Sanitizing South Africa: Race, Racism and Germs in the Making of the Apartheid State, 1880-1980 (2015)
This dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which race and racism have been both causes and effects of South Africa's twentieth century. Breaking with previous histories that have seen race as merely an effect of industrial capitalism or as an important social construction that at some point ceased to be constructed any longer, this dissertation charts the constant social construction and reconstruction of race together with the very real material consequences that this process produced. In order to do so, however, a historic lens, 'sanitation', will be used. A reference to the modern preoccupation with cleanliness, sanitation and its myriad discursive entanglements (personal hygiene and health, physical surroundings, social groups), associated referents (the body, the environment, race and medical science) and, ultimately, real-world effects (consumption habits, public health ordinances, racial segregation, scientific practice) would have a meaningful impact upon how race was constructed and acted upon historically. Charting this intersection of race and sanitation over one hundred years, this dissertation will make two primary arguments about the origins of Apartheid. First, far from being a domestic affair rooted in 'backward' Afrikaner nationalism or local mineral discoveries, the racial dynamics of South Africa were part of a global chain of meaning-making that in the wake of germ theory came to define the black body as inherently diseased and dirty. Secondly, race was not merely a social construction for it was constructed as a physical reality that came to elicit deeply felt disgust. It was this disgust and not high-minded ideology that made racial segregation appear utterly logical to those charged with implementing it. So logical in fact that by the time Apartheid was official policy, civil servants would automatically and subconsciously find solutions to problems that relied almost entirely on imagining the black body to be unsanitary.
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