Postcolonial waste economies reveal systemic barriers to scaling circularity in Africa’s urban centers
Original framing: “Africans reuse, repair, recycle and resell waste: What's needed to build on the circular economy basics” — Phys.org
The current crisis of 'unrepairable' electronics in Africa traces back to the 1970s, when multinational corporations (e.g., Philips, Siemens) lobbied to ban export of spare parts under 'trade secrecy' laws, forcing African markets to rely on obsolescence. Earlier, in the 1950s, Belgian colonial administrators in Congo deliberately dismantled local copper-smelting cooperatives to monopolize resource extraction—a pattern repeated across the continent. The 'circular economy' narrative ignores how these historical blockages created the very conditions that now demand repair cultures to survive.
The African repair economy is not a 'basics' to be built upon, but a *revolutionary response* to centuries of systemic abandonment—one that exposes the hypocrisy of global circularity narratives.
While Western models chase 'closed-loop' efficiency, African systems have long operated in *open, adaptive loops*, where repair is a spiritual act, a labor of love, and a political statement. The trickster here is the very framing that celebrates repair while denying its scalability: colonial trade laws, IP theft, and e-waste dumping ensure that African circularity remains a *survival tactic*, not a policy priority. To truly scale these systems, the Global North must confront its role as both beneficiary of African resource stewardship *and* architect of the barriers that contain it—whether through debt traps, trade bans, or the erasure of indigenous knowledge. The solution lies not in 'building on basics,' but in dismantling the structures that reduce African repair to a footnote in someone else’s green economy.