This is an email I just sent to a European graduate student, who is attempting to do a major research (thesis?) paper on Agbogbloshie.
I always have taken time to encourage researchers. It is part of my "fishing for swordfish, surrounded by perch" philosophy of blogging. The blogs are ignored by most people, because most people don't have the bandwidth to really focus on them, or to do a deep dive, or review ground already covered.
But these emails and blogs reach people who are truly concerned, and who ultimately discover that there is an almost sinister systemic manipulation of "do-gooders" empathy to accomplish monetary gains. I usually talk about the Western (and now Asian) lobbies - Big Shred, Planned Obsolescence, and Charity Industrial Complex. But in this morning's email to the Swiss based graduate researcher, I like to remind us that Africans have Agency, even if some of their agency is systemically marginalized by the desire for shiny white consciences.
In Accra, Ghana, it's the land value stupid. Agbogbloshie, for decades (IMF and World Bank papers go back to the 1960s) has been an urban scrapyard next to the Old Fadama slum. If you want to know what is ultimately going to happen, read about the Kowloon slum in Hong Kong. All the "recycling" story is just using BAN propaganda to leverage demolition and expulsion of some of the most valuable real estate in one of the richest African urban centers.
It's not about you, or your old computer.
This morning's email response to a student in Switzerland, researching how to "improve" or "aid" recycling practices at Agbogbloshie.
Hi XXXX
I will have to return to give you a more complete answer, but from just a review of your email I realize that you need one key piece of information.
This article, written by my friend (of Kumasi, Ghana, now a professor in Germany) Dr. Grace Akese, is the most recent non-superficial overview of Agbogbloshie.
(Electronic Waste and the Environmental Justice Challenge in Agbogbloshie 2017)
It explores more deeply Grace's seminal contributions to the discussion in 2015
(Sweeping Away Agbogbloshie. Again 2015)
Both articles are revealing that a LAND VALUE / PROPERTY dispute - common in every rapidly-growing City, is using Western propaganda, from both sides. Europeans "recycling experts" lack the awareness that the "scrapyard/dump" is in the center of a metropolis. It is much smaller than the abutting slum (Old Fadama). In every city the scrapyard and slums in the city center (Kowloon, Hong Kong, e.g.) are ALWAYS eventually developed, and that always involves forced evictions and demolitions.
"Sodom and Gomorrah" is a label applied to the area by land developers 20 years ago, and it was propaganda meant to prepare press and constituents for a forced demolition by referring to the "majority Muslim" culture of the Slums (the Accra region of the south is majority Christian). At the time. there was NO discussion of "e-waste", that came later when Basel Action Network published outstanding, outrageous, exponential lies about Agbogbloshie in order to gain millions of dollars of donations (not a penny of which is sent to Ghana, by the way).
(A Place Called Away, 2010)
I suggest you go to Google Maps, triangulate the slum and the scrapyard from the Airport, the Capital Building, the Presidential Palace, the Largest Shopping Mall, and put your mind in the place of a City Planner or Real Estate Developer. Then read about Hong Kong's demolition of the Kowloon slum, how long that took, and the value of the new buildings and real estate that were erected on the former "Kowloon" today.
Basel Action Network is a small, discredited guy in Seattle Washington, who does not know what he is talking about and makes everything up as he goes. But his ridiculous (40,000 orphans processing millions of tons of western e-waste) exaggerations in 2010 were SO ('unbelievably") shocking to the white-guild system that they caused Europe to skip the counter-arguments from Africa's Tech Sector, and Europe's Systemic colonial advantages - access to definitions and vocabulary in Basel Convention "interpretations" - shifted Annex IX B1110 (explicitly allowed reuse and for that matter RECYCLING exports from non-OECD, so long as the intent of the export is not to dump). When these "Biggest E-waste Dump On Earth" ludicrous headlines appeared in the Western Press, it threw a match onto the "opportunity" to re-develop Agbogbloshie into the next high rise or shopping mall.
Africa is playing different game than Europe. Africans are the experts in what Africa purchases, collects, recycles, dismantles. Europe, and to a large degree the USA, were "played" by a small greedy stupid NGO, and the collateral damage is to the best and brightest and most skilled men and women in Africa.
FREE JOE BENSON
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