On a rainy Saturday afternoon in Accra, Ghana, Alhassan Abdalla hustled the children out of the path of a squad of bulldozers. Soldiers used tear gas and nightsticks to force citizens from their homes, clearing the way for heavy machinery to destroy Accra’s scrap market. In the process, they knocked down the neighborhood children’s center. Alhassan stopped a soldier, pleading with him to stop beating people. The nightstick was turned on him.
Alhassan grew up in the world’s most infamous electronic waste scrap yard, Agbogbloshie---a place where young men like Alhassan eke out a living mining old computers and car batteries for raw materials. A kilo of copper at a time, he saved enough money to pay his way through business school at the University of Ghana. All the while, he’s continued to live in Agbogbloshie. He’s spent the last 10 years establishing and directing a center that provides the community’s youth a safe space to read, do homework, and play.
Now, the center is gone. Erased from the landscape.
Over the course of the weekend of June 20 (ironically, at the same time cities around the world marked World Refugee Day), bulldozers backed by Ghanaian soldiers systematically demolished the community. The government’s heavy equipment tore through scrap yards, houses, and worship centers. Thousands of workers and their families left with nowhere to go protested the government actions. Early estimates put the refugee count as high as 20,000 people.
For years, Western consumers have been told that 80 percent of our old electronics were being dumped and burned around the world in places like Agbogbloshie. That number has since been discredited. Most of the electronics that are shipped overseas to places like Ghana are working or repairable secondhand goods---not waste. (In a place where a new computer can cost more than a month's paycheck, used equipment can find a robust afterlife for years after it was discarded by Westerners.) Still, governments used the statistic to justify all-out export bans, limiting the trade of used products. As consumer demand within Africa has grown, these export bans have been increasingly ineffective at reducing the number of end-of-life electronics in Africa. And with recycling and collection centers few and far between, informal scrapping is a matter of course.
Agbogbloshie, in particular, has been the focus of international condemnation for its bustling scrap market, where workers break down electronic waste and car parts into their base materials. The process is toxic, requiring burning insulation from wires and extracting heavy metals from circuit boards with acid. I visited in 2009 and met self-taught scrappers---making a living selling recovered metal and plastic---who have paid for their efforts with respiratory problems and chronic headaches.
Ever since Western attention focused on Agbogbloshie, a parade of photojournalists and documentary filmmakers have visited the site. The scrap yard is just 22 acres---and journalists have photographed every centimeter of scorched silt. Most reports of the area focus on the small burn area. But there’s another side of Agbogbloshie that goes completely uncatalogued: huge repair and resale markets, where Accra’s “waste” finds a second useful life---recycling in the purest sense of the word. A more modern e-waste processing facility even opened in Agbogbloshie this year. But that isn’t the story of Agbobloshie---of people fixing phones instead of burning them---that people want to hear. Instead, a complex community has been reduced to a symbol of Western guilt: of dumping and burning.
“The exploitation [of] Agbogbloshie has been immense,” tweeted photographer Heather Agyepong. “Take pics, interviews, leave and don't look back," a pattern somehow tragically in keeping with a place that’s been dubbed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by outside journalists.
And so, after years of suffering under the withering gaze of international media, Accra’s government decided it had had enough attention. With less than a day’s notice, officials demolished the market. Scrap dealers and shop owners raced to salvage their inventory. Young children were left huddling on top of suitcases in the rain with nowhere to sleep. Women stood around with rescued possessions on their heads, wondering where to go. Fires broke out. There’s been no explanation for the government’s haste or use of violence.
By repeatedly criticizing Agbogbloshie, we in the western media inadvertently helped condemn its workers and their families to eviction. And to what end? The living conditions in Agbogbloshie were very bad---but removing a slums with no relocation plan won’t solve the problems of the community. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme and Amnesty International have both criticized the Ghanaian government’s increasingly common practice of forced eviction. A 2011 Amnesty International report on Old Fadama (as Agbogbloshie is called by locals) states, “When forcibly evicted, people face homelessness and destitution and have no choice but to live in the ruins of their former homes or move to another slum area.”
And banning the export of used electronics won’t solve the international problem of electronic waste. It’s a reductive, knee-jerk reaction to a complex problem---just like the evictions themselves. Restrictive export bans cut off jobs and affordable resources where they are needed most.
Of course there are electronics in Ghana that need to be repaired, refurbished, and recycled---that’s a byproduct of using electronics anywhere. But Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other top-tier electronics manufacturers do not publish safe repair or recycling practices for their products. Electronics are only landfilled or burned in places like Agbogbloshie when they cannot be repaired or reused anymore. More information would enable recyclers and refurbishers to do their jobs with less burning, more repair, and higher profits. (Notably HP, Dell, and Lenovo make this information readily available---and repair technicians I've met throughout Africa heavily rely upon it.)
Although they have been reduced to scrap burners by media reports, the majority of Ghana’s informal sector are skilled workers (the ingenuity of Ghana’s mechanics is renowned). The informal economy there represents at least 70 percent of the gross domestic product. Ghanaian shops have become experts at giving new life to our old things. Local manufacturers cut up old engines to make new tanker trucks. Internet cafés and computer repair centers abound, making the most out of old equipment.
Africa’s self-taught scrappers and refurbishers need support: business training from their government, recycling expertise from the international community, and technical support from the manufacturers who make the electronics they’re breaking apart. But instead of buoying up Agbogbloshie’s informal sector with formal support, government officials erased the community from the map---destroyed it as suddenly and vengefully as the Sodom and Gomorrah of old.
