Agbogbloshie: Resonances in the Colonial Archive

Jacob Badcock elucidates the parallels between 19th century colonial notions of sanitation and urban space and the recent demolition of an e-waste scrapyard in Accra (Ghana).

In July 2021, Agbogbloshie, an infamous scrapyard and electronic waste (e-waste) processing zone in Accra, Ghana, was “swept away” in a police and military-backed demolition carried out by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) under the direction of then-Accra minister, Henry Quartey. This was part of Quartey’s “Let’s Make Accra Work” policy to improve sanitation conditions and reduce pollution in urban areas (Akese, Beisel and Chasant, 2022; GhanaWeb, 2021).

The former Agbogbloshie scrapyard bordered one of the largest informal settlements in West Africa. In 2015, in the wake of deadly flooding in the Korlee Lagoon, which was attributed to e-waste pollution, thousands of homes on the lagoon’s banks were bulldozed (Little & Akese, 2019). The recent clearance of Agbogbloshie has raised concerns that the informal settlement there could be demolished as part of a broader strategy of government land grabs (Sarpong et al., 2025).

For over a decade, Agbogbloshie had been subject to intense media scrutiny owing to the highly toxic informal e-waste recycling activities that take place there, such as the burning of plastic-coated copper wires. Major news outlets have described it as “the world’s largest e-waste dump,” “e-hell on earth”, or simply “Sodom and Gomorrah” (The Guardian, 2014a, 2014b; Gizmodo, 2013). Dramatic photographs taken at Agbogbloshie, of mounds of disused computers, polluted water bodies, and child labourers (known as ‘burner boys’) engaged in the burning of plastic-coated wires, were published by major international news sites, hung on gallery walls as ‘art’, and sold at auction houses (Ouedraogo, 2008; Hugo, 2010; The Guardian, 2014c; Iheka, 2021; Badcock, 2022).

Despite the dramatic and highly stylised nature of these photographs, environmental advocacy groups have held them up as objective evidence of indiscriminate e-waste dumping in Ghana by the West (Puckett, 2010, 2014; Lepawsky, 2018; Akese, 2019). The perceived objectivity of the camera has given both epistemic authority and great affective power to spurious claims about the nature and scale of e-waste pollution at Agbogbloshie, such as the oft-repeated (now-debunked) belief that “hundreds of millions of tons” of e-waste are shipped to Agbogbloshie every year (Klein, 2009; Lepawsky 2018, 4). Ultimately, the framing of Agbogbloshie as a kind of “hell” has obscured the complex and highly organised nature of the informal e-waste recycling sector, giving the state the necessary justification to demolish the site which has long been in the crosshairs of government agencies for development (Akese, 2019; Akese, Beisel, and Chasant, 2022; Little, 2021; Hart, 2024).

Waste, race, and urban space

The demolition of Agbogbloshie was carried out not only because it posed a risk to public and environmental health, but also because of long running land disputes and its potential impact on Ghana’s ability to retain and attract foreign investment dollars. Several geographers point out that what happened at Agbogbloshie parallels “how colonial and post-colonial authorities weaponise aesthetics, hygiene, morality, security, and other socio-economic concerns” to legitimise their demolition of what they deemed to be ‘dirty’ and undesirable sites (Grant, Oteng-Ababio & Shin, 2023).

This essay fleshes out the parallels between historical representations of sanitation and urban space under the British colonial government of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) from 1874 to 1957, and the recent demolition of Agbogbloshie. I understand Agbogbloshie as the latest iteration in a century-long colonial project to implement normative European urban planning in Accra by seizing and redeveloping land on public health and sanitation grounds—designating ‘informal’ settlements as undesirable and ‘dirty’ places needing to be displaced or eradicated to establish order.

To make this argument, I focus on a series of photographs included in a 1909 report by colonial sanitation expert W.J. Simpson. Addressing the outbreak of bubonic plague in early colonial Accra (Simpson, 1909), Simpson drew on photography as a way of furnishing scientific evidence regarding what the colonial government deemed unsanitary living conditions in Indigenous urban areas. These images are instructive for understanding how photography was, in the colonial period as much as today, critical for imagining waste, race, and the urban space—functioning as part of a broader “civilising mission” to control disease, regulate “native” uses of urban space, modernise infrastructure, and maximise economic efficiency in line with British colonial goals (Hart 2024, 220).

Photography and Sanitation in the Colonial Archive

The Colonial Office in London dispatched Simpson to Accra on the 2^nd of February 1908, with the aim of studying the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Gold Coast colony (Simpson 1909, 2). While posted, Simpson was appointed President of the Public Health Committee and reported on sanitation conditions in other parts of the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and Southern Nigeria. His report is a significant document depicting the move toward a more ‘scientific’ and technocratic mode of public health and urban planning governance in colonial West Africa. It not only recommended best practices in response to the disease outbreak but also set out the importance of regulation, urban planning, and housing development as preventative public health measures.

Consider the photographs captioned “Dustbin No.11. Salaga market” [Figure 1] and “Jamestown Market and refuse ground” [Figure 2] (Simpson 1909, 103).  Simpson describes how “flies used to swarm from the one to the other” of these locations and claims that these images are “representative of the dirty condition of the native town” (Simpson 1909, 38). In the Salaga market scene, the viewer is confronted with the image of a child in traditional dress, resting a bowl atop their head. Behind the child is a structure comprising two supporting walls, a shorter front wall, and a roof made of corrugated iron. To the right of the structure, several other people in native dress are sitting on the ground. To the left, two empty baskets are resting on the ground. We can see a pile of unidentifiable matter spilling out from the ‘dustbin,’ but we cannot see inside the structure itself. In the Jamestown refuse ground image, there are no people: we see an empty patch of land, shrouded by a cloud of either dust or smoke, bordered by trees and built structures on the horizon and littered with unidentifiable refuse in the foreground.

What, precisely, is “representative of the dirty condition of the native town” in these images? Despite the evidential value attributed to these images by Simpson, the camera allows us to see very little of the adverse conditions he refers to. In this way, his earlier textual description of the site as “dirty” overdetermines the meaning of the images, which function less as proof of unsanitary conditions than as documents of broader colonial anxiety about the Indigenous geographies that did not conform to normative European standards of urban planning and sanitation.

The first image shows a child in proximity to materials described as “dirty,” conflating what we are told are the unsanitary conditions of Indigenous housing and the bodies of the “native” population. The underexposed interior of the dustbin—the place from which the dirty, unidentifiable matter spills—is printed in dark tones, opaque, almost black. Sitting on the floor, the other figures are level with the waste matter strewn about the ground. The image is thick with the suggestion that there is somehow an intimacy between the “native” body and the waste material that Simpson, without presenting any rigorous epidemiological theory, asserts as the cause of disease (Simpson, 1909).

The second photograph, absent of figures, recalls earlier practices of colonial landscape photography that show Accra as a kind of terra nullius. Much of the problem for British colonists hoping to reshape Accra was that they did not encounter a “blank slate” but a “form of Indigenous urbanism” that long predated colonial attempts to transform the city (Hart 2024, 222). The empty landscape shows the “native town” as a place ripe for development, for the construction of new housing, buildings, and infrastructure that could realise the colonial ideal of Accra as a modern, colonial-capitalist city. The identification of this landscape as a refuse ground with the only visible feature being a pile of discarded objects, seems to suggest that the “native town” is not simply empty but a kind of wasteland where the existing use of the land is informal, inefficient, and unsanitary and therefore in need of planning and reform (Simpson, 1909).

Simpson’s recommendation for refuse in Accra is to collect and burn it in an incinerator, with the resulting ash used to fill in excavations. This anxiety to do away with visible refuse has informed similar recommendations about e-waste and refuse at Agbogbloshie, with some researchers suggesting that incineration could be an alternative to expensive recycling methods or the present informal recycling methods (which, although polluting, provide a livelihood for thousands of informal workers) (Laskaris, 2020). 

Demolish and Develop

“The houses in the native town are generally of the most primitive type,” wrote Simpson, “which, in itself, need not be unhealthy if regulated” (Simpson 1909, 39). Simpson proceeds to identify a few key features of these houses: namely their “irregularity,” the narrowness of their entrance passages, the “dilapidated” condition of many homes, their “primitive and unregulated structure” (Simpson, 1909,39). These observations have a clear epidemiological focus. Simpson argues that the prevalence of rats and the proximity of houses make it possible for the bubonic plague to become “endemic”. He recommends that “the only safe precaution was to make a clean sweep of the worst areas”—in other words, to demolish and rebuild them (Simpson 1909, 39-40).

The photographs included on housing do confirm some aspects of Simpson’s description. In this photograph [Figure 3] we see the corrugated iron roofs that Simpson describes, held in place by bricks and wood planks (Simpson 1909, 105). There is a visible gap between the roofs and the exterior walls of many of the houses. In other views, from the street level, we can see how closely built up the houses are, with narrow walkways and small courtyard areas.

In the caption above the image, Simpson writes that “[n]othing but demolition of the huts and remodelling of the whole area can render it healthy” (Simpson 1909, 105). Often, Simpson reaches beyond the impartiality of scientific investigation to project his aesthetic judgements about Indigenous housing onto the report. At one point in his description, Simpson likens the houses in this area to “that formed if a cartload of bricks were overturned so that each brick was on the ground” (Simpson 1909, 39). Evidently, it was for aesthetic reasons as well as epidemiological ones that Simpson recommended that Indigenous urban housing should be demolished On the strength of Simpson’s report, the colonial government passed The Infectious Diseases Ordinance of 1908. This ordinance advised that “the worst houses should be demolished, which would give more breathing space for the others” (Simpson 1909, 41-42). It also prescribed that no new buildings should be constructed in Accra without reference to a town survey and plan. Such ordinances were crucial to the attempts of colonists to reshape Accra in their image. They had enormous consequences for urban development in the city, empowering the Accra Town Council (ATC)—an antecedent to today’s AMA—to seize land, demolish homes, and redevelop them in the colonists’ image on sanitation and public health grounds.

Conclusion

In the colonial period, as now, photography played a crucial role in evidencing the need to eradicate Indigenous and informal forms of urban organisation. It provided a visual aid to an as-yet unrealised vision of “ordered modernity” that promised an ordered city along the lines of European urban space. It is ultimately logic and the unrealised promise of European urbanism which continues to be drawn on by the likes of Henry Quartey and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to justify the use of repressive state violence to evict workers from and demolish environmental crisis zones like Agbogbloshie (Hodge 2007, 7-8; Hart 2024, 221).

About the author

Jacob Badcock is a final-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at University College London (UCL). His research concerns the ethics of photography at Agbogbloshie, a scrapyard and e-waste processing zone in Accra, Ghana. He has been published in Burlington Magazine, the Journal of Visual Culture, and the recently edited volume Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (Routledge, 2023).

References

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Akese, G. 2022. Beisel Uli, and Chasant, Muntaka, “Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition,” African Arguments.

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Little, P., C. 2021. Burning Matters: Life, Labor, and e-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana, (Oxford University Press).

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Sarpong, A., Owusu, D. M. M., Onallia, E.O. 2025. “Decoding the Logics behind the Demolition and Redevelopment of Agbogbloshie Scrapyard, Accra, Ghana,” Geoforum 159. 104180.

Simpson, W.J., 1909. Report on plague in the Gold Coast in 1908, (J. & A. Churchill). Same series of photographs is also held in the National Archives Colonial Office collection under C1069/45. 

The Guardian Newspaper. 2014. “Agbogbloshie: The World’s Largest E-Waste Dump,”(27th February).

The Guardian Newspaper. 2014. “Life in Sodom and Gomorrah: the world’s largest digital dump,”(29th April).