“We’ll clean up,” the manager said. The next day, I returned and saw a pile of broken chairs being loaded on a truck. “Good, now all that mess is gone and we can move around the office more efficiently from now on,” was my first thought.
It already seems like ages ago, but when I was running a project in an Ethiopian government organization last year, I seemed to stumble upon a broken (and very old!) chair around every corner. As I later was told by the same manager, the chairs were not thrown away, but auctioned. Since chairs are relatively costly, people in the slums are very happy with the cheap broken chairs which might be possible to fix, to sell, or whatever – maybe even to sit on. This was a big surprise to me: if I had such a chair (or 20, like in this case) I would have paid at least 10 bucks to get rid of them (back home, that is)…
Six days later, confident with our project’s progress, the manager shows me his own balcony at the office. I gazed behind the large satellite antenna which was occupying over half of the balcony – “you don’t want to miss the Champion’s League, do you?” – and I allmost voluntarily jumped the 4 meters down when I saw… The Chair.
This broken chair, abandoned by its former occupant, was now bearing the weight of what looked like or probably had been a tomb stone. But why? Well, the chair was part of an ingenious mechanism to keep the power cables from falling down on the clients walking underneath. (As I was told, the power cables were not in use anymore, but they had no priority to be removed.)
This memory dates back to February 2008, so why am I telling this now? Well, I am writing my bachelor thesis on land registration and today I came across an interesting anecdote of Emperor Menelik II:
“During the 1890s, Menelik heard about the modern method of executing criminals using electric chairs, and he ordered 3 for his kingdom. When the chairs arrived, Menelik learnt they would not work, as Ethiopia did not yet have an electrical power industry.”
This is the sterotype Africans-and-Western-technology kind of anecdote, though funny ofcourse. Ron Walters writes about it in a slightly different way and explains it as the visual aid of a seemlingly intelligent man combating the high crime rates. (Both sources describe Menelik II as an Emperor who has brought advanced Western technology and administrative thinking to Ethiopia.)
I can learn at least four things from this blog post:
- Some chairs serve a Higher Purpose and are therefore electrically wired.
- I am currently experiencing an obsession for chairs, as I have ordered myself a big new one yesterday and I am eagerly waiting and waiting and waiting and… until it arrives.
- Electric chairs do not need electricity to decrease crime rates.
- Waste is only waste if we waste it.
[...] in the capital city Addis Ababa. (This is the same remarkable Emperor Menelik II as I discussed in my last post titled “On the electric chair”.) Over a century later, Emperor Haile Selassie, ruling from 1930 to 1974, ordered to measure and [...]