The original note, as written at the time
A dystopian future where Africa is the modern slave terrace of a technologically advanced world. A reminder about the consequences of mistakes made by African governments today.
Ongoing development
They call it a terrace because it sounds like somewhere you would want to sit.
It began as a debt. That is how these things always begin — thoroughly, legally, with a signature and a development bank and a photograph of men in good suits holding a cheque. Then the debt needed a guarantee, and the guarantee was the ground, and by the time the repayment stopped the ground had already been sold twice to people who had never seen it.
Nobody calls it slavery. There are no chains, and the word is not permitted in the documentation. What there is, instead, is a residential permit that is issued to the worker rather than the family, and an employer who holds the permit, and a fee for transferring the permit, and a fee for the fee. Stay past the term and the permit lapses and the worker becomes an irregular person on the very ground his grandfather was born on.
I want to describe the morning accurately, because I think that is where the lie fails.
On the terrace, the sun comes over the ridge at twenty past six and hits the container roofs first, and there is a period of perhaps forty minutes when everything smells of the previous day and the water in the pipes is still cold. The workers queue at the single standpipe. They are not chained. They have phones. Two of them are studying for a qualification that will be recognised in a country none of them will ever be permitted to enter.
The woman in front of me has a child who is four and who has never been outside the boundary, because outside the boundary is not permitted without a permit and the permit is issued to the worker. She has a book. She reads to the child in a language the training materials do not contain.
The supervisor is not cruel. He is careful, because a dead worker is a lost permit and the paperwork is immense, and care and cruelty produce exactly the same morning from where I am standing.
What the papers call the arrangement, I have begun calling the terrace, and I find that this is the only freedom left to me — to give the thing a name that does not sound like somewhere you want to sit.