El Anatsui: From the Garbage Bins of Nsukka to International Museums

From Naples to the African Continent: Waste, an Economical and Political Issue

Naples has been collapsing under mountains of detritus for several months now,1 1  - As the paroxysms of a crisis mired in quicksand for the last fourteen years, thousands of tons of garbage accumulated in the regions of Naples in the last few months, provoking the anger of the riverside residents and a state of sanitary emergency. Colossal budgets were squandered in vain in an attempt to regulate a situation that had been poisoned by fraudulent politicians and by the hand of the camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, which took hold of this lucrative market. and this proliferation strangely recalls the reality of other continents and epochs. This event undeniably highlights, at the core of Europe, the complexity of an environmental issue dependent upon ­economic as well as political interests and about which, given our ­immersion in simplistic and virtuous discourses, we have a tendency to forget. Certain environmentalist spokespeople denounce our naïve perspective: “While attributing culpability to citizens and in proposing a facile expiation of their sins by means of small, individual gestures, we forget to explain to them that a good number of the public policies to which we subscribe are anti-ecological.... Ecology is not only a false pretext; it has also become a publicity campaign, as deceitful as it is ­convincing. Ecology finds itself used for marketing ends to justify the most detrimental procedures to the planet.”2 2  - Jean-Louis Roumégas and Anne Souyris, “La semaine de l’écoblanchiment,” in Libération, Tuesday, 8 April 2008.  

As unexploited remains, waste has become the object of ­lucrative, more or less honest transactions contracted at an international scale. If the situation in Naples can call to mind the open dumping that fouls the vicinities of African cities and villages, it is not by means of a simple formal association. The relation between the two continents was woven using the threads of Africa’s tragic history as the “dumping ground of Europe”³ 3 - François Roelants du Vivier, Les vaisseaux du poison (Paris: Sang de la Terre [Les Dossiers de l’Écologie], 1988). and the traffic of garbage.⁴ 4 - From the 1980s to this day, countless scandals have been denounced. Recently, the Panamanian ship Probo Koala (August 2006), chartered by a Dutch company, seriously polluted with its toxic refuse several public dumping sites in Abidjan (in contempt of the Basel convention). Today, used consumer goods (cars, tires, or ­electronic garbage) are more likely to arrive in Africa, usually under the guise of their reuse.