Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty Grace Akese Jacob Doherty, Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 288 pp. I review this book from Accra, Ghana, where I am researching the aftermath of the demolition of Agbogbloshie, the infamous e-waste site in Accra, popularly known as the world’s largest e-waste dumpsite. In the summer of 2021, as part of the Greater Accra Regional Ministry’s campaign of #letsmakeAccrawork, the site was violently torn down amid armed military and police presence, and economic activities there were brought to a halt. What appears to be a complete erasure had precedents in evictions and similar demolitions in 1993, 2002, 2004, and 2015. Reading Doherty’s Waste worlds in the here and now of Agbogbloshie’s very own morally charged rhetoric of urban decongestion, displacement, economic precarity, and environmental harm, I couldn’t help but draw parallels about how urban social and environmental transformations manifest through waste and its infrastructure in Africa’s major cities. The title of the book Waste worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s infrastructures of disposability is telling of the grounded and ethnographically rich nature of his accounts. Doherty offers a lively and engaging ethnography of Kampala’s waste and its infrastructural life. Waste is not just a matter of management within a technocratic regime. Waste foments lively engagements with people and places; as such, it is part of and creates lived worlds that “emerge through the process of inhabitation—the everyday world-making practices of cleaning, sorting, discarding, and salvaging” (6). Waste worlds are “the official and unofficial infrastructures and economies that constitute the city’s waste stream and develop around it” (3). In three parts, each with five chapters, Doherty thoroughly and engagingly transverses the “heterogeneous assemblage—of waste, technologies, [End Page 177] discourses, moral logics, forms of work, political rationalities” (22)—that make up these emergent worlds. What, then, do the densely inhabited waste worlds of Kampala look like? The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), a new municipal authority formed by President Museveni’s government, features prominently in Kampala’s discardscape. Created primarily to subvert the power of the city’s elected officials, KCCA’s mandate includes cleaning the city. Doherty shows that the KCCA evangelizes this mandate and embraces a moral charge to cleanse, reorder, and eventually redeem a city that has fallen from grace. Assuming an overlord, the authority enrolls a regime of disposability, which among other things, manifests in evictions and displacements, a process that Doherty describes as a “destructive creation” (69) where in the name of development, some places and livelihoods are inevitably sacrificed. Even as the KCCA actively renders some livelihoods and space waste as a necessity for development, it must also remove the waste created by residents. In its waste removal efforts, the authority is unable to maintain a sealed waste stream where waste collection, often outsourced to private services (in low-income settlements), travels from spaces of generation to final disposal–from homes, offices, and factories to landfills. Para-sites comprised of so-called informal waste scavengers and salvagers punctuate the city’s imagined linear waste stream. In a system designed to exclude them, they are the conditions of possibility that makes it function properly. In this highly charged field of struggles around waste and its infrastructure, the KCCA thinks of itself as a-political, wielding only a technical mandate to clean Kampala. In this field of struggle, I find Doherty’s attention to the play out of race and racialization in Kampala one of his most compelling contributions. There is limited direct engagement of race and racialization logic in the burgeoning studies on the politics of waste in Africa. To the extent that race is engaged, studies more broadly focused on toxic waste flows from the West to Africa and associated environmental justice concerns. Following Jemima Pierre’s (2013:xii) insight that a “modern, postcolonial space is invariably a racialized one,” the final part of the book sheds light on the racialized scripts and framings of urban futures that play out in highly publicized yet mundane events like the monthly cleaning exercises organized by...