The Sanitation Station

Last week, on the 15th October, it was Global Handwashing day. This day was designed to promote proper sanitation practices and to increase awareness of handwashing as a preventative measure of illness and disease, where it acts as a tool t o remove barriers to education, economic opportunity and equity .   "It’s simple. It’s right there and doesn’t cost anything" Miryam  Wahrman In this post, I will outline how promoting handwashing as a mechanism to prevent disease and illness, is not quite as simple as biologist: Miryam Wahrman (William Patterson University of New Jersey), framed it in a 2020 Guardian article, where in reality, there a lot of different  facets to the faucet...      The "father of handwashing", Dr Semmelweis discovered the importance of handwashing over 150 years ago, and even though we have had this knowledge for over a century, handwashing  still remains severely neglected as a public health investment . In West Africa, as shown in the figure be

  Figure 1: Sanitation worker Africa is to be pitied, worshipped and dominated . Without any form of intervention, from me, a white British university student, and perhaps you reading this too, Africa is and will continue to be doomed. The whole entire continent... I feel it is important as I begin my blog to break down the colonial legacies that exists when writing about Africa and dispel the idea that by writing this blog I am striving for commendation and respect for being yet another white "hero" of Africa. The white saviour complex is deeply intertwined within the history of slavery and colonisation in Africa, echoing the attempt made by Westerners to help the poor and civilise the continent . A series of tweets by Nigerian writer Teju Cole effectively summarises this concept: "The white saviour industrial complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."  Throughout Africa, "white saviourism" has