Counting Fake Latrines: Performing the State in Rural Ethiopia

Rural public servants in Ethiopia are responsible for enacting policies that are subject to competing and contradictory demands, and that often do not accord with people's existing priorities. Referring to the riddling Amharic language game of enkokilish, government workers described their work as like a game: repetitive, unproductive and not grounded in reality. This article will look at how initiatives to improve sanitation under the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front government, in concert with international development actors, resulted in different registers of absurdity, from attempts at fomenting humiliation among rural populations to the fake latrines that studded the landscape of North Shewa to the production of invented statistics. These performances of compliance from both local people and government workers are not merely spectacle but affected how the state is experienced by those who work for it, and how it is perceived by its citizens.