Buses hate all that is me.

On a trip seven years ago, I was taking a bus from Zagreb, Croatia out to the coastal town of Split. This was on the old road, so it was an eight hour drive (new road is five.) Somewhere around hour six or so, the bus pulled to the side of the road, sputtered, die, and then the engine exploded in a ball of flames. Luckily, I lived to tell about that.

Two years ago, I was taking bus from Belgrade, Serbia to Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. The bus was doing fine until it lost a radiator hose which was thankfully repaired mid-ride so that I made it in to Sarajevo tired and late, but on the same bus and without serious threat to my well-being.

These experiences all seem like child's play now that I have experience what Sean at Journey without Maps calls, The Most Miserable Bus in the World. Yes, the crappy-bus bar has been set high in this latest experience and I hope it will remain the pinnacle of personal bus crapdom for me, lest one bus run over me, back up, run over me again, and then shoot me dead.

It all started with my wife and I throwing caution to the wind and thinking we could circumnavigate the most hellish part of this bus trip by not taking the route from Abidjan up to the border. That can take from 1-2 days by itself due to the buses not wanting to drive through Yamoussoukro at night due to the fear of roving bandits in the area.

So, we got up at six on Friday morning and mooched rides through various friends of friends who were knowing people going north and we eventually bounced our way to to Korhogo and spent the night at a friend's house there. This part was all well and good, hauling along at 100kph with air conditioning and avoiding the slowdowns that come with the damnable checkpoint "greasings".

Well-rested, we set out from Korhogo the next morning to take the Sama Transport bus from there up to Sikasso in Mali where we thought we'd spend the night as the trip took so long. The bus was scheduled to leave at eight and we were pleasantly surprised to have it leave at 9:30. The trip up to the border was mostly uneventful. Slow would be the primary tag to attach to any article about it though as the bus stops at literally every wide spot in the road to take on more passengers, drop off others, or pick up letters that people are sending. Ah yes, if you want to send something via express mail in Côte d'Ivoire or Mali, you use Sama.

After getting a quick, painless stamp at the Malian border, we then went to customs. I wish I had brought a chair. That took something like an hour as the inspection officers wanted to look through every single part of the bus, come up with a tally and then negotiate the "donation" they were to receive, as our driver put it. I also learned a new word on this particular Saturday which was the "donne-donne" as in the "give give" which is what some kids told us when we asked where the driver was. "Oh he's at the donne-donne."

Once crossing the border, we were puttering our way along in minor passenger transport and mail delivery courier stops until we reach Sikasso. So, here's the funny thing about Sikasso, according to the ticket guys in Korhogo, there is no transfer to another bus in Sikasso to reach Mali, to which I retort, oh yes, there is very much a transfer to another bus in Sikasso to reach Mali and the really really cool part is that they oversell that bus so you have to scramble to get on it. Or you can then wait for the night bus of which the first one of which leaves at 22:00. Not having it in us to fight through the line for the oversold tickets, we took one quick glance Sikasso and opted for the night bus.

The night bus left at a quarter past 22:00 which was pretty good. The driver drove like a maniac and had to listen to his music through the bus sound system at full volume, so sleep was out of the question, but rolling discotheque was very much in the question (or the answer?) Whatever, it was going to be alright as forward momentum to Bamako was the goal and that was happening. Of course somewhere around 1:30 we came across a massive line of trucks and quickly came to a dead stop.

It turns out in the course of all this driving, a strike had occurred that the Malian truckers (or more their bosses) called. They had decided that buses were part of it as well (they weren't) and thus about 5km East of a town called Bougouni, they stopped our miserable bus. The strike was about the fact that the government had reduced the maximum weight that trucks can carry (a good move considering what happens often) and so they had been striking for four days prior to our arrival at the point of blockage.

No amount of negotiating by the bus drivers (there were more than just us stopped) could get up through and so we did what you do when stopped in the middle of nowhere at 1:30 in the morning--you sleep on the ground next to the bus. That was an adventurous night filled with strange dreams of Malian women walking past me dressed in their brightly colored clothes as well as the feeling I was in a zoo as I believe that every single person who walked by shined their flashlight or mobile screen at the beleaguered white guy sleeping on the ground.

At 6:00, everybody got up and we decided to get the hell out of there, walking past the blockage point, hitching a ride to the nearest town, and then taking yet another bus that did eventually get up to Bamako in the middle of the day. In a private car, from Korhogo, Côte d'Ivoire to Bamako, Mali, the trip takes a bit less than six hours. As it went for us, it took 30.

While the strike was unfortunate, these things can happen. You get snarled up in them rightly or wrongly, but you move on. It's more the issue of Sama Transport that I take issue with. They are Satan. Actually no, they're worse than Satan as you know Satan's rules when you're headed "down under".

In short, Sama is a horrid company, but unfortunately they're the main choice you have to take to get around and they seem to have a monopoly in Côte d'Ivoire as well as Mali. The only other options are scooting along in shared taxis between towns or to take very expensive flights. From Abidjan to Bamako is $500 and it's an hour flight. Needless to say, if I have to fly back, I will if the choice is that or spending another night sleeping in the savanna next to my otherwise illustrious "direct" bus. Sean, I am a fool to not have heeded wise words.

During the past days, a number of different news and blog posts led me to think hard about e-waste, how it is generated, treated and dumped around the world, and how this relates not only to environmental issues, but algo to the global economy. First, it was this post at Subsaharska, in which Miquel argued that e-waste

"is a big problem and it's only going to get bigger. It's one of the things that makes me truly cringe about the information age in that the leftover components are all getting dumped in countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. People have few ways to fight back other than to deal with what is dumped upon their shores. And when they do fight back, suddenly, they're called pirates...For anyone who thinks that they need the latest iPod/iPhone, or laptop marvel, they should come and stay for awhile in rural areas in Africa where the trash is burned daily and you're breathing in an ungodly amount of things you'd rather not know about (mainly damnable petrochemicals.) For me, in a few months, I won't breath this anymore, but for the people here, it's constantly in the air and it's only growing more. Think the next time you buy an electronics item, stop and think if you really and truly need it."

Not only e-waste, but numerous other types of waste (often of the most dangerous ones - such as nuclear waste, toxic substances, deathly chemicals...) end up being dumped on the poorest areas of the globe. In some cases, this is done with the encouragement of the country's government, who expects to benefit from their "comparative advantage" in the global economy by providing the services at a very low cost - needsless to say the real costs being born by the workers on these areas, who work in awful conditions and without the necessary safety requirements. One of the industries where this is most visible (and horribly spectacular) is the ship-breaking on Indian and Bangldeshi beaches (See this blog entry and this El Pais article (Spanish) .

Photo from the El Pais article

In other cases, toxical waste is disposed in more shady deals, sometimes completely illegally ones. For example, the N'drangheta (Calabrian version of the Sicilian mafia) has recently been found to have made a big business by getting rid of nuclear way in "un-ortodox" ways, such as sinking boats on the Mediterranean sea, or shipping the waste to Somalia, where it was buried after bribing local politicians. Also it was recently revealed that, the British company Trafigura, was found guilty of dumping

"400 tonnes of toxic waste from the cargo vessel Probo Koala...at the West African port of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. The waste was loaded on to trucks and dumped around the city.Over the following weeks, thousands of residents found themselves choking and coughing, some vomiting. At least 10 are said to have died and many still bare the scars"

. Trafigura finally agreed to a $45m (£30m) payout as compensation, which those affected began receiving earlier this month. I blogged about this at the time (here, in Spanish), and you can read the full story here.

Growing amounts of e-waste are fast becoming ones of the most pressing and dangerous type of waste; often this is just dumped on the landfills of the poores countries. For example, see this series of photographs by Andrew McConnell on the Agbogbloshie suburb in Ghana's capital, Accra, which has become a dumping ground for hundreds of tons of e-waste from Europe and the US (via Subsaharska too). As McConnel notes, this waste often enters these countries thanks to unscrupulous trades who label the goods as second-hand goods, or charity donations. This opens another aspect of the debate: the import of used and second-hand goods into African countries. Recently, it was reported, here, that Uganda was

"reconsidering its ban on the importation of used electronics following complaints from traders and other stakeholders over the indiscriminate nature of the policy...(Prefering instead) a more targeted approach to the implementation of the ban to focus on technology that is harmful to the environment instead of uniform application to all secondhand goods".

This was a similar story as the one coming from Pakistan, a country where e-waste is a serious threas, and whose country is considering a ban on the import of used computers. You can read here a nice article debating how, as well as disadvantages, importing second-hand computers can make these more affordable and therefore available to more people. My opinion here is that prevention is better than cure, and if importing used computers is going to becoming a back-door for dumping of e-waste, then a ban should be adopted.

Photo Andrew McConnell

Furthermore, as this BBC "Have Your Say" debate suggests, there are indeed arguments for banning not only electronics but also other type of second-hand and charity goods (such as clothes) which harm local production. Again, here I support the protection of local industries, and a ban od second-hand cloths will be a positive development - although unfortunately here not sufficient for saving local textile industries, whose biggest competitor is cheap Chinese products (and as you can imagine, African countries would not risk losing Chinese investments and support by rising their import duties on Chinese goods...). I think perhaps the answer for textile producers and designers in Africa is to turn their already beautiful, good quality pieces into fashionable products which can can be sold (and priced) as luxury items - something for which they need only a good branding and marketing campaign...

An example of luxury goods made using the appeal of African textiles, done however by an Italian company, Moroso (More at Nosideup)

I think both e-waste and the textile industry's precarious situation are simply different faces of the key debate - the global economy and Africa's integration into it. The general debate on import bans and on the textile industry, is part of a larger and a well-known outcome of the development and globalisation debates (dating back at least to the 1960s and some African countries' attempts at import substitution industrialization (ISI)) E-waste is perhaps, a more clear product of globalisation, and how Africa is integrated into the global economy at present. Globalisation has facilitated the flow of information, goods and capital (much more than people, who remain still tied to their countries, especially if you come for a poor country), resulting often in positive outcomes. Most often however, the results have been largely negative - not only growing disparity between rich and poor, but also the appearance of gray zones. On the words of the anthropologist Carolyn R. Nordstrom, the global economy has meant increasing flows, but also increasing "fractures". These fractures can be physical spaces - such as war-zones and "failed states" like Somalia - but also all kinds of activities, from clearly illegal ones - terrorism, kidnappings and drug trading - to the gray activities of multinational corporations - pharmaceuticals, arms and oil producers of course, but also companies responsible for what Nordstrom labels "blood-tomatoes" (grown in war zones), the mobile phone industry's thirst for coltan (which as Mike in Mo'dernity, Mo'problem notes, cannot be stopped simply by consumer-power), and many others.

And it is not only in producing goods that the "fractures" of the global economy become relevant, but also - as e-waste shows - in the disposal of it. On this there is, as Miquel says, a certain degree to which individuals can contribute, by not going for the latest technology craze without thinking the implications through. Ultimately however, the inmoral and illegal disposal of dangerous waste is result of the "fractures" on the global economy, much like the competition faced by the African textile industry is a result of its "flows". In order for these problems - symptoms - to be solved, their root cause - the uneven global economy - must be addressed; if not, all we'll do, will be mere gap-filling.

I've really getting neurotic about mobile phones. Not so much in developing for them or their being the new-new data platform but mainly due to the fixation in how Africa is the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Yes, it's true, but that's because penetration is so low, whereas in North America of Europe, the market is saturated already.

I've said it before but the growth figures are way out of line. I have two numbers with two different carriers here in Côte d'Ivoire: Orange and Moov. I have to have both of these numbers as at any given point at least one of them is without a signal and that is often when standing directly below a tower. The networks are overloaded.

This last week put me over the top when both phones were without data access and voice at various points with 2-3 hour delays on SMS's. It makes people pouting about 3G access on their iPhone seem paltry. Although, after talking to a friend of a friend who was in Myanmar for the last three years, the networks here are blissful by comparison.

I'm seriously thinking about getting a third and looking like a true idiot with all these devices dangling off of me. But, it's the case that the mobile systems here, as in many parts of Africa (I've personally experienced the same problems in Ghana as well as Congo) are purely set up for the extraction of wealth. What mining and rubber harvest was to Sub-Saharan Africa during Colonial times, the mobile phone industry is to Modern times. Put in as little money as possibly to get out as much as possible. This explains why there are so many mobile players out there and they all offer pretty much the same kind of deal--a less than stellar one.

Sure, the market will continue to grow and with every person getting two or three numbers, it's going to look huge. But, for anyone actually using the networks on the ground, they leave a great deal to be desired, no matter how large and pretty their billboards down in Zone Quatre appear.