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“This will make you sick” – this was the message South Africans were greeted with when they opened their Sunday newspapers in recent weeks. The bold warning was the headline of a provocative newspaper ad placed by Amnesty International South Africa in partnership with Joe Public as part of a campaign calling on the government to eliminate pit toilets in schools by the end of 2024.
The ad goes on to explain that it is “printed with ink made from human excrement from illegal common pit toilets still used in over 3,900 schools in South Africa”. Fortunately, it says, “the toxic excrement you are now in direct contact with has been disinfected to kill the pathogens that breed within it”.
But perhaps even more sickening than the ad itself is the revelation it makes – that more than a million schoolchildren still face daily physical and health risks from pit toilets that should have been abolished in schools years ago.
In 2013, South Africa’s Minimum Uniform Codes and Standards for Public School Infrastructure (School Infrastructure Regulations) banned the use of ordinary pit toilets in schools and they must be removed by 2016.
But more than a decade after those regulations were introduced, all original deadlines for the delivery of health facilities (2016 and 2020) have been missed, as have new deadlines, including one set for the end of February 2023, due to multiple postponements by the Department of Basic Education (DBE).
The DBE currently plans to eradicate these pit latrines by 2025. However, Amnesty International South Africa has urged the government to stop postponing this date and eradicate these illegal pit latrines by the end of 2024.
“Drastic action must be taken, so we created this ad to shock South Africans into awareness and make them unable to look away. These illegal pit latrines continue to violate the constitutional right to sanitation, as well as the right to health, education, dignity and, because of the potential dangers of these latrines, the right to life,” said Shenilla Mohamed, Executive Director of Amnesty International South Africa.
Sadly, in April 2024, another child, three-year-old Unecebo Mboteni, drowned in a pit toilet.
Xolisa Dyeshana, Chief Creative Officer at Joe Public, said: “As always, our partnership with Amnesty International South Africa is driven by a shared passion to bring about positive change in the country. In this case, we hope to urge the newly formed government to reconsider this issue and ensure that everyone can enjoy basic human rights.”
The idea behind newspaper advertising required a groundbreaking new printing medium – which led to the creation of the world’s first printing ink made from human excrement.
“To create the ink, we worked with scientists to innovate a new chemical process – heat-treating, sterilizing and dehydrating the feces to create a fine powder that was used to develop this incredible printing medium,” Dyeshana explained.
Meanwhile, ad design templates were created in a strictly controlled environment, photographed, and ultimately printed using fecal ink, ready for insertion into the newspaper, with readers being urged to scan a QR code to sign the petition (click here).
In this way, Amnesty International South Africa hopes that the government will take responsibility for eliminating pit toilets from all schools by the end of the year – the advert exposes South Africans’ exposure to faeces from pit toilets and pushes the South African government to achieve its target of no children having access to pit toilets in schools by 2025.
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