It is a sea of rubbish that does not reject you, rather it is ready to swallow you up to make you understand even better how it has been vomited up by you and your fellow human beings. Hills, sinkholes, plains and clearings, crevasses and ups and downs created by rubbish of all kinds make up the most sadly hyperreal landscape in Kenya, known and celebrated for far more memorable scenes.
12,000 square metres of decay, 850 tonnes per day of waste, much of which remains on the surface or burns, making the air toxic.
It is the Dandora garbage dump, on the outskirts of the capital, where people wear the few good clothes they have and cover them with dirty rags, and children train their virgin imaginations by rummaging through millions of discarded objects, until a disease discards them from the infamous circle they have fallen into, without having committed any crime in a previous life.
The Dandora dump is there because a developing country, for the past few decades, has been thinking first about maximum systems rather than growth in essential services. Kenya devours time like a predatory feline on the savannah devours defenceless gazelles. And the devourer, omnivorous and bulimic, inevitably defecates and vomits.
The Dandora garbage dump is also there for another reason, that you can make money even on vomit.
Recycling is one of the most overused, do-gooder and hopeful words of the new millennium, but for Africa recycling is not a new verb, it has always been done in order to survive: every piece of old iron has a new use, every piece of furniture, tool, scrap of cloth, even plastic or glass objects, find a useful place. Now that recycling has become one of the planet's main salvation yearnings, it does not seem true to those who know the material well that they can make money out of it.

Dandora is the realm of the vultures who take the waste, profiting from the infinitesimal work, degrading and underpaid but capable of dragging men, women and their children living around the dump to the next day. The vultures arrive before nightfall and collect plastic, glass, metals, skins and fabrics. All that they can also resell to those who will then offer, at the price decided by their marketing full of good feelings, their ‘green’, 100% recycled products.
This is Dandora, the valley of waste and abuse, which may now disappear... or evolve.
The municipality of Nairobi, in recent days, has in fact been given the green light by the Kenyan High Court to hand over Dandora to a Chinese company. The project is an ambitious one, the construction of a 330 million euro waste-to-energy plant, to transform landfill waste into energy.
Private entities and non-governmental organisations had submitted a petition, arguing that the plant would create additional health problems for those living in neighbouring areas, and that the population and residents of Dandora, who for various reasons will be directly affected by the construction of the waste-to-energy plant, have not been informed or given the opportunity to express their grievances, even though the approval of any project, by law, must be preceded by one or more public meetings. Curiously, especially for those unfamiliar with a certain Africa, the judge ruled that the case was filed too early to judge whether there could be any evidence of a ‘violation of the right to a clean and healthy environment’ and that the process of publicising, evaluating and awarding the tender does not concern the use and occupation of land and therefore the Environment and Land Court does not have the power to declare such an award illegal or not.
A waste project, the very word says it, cannot be refused.
Like certain proposals from Beijing.

According to studies by the Lazio Region, concerning the announced project for the Malagrotta landfill, outside Rome, living near a waste-to-energy plant increases the risk of respiratory, cardiac and cerebrovascular diseases, as well as the risk of cancer, particularly among women. Scientists from the Department of Epidemiology explain that the thermal process involved in the combustion of waste releases various substances into the air, in fine and less fine particles, including heavy metals such as mercury and lead, and incomplete combustion products such as dioxins and benzene.
For the municipality of Nairobi it can be done, for the Chinese it cannot be done, for justice it is premature to speak of risks for a population of ghosts wandering around the waste and often having the shortest life span of a diagnosis.
Even justice, in a developing country, is a ‘work in progress’: you start doing, then you will see. And there are good intentions, it will go all the way.
It seems that the Chinese really want to try. They have promised that Dandora's waste collectors will be involved in the construction of the waste-to-energy plant and those who are good and willing will be employed in due course. Will the expertise of those who have rummaged through rubbish for a lifetime, sorted bottle shards or rubber slippers, be needed? And above all, how will the vultures be recycled or be recycled?