Fortune and fantasy on Africa's oil frontier
Football pitch. Photo by Christiane Badgley
Who cares about the environment?
The acrid smell of burning plastic wafts out from Accra’s vast e-waste dump known as “No man’s land.” The thick smoke crosses the Agbogbloshie market and the notorious “Sodom and Gomorrah” neighborhood where many of the dump’s workers live. Entering No man’s land the fumes are unbearable.
It is a hellish place, yet everyday people toil here under the burning sun and choking smoke. Men and boys tear apart appliances, engines, phones, televisions and computers, breaking everything down into scraps for resale. They burn bundles of wiring to extract the copper, which they then sell to Chinese, Malaysian and Russian buyers.
Lifting machinery. Photo by Christiane Badgley
Burning copper wire. Photo by Christiane Badgley
The Environmental Protection Agency is aware of this dump. According to one of the bosses here, government officials come by occasionally, but nothing changes. Well, the Ministry of Education and Sports did put up a football pitch. If you don’t see the sign, you probably won’t notice though; the pitch looks like the rest of the dump.
Christiane Badgley has been producing and editing documentary films for the past twenty years, with much of her work focused on the U.S. criminal justice system and post-colonial African politics and history.
