2 Finding Juba’s Public Health Office is a challenge. After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005, ending twenty years of civil war, Juba was made the administrative capital of South Sudan, and the new government needed a home. It displaced the state government and moved into its buildings, creating a domino effect as homeless bureaucrats occupied the offices of others lower down the scale.The Public Health Office for Juba ended up in a small room at the back of the local police force compound. The police station is packed with indolent figures, slumped against walls. Hundreds of soldiers live outside in impromptu tents and makeshift shelters – they are here to ensure the referendum for independence passes without incident. A glorious ficus, its tangled trunk a mess of separate coils, has been transformed into a Christmas tree; hanging from its branches are gifts: the clothes, smoked fish and mosquito nets of the army that won independence from the north. At the back of the compound, Kallsto Tombe Jubek, the beleaguered head of Public Health for Juba, is sitting in a sparse office.There are no files in the room, but along the front of his desk, arranged like a small Hadrian’s Wall, is a set of cans and bottles: instant coffee and beans, guarded by a miniature Sudanese flag. During the civil war, Juba was a small merchant trading town. Encircled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the town was held by the northern government. It was difficult to get supplies, and residents still talk darkly of those difficult days spent searching for food. There was no problem with rubbish during the war, Jubek explains. People burnt their rubbish. In villages up and down Sudan, I have seen the same practice. Old food, clay and animals hides are taken out to the edge of a village and burned; the ashes can later be used to fertilise fields. Fire in the village can be productive; in central Sudan, back in March, the evening sky was aglow, as villagers set the land aflame to revitalise the soil. After 2005, everything changed. Juba was rapidly filled with NGOs, hotels and the UN. With them came thousands of expatriate workers, plastic bags, promises of development and a quantity of rubbish Juba had never had to deal with before. Whereas the rubbish in the village is generally organic, in Juba today it is plastic and chemical: burning it does not renew the soil, it destroys the land. In 2006, with USAID money, the local administration finally established a rubbish dump.The going has not been smooth. It initially offered contracts to rubbish collection companies, but, Jubek told me, many of the companies just went around Juba, promising waste disposal services and collecting money from hotels and businesses, before promptly vanishing. Now there are three companies working in Juba, but they cannot cope with the demand.A company called South Sudan express services central Juba. Just taking the rubbish from one of the larger hotels, Jubek tells me, can occupy one of their vehicles for the entire day. South Sudan Express only has eight vehicles.
urbanism | south sudan by joshua craze BURNING THE FUTURE
rubbish recycl ing land appropriation dislocation industrial waste
the disposing of waste that cannot be disposed
1 The fires start at dusk. From the edges of dirt roads a hazy smoke rises up and hangs over the town, suspended in the dusty air. Leaves, batteries and plastics bags combine in the smouldering fires that cover Juba – Africa’s newest capital – with smoke every evening. By morning the fires have subsided, and, walking through the streets, you can find hardened fragments of cauterised plastic beneath the ashes; ruins of the future. In The Road to San Giovanni , the Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a series of cities – mirror images of Italy’s own proud industrial centres – that generate rubbish cities, doppelgangers of their own excess.The more productive the cities become, the more they threaten to drown under the growing piles of rubbish that surround them.‘ This ’, he writes of Leonia, his fantasy city, ‘ is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and decades ’. Calvino paints a picture of a society that welcomes each day as if it were the first, and yet is choked by its own unacknowledged history. In Juba, it is not the past that is suffocating us, but the future. The endless burning plastic that fills Juba’s streets, unknown six years ago, is an anticipation of Juba tomorrow.
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Giulio Petrocco
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