The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa
On November 3rd and 4th, a workshop on “The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa (DirtPol)” will be held at the MacMillan Center. It’s one of the last activities to be held for the DirtPol project that Stephanie Newell, professor of English, began in 2013 with significant “frontier research” funding from the European Research Council. Professor Newell’s research focuses on the public sphere in colonial West Africa and issues of gender, sexuality, and power as articulated through popular print cultures, including newspapers, pamphlets, posters, and magazines. She studies how local intellectuals – ranging from school leaders to national leaders – debate moral and political issues through the medium of print. Professor Newell is especially interested in the cultural histories of printing and reading in Africa, and the spaces for local creativity and subversive resistance in colonial-era newspapers. The DirtPol project positions these interests in an interdisciplinary and comparative historical perspective, and includes the study of popular discourses about dirt in Nairobi and Lagos in relation to changing ideas about taste and disgust, sexuality, multiculturalism, and urbanization. Marilyn Wilkes at the MacMillan Center spoke with Professor Newell about her DirtPol project. An edited version of the conversation follows:
What do you mean by the term “dirt”?
Dirt is not just an empirical substance that we can see, smell, and touch. Dirt is also an idea that shapes our perception of the world around us and how we interact with the environment and the people in it. This project is about how dirt is used as a category to interpret other people.
What was the catalyst for the project?
I was sitting in the archives reading a lot of material from the colonial era as well as popular fiction, novels from the 1920s and ’30s that related to Africa. After about three or four years of being really immersed in these archives, I started to see that a particular group of people were writing, using the category of dirt and filth in order to try to interpret their travels in Africa. Often, it wasn’t the arch imperialist, colonial types, who obviously had dirt in mind when they tried to sanitize and cleanup and impose European models onto African cities. Rather, it was a category of working class traders from cities in the U.K. who were traveling in Africa, and writing diaries and journals. They were trying to interpret the cultures they were traveling through. I started to notice in the archives that “dirt” was being used in multiple ways and configurations in order to interpret other cultures. The key point is that it wasn’t always negative. That’s why I wanted to pursue this project.
Give us an overview of the DirtPol project.
We started the project in September 2013 and it will end this year in December. There were two teams of researchers that examined the extent to which urban encounters in Nairobi, Kenya, and Lagos, Nigeria, are marked or mediated by categories denoting dirt. Through in-depth qualitative research in local schools and communities, archival research into colonial discourses about dirt in Africa, and research into locally-produced media, the project focused on popular and everyday conceptualizations of the body and environment in Nairobi and Lagos. The project offers an ambitious qualitative, comparative, and historical study that asks about the implications of locally-situated understandings of dirt in diverse African contexts for current debates about urbanization, the environment, sexuality and ethnicity. By examining the concept of dirt from the period of the consolidation of colonialism in the 1880s through to the present in two African cities, the project situates contemporary popular media in relation to Africa’s long history of intercultural encounters and, in so-doing, aims to historically contextualize wider policy issues relating to public health, urbanization and anti-racism in developing countries.
Why is the DirtPol project important?
A lot of policy around public health and hygiene and contagion – think Ebola, for example – understandably is focused on sanitation and cleanliness as the desired goal. The hypothesis is that if you talk about those issues through ideas of dirt, it’s not simply the opposite of cleanliness. You can open up a whole set of people’s opinions and perspectives and prejudices. DirtPol is about public opinion and how the media – through newspapers and through people’s conversations with each other – shape ideas about other people in the city. It’s about trying to capture public opinion during times like, for example, the Ebola crisis.
The Ebola crisis emerged toward the end of 2013 and continued throughout 2014. The media in West Africa was dominated by it. Movies were made about it. A lot of popular music was written about it, too. Obviously you have the official public health messaging about how to avoid contracting Ebola, but mapped on to that, the part we’re interested in, is the popular culture related to Ebola – the myths, the rumors, the gossip, the prejudice, the ideas about what could cure Ebola. People were saying if you drink salted water, it would cure you of Ebola. Shopkeepers were hoarding salt. People were dying from drinking salted water. Those were local understandings of contamination associated with Ebola. One the one hand, there’s the official response, but then you’ve got this whole field of urban understandings of contamination that really do affect how people respond to crises.
While DirtPol is a cultural media studies project, I think it can contribute to public health discourse some understandings of how people respond to particular health messages in African cities.