An Exit from the Garbage City: Resistance and “Chikonko” in Zambian Waste Management

This study examines citizens’ responses to exclusions, injustices, and power asymmetries in the context of public participatory processes in solid waste management within the Mtendere township in Lusaka, Zambia. Interviews and field observations illuminate experiences of disenfranchisement from public spheres and a collection of everyday resistance practices that bear resemblance to one another through their ‘exits’ from these spaces taken by the citizens. We show how, and with what implications, Zambia’s decentralisation policy toward grassroots structures for planning in solid waste management conditions can be understood as a phenomenon of everyday resistance by the citizens of Lusaka. Accounts of citizens’ lived experiences suggest that socio-economic, political affiliation, gender, age, and litigation are often used to exclude them from participatory processes. The role of trust and distrust respectively open and close (sometimes involuntary) exit doors from the public, meaning citizens resist authority through distance. The resulting responses include counterpolitical processes on the part of households to voice displeasure (“chikonko”), such as indiscriminate waste disposal, rumor spreading, and keeping ideas to themselves. The study first represents a case of the everyday—household waste disposal—becoming politicized in the context of a power struggle. Second, it shows a case of spatially conditioned resistance that takes on different properties of communication and public manifestation depending on where it is enacted.