Euro Agbo Photo Journos Redux 1: The Butterfly and the Whale (enacted by 2 roosters)

With the help of Ghana Tech Wahab Odoi, and the miracles of the internet, I have managed to put together a lot of the pieces behind the strange alt-coinish entry by the  band Placebo.  Their MTV video's use of Agbogbloshie as a backdrop for "Life is What You Make It" debuted during the middle of this blog's series on Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos.

As far as making friends with people you run into in strange places - well, chalk this chicken fight up to unfortunate timing.

I was in the middle of a "photo journo flog" series.  And Sasha Rainbow was thrilled with what seems her studio's most prestigious work to date. And the band and Placebo fans were unprepared to play a part in an environmental lesson plan.  What does work for photography often does not work as journalism?... um no it's about the music dude.

Artists look for simplicity - a simple, powerful photo can tell a thousand words. But those words may be false, and quite easily proffer mere racial profiling.  I brought their video into the "Free Joe Hurricane Benson" debate, and they seem angry and perturbed.  Easier to describe me as a trollish brute than to entertain the possibility that their depiction of poverty was bleeding with collateral damage, and wrapped in #ewaste activist folly.

How did we meet in this place?  All of us? How does Awal, Yahroo or Razak wind up with a Whatsapp treasuretrove of white contacts from UK, USA, Spain, etc?  Since just the last month, I've been sent photos and been handed by phone to speak directly to five "freelance documentary makers".  It's a land rush... but they don't know what kind.

What $20,000 Means: Blog to Sasha Rainbow, Brian Molko, Stefan Olsdal, @PlaceboWorld

Dear Directors, Producers, and Stars of the Music Video "Life Is What You Make It",

About two weeks ago, I ran across the release of your new Placebo music video through my organization, Fair Trade Recycling / WR3A, which researches public posts on Agbogbloshie.  Despite recognizing some of Placebo's hits from the past two decades, I admit I was not at all acquainted with the artists.  Over the course of 2 weeks, I've developed a much greater appreciation for not just the art, but the social justice that Brian and others with the band strive for.





I know a lot more about African recycling than I know about music.  I've been to Abgogbloshie and Old Fadama several times with our members from Tamale, Ghana.  We have translated for or been interviewed by several documentary and print journalism investigations on so-called e-waste dumping in Africa.  Here are 4 good articles and films on the topic of export.

3Sat
Aljazeera
Smithsonian
SciDev

But let me explain how we can work together to create clean and sustainable recycling jobs for the "workers of Agbogbloshie".  There's a win-win here, and there are plenty of other people besides me you can go through if I've tarnished the relationship by introducing the subject.  ("Alright then, I'll go to hell," often starts here).

A Refreshing "Victimless, Villainless" Assessment of E-Waste in Chennai India: Naveed Ahmed Sekar

Mobile Consumption and Disposal in Chennai Metropolitan Region India (2017 Naveed Ahmed, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany)

This short analysis of "e-waste" phones in the rapidly emerging market of Chennai (Tamil Nadu), India, is the kind of abstract approach that could make a good model for other products and other cities.  

Once again, it shows the "circular economy" is heliocentric, and does not revolve around Europe.  Telephones sold to families in India (4 phones average per household in Chennai) are not thrown into the sea.  The secondary market is not "competing against" the legitimate scrap market.

Instead, Naveed shows the issue is reluctance to let go of devices. When people remember the purchase as a great sacrifice, they hesitate to believe it is eventually worth only the sum of its raw materials.  This leads to the same "hoarding" documented by Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s.

Loving vs. Placebo? Sasha Rainbow, Life's What We Make It

First of all, happy 50th anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia decision, June 12, 1967.

Here is a thoughtful article in Salon, written by Dave Singleton, the godson of attorney Robert McIlwaine. 

“He” was my godfather Robert McIlwaine, Uncle Bob as I called him, and my secret was a surprise. I discovered recently that he was the lead lawyer on Loving v. Virginia, the iconic U.S. Supreme Court case on interracial marriage. He argued for Virginia and against the rights of the interracial couple.

Like Singleton, I spent all my summers Mark Twain country, where slavery had been legal. A lot of my own writing was influenced by conversations among grandparents and family members when I was 5 years old in 1967.  My parents generation was pro-Loving, but they argued with older Ozark relatives about it - some of whom I adore still.  

The anti-Loving marriage argument at my grandparents home was that "It's not right to the children, it deprives the kids of either society".  That is familiar now.  I've heard it said about marriages across religious lines.  And it struck me deeply because, at 4 years old, I'd asked the girl next door, Sally, if she would marry me when we grew up.  She explained to me we could not because she was Jewish.  I asked my parents if it was true that a Christian boy was not allowed to marry a Jewish girl.  They told me it was actually possible, but that family can oppose it, and that you have to "think of the children".

I could not, at that time, imagine ever loving a girl as much as I loved Sally.  And perhaps that's why the evening news of the Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia, caught my 5 year old attention.

Today, I'm grateful to have grown up knowing and loving 'racists' who were just cautious, frightened people, not bad people - like the uncle of the Salon writer.  I think this prepared me to recognize 'accidental racism' in the environmental community. These are my friends, sharing my recycling passion, many of whom seem as stubborn as any family in the south when it comes to trade in used equipment with black people.  

Where I grew up, you learned that you can hate and detest a friend's idea, without thinking too much less of the friend. If you think free export policy will hurt Scrap Sector's children, and I think anti-export policy hurts the Tech Sector's children...  I don't describe you as a bad person.

But righteousness always hears it that way, doesn't it?  And when you become famous for being righteous, you invent and prosecute "blasphemy".

The nuance is sadly missing from the response I got yesterday, indirectly (posted to a fan group) from Placebo "Life is What You Make It" director Sasha Rainbow.  Rather than answer any of my questions, even my messages offering to introduce common third parties if she doesn't want to speak to me directly, she pasted a new sunshine on my bum, spank slapped me personally as a very bad human being who people should avoid talking to.  I'm thinking of writing in response to her characterization of me and Fair Trade Recycling. Maybe tomorrow.

Perhaps we are just competitors.  Perhaps she saw the teaser for the Joe "Hurricane" Benson documentary I'm trying to shepherd, and it's just business to position her own Agbogbloshie documentary ahead.  She has employees, mouths to feed, etc.