Douglas Schorr

Lions and elephants don’t need toilets. We, insignificant us, need sewerage farms and goodness, without them we’d STINK!

In our 1950s Bulawayo home, sitting at the small kitchen table finalising our homework, my sister and I would half listen in as Mom patiently taught young Magdalene—today it was about watching stock levels and the other regular topic, soap.

The maid, aspiring to be a housekeeper, came from a kraal in the foothills of the faraway Essexvale Hills. Having running water in our home was a privilege. In her home, water was extra precious – every drop for cooking and drinking was carried in. She’d made a daily trek since childhood. Perhaps once a week there was time (and in the rainy season, water enough) for a splash in the stream. Now working in the European suburbs, she delighted in her quarters and the shower, though the soap part puzzled her.

“Necessary!” cackled Muhle, our elderly school gardener, scraping at his disgusting pipe. I was something of an odd kid. During break times, I’d sometimes sit with him on the steps by the bicycle shed, where this wiry, wrinkled sage would answer my childish Ndebele questions in his broken English. “We are a smelly lot!”

“How so?” I asked.

“Before soap? Nkosi Graham—dead long time now—he cut me piece of ‘blue’.” His gnarled hands measured out roughly two feet, showing the size of those long bars of basic all-purpose soap. “Use it in morning, he said. Headmaster not like smelly…”

The second son of a headman’s first wife, Muhle had grown up on the plains below Ntabazinduna – the mountain where the first king, Mzilikazi, had his errant generals executed. He was just a boy of eight when he first encountered European men – white-ghosts, or “mhlope”. “They smelt terrible!” he roared, eyes twinkling at the sixty-year-old memory. “Could taste them in the air while herding!”

Uncle Charlie, now well into his eighties, had been one of those young pioneers. “The concentrated smell of animal dung told you a kraal was ahead. You knew you were close when the rank odour of unwashed bodies mixed in!” Sitting on a rock under the old Marula tree at the crossroads of Hillside and Hillcrest roads, his pipe waved across what was once the 2nd and last king, Lobengula’s capital. “Here in 1894, when I was in my twenties, thousands lived in clusters of huts with cattle pens, stretching from the ridge down to the creek below Durham Road. And not one toilet! I looked.”

“The creek?” I gagged, thinking of me and my gang’s summer swimming spot.

“Clean and tasty then, except where cattle muddied it,” Uncle Charlie mused. “But here’s the strange thing – no waste pits, no piles of mess, despite the kraal being decades old.”

“If we didn’t have the shit-bucket err, sorry Uncle, err, night-soil collectors…” I started thinking of the donkey carts with the big iron tanks that used to clink and clunk their way down the back-lanes between the rows of houses well before the sun came up. “Thank goodness we now have mod-flush toilets,” I murmured.

“Indeed!” His weathered face crinkled with amusement. “A young herd-boy… I suppose he was about your age… once asked me, ‘How come white men are so full of shit?’” He chuckled at the memory.

“What!” I exclaimed.

“Of course, because I had worked out why they hadn’t any toilets I knew he wasn’t in any way being cheeky. It was a perfectly intelligent question. You see…” and in the same measured tones as Muhle used with me, Uncle told me that “back then” the African veld offered little besides meat. And if you added the milk drawn from the domesticated animals over 95% of their diet was meat and fat, milk and water. The women did collect what Uncle called “isitshebu”, a (bitter) vegetable, and seasonally there was a little fruit from the marula, sour plum and so on. Portuguese-introduced maize and vegetables were gaining acceptance, but yields were low and storage, if there was any, a problem. “When they went to the bushes beyond the ‘fence’, it was… let’s say infrequent, and with little to poop!”

“One plateful in makes one plateful out, surely?” I asked feeling my cheeks burn-up. That very morning I had had another of those awfully smelly and wet what I described to Mom as “cow pat poops”. They always left me with such a mucky bum that the only way was to nip out, hurry to the bathroom and wash. My big brother saw me and shouting, “Mom, he should be sent outside to use the hose-pipe. This is disgusting,” Mom and he had a row, allowing me to escape and wash up.

Uncle Charlie seemed to understand. “We do don’t we, but…” and he pointed to the circling vultures overhead. “Like them, our ancestors had exceptionally efficient digestion. Strong stomach acid broke down proteins and fats completely. When humans eat like true carnivores, as black Africans did then, very little waste remains.”

It’s true – please read my post, “Fiery Stomachs”.

“Change came fast though,” he added, neatly slicing his biltong with his gleaming skinning knife. “By 1910, I was seeing black Africans using made-in-Johannesburg iron ploughs. They too wanted European foods – corn, grains, vegetables, sugar, syrups – Lyle’s! Our bodies weren’t designed for that. We lost our vulture-strong stomachs.”

“ Lyle’s – the one with the lion and the bees on the tin?” I exclaimed. “So powerful, so natural – I love it! It is the only way I can eat the morning porridge.”

He shook his head. “Shame on them for they do not know what they are doing.” My Dad later said Charlie was countering Lyle’s Biblical inference with one of his own. I don’t know but I do recall he leaned closer, his voice carrying decades of observation. “We all smell now, sonny-boy. Our sweat carries the scent of what we eat. This new diet made us stink so bad, we created a trillion-dollar industry to hide it!”

Today, watching Bulawayo’s sewage system struggle with its modern burden, I often think back to those conversations. How different would things be if we still ate like our ancestors?

Postscript…

A few months ago, the trusted local Zimbabwean newspaper, Pindula News, reported that Bulawayo was a most unsavoury place to live. The city sewage system, once one of the best in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, could no longer cope.