This seminar considers lethal childhood poisoning by pesticide use and exposures in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The paper presents case study material that deals specifically with the challenges faced by mothers and child care givers to keep precarious homes rodent free and children safe in the midst of abject poverty, debilitation, poor service delivery, and readily available illegal agricultural pesticides, which have been repurposed by township street sellers to eliminate household rodents.
Street pesticides are introduced as those which are used extensively, not only in South African poor urban communities but globally, to eradicate rodents that carry diseases and bite children; cockroaches causing allergies and creating a stigma of uncleanliness; and other poverty related pests including flies, bedbugs, and fleas.
With its population of an estimated seven million, a growing number of people in the Western Cape live in low-income urban townships. Residents in both permanent and informal housing are subjected to a range of environmental harms and health-related risks associated with poor sanitation, inadequate refuse disposal, limited access to clean water, insecure housing, and pest infestation. To safeguard against diseases carried by rodents and rodent fleas, including salmonella, leptospirosis and plague, and to eliminate pests from domestic spaces, residents resort to using unlabeled and illegal pesticides referred to as street pesticides by leading pesticide scientist, Hannah-Andrea Rother (Rother, 2008).
This seminar illustrates how child poisoning from street pesticides is caught up in social and political forms of toxic layering and the invisible harms associated with pesticide use and exposures.
Bio
Susan Levine is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of Health Humanities and the Arts at the University of Cape Town. With her emphasis on the value of multimodal ethnography, her research asks how the arts can enliven anthropological inquiry and create new audiences for scholarly research. She has published books and articles on children's work on South African wine farms, AIDS denialism, the role of documentary film for health education and activism, and more recent work on Covid-19, environmental toxicity, and critical adoption studies. Susan has an abiding passion for pedagogical innovation and epistemic generosity.
