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Paper short abstract

In Northern Tanzania, many septic tanks are reinforced with reused railway tracks. The paper shows how household sanitation is made to work through delegated networks that secure durable materials while displacing risk, revealing infrastructure as a morally stratified social process.

Paper long abstract

In Northern Tanzania, fragments of colonial railway tracks are widely reused to reinforce septic tank lids, despite being state property. This practice depends on informal supply networks involving actors often described as wahuni—a moral category referring to people at the margins of society associated with disorder or theft—who remove, hide, and distribute the tracks. Although publicly condemned for criminal behavior, these actors are indispensable for residents who cannot afford formal materials and rely on their networks to obtain the tracks. The paper asks how everyday infrastructures are made to work through relations that are simultaneously condemned and relied upon.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with residents, builders, informal suppliers, and railway officials, the paper examines septic tank construction as a site where technical requirements, economic constraints, and moral evaluation intersect. Septic tanks are often constructed directly within household compounds due to limited space, and their lids are routinely walked over, sat on, and used as surfaces for washing clothes or children’s play. Structural failure therefore poses serious risks, while rebuilding is difficult in densely built neighborhoods. In this context, railway tracks are valued for their durability and load-bearing capacity.

The paper argues that sanitation infrastructure is sustained through delegated coordination in which material reliability depends on socially distributed roles. By showing how households outsource morally and legally risky aspects of material procurement to builders and intermediaries, it expands the notion of “people as infrastructure” (Simone 2004) to foreground mediation, moral distancing, and the uneven distribution of responsibility.