The Life Of A Flip Flop

Caroline Knowles, Professor of Sociology, at Goldsmiths, University of London recently undertook the mammoth task of investigating the life of a flip flop. From the oil fields of Kuwait to rubbish heaps in Ethiopia, here is Caroline's fascinating story...

The journey begins in Kuwait

The flip-flop has many beginnings. But it will always originate in oil.

When I first came up with the idea of following the life of a flip flop, I initially planned to follow the largest volumes of ‘traffic’ moving along the flip flop trail. This would have meant that I should have started in Saudi Arabia because it holds the world’s largest oil reserves and it supplies centres of plastic production. But researching the male world of oil in Saudi poses a number of practical problems for a female researcher. Therefore Saudi had to be ruled out.

It is worth noting here that where oil is transported to and for what purpose is shaped by complex, shifting geopolitical calculations expressing tensions between regimes. Oil security and diplomacy are interlaced as oil purchasing and producing nations favour some alliances over others and this too directs where oil goes.

The cold war still runs through oil as Russia seeks influence in bordering regimes: sanctions against Iran means finding new sources. America secures its recently won oil-independence with Canadian supplies, lessening its reliance on the Middle East. The tectonic plates of geopolitics shift once more as oil redraws world maps.

Iran and Iraq’s oil reserves were an option, but it is difficult to get a visa for Iran while sanctions limit its exports, ruling it out as a research site. Oddly Iraq is more accessible: but I ruled it out on safety grounds.

Connections between oil, armed conflict and regime paranoia is not, however, coincidental. Oil production is a high-tension point in twenty first century geopolitics and in just searching for a place to start my research I had learned my first lesson about oil.

And so the flip-flop trail began in Kuwait. Kuwait has significant oil reserves and production volumes and is part of a long-term significant oil-producing region in the Middle East. It exports 87% of its oil and favours Asia’s growing plastic producing markets. This is the right oil and it moves in the right directions making it the first leg of the flip-flop trail.

Oil is responsible for Kuwait’s impressive GDP; it accounts for 95% of its export earnings and 95% of the government revenues on which its citizens depend. Kuwait literally runs on oil and over half of it comes from Burgan – the world’s second largest oil field. This economy shaped by oil is also a source of fragility and insecurity. Just think of the images of burning oilfields as Iraqi troops retreated from Kuwait under the coalition bombardment known as ‘desert storm’ in the winter of 1991. Oil is dangerous stuff.

Kuwait has only one oil Company – the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) – and it is government owned.

It was a local turn that finally gave me access to KOC. An email to Goldsmiths International Office revealed that we had four Kuwaiti students. One replied to an email, telling me that her father was an oil geologist. This is how I met Abdullah. It took a few emails to explain what I was doing but he got it and could see how he could help.

Oil flowed through Abdullah's life; he was a researcher’s dream informant – he had time, contacts, knowledge and a keen interest in politics and current affairs.

As the oil tanker from Kuwait approaches the coast of South Korea at Daesan, corporate Korea rises up to meet it.

On this section of the flip-flop trail access to petrochemical plants seemed almost impossible. Before leaving London I had emailed all of the big companies. Some of them even advertised tours of the plant for foreign visitors, and I filled out those forms too. The answer, where we managed to get one, was always 'no'.

On the face of it access was impossible. We agreed to turn up anyway and see if we could talk our way in.

We arrived outside the plant, when it was a freezing -15 degrees. We asked the security guard if we could go inside the plant, and he refused.

One lunchtime, in a café opposite the plant, we managed to finally get some success. I noticed an older distinguished-looking man I thought might be senior. When he slipped outside for a cigarette, the research assistant followed and smoked with him telling him that we were trying to get into the plant to understand how it worked and who worked there.

As we went back to eating lunch a call came through to the café for us: it was the senior man, who turned out to be Mr K, saying he would phone security and authorise our access for ‘a meeting’. Minutes later we were inside the plant and our investigation underway.

We made two visits to the plant, which is vast and eerily unpeopled, once being shown how the plastic granules are made, and a second time on the LG bus, which drove the workers in and out of the plant for the start and finish of their shift. It felt good to have got into such a highly securitised space.

On several occasions I walked around high fences with razor wire and security cameras taking photographs of the plants in the area trying to take in the impact of petrochemicals on the landscape. I always had to work quickly before I was stopped and questioned.

The plastics move to Fuzhou

The trail then moves along to the epicentre of plastic production in Fuzhou, China, as tons of plastic granules from Korea are run through the port.

These are the plastics that make high density, high-value objects like car bumpers and trim, not lower value objects like flip-flops and plastic bags, made from polyethylene and EVA granules. It is here that I lose the flip-flop trail. Does the trail pass through the city itself then? Virtual evidence, in the form of websites claiming to manufacture and supply wholesale flip-flops, suggests that it might. But I’m not sure.

It is time to visit one of the city sites comprising the flip-flops web presence: Dai Wei’s office/showroom. I’d tracked down Dai Wei – this, of course, is his not his real name; I don’t want to get him into trouble – from my research on the internet.

I had hit a significant part of the flip-flop trail, if not the factories. Like his international customers I couldn’t find the factories without him. Dai Wei is the translator – translating orders worldwide into small-scale factory production: connecting the vectors of consumption with making. The trail through this city is impossible to navigate without a guide as it mutates into its zones and peripheries, and somehow, through a mix of luck and persistence I had hit on the right guy.

Chasing the flip-flop trail through the city of Fuzhou and finding the flip-flop factories was only a beginning. I had to get into one of the factories for long enough to observe the production process and speak to the workers.

I started at the top. Dai Wei, my interlocutor, and I visited a number of factories of different sizes. We were graciously entertained by factory bosses who laid-on large lunches and showed us around, while patiently answering my questions about how they started the factory.

Flip-factories, it seems, can be grown from humble home-factory beginnings with a single machine and family labour. But they can only grow if they switch to injection-moulding technology, which takes capital and connections. Bosses with party connections were best able to take advantage of burgeoning market opportunities in the 1990s as the state retreated from shoe production, and leverage up to more profitable production technologies.

When I began enquiring about spending some time in a factory and watching production, Dai Wei blocked it. It could be dangerous in these industrial villages beyond the city, and I don’t speak Chinese.

I quickly investigated the situation. How had this improvement in her fortunes been possible? She directed me to her daughter, now working for herself making coffee for sale on the street. She had taken a job in Beirut as a maid for two years and sent back her wages to improve the family circumstances. She had become a (domestic) transnational migrant.

Where were Zema’s old flip-flops? I needed to complete the trail. She told me she had thrown them in a rubbish skip ‘with the house dirties’ on the other side of the main road that ran through her neighbourhood.

I set off in taxi to where she had directed me. 11 km from the city centre. Gebrekristos is hard to locate: the taxi driver had to enlist a local to show us where it was. When we eventually get there at the end of a long winding unmade road, there is no sign of the rubbish, but a large number of the residents appear to be disfigured.

Asking around a bit I discover from a local priest that I am in a leaper colony: people come here from all over Ethiopia for treatment. I am on the wrong trail. I am sure that the flip-flops went to the giant city landfill site at Koshe, three kilometres further on.

I pointed out that Michael Tan (the photographer on the project) was about to arrive from Singapore. His family come from Fujian and he had made many visits as a child to his grandparents. He knows both the area and the local language. Dai Wei was sceptical. It depends, he said, on what kind of a Chinese man this Straits migrant was. He’d need to meet him.

This was his way of expressing his anxieties about the research. I was working without official permission, which he felt OK about while he was accompanying me and uneasy about when he was not.

And while it is clear that journalists need permission to work in China, academic research is a greyer area. Had I sought permission officially it would have taken a long time to get it, and then I would have been assigned a minder. This would limit what people would say, making the data worthless. I needed to work under the official radar and speak with people privately. In these circumstances they spoke freely. Anything public was another matter. I could have got Dai Wei into trouble by drawing attention to myself.

Michael arrived and Dai Wei was satisfied he was the right kind of Chinese man. We set to work, travelling each day to the factories where Dai Wei had fixed it with the boss. I watched, drew sketches and made notes from the dusty, fumy factory floor.

Michael took photographs and discovered the two makeshift living areas where two (rural) migrant worker families lived inside the factory. We fitted our interviews into the rhythms of the workers' work, asking a few questions at a time. Michael translated and I recorded. This went on for a few days.

Then the boss returned as suddenly as he had left and was angry to find us still there. We were interfering with production and maybe we were planning to open a factory of our own now that we had learned how it all worked. I think he and the workers were anxious about what we would do with what they had told us about their lives and work in the factory. They could get into trouble with the (local) authorities. Respecting this unstated concern we left immediately.

As workers we knew left for the night they stopped to speak to us. One invited us back to his house. Thus the research moved on into a more private domain as we continued more discretely, and to everyone’s relief, to talk to people in the private spaces of migrant workers homes.

Onwards to Ethiopia

At this major junction the flip-flop trail splinters in all directions.

As always, I followed the largest numbers (in container ships) passing through Singapore, then west, navigating the Red Sea and the sudden seizures of Somali pirates, and on to the port of Djibouti.

From here they are shipped overland to meet a rising demand for cheap shoes in the East African state of Ethiopia which, with a population of over 84 million and a low GDP, is an ideal market for Chinese goods.

At least, I thought this was the route as I stood on the Ethiopian side of the Somali-Ethiopia border at Dire Dawa waiting for the trucks of flip-flops to arrive. Conversation with a policeman at the checkpoint the next morning revealed a fork in the trail I had not suspected.

Only some flip-flops come through Djibouti and Dire Dawa, the rest land along the Somaliland coast and on to the Somali markets in Hargeisa, crossing the Ethiopian border at its less secure points. Both routes converge on the markets of Addis Ababa where distinctions between contraband and official flip-flops are erased – except in the price.

Intrigued by this development, we tried (and failed) to get closer to the ‘unofficial trail’.

It took a ‘contrabandist’, as they refer to themselves, in Addis to explain that as an illegal activity, smuggling is inevitably invisible: otherwise smugglers would be caught!

We learned from him that smuggled flip-flops are moved in fast cars driven through checkpoints with false plates; they are hidden under bundles of wood on camels driven by villagers; they are moved by calls from one mobile phone to other; they are moved by a matrix of contrabandists each specialising in a small bit of the route.

Trying to plot these routes was equally futile: they are part of a (secret) shifting matrix of back roads that must not settle into a recognised route. In fact, I only managed to find contrabandists to interview because my student assistant at Addis University had been one himself.

Five years later and with additional funding to complete the trail, I arranged to follow the bit I had missed – from Berbera on the Somaliland coast where the contraband flip-flops land, to Hargeisa and over the Ethiopia border through one of the smuggling routes.

I booked a flight to Berbera and with help from a Somali student arranged to get a visa. Although Somaliland was peaceful – the infamous jihadists and warlords operate around Mogadishu – I arranged for an armed security escort and a driver to get me to the Ethiopian border.

As always when leaving on research trips I filled out the university insurance form. This was when my arrangements began to unravel. The FCO would not discuss their blanket travel ban on Somalia, and this invalidated the university insurance and worried the Warden. I had no option but to cancel.

Undeterred, I thought I’d check out the Djibouti route instead. But days before I was to travel, serious rioting broke out and I had to cancel too.

The route through Somaliland is the only part of the trail on which I had to rely on secondary sources. But there were lessons here too. The flip-flop route had revealed some of the geopolitical tensions of our time. Not being able to go there was as important in the story as going there.

The untravelled track...

The inaccessibility of the Somaliland section of the flip-flop trail left me in Addis Ababa in the spring of 2012 with more time than I needed to complete the research leading to the end of the trail.

Things had changed but not in the ways I’d imagined. The old lady with the flip-flops – Zema – was living in the same house. But inside her house it looked completely different. Five years ago it was bare; photographs of Wayne Rooney and the Virgin Mary sat atop the sideboard next to a cassette player. Now she had a satellite dish, TV, fridge, upright chairs, and a suite of lounge furniture, all crammed into a tiny living space making it difficult to move around.

Back in Addis things were thankfully more straightforward. We followed flip-flops from the Mercato, the largest open-air market in Africa, through smaller markets and kiosks, interviewing merchants and contrabandists, to establish their knowledge of the supply chain.

We followed the flip-flops onto the feet of an elderly woman who owned only two pairs of shoes – the other pair were black plastic ballet slippers. We followed her on the routine errands of everyday life: around her home and to her neighbours, to market and to church.

We interviewed her and learned that her move to the city and to work on a building site brought her shoes. Before this she was barefoot.

My first sight of Koshe is from the highway: a giant, murky, grey-brown raised area of partially decomposed rubbish, with occasional bright specs of colour. As my hopes rise from having found it, my heart sinks as I try to take it in.

The interpreter I have engaged for this mission through my contacts at Addis Ababa University is not keen on going ahead. Leaving the taxi and crossing the highway by the bridge, I try to absorb the panoramic view afforded by this elevated viewpoint over the highway. This thirty-six hectare site – shrinking as the city attempts to regulate it – is patrolled from the air by large birds of prey, diving into the rubbish. Motley crews of wild dogs gambolling and snatching at the soft ground patrol it at ground level. Smoke rises in several places, adding a layer of haze to the murky colour scheme.

Between the foraging dogs, the smoke, and aerial avian bombardment, some heavy machinery operates. Yellow bulldozers nose the heap and shift and level it; municipal rubbish trucks and flatbed trucks with skips arrive from all over the city and discharge their contents. Between the dogs, the birds and the machines there was something else, something I could only slowly take in.

Two or three hundred people, dressed in the same murky hues as the rubbish dump, backs bent, hooks in hand, were working on its surface.