Dirty politics: The stories of soap in South Africa

1 Introduction

When the well-known South African soap brand, Sunlight, launched an award-winning campaign, #SunlightSinceSince with a paper-based newspaper advertisement in the run-up to South Africa’s Heritage Month in September 2018, South Africans shared a range of stories and reminiscences about this much-loved green bar of soap’s capacity to turn all kinds of dirt into cleanliness on the social media platform Twitter. The sharing of these stories and memories of a typical South African product that has been used in the country since 1891, confirmed the multipurpose cleaning agent’s claim of transcending South African linguistic and cultural differences and being instrumental in the construction of a sense of belonging to a social category of South Africanness. Whereas the green soap bar cleanses, the stories about this process of sanitation generates a sense of belonging to specific social categories, and performs boundary work that distinguishes the category’s members from non-members. In fact, the campaign’s print advertisement, showing various stages of the soap bar and referring to the product’s range of purposes in a mix of languages including English, Zulu, and Afrikaans, is already an example of a story about South Africanness. At the same time the text is also a form of border control that delineates South Africanness because of its exemplary mix of South African languages.^[1]

This commemorative, partly nostalgic and enthusiastic narrative of belonging, of sharing a sense of South Africanness with other users of the soap, was bluntly interrupted and questioned when the Covid-19 pandemic starkly exposed material inequalities. Reporting on the dire situation of millions of South Africans in lockdown during the early months of the worldwide pandemic, South African anthropologist, Fiona C. Ross, quoted the desperate conditions under which a friend of hers living in a Cape Town township faced the pandemic: “this corona virus scares me a lot and we have nothing to protect us from it only water and soap and that we don’t even have I mean soap” (cited in Ross 2020).

Apart from revealing the material realities of ordinary, day-to-day living in South Africa, the two different narratives also reveal a very different social figuration and set of social relations as a result of access to and interaction with soap. In this contribution, I will utilize Nira Yuval-Davis’s (2006) distinction between belonging and the politics of belonging to trace how specific stories and narratives featuring soap that circulate in the South African cultural archive refer to specific cultural templates or social imaginaries that perform a set of different functions: these stories signify categories of social belonging, enable social subjects to identify with specific subject locations, and are utilized to both confirm and patrol the borders of these categories of belonging in acts that may be described as the politics of belonging.

2 The concept of belonging

The analytical concept of belonging is, apart from being widely used, often seen as “self-explanatory” (Anthias 2018; Youkhana 2015). Although closely related, the concept is not synonymous with the notion of identity (Lähdesmäki et al. 2021: 26). Identity has a categorical dimension and denotes stasis, while the concept of belonging points at process and relations between subjects (Anthias 2018: 140–141; Halse 2018; Lähdesmäki et al. 2021). More specifically, belonging refers to a socio-spatial sense of attachment, of “feeling at home” – in a place, or a group (Antonsich 2010; Wright 2015) but also to a political process of inclusion and exclusion – of boundary making and boundary patrolling. Feminist scholar Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) untangles belonging as a complex process that involves the identification of individuals with specific social locations or social categories (e. g. gender, sex, race, social class, etc.), the affective identification of individuals with these locations or categories through meaning-making practices, such as the stories we tell about ourselves and who we are, and distinguishing these categories of belonging as different but related to one another through processes of evaluation.

Furthermore, belonging is a process that also has a political dimension. Members of collectivities continuously maintain, reproduce and police discursively their boundaries by formulating the norms and criteria of group membership, checking that members keep to these norms and that no unqualified subjects sneakily enter the collectivity. In the words of Floya Anthias, “belonging denotes what people feel and their orientations, [while] the politics of belonging [denotes] those contestations and struggles around who does and who does not belong” (2018: 143). The politics of belonging, also called the “dirty work” of “boundary maintenance” (Crowley cited by Yuval-Davis 2006: 204), has both an ideological and constructive function in the sense that groups, and conditions and criteria for group membership are naturalized and mythologized in order to make the boundaries of belonging appear natural, evident and beyond discussion (Yuval-Davis 2006: 199). In fact, the border work of the politics of belonging achieves two things: it comprises specific political projects “aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways to particular collectivities that are, at the same time, themselves being constructed by these projects in very particular ways” (Yuval-Davis 2006: 197).

Whereas the tendency is to consider belonging in terms of space, place or territoriality, I favor a (neo)materialist approach in this contribution. This approach sees social subjectivity and its attendant categories of belonging as the result of a complex process, the first of which is the interaction between the material world and human bodies (Lähdesmäki et al. 2016: 238). These bodies emerge as social subjects who belong to specific social locations “in the combined and simultaneous action of material dynamics and discursive practices” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 6–7). This approach is useful because it allows me to focus on the interaction between matter – dirt, soap and human bodies – and stories about this matter in creating identities and a sense of belonging. In what is to follow below, I will scrutinize how particular social categories, or social locations, of “clean” and “un-clean” social subjects, and the connection and relations between these (collective) subject locations and persons (as social subjects), come into existence. I will do this by exploring how stories about dirt, soap and human bodies both constitute different social subject locations and the social relations between these locations, while also situating social subjects within these locations (Anthias 2002: 493). In short, this approach will enable me to examine how stories about dirt and soap are, following Eva Youkhana, “creative poetic acts” (Youkhana 2015: 11; see also Raud 2016) that produce and reproduce social identities.

3 Narratives, stories and social imaginaries

A narrative approach to the “politics of belonging” sees narratives as instrumental in identifying individuals and groups or collectivities with specific social locations and social categories. Deviating from classical narratology that, following Gérard Genette, distinguishes between histoire or reconstructed chronological order, and narrative, or récit, as the way the story is organized for an audience (Herman and Vervaeck 2019: 257), I find it useful to instead distinguish between specific or concrete stories as an interactional activity through which narratives, cultural templates or social imaginaries are construed, sustained and reconfigured, and which are themselves informed by these narratives (Gubrium and Holstein 2009; Smith and Monforte 2020; Frank 2010; for a critical discussion see Herman and Vervaeck 2019). This distinction enables us to differentiate between concrete iterations (stories) and those templates or socially shared imaginaries or narratives they are sourced from, while also placing greater emphasis on the audience in the production and circulation of stories. These imaginaries provide, at a very basic and abstract level, the parameters within which people imagine their social existence: “it gives them a sense of a collective identity by furnishing the foundations of what constitutes ‘us’, typically involving deep boundaries and binaries that enable and perpetuate distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” as Patomäki and Steger explain (2010: 1056–1057). At the same time, these imaginaries “become social entities” that mediate collective life (Gaonkar 2002: 4).

For my argument I will not be focusing on the wide and productive discussion on “social imaginaries” as paradigm in the making (Adams et al. 2015: 42), but the concept of the imaginary (rather than individual imagination) will be used here to provide an analytic that, loosely following Charles Taylor (Taylor 2002: 106), allows us to investigate how people imagine the structuring of their social existence: how they fit together with some and not others, how these imaginaries both produce and are produced by the dynamics that structure society into various groups and collectivities of insiders and outsiders who are situated closer or further away from institutions of power and decision-making. Of specific importance here are how these templates of social inclusion and exclusion both form the bedrock of the specific stories that people tell one another about themselves and others, while at the same time these underlying, deeply shared templates are also formed by stories. The distinction between the two levels (the first being concrete iterations, i. e. stories, and the second being their underlying culturally shared templates or narratives) enables us to consider stories as the means through which social relations and relationality are expressed and formulated (Helms 2003; Bieger 2018). Stories contain shared understandings of social identities and belonging – understood as sameness or difference – and confirm societal self-understandings or challenge them.

In the following, I will explore how soap as material matter has been incorporated in specific South African stories circulating in the cultural archive, and investigate the politics of belonging produced by these texts – some of which are no more than fragments or traces. My aim here is to both map social subjectivity, in this case referring to the production and reproduction of specific separate and different social South African collectivities, and investigate how stories about soap partake in the politics of belonging that accompany this discursive construction of social subjectivity and group formation. Such an approach is instrumental in challenging the idea that cultural, political and social groups exist as pre-defined units of analysis. Rather, social categories are the result of intersubjective relations, material conditions, and power relations. These social dynamics both produce and are produced by social imaginaries or narrative templates and their concrete utterances, or stories. The goal here is thus to investigate the construction and maintenance of social categories and social subjects by means of a broadly chronological approach to investigate stories about soap in a South African context.

4 Stories of soap in South Africa

Taking soap as a sign is a slippery but insightful enterprise: not only does it denote the possibility of cleanliness and hygiene in the face of dirt and danger, but in the South African cultural archive it appears to play a crucial role in cultural narratives that construe various different social locations that complicate the notion of a single category of South Africanness, and in fact functions as a bordering mechanism that delineates membership and belonging to various particular social categories. This border-work of soap is of course not peculiar to the South African context, as the work of Mary Douglas on dirt has made clear. Practically everywhere, dirt is seen as “matter out of place” according to a systematic ordering and classification that rejects seemingly inappropriate elements (Douglas 2003). Dirt is a contravention of that ordered set of relations, a phenomenon that troubles the borders of specific classification categories. What is particular about the South African case though, is how the social order was and is made sense of and how different South African social subjects, classified according to race, ethnicity, culture and so forth were and are construed, and how, oftentimes, the threat of dirt troubled and often still troubles these social subject categories.

With the arrival of the Dutch to South Africa by the mid-seventeenth century, European-made soap arrived in the country too, as did a European narrative about civilization and cleanliness. These Europeans were dependent on soap produced in Europe, which was a scarce commodity. On the 6th of May 1658, the daily register of Jan van Riebeeck, for example, mentions specifically that “thousands of boxes of soap” arrived from Europe on a Dutch, slave-carrying ship (the Hasselt) at the Cape (cited by Claassens 2003: 244). The Europeans, despite what we consider today as the morally repulsive act of enslaving others, considered themselves clean and civilized, viewing the local Khoi and San (also called Khoisan or Khoesan) they encountered at the Cape as “the strange, exotic opposite of the European” (Van Wyk Smith 1992: 285) and dirty, savage and uncivilized, a dichotomy critically examined by Malvern van Wyk Smith (1992) and Maas (2020). The reports by European explorers who visited the Cape during the early days of European colonialism at the Cape reveal the border-work performed by these descriptions of the local inhabitants, the Khoi. These descriptions created and maintained a distinction between themselves and the locals on the basis of observations and perceptions regarding sanitation. One such explorer, Johan van Mandelslo, for example, wrote in 1639 that “the people found here [at the Cape] are black, uncivilised and beast-like in their life and speech, more resembling beasts than men; they give off a nasty smell because they smear all their bodies with fish oil, so that they shine from it” (cited by Maas 2020: 47), while another, Nicolaus de Graaff reported in 1640 that the Khoi are uncivilized because they have no laws, policies or religion, and are nothing but “wild heathen, dirty and stinking men, in their customs more beasts than men” (cited by Maas 2020: 47).^[2]

Many scientific observers and explorers into the country’s interior noted down observations of the local custom and widespread habit of smearing the skin with a mixture of animal fat and sprinkling the skin thereafter with powdered, herbaceous plants such as Buchu. Although early observers noted this practice with disgust as a sign of primitiveness, later scientists and travellers such as Peter Kolb, Anders Sparrman and François Le Vaillant showed greater understanding of this useful, unguening practice (Beinart and Dubow 2021). Such later travel reports did not so much delineate a distinction between the Europeans and the locals such as the earlier ones established, but recorded aspects of the Indigenous knowledge systems of the Khoi with regard to the usefulness of local fauna and flora for a range of purposes, including body ornamentation, care and protection of the skin against insects, sun, and dirt, healing and rituals (Kananoja 2021; Van Wyk and Gericke 2018; Viljoen 1999).

This local knowledge in time was transferred to European settlers who moved into the region during the eighteenth century, adopted African practices, and sometimes took Indigenous women as partners. These frontier settlers acted as “cross-cultural go-betweens” that provided useful information to visiting European naturalists and scientists on expeditions into the South African interior (Kananoja 2021: 167). Besides these “intercultural” settlers, the Khoi and San, who had become dependent on the colonial economy as domestic and farm laborers, were also important actors in the transfer of knowledge and know-how concerning the use of local plants for a variety of purposes: “environmental knowledge was made and exchanged in these everyday settings, in which whites were in a commanding position, and could also acquire information by force,” Kalle Kananoja explains (2021: 168). One domain of local knowledge exchange concerned the making of soap. The saponic qualities of many local plants were known to the Khoi and San, who used the ashes of the burnt leaves of the Salsola aphylla bush, called Ganna or ganna bush, as lye and mixed this lye with the fat from the tails of sheep to make soap (Mitchell and Hudson 2004: 45). In his novel, Praying Mantis (2006), the South African author André Brink praises in a lyrical passage of more than two pages the fact that there is nothing about soap making that the San woman, Anna Vigilante, does not know (Brink 2006: 71). Across a number of pages this process of making soap is extensively described and incorporated into the novel’s story.^[3]

This practice of soap making became an important economic activity for frontier settlers and Vryboere or ‘free farmers.’ This home-made soap, known as boerseep or ‘farmer soap’ was thus introduced to the households of free burgers farming in the southern interior of the country. Out in the open, or in small, round roofed small structures called soap houses, this kind of soap had been made in the Karoo by Khoi servants and farmers’ wives since the eighteenth century. This farm-produced soap was not only for the use of those living on the farms, but produced in such quantities in order to be sold off to others, which in turn enabled these, otherwise isolated, settlers to maintain economic relations with the more urban areas of the Cape (Malherbe 1978: 54). In fact, soap and candles were sold quite profitably to a growing urban population in the Cape for cash, as the European explorer, Hinrich Lichtenstein observed around 1804:

The children and slaves are sent to collect young shoots of the Channa bushes [Salsola aphylla]. The ashes of these saline plants produce a strong [lye], and of this, mixed with the fat of the sheep, collected during the year, the women make an excellent soap, from the sale of which a considerable profit is derived; large quantities are sent to the Cape town, where it is sold at a high price. (Walton 2007: 20–21)

This small fragment reveals how social categories cluster around the making and trading of soap. The soap makers, situated in the domain of the oikos, are skilled, female, young and/or enslaved, and their relation vis-à-vis one another is carefully delineated in the story: ungendered children and slaves are in charge of fetching the raw materials (“the young shoots of the Channa bushes”), while the chemical transformation of these ingredients into a high-quality product (“excellent soap”) is in the hands of, racially unmarked, women — the farmers’ wives being implied here, neglecting to mention exactly how overseeing and performing the labor is actually organized. Lichtenstein does not mention who is responsible for the profit that is derived from selling the soap well (“at a high price”), but it is implicit – as absent presence – that the farmer himself took the earnings. This mercantile reference places him (male, white) in the domain of the free market. In this brief, nearly off-hand reference in a much longer description of his travels through the Karoo, Lichtenstein describes soap-making not only as a cornerstone of rural home-industries and key to settler entrepreneurship, but also as a means to produce and reproduce identities in the settler household in terms of gender, age and race.^[4]

With soap being tied to a settler economy, it is not surprising that in the social imaginary soap-making became associated with boervroue (farmers’ wives), notably Afrikaans-speaking, rural women, who continued the tradition of soap making well into the 1930 s for use in both the kitchen and to wash clothes with, after which this practice disappeared when commercially available washing powder, and commercially manufactured toilet soap became more easily available in shops (Claassens 2003: 245). Normative ideals constituting the notion of a “good” Afrikaner woman were partly located in her capacity to make or boil soap, a laborious and time-consuming process, which became an important element of Afrikaner culture: “the special care that the women took in making and finishing off their soap, [became] a demonstration of their personal pride and thus these soap blocks mirrored their skill and pride in their culture” (Steyn 2006: 16–17; see also Van der Waal-Braaksma 1986). This narrative of the “good” boervrou – skilled in household practices such as taking care of her family (which included being skilled in making soap) – became an important argument during the struggle for suffrage among Afrikaner women “(employing) the language of home-making and motherhood as a means of conferring legitimacy on their campaign for citizenship,” as Louise Vincent explains (1999: 2). In 1930, the political rights to be won were compared, no less, to “a cake of soap” to be used by women to “clean up the dirty places of the country, and lighten darkness wherever it is possible” (Vincent 1999: 2, citing suffragist Mrs. M. Moldenhauer).

The idea of soap bringing both cleanliness and civilization to replace dirt and “darkness” was part the colonial narrative that considered European culture as modern, democratic, and thus civilized, the European body as clean, healthy, and hygienic, while in comparison, the body of the African was seen as dirty, unhealthy and unhygienic and in desperate need of being (perpetually) cleaned. Thus, it makes sense to find the commodification of Pears soap, according to Anne McClintock, in the center of Britain’s emerging, racialized (and racist) commodity culture (1995: 212). Stephanie Newell shows how this colonial narrative of “dirty natives” was iterated in specific advertisements, such as the one entitled “The Birth of Civilization,” depicting a dark-skinned man holding a bar of soap while the text states that “the consumption of soap is a measure of the wealth, civilisation, health, and purity of the people” (Newell 2020: 4).

These racialized, social imaginaries about health and dirt also materialized in socio-spatial arrangements and political interventions into space that demarcated urban spaces as modern, and thus fit for Europeans to inhabit, while the Africans – whose “primitiveness” and “traditionality” were important notions underlying the racist, capitalist system dependent on black labor – were seen as “matter out of place,” according to ideas circulating at that time, and thus as “dirty.” Public opinion about the black body as a “primary source of contagion” informed the so-called “sanitation syndrome” that carried the idea that the white public needed to be protected from the black, i. e. “dirty” body, seen as vector of disease, that threatened the colonial and white nationalist social order based on notions of hygiene and race (Flikke 2003). An outbreak of the bubonic plague in Cape Town in 1901 enabled local authorities to pass various acts to regulate sanitary conditions in the city, but above all, to pass legislation against slums in defense of public safety, notably the Native Reserve Locations Act of 1902. This legislation enabled the removal of black inhabitants from the city and their relocation to what became known as the first South African township, Ndabeni. Located about six kilometers from the current center of Cape Town, and close to a sewage plant, Ndabeni was itself razed a couple of years later, in the wake of the 1918 influenza epidemic, with the inhabitants being relocated a second time to the new township of Langa (De Satgé and Watson 2018: 71). Removing black inhabitants from the modern, white city – forcefully when considered necessary – became an often-applied strategy to restore what was considered to be the “ideal” (clean, and safe) social order; an imaginary, racially “ordered” Apartheid order.

This disciplining of black bodies by the political system of segregation and Apartheid did not only take the form of physical separation, but ideologically too, through education, domestic training and public discourse the disciplining continued. Advertisements for consumer goods such as soap, for example, continued to suggest that civilization, modernization and cleanliness were aspects that still had to be passed on to the black body. The result was the representation of a range of cleaning practices of self, clothes and specific kind of idealized domestic private environment, as soap advertisements in black middle-class, urbanite magazines attest. Tim Burke’s description of commodity culture in Zimbabwe applies just as well to the South African context: “Soap, while having been seen as a fundamental need by most Africans since at least the 1950 s, has been closely tied to the practices of cleanliness and domesticity promoted first by missions and the state and later powerfully and massively reproduced in postwar advertising” (Burke 2001: 14). More specifically, as Shireen Ally explains, this disciplining of the black body was not only due to colonial ideas about cleanliness and civilization, but also because black consumers were also “a labouring class of cleaners [...] Settler colonialism discursively premised itself on Africans as filthy savages while white colonists depended on those same ‘dirty’ heathen blacks to keep them Christianly clean” (2013: 324).

External cleanliness of the body was a crucial criterion for the African body to be permitted to move across the border that delineated white and black domestic spaces in Apartheid South Africa – a transition afforded by using soap that allowed the docile, servile African body to be granted access to white domestic spaces as domestic worker. There are plenty examples from South African literature about this entangled and intimate experience of white and black bodies together in white domestic contexts that demonstrate how the borderwork of belonging in this context construes and confirms categories that concatenate around notions of “cleanliness” and race. Ena Jansen, in her study of the representation of domestic workers in the South African cultural archive, provides textual examples that reference the use of soap. These references show how explicit evidence of soap use functions almost like a “passport” that allows its carrier to cross an invisible border. A prominent example appears in the recollections of Afrikaans author, Rian Malan. In his book My traitor’s heart, he recounts his own association of domestic labor, and black domestic servants with, among other things, the smell of soap:

In my childhood, there were always Africans in our backyard. We called them natives. They lived in cold, dark rooms with tiny windows [...] The natives’ quarters smelled of Lifebuoy soap (emphasis added), red floor polish, and putu, the stiff corn porridge that is the staple food of Africa. Natives cooked my meals, polished my shoes, made my bed, mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedge, and dug holes at my father’s direction [...] They spoke broken English or Afrikaans, wore old clothes, had no money and no last names. That was all it was really necessary to know about them. (Jansen 2019: 94)

This association is similar to another casual but meaningful reference to race and soap that we find in July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (1981). This passage describes how, daily, for the white family, Smales, their day began in their master bedroom en-suite, just as it did for many other upper-class whites in “governors’ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses’ company bungalows, with an offering of a tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap” (cited by Jansen 2019: 201, emphasis added). In both cases it is because of the evidence that the African body has been washed that July, the domestic worker of the Smales, and the unnamed “natives” in Malan’s case are tolerated in the white residence during the height of Apartheid in order to perform domestic labor. Literary traces such as these point at a social imaginary of racial and class categorization, and an attendant white, ideological politics of belonging that carefully regulated the physical movement of the black body and its positioning as social subject. Various laws regulated where and with whom people could live, how and where they could move in and through public space, and under which conditions these rules did or did not apply. These fragments make evident how an imaginary of cleanliness, and its connotative ideas of civilization and modernity, tolerated the proximity of a particular kind of African – servile, loyal and above all, clean – in white residential areas.

These stories that connect cleanliness and civilization to “acceptable” forms of Blackness give no recognition though, of the circulation of other imaginaries of cleanliness that are also connected to subjecthood. In fact, as the Sunlight campaign, discussed at the start of this text, made evident in the Twitter responses to its call to share memories of the product, this brand of soap – a veritable “lieu de mémoire” (Nora 1989) for many South Africans – trigger not only memories of domestic bodily care, but also references to the spiritual purposes to which this matter is put to use. In the Sunlight heritage campaign, some of the reactions, stories and anecdotes concerning memories of using Sunlight, related how soap is used not only in practices of external physical cleansing, but also for internal cleansing, both in a literal and figurative manner. Apart from the references to the use of soap as an ingredient for an enema to clean the bowels,^[5] other references point to a more figurative understanding of internal cleansing. In 2017, the South African artist, Buhlebezwe Siwani exhibited an installation entitled Batsho Bancama (translated as ‘And they gave up’). The installation consists, among other elements, of a cast of the kneeling artist’s body made of green soap, before an enamel washing bowl, and surrounded by more washing bowls also made of soap. With the installation the artist reflects on the cultural use of soap in healing and initiation rituals, such as that of the passage of young black females into adulthood, explores how the body is ritually cleansed with soap such as Sunlight by traditional healers to mark this symbolic transition (Mabaso and Braat 2018: 56). Siwani’s work also comments on the connections between cleanliness and the female body and the conventional disciplining of that female body according to gendered, patriarchal norms and expectations.

This topic is also critically explored by photographer Zanele Muholi. They locate the focus more precisely on the disciplining of the queer body. In the series of photographs, Only half the picture, the artist confronts stereotypes and taboos faced by the black LGBTQI+ community in South Africa. One particular image entitled Ordeal is a “close-up shot of a person hunched over an enamel bowl containing water, wringing out a cloth.” The work’s title provides an anchor to the possibility of meanings offered by the image,^[6] suggesting that the person is washing their body after a “traumatic event,” as the British Tate Museum’s note of the photograph explains (Greenberg 2013). Photography scholar, Kylie Thomas, following other photographs in this series, discusses this representation of a “traumatic event” as a critical exploration of “corrective” or “curative” rape of black lesbians “in order to make us (it is the artist speaking here, as avowed black lesbian on behalf of other black lesbians and transgender persons) into ‘real’ and ‘true’ African women – appropriately feminine, mothers, men’s property” (Muholi cited by Thomas 2010: 429; see also Van der Vlies 2012).

A last category that I would like to touch on in this contribution is of stories that investigate the reality of lack of access to the most basic needs of running water and sanitation which is a dire daily reality for millions of South Africans. These stories activate the imaginary of a dignified life, and the difficulties of living such a life. In the post-apartheid novel, Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker (2000) about the nearly 13-year-old, homeless prostitute Azure, the first-person narrator describes his sensual experience of bathing at the home of a rich “client”:

he [the client] gets out to dry himself and leaves me [Azure] with a few minutes of heaven with water and fresh smelling soap. I slide the soap all over my body, blowing bubbles when I can, a silly grin that only I can enjoy on my face. The water falls on me with pleasure. I tingle with cleanliness. (9)

Having no running water is not only a problem for homeless minors such as Azure, but the daily reality in many South African townships and in the growing informal settlement areas. Failed promises of service delivery providing water and sanitation to townships in Cape Town have led to poo-protests and “toilet wars”; in 2011 such protests were started by residents angry about the municipality’s installation of 1300 modern toilets in an unenclosed environment, which the residents interpreted as a denial of their human dignity (McFarlane and Silver 2017: 132). The past ten years have also seen forms of civil protest against structural inequalities using human excrement. These protests can be understood as advancing the claim that, for democracy and citizenship to exist, certain basic infrastructural conditions – such as access to running water and sanitation, both being at the basis of public health and private hygiene – must be met (Jackson and Robins 2018: 71).

Lack of access to water was explicitly on the political agenda when Cape Town faced a looming Day Zero in 2018. Day Zero was the name given to the foreseen scenario when taps were to run dry in the city because of continuous droughts in the water catchment areas, increasing urbanization and irresponsible water use. Already then, the racialized, structural inequalities between the middle class (most of the whites) and desperately poor (largely black) became visible. More recent comments by South Africans expressed during a recently held survey amongst South Africans about living conditions during Covid-19 lockdown underlined that in the meantime not much has changed. Many respondents drew attention to existing failures in service delivery that compounded loathsome experiences of lockdown. One respondent for example stated: “Please help our community, our municipality doesn’t care. We don’t have electricity, water in our yards or even toilets. We do struggle a lot and it’s 6 years now,” while another explained: “We don’t have food, toilets and we are suffering. We have to break the lockdown rules to look for these” (all examples cited by Runciman et al. 2020).^[7] These oral stories make amply evident how infrastructure and access to it, reduced under “normal circumstances” to the background of the lives of many, but not for all South Africans, run like a demarcation line through South African society, dividing those who belong to the “haves” from those who do not – the “have nots,” who lack not only soap and water, but the recognition of their basic human right to dignity.

5 Conclusion

In the discussion above, it is evident that the South African cultural archive provides a rich but complex collection of stories and story fragments about what it means to be clean. Underlying these stories are a number of narratives or social imaginaries that carry ideas about cleanliness. Since their arrival, Europeans socially distinguished between those who were deemed “clean” and those who were deemed “dirty” to enforce ideas about civilization and perceived differences between people. These ideas circulated amongst European reading publics in the form of travel reports by European explorers and travellers to the country. Built on these distinctions, settler colonists and white nationalists later developed policies regarding public health and safety that enabled them to physically divide and separate different groups. The making and using of soap, and the storying of these practices construed and sustained ideas about proper and good personhood. In the case of rural Afrikaner women, identity was partly elaborated through their ability to make soap (and other household products). Later, when soap became more commercially available, soap became a signifier of a particular category of African whose presence was not only tolerated but in fact strongly required in white domestic space in order to perform domestic labor. The storying of soap configures and reconfigures imaginaries of spiritual and moral purity too, especially with regard to patriarchal disciplining of women’s bodies and sexuality. A different imaginary appears in stories that refer to ongoing, debilitating social inequality that negates dignified humane life. Finally, a new narrative or imaginary is appearing as part of projects to reconfigure the pernicious and durable social categories construed by European colonialism. This decolonial reconfiguration of social categories is a form of border work that redraws the former categories of civilized and uncivilized because of new stories that are told about local and Indigenous knowledge systems and the transfer of knowledge between locals and settler colonists.

What I have discussed in this contribution is how the stories about being dirty and becoming clean do not only refer to daily bodily care practices, but may be understood as a form of semantic border work that construe, sustain and reconfigure specific social identities. The construction of these identities and social locations, and the identification of social subjects with these locations or categories are not smooth or uncontested processes. Rather, as the many stories about dirt and soap have shown, it the result of struggle – contestation about what goes where and who belongs where. Stories are powerful social acts, putting matter and people in (their) place – where they are deemed to belong.