Agitating the Neoliberal City: How E-waste workers in Ghana expose the fictions of Cartesian Urbanism.

• In Event: Navigating Urban Ecologies in West Africa

Description for Program

This paper takes as a point of departure the experiences of e-waste workers on an e-waste dump nestled in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. The dump is located in Agbogbloshie and Sodom and Gomorrah, a suburb that sits on the Korle Lagoon. Fed by the Odaw River, the lagoon flows into the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Guinea. Moving beyond narratives that cast this e-waste dump as the world’s largest e-waste dump, thus reproducing Africa as the heart of technological and toxic darkness, this paper attends to the ways in which e-waste workers, colloquially known as “condemn boys” unsettle the “urban/rural” divide. As migrants from Ghana’s impoverished Northern regions, “condemn boys” arrive in Accra in search of greener pastures. Yet, this urban landscape, arguably imagined as the domain of success, presents myriad challenges. These range from islamophobia, ethnic-hatred, and the racialization of Northern migrants, all of which are traceable to the violence of Ghana’s historical entanglement in the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and now neoliberalism. I ask the question, how do condemn boys’ lives in Accra rewrite the urban script of urbanity as a site of progress and upliftment? How does this rewriting reveal the palimpsestic and omnipresent character of the violence that links the urban and the rural in Ghana’s postcolonial landscape?

Author

• Kwame Otu