Once upon a time, gold, ivory, and spices left Africa. 
Today, broken televisions, worn-out computers, and refrigerators that no longer cool anything—not even consciences—arrive there.
Colonialism, as we know, changes its clothes but not its trade. 
It used to take resources and leave scars. Today it does the opposite: it leaves waste and takes a clear conscience.
They call it “second life,” “donations,” “accessible technology.” But often it’s just scrap metal with one last breath, just enough time to cross an ocean and die in Africa.
According to the most recent data, about 70% of the electronic equipment entering Kenya is imported, often already nearing the end of its life cycle.
Translation: these are not tools to bridge the digital divide, but time bombs disguised as progress.
And indeed, the bill comes due. Always.
Kenya already produces over 50,000 tons of electronic waste per year, and it is the fastest-growing waste stream in the country. But the real kicker is this: only about 1% is formally recycled. The rest ends up where things we don’t want to see end up: in the suburbs, in informal dumps, in the bare hands of those who have no alternatives.
In Korogocho, just a few kilometers from the skyscrapers of Nairobi that look toward the digital future, the future has already short-circuited. Here, e-waste arrives, is dismantled, burned, and melted down. Not in sterile laboratories, but on patches of black earth, amid shacks and children.
They pay the price. Almost always them.
61% of e-waste collectors in these areas report health problems: lungs that close up, skin that breaks open, bodies that give up. And within those fumes are names that sound like a list of poisons: lead, cadmium, carcinogens.
But take note: it’s not just a tragedy. It’s also an economy.
Because inside that trash there is copper, aluminum, even gold. And so someone digs, burns, recovers. Survives. E-waste is at once poison and wages, disease and opportunity. It is the perfect paradox of our global age: what kills, provides a livelihood.
And so the question is no longer technical. It is not “how to dispose of it better.” It is political, almost moral: why can the rich world afford to export its own problem?
The answer, if we are to be honest, is simple and ancient: because it can.
Because the global system still functions like an old colonial ship, only instead of spices there is waste, and instead of the East India Companies there are more sophisticated logistics chains. The mechanism is identical: externalize the cost, internalize the profit.
And so Africa, which produces less electronic waste than other continents, still becomes a final destination for others’ waste. A global landfill with a diplomatic smile.
Kenya, in all this, is caught between two uncomfortable truths.
The first: it is a victim. Because it receives what it did not produce, or receives it in disproportionate amounts.
The second: it is an accomplice, or at least forced to be one. Because those flows fuel markets, informal work, and access to low-cost technology.
So what? Do we shut everything down? Do we halt everything?
Easy to say from afar. Harder when the choice is between breathing poison or going hungry.
Perhaps the real solution isn’t here, among the shanties of Korogocho or the landfills of Nairobi. Perhaps it lies thousands of kilometers away, in the countries that produce and consume endlessly. Where objects last less and less, and responsibility even less.
Because as long as the Global North continues to call “recycling” what is simply the export of problems, colonialism will never truly be over.
It will have merely changed its name.
And its smell.