In her book Garbage Citizenship: vital infrastructures of labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks presents a detailed description and lucid analysis of how garbage and waste infrastructures are crucial in understanding the politics of urban change in Dakar. Using an ethnographic approach that is sensitive to the historical, political and economic contexts, Fredericks provides a materialist analysis of waste infrastructure in Dakar. She reveals how managing environmental sanitation during Senegal’s neoliberal reforms, characterized by the imposition of structural adjustment policies from the 1980s, created an avenue for some form of participatory politics that allowed the urban poor to make economic and political demands on the state. However, critical to the analysis in the book is the crucial role of labour in waste management and governance in urban Dakar. Fredericks draws on AbdouMaliq Simone’s conceptualizing of people as infrastructure to analyse labour as waste infrastructure.Footnote 1 Fredericks paints a nuanced picture of the cultural politics of labour that reveals trash collection struggles in Dakar and both the indignities of the working poor and their ability to fight back to restore the value and dignity of work. More importantly, she demonstrates the significance of labour as human bodies assumed the place of technological systems.
Fredericks situates her analysis and arguments in broader discourses straddling urban waste infrastructure, neoliberalism and labour and transformations in trash management in Dakar in her introductory chapter. In so doing, she underscores how the materiality of trash and waste infrastructures in Dakar are socially, culturally and politically embedded. Significantly, she delineates a theory of the South that complicates discourses that project neoliberalism as a global phenomenon impoverishing passive local victims. Instead, she inserts the agency of the working poor in Dakar to show how their struggles at some historical moments could fracture the hegemony and tyranny of neoliberalism.
Fredericks proceeds to flesh out her argument in four substantive chapters and a concluding chapter. She begins by examining the institutional arrangements that characterized the waste management system in Senegal in the immediate post-independence era and how its dysfunctionality in the late 1960s, coupled with the political crisis of the period, led to its privatization. The continuing declivity in Senegal’s economic conditions during the late 1970s created conditions for the imposition of structural adjustment policies that further complicated the political and economic situation. The debilitating economic and political conditions led to protests that created an avenue for the emergence of an urban movement called Set/Setal (meaning ‘to be clean or make clean’) in 1988–89, foreshadowing a new chapter in Dakar’s infrastructural politics. Interestingly, Senegal’s political elites manipulated the movement’s youthful exuberance to their advantage and involved them in trash work in ways that changed the institutional form of the management of trash and the composition of its labour. In Chapter 2, Fredericks explains how new institutional arrangements emerged from the volatile politics of garbage and the youth who became involved through Set/Setal. She argues that mobilizing the youth to participate in trash work was not merely about solving budgetary constraints and creating entrenched political patronage, but also about fostering a new ethic of citizenship through building a more intimate infrastructure.
Fredericks further analyses how garbage was articulated through a community waste management project on the outskirts of Dakar (Chapter 3). Here, garbage politics and trash work assume overt gendered and ethnic dynamics. Fredericks demonstrates how discourses of women’s intimate relationships with managing household waste were exploited to extract free labour from women through the ENDA project at Yoff. This project ‘instrumentalised associations of waste work in the home as intrinsically women’s work … to idealise women as participants and thereby extend their social reproductive duties into neighbourhood space’ (p. 111). Yet women could be dismissed through misplaced discourses of female ‘inferiority’ and the spurious claim that women were not real breadwinners. Paradoxically, when youth mobilized to do trash work in the early stages of Set/Setal, female participants saw an opportunity to contribute to the home as financial breadwinners and stake claims to moral authority in the public sphere. Through this gendered reading of trash work in Dakar, Fredericks complicates simplistic arguments characterizing community-based NGO initiatives in the ‘global South’ that claim to empower women. Further, Fredericks analyses how Lebou ethnic elites, through the ENDA project, stereotyped their adversaries, the Geejndar – an ethnic minority at Yoff – as the dirty ‘other’ requiring discipline. In this way, garbage politics provided a means for local elites to denigrate and monitor their adversaries and, in a way, discriminate against them.
Shifting analysis to the moral economy and the politics of Dakar’s waste collection system, Fredericks demonstrates how institutional transformations regarding waste infrastructure and many years of tinkering with waste management systems paved the way for the unionization and radicalization of trash workers (Chapter 4). The union protested against the deteriorating working conditions and the precarity of their work using religious and moral discourses to court the support of the public and to bargain with the city authorities. In this way, Fredericks shows how religion and morality provided a discursive grid that enabled trash workers to persuasively stake their claims on the state on a ‘moral-ethical level’ (p. 148). Bringing the various strands of the book together, Fredericks concludes by demonstrating how garbage is a valuable concept for analysing the praxis of citizenship and creating ‘otherness’. In this way, she underscores how garbage and waste infrastructure can be mobilized as a political tool by both the working poor and the ruling elite.
Despite its many strengths, the book could have benefited from an analysis, even a brief one, of the public health implications of the poor management of trash that often resulted in the trash revolts. The many days when garbage remained in households during trash workers’ strikes or the instances where trash was deposited in the street as a form of protest were obvious public health threats that are worth investigating.
