Excerpts

Below you'll find the first two chapters of the book

A MERCEDES IN OUAGADOUGOU

I don’t think I ever would have thought of it myself. Visiting Ouagadougou, mean. A good friend of mine, a fellow Dutchman, was getting married there, in the capital of the West African country Burkina Faso. To a Burkinabé. And I didn’t want to miss that. The wedding lasted three days and three nights. The last night, exhausted, I hailed a cab. Now, Burkina Faso is one of the world’s poorest countries, and I knew that most of the cars there are far from new. But this one had them all beat. The body was battered on every side, the headlights were missing, the tires, bald. Clouds of ink black smoke poured from the tailpipe. The interior wasn’t much better: where once the odometer had been was now a gaping hole. Springs protruded through the seats. The upholstery on the doors had all but disappeared, leaving bare metal.

Stuck to the cracked dashboard was a decal of the Dutch soccer team PSV.

A PSV fan in Ouagadougou? I tapped on the team’s red and white logo and asked the driver if he was an admirer of Dutch soccer.

He had no idea what I was talking about. He’d never heard of PSV, didn’t give a damn about soccer. He didn’t even know where the Netherlands was. And that decal had always been there. It looked it, too. Yellowed. Frayed at the edges—someone had tried in vain to pull it off. How had that decal wound up in an African taxi? Had the previous owner, perhaps, been a PSV fan? As fascinating as the thought was, a PSV fan in Burkina Faso seemed improbable.
Wasn’t it more likely that an even earlier owner had been a fan of the Dutch soccer team? That had to be it: that car came from the Netherlands. And sure enough, when I got out, my suspicions were confirmed. In Europe, every car has a white oval decal on the back with one or two black letters to indicate the car’s country of origin: F for France, S for Sweden, PL for Poland, and so on. This one was no different: a white decal with the letters NL was stuck to the rear end.

It was a Mercedes 190 Diesel, that taxi in Ouagadougou.

THE PURCHASE

Year: 2004
Mileage: 136,400
Price: $1,200
Owner: Jeroen van Bergeijk

There are ads like this on the Dutch Internet auction site marktplaats.nl all the time: For sale: 1988 Mercedes 190 D Price: $1,400 136,400 miles. Alarm. Black 4-door. Excellent condition. Recent checkup, oil change, safety and emissions inspection. This one gets my attention because everything about it seems right: the kind of Mercedes I’m looking for, a reasonable asking price, not too many miles, and a recent inspection. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” the owner says when I call his cell phone number on a Saturday morning. “You can have a look, but the first good offer gets it.” I drive immediately to one of the new suburbs just outside The Hague. The owner’s name is Ronald. He works for the police. And so, the implication is, can be trusted. Ronald is a well-built man with close-cropped hair, about what you’d expect for a police officer.Taciturn, a bit stern, but not unfriendly. We stroll to his Mercedes, which seems rather out of place among the brand-new gleaming mid-class cars parked on Ronald’s tidy little street. The finish is dull. There’s a crack in the bumper. The sunroof doesn’t open anymore. The driver’s seat sags, and the doors don’t lock.

I couldn’t get that cab in Ouagadougou out of my mind. On the plane home to Amsterdam, I’d obsessed about how that car had wound up there. I imagined a Dutch aid worker who’d gotten the Mercedes from his uncle and imported it through the port in neighboring Benin. Maybe an African immigrant to the Netherlands had bought the car and sent it to his family in Burkina Faso. Or some adventurous Dutchman had driven that Mercedes 190 straight through the Sahara to Ouagadougou to sell it there to the highest bidder. But what really happened? How did a Dutch car end up in Africa?

Take Ronald’s Mercedes. A seventeen-year-old car is, in fact, living on borrowed time: the average life expectancy of an automobile in Western Europe is only fifteen years. For a car like Ronald’s there are really only two scenarios. Most likely it’ll end up on the scrap heap. Not because a seventeen-year-old car is in such bad condition but because the cost of the repairs it will soon undoubtedly need will greatly exceed the car’s value. In Western European countries like the Netherlands, Ronald’s car has lost its usefulness. But in countries where the cost of repairs is much lower, the same car is still worth something. Hence the other scenario for Ronald’s Mercedes: export. Of the more than seven million cars driving around on Dutch roads in 2005, more than a quarter million had been exported by the end of the year. All the wealthy Western European countries export their old automobiles, millions in total. Nowadays most go to Eastern Europe, but a considerable minority, an estimated 500,000 per year, wind up in Africa. That Dutch Mercedes in Ouagadougou is not alone. The Opel Astra of a traveling salesman from Hamburg spends its days as a bush taxi in Ghana. The Toyota Corolla of a Parisian housewife is now the property of a camel trader in Mauritania. Most of the old automobiles that leave Europe for Africa are shipped by boat, but a small number are driven there. In fact, since the 1970s, driving a used car to West Africa has become a popular pastime among French, Belgian, German, and Dutch adventurers. These people are like the godwits, terns, and swallows that summer in Europe. Every winter they flock to West Africa, selling their castoffs at a tidy profit in countries like Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. To get there, they have to bribe customs officials, befriend corrupt cops, and—above all—drive straight through the Sahara.

I go for a test drive in Ronald’s Mercedes. It appears to have few mechanical problems: the engine runs well, the brakes are in order, and though the acceleration is a little sluggish, it shifts easily. It looks a bit shabby here in this brand-new suburb, but for a seventeen- year-old car it’s in excellent shape. Ouagadougou’s cabbies will envy me. I even get Ronald to knock two hundred dollars off the price, and a little later it’s mine, that African-taxi-to-be.