Tales from a Second Hand Planet
Pemba, it would seem, is a graveyard of international consumerism. Products from shinier and more materially endowed places the world over spend their last days in this isolated northern Mozambican port. Dusty, slightly crumpled cereal boxes sit on shelves approaching their expiry dates; Brazilian biscuits go stale quietly in their packages. T-shirts emblazoned with everything from the CN Tower to 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg hang in market stalls, waiting to be worn into their final tatters. Handout baseball caps from major multinational corporate conferences hang racks, surrounded by a surprising range of dangling and likely used running shoes. A smorgasbord of multiethnic faces smile at you from fading packaging, from the Middle Eastern beauties on hair products to the awkward-looking blonde housewives on the ironing boards. Arabic, Russian, Chinese and every European language you can imagine jostle with each other on boxes to create a linguistic maelstrom, with Portuguese pulling out ahead only slightly (followed closely by English courtesy of South Africa’s proximity).
As could only be expected, products made in China comprise the vast majority of cheap, quasi-useful goods available in the small trading shops. At Asia Dong, the owner packs up your goods while skillfully dangling a cigarette from his mouth, evoking distant dreamlike memories of a Chinese world. Industrial trucks rumble down the broken roads as passenger vans speed by, often still sporting the East Asian characters that served them so well in their previous lives in China, Japan and Taiwan. Ageing sedans with cracked windshields ‘imported’ from elsewhere ply their trade as taxis. The Exito gas station, standing out starkly as a beacon of shiny consumer convenience in this raw landscape, offers a fine selection of international liquors. Oddly, many of the packaged food products on offer originate in Dubai. My Nokia cell phone speaks English, French, German and Turkish.
Some glimmers of that sanitized consumer world I call home do break through from time to time. The polished ATM at the Standard Bank addresses me by name on its colourful screen, and South African satellite TV shows me strange places that are made of glass and bright lights. Pemba is a frontier outpost, the last stand of international consumer convenience in a vast landscape of isolated villages and subsistence farming. And yet even here, things we are told should be shiny and new are rough around the edges, passed down as they are through various cultures, flatbed trucks and layers of dirt. The sleekness of my Toshiba laptop is a bad joke as it regularly collects dust from the red soil. This electronic good was designed for a tabletop in a London Starbucks, not the earthiness of northern Mozambique.
Of course, I’m not about to argue that Pemba is a shining star of material prosperity- far from it. By vast majority it is a sprawl of mud huts, dirt paths and deep material poverty, of daily lives far removed from the imported goods I speak of here. There is nothing glitzy nor glamorous about this place, as dirty bare subsistence is the norm. But even here, in this remote province in what is considered one of the ‘poorest’ countries in the world, luxuries are readily available to those who can afford them. Far from being a bad stereotype of its remote African setting, frozen in time and waiting for tourists to discover the value in its ‘traditional’ culture, Pemba moves and shakes as much as it can given its isolation and almost complete lack of anything that could be described as industrial infrastructure. People from various continents and cultures have converged on this frayed little town to make a living, making for a cosmopolitan place that is a far cry from your Lonely Planet-style myth of an ‘authentic’ Africa that has not existed for centuries if ever (and no, Africa is not a country).
In this place, consumerism is raw and in your face: it offers up a good reminder of the less savoury side of our global obsession with buying, using and disposing of lots of stuff. Unlike the more ‘rationalized’ places I have lived, and more like a comfortable majority of our planet, consumer waste does not disappear courtesy of a well-oiled, trash disposal system. Rather, it is quite simply dumped on the street. Make a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, and chances are the can you pried open and discarded will be rolling down the street at you later that afternoon. Live in one of the town’s very few highrise buildings? Simply walk down the stairs and dump your trash over a small wall into a dirt alley. Then it becomes someone else’s problem, or no one’s problem at all. A flatbed hauled by a tractor does come around and collect the piles of trash and organic waste, but I can only imagine it gets shifted to the dump further down the road to be sifted through by small children. Material poverty is often the greatest incentive for recycling.
As a Canadian and honorary member of that notorious myth called the ‘West’, it is fascinating for me to branch into international connections that lie beyond our arrogance that all the ebbs and flows on our planet somehow belong to the Anglo-Saxon world. Here, products arrive from South America as logs depart for East Asia. Here, South Africa is more the looming giant than the United States. As isolated as it is, Pemba is nevertheless plugged into this transnational flow of inanimate objects we call progress. Only here, the story is turned upside down and inside out: far from computerized assembly lines, worlds away from the noxious and churning industrial landscapes of China, this is where economic globalization comes to die in peace. And what place of rest could be more fitting than the dusty shelves in a crumbling Portuguese colonial-era building on the edge of nowhere, watched over by a bored south Asian shopkeeper as the palms trees sway gently in the breeze.
September 23rd, 2006 at 6:37 am
If you come across any sports-related attire boasting some sort of championship, try to see if the team in question actually won. You know how e.g. the Hurricanes had “2006 NHL Stanley Cup Champions” hats on as soon as they won game 7? Well you can bet that somewhere there were also such hats for the Oilers that never made it on to the ice. My theory is that such products are written off and shipped off as donations to places like, say, Mozambique.