Noxious Earth

ITS 45,000-ODD RESIDENTS call it “Sodom and Gomorrah”. Officially named Agbogbloshie, this suburb of Accra is one of the worst urban toxic dumpyards in Africa, a 361-acre open-air gas chamber located over a computer graveyard landfill. The area is a perennial miasma of some hundreds of tonnes of lead, cadmium, antimony, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorinated dioxins. The black smoke of copper wiring being burnt to expose the pure stuff under the sheath barely hides the spectres of dumpyard diggers—some as young as seven, thousands of teenagers, and a scattering of sexagenarians who’ve survived, somehow, years of irreversible lung damage.

Agbogbloshie, which comprises 0.7 percent of the 200 sq km Accra, and has 1.15 percent of the city’s 3.9 million population, nonetheless has a giant impact on the capital’s wellbeing—rather, the lack of it. The lead in the ground leaches into the Odaw River about 120 yards from the largest residential community in Agbogbloshie, and the toxin-carrying fish—77 percent of Accra’s economy is piscine—end up in the Agbogbloshie Food Market.

The traducers on Accra’s dumpyards—not just on Agbogbloshie but also smaller gas chambers like Galloway, Kpone-Kokompe and Ashiaman in the Greater Accra Region, and in Nigeria and the Côte d’Ivoire—are Germany, Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands, all of them prohibited by EU rules from tipping their rubbish anywhere but at home.

But European, US and Ghanaian traders bypass international laws by labelling the junk as “secondhand goods” or “charity”; in truth, though, 80 percent of Ghana’s e-waste comprises broken or obsolete computers, or, occasionally, working discards of rampant consumerism. Sometimes, they are genuine donations—but since donations can’t be donated, when they die they go to Agbogbloshie.

There, they are cracked open like lobsters, and the marrow extracted: at the top of the value chain is copper, followed by aluminium and zinc. And tiny flecks of gold. The dirt-poor extractors sell at about four times less than the international market rate—to the next group up the food chain, the Ghanaian middlemen, known for their rapacity.

These middlemen hunt down hard drives, hundreds of which line the Agbogbloshie Food Market, and a handful of which are data-salvaged every month by Ghana’s internationally infamous cyber-scammers. These drives, insufficiently scrubbed by their previous owners, deliver up credit card numbers, account information and records of online transactions. Recently, an HDD purchased by a group of visiting graduate students from the University of Columbia—for 69 Ghana cedi ($35)—contained a $22 million Northrop Grumman military contract.