ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

South Africa’s Foul Urban Airs: Underground Sewers and Environmental Pressures in the British Cape Colony and Natal, 1860-1910

• In Event: Public Health and Governance in the 19th and Early 20th Century

English Abstract

Nineteenth-century European public health officials envisioned new underground sewers systems as a cure to many urban ills, efficiently funnelling waste water into rivers, oceans, or other supposedly uninhabited spaces. However, British engineers in South Africa discovered that the same sewer construction did not fit different environments. As water scholars have shown, nineteenth-century wastewater systems forced officials and every-day persons to re-evaluate how they lived with and in urban environments, particularly during disease outbreaks and sewage overflows. Drawing on a wide variety of archival materials, I argue that difficulties in sewerage construction and maintenance in coastal southern Africa drove engineers and public health officials to create new strategies that better suited their colonized environment.

Focusing on the Cape Colony and Natal’s coastal port cities, I explore how wastewater disposal exposed the colonial urbanization’s reliance on and adaptation to the norms of an occupied landscape. When attempting to build and maintain sewer systems in these places, engineers and other officials discovered an environment that unconsciously resisted their designs. Strings of fungi and plant roots broke through brick mortar and slowed the movement of sludge. Foul airs emerged from manhole covers, leading to residential complaints of fever and typhoid outbreaks. Oceanic currents swirled sewage in port harbors and back up the sewer outfalls on the beach from which it came. Ultimately, I show that colonial southern African drainage systems were intimately bound up with urban and “natural” environmental entities, crashing dreams of an interconnected system that effectively managed local sanitation.

Author

• Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Washington University in St. Louis