than discursively articulated, this demand is an insistent
sounding infusing the topos of daily life. Exhibiting little
of the associational scaling up of Appadurai’s (2002) deep
democracy, the political potential of Manhean’s public toi-
lets derives from a digging in and drilling down, linking and
elaborating on the crude grounds of individual and collec-
tive survival. Refuting both Arendt’s (1958:65) dismissal of
the base functions of the body in modern public life and
Agamben’s (1998) political evacuation of bare life, intimate
106
acts in Manhean take on a political face through their de
facto definition of the contours of public policy. Speaking
primarily to and of the city and locality, not the wider polity,
they suggest a distinctively urban dynamic played out in the
shadow of the waning developmental state.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Initial research for this article was made pos-
sible by the DFID (UK)–sponsored Overseas Development Insti-
tute’s African Power and Politics Program. Subsequent research was
supported by the University of Florida Center for the Humani-
ties and the Public Sphere. Field research would not have been
possible without the expertise of Marina Ofei-Nkansah, who pro-
vided research assistance and administered an initial round of sur-
veys and made a photographic record of Manhean’s toilets in 2009.
Tema Mantse Nii Adjei Kraku II, Tema Traditional Council, and
Tema Wulomo provided permission to carry out the study. The
cooperation and input of Tema Manhean’s Assembly members,
Tema Municipal Assembly Waste Management Division, the man-
agers and employees of Manhean’s public toilets, and the larger
Tema Manhean community were all essential to the research. Ear-
lier versions of the article were presented at the Centre for Re-
search in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of
Cambridge, in March 2012 and at the Institute for Anthropolog-
ical Research in Africa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in
May 2012. I thank Harri Englund, Filip DeBoeck, and Ann Cassi-
man for their comments. Viviana d’Auria of Leuven’s Department of
Archtecture, Urbanism and Planning helped me to gain an under-
standing of Manhean’s place in Tema’s broader history and Edward
Bottoms, Architecture Association archivist, facilitated my access
to the publications of Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Conversa-
tions with University of Florida colleagues Renata Serra, Richard
Rheingans, Richard Kernaghan, Donna Cohen, Vandana Baweja,
and Charles Hailey contributed to the article’s conceptual de-
velopment. American Ethnologist editor Angelique Haugerud and
anonymous reviewers provided manifold insights in reshaping the
article for publication.
1. This thesis has long been considered a fundament of modern
sociality and civic order, and Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay rightly labels
it “the municipal-civic master discourse” (2006:226).
2. This perspective is articulated by Jacky Bouju (2008:159), who
recognizes that recurring claims of “lack” regarding public sanita-
tion usually hide political struggles and policy failures underwriting
resource deprivation.
3. There is also an emerging literature within Africa-based an-
thropology addressing the governance of public goods and ser-
vices (Issa 2011; Olivier de Sardin 2011). Although sharing a con-
cern with the everyday life of the state, the approach I develop here
is more experiential in orientation than this literature’s strongly ad-
ministrative focus, which highlights formal and informal rules of
resource access and delivery but is much less concerned with their
existential rendering or the kinds of political claims and conscious-
ness they embody.
4. Georges-Eugène Haussman’s Paris is a famous example of this
logic (Harvey 2008; Rabinow 1989).
5. See Field 1937 and Parker 2000 on Ga history and and culture.
6. Drew and Fry worked alongside Le Corbusier in designing
Chandigarh (Galatay 1975:16).
7. The plan for Manhean can be found in Drew and Fry 1956:
n. 142.
8. On the basis of a study of imperial France and North Africa,
Paul Rabinow (1989) argues that work in the tropics enabled the
full flowering of the imperial planning imagination.

9. Both Kilson 1974 and Pellow 2008 discuss the conventional ar-
rangement of the Ga family house in mid-20th-century Accra.
10. Although not the case in the old town, per Oko Adjetey
(1964), in Akan towns and settlements of central Ghana, public san-
itary pits were commonly located at the outer boundaries of the
community (van der Geest 2002:201). It is not clear if Drew and Fry
were aware of this practice.
11. The process of in-migration has continued apace, and find-
ings from 2010 suggest that less than 40 percent of residents of any
household are related (Raets and Thijs 2010:311).
12. Urban planners Valerie Raets and Sara Thijs (2010) detail
changes in Manhean’s built form.
13. Deborah Pellow (2008:82) recounts a similar occurrence in
the Sabon Zongo area of Accra, with the rise of the Provisional Na-
tional Defence Council, spurring residents to keep up public toilets
and public space in the city.
14. In 2010, this was about $12,000.
15. Whereas for Arendt (1958), the modern era is marked by the
troubling insertion of the social into the public, the base act of shit-
ting is among the very few social practices returned to the proper
space in the private realm.
16. In Manhean, exposure of the private body is secondary to
proper comportment in public space. This point was made by a toi-
let manager who noticed a woman defecating by the beach while
he conversed with friends a few hundred yards away. When he told
her it was inappropriate to expose herself in clear view, she fully ac-
knowledged her proximity but chastised him for failing to avert his
gaze. Here, separate from the actuality of copresence, an act can be
both public and intimate depending on the kind of witness bearing
it engenders.
17. Kutsho translates to “subdivision” in Ga.
18. Mang refers to “neighborhood” in Ga.
19. In Capetown, the summer of 2013 was marked by a string of
political actions by residents and representatives of informal settle-
ments protesting the provision of inferior-quality portable toilets
to private homes in lieu of individual flush toilets. The actions in-
cluded the theft of toilet containers, dumping of feces, and a march
on city offices (Eye Witness News 2013; Koyana 2013).
20. As defined by Cindi Katz, “Social reproduction encompasses
daily and long term reproduction. At its most basic it hinges on the
biological production of the labor force both generationally and on
a daily basis through the acquisition of the basic means of exis-
tence: food, shelter, clothing and health care” (2001:711).
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bchalfin@ufl.edu
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