“We Are All North Here”

Abstract

This chapter explores e-waste burning work through the lens of labor migration, city–hinterland connections, and chieftaincy relations and politics. In particular, the chapter focuses on the story of one worker’s lived experience as a migrant e-waste laborer, husband, father, drummer, and member of a dominant regional chiefdom in northern Ghana. The chapter highlights how this worker and other e-waste workers navigate urban labor and marginalization in Accra, while at the same time sustaining social ties in northern Ghana where Dagomba chiefdoms hold local and regional political power. The chapter shows how narratives of migration and rural–urban livelihood can expose the integral role of social mobility and movement in e-waste ethnography in Ghana more generally.