Rudimentary toilets: in South Africa, children are drowning

July 5, 2023

Oratile Diloane, 12, is unable to speak clearly. When he takes off his cap, he reveals a large scar on his skull: he lives with the aftermath of a fall in the rudimentary toilets of his school in a rural corner of South Africa.

A concrete slab, a simple hole and a three-meter pit into which excrement falls: open latrines are still commonly used in remote and deprived areas of the country, ranked the most unequal in the world by the World Bank in 2022.

“Legacy of apartheid”, these toilets, decried for being regularly at the origin of serious accidents, are the sign of still stubborn disparities, 30 years after the end of the racist regime, considers Sibusiso Khasa, of the NGO Amnesty International .

According to official figures, more than 3,300 of the 23,000 public schools in the country still have them. But the lack of decent infrastructure is also the result of the failure of successive governments to guarantee the same rights for all, underlines Mr. Khasa.

The government regularly promises this: In 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the release of half a million dollars to eradicate pit latrines in two years. Recently, Education Minister Angie Motshekga set a new horizon of 2025.

“The fact that they are not meeting their own deadlines is a flagrant indicator of the lack of political will,” Khasa said.

At the primary school in the village of Kanana, 180 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, the pit toilets have been replaced since the Oratile accident.

His mother Refilwe Diloane, 46, told AFP “the bruises and swollen head” of her son, narrowly saved, and the “feces” coming out of his mouth.

She evokes with a sad smile the memory of a lively and healthy child, who “could have been the next president”. The accident “killed my child,” she said in tears.

Oratile today suffers from hydrocephalus, a disorder that disrupts brain function, but also from epilepsy and autism. He underwent surgery in 2018 but his memory loss remains.

Unable to remember his age, he nevertheless remembers what happened to him: “I fell in the toilet” and the school groundskeeper “came to take me out”.

A teddy bear in his arms, he goes back and forth, in and out of the house. He talks to himself, occasionally letting out a laugh.

Driving a mini-van, Emmanuel Mantlathi slows down in the dusty street. He honks and waves at the little boy he used to drive to school every morning.

In March, a four-year-old girl died in a school pit toilet in the south of the country. In April, another girl under the age of two died in the same circumstances, in the backyard of a house in another province.

Contacted by AFP, the Ministry of Education did not respond.

In recent years, rights and family groups have taken the government to court. In 2019, a court sentenced him to pay the equivalent of 68,000 euros to the family of Michael Komape, who died of a fall in an open toilet in 2014. He was five years old.

“We are afraid for our children,” said Lebogang Lebethe, 48 and mother of four, busy hoeing sweet potatoes in her garden. His house adjoins that of the Diloane family. One of his sons was in the same class as Oratile at the time of the accident.

When “we leave our children at school, we think (…) that they are safe. A story like this is devastating”.