Africa Dumping Ground

“Africa is a dumping ground for what the rest of the world does not want,” a friend said to me as we get clouded by the black exhaust from a minibus with Chinese characters. There are the vehicles from China and Japan, the second hand clothes and shoes from North America and Europe, the appliances and electronics from everywhere else in the world. My guess is the products that do not pass quality control end up in countries like Zambia. There is a whole industry of second hand goods – products and by-products of globalisation for developing countries.

I blew a fuse and burned out a light bulb in my house last night. Those two insignificant happenings made me realise the extent to which all sorts of miscellaneous products end up in Zambia. It never occurred to me there could be many kinds of screw on 60W light bulbs: ones with threads and ones with two hooky things (I am obviously not an electrician). The same light fixtures in my house fit two different kinds of light bulbs. How strange. Similarly, I have not quite figured out my stove. Trial and error is not the safest method, but it seems that I can only have one burner or the oven on at one time, or else the fuse in the adapter blows and sometimes melts and emits toxic smoke (I obviously do not know anything about electricity).

Plug adapters and voltage converters must sell at a ridiculous rate in Zambia. All the various appliances in my house probably represent all the different plugs in the world. The sockets in the wall are the UK rectangular three prong, but rarely do products come with that plug. Most are the two skinny circular plugs or the three fatter circular plugs. A recently acquired cell phone charger has two slanted plugs. How did Zambia start receiving all sorts of devices that do not use the available sockets. Maybe dumping ground is too negative, seeing that the items that end up here actually get used.