Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  “Agreed,” I said.

  Knowing that the flashlight became useless at one volt, Whit could now measure how long various batteries could reasonably power the light—that is, deliver more than half a volt (considering there are two batteries) at the constant current being drawn by the bulb. He began by connecting a new Tiger Head to the battery analyzer, then entered the following parameters on the laptop interface: start at 1.5 volts and draw down steadily at the flashlight’s current load until .5 volts. “So we’ll time that and see how it does,” he said, “then we’ll do the same with a Burro battery starting at 1.2 volts, which is its top-rated voltage.”

  By the next afternoon, we had the results. Both batteries had comparable duration: the Tiger Head dropped to half a volt in six hours and thirty-eight minutes; Burro hit the same target in six hours and fifty-seven minutes—about twenty minutes longer. But the big difference was in overall performance, as plotted on two graph charts. The Tiger Head was obviously brighter at first, since it starts out delivering 1.5 volts compared to Burro’s 1.2. But after just forty-eight minutes, the Tiger Head had dropped below 1.2 volts. By contrast, the Burro kept running at 1.2 volts for more than six hours—virtually its entire life. In other words, Tiger Head was brighter for forty-eight minutes, and then Burro outshined it for five more hours. The graphs made the difference clear: Tiger Head’s power drain charted a steady decline from the get-go, but Burro’s graph was essentially flat for six hours—dropping off rapidly at the end. Burro truly delivered on its promise of more power.

  (Whit later learned that the popular LED-powered flashlights were not drawing a constant current but were in fact drawing less and less current as the voltage decreased. Recalibrating the test with that information showed that the Tiger Head–powered device was brighter for about six hours, then Burro was brighter for about thirty hours, at which point Tiger Head hobbled along at one tenth its original brightness for another couple of days.)

  That was good news, but it didn’t explain the complaints about bad batteries. Obviously not every battery was performing up to snuff. Whit started running batteries through the analyzer and found that on average, the batteries had lost about 20 percent of their original capacity. This was not too surprising—it’s what happens to rechargeable batteries over time, and some of these were nearly a year old. Still, the drop-off was more than Whit had expected. “The business model is based on batteries lasting three years—two years at least,” he said ominously.

  “What do you think’s frying ’em?” I asked.

  “Could be a lot of things. Some of the original chargers we had might have damaged them; they were putting out way too much power. It didn’t help that the second load sat in a can for five months.” What he meant was that the shipment from China had been held up at port in Durban, South Africa, due to an incompetent shipping agent; the batteries spent months in an airless metal container. Heat can cause permanent damage to NiMHs.

  “And they could just be low-quality to begin with,” said Whit, who was up at five every morning to email China, looking for a better battery manufacturer, among other product sources. “And frankly, I think usage patterns could be hurting them. People are using this fairly sophisticated battery in all these dumb devices, and they’re just running them until they quit working—which is how they use throwaways. Some are coming back at zero capacity, and NiMHs don’t like to be run down all the way to nothing. It’s best if you leave some capacity in them. In some cases I think these things are getting run down until they reverse polarity, which is really bad.”

  Whit began a reconditioning program for batteries that had been returned as faulty from the field. He stayed up for hours after dinner, sitting at a small desk in the battery room, discharging bad batteries, then applying small currents to jump-start capacity before charging them again. Mostly it worked—the reconditioned batteries performed as well as average and went back into service. But some were beyond repair, or even understanding.

  “Max, check this out.”

  I looked over Whit’s shoulder at the laptop. “So I just reconditioned this one, and it’s showing good capacity. But when I put any kind of load on it, it drops right off a cliff, down to nothing.” He pointed to what indeed looked like the profile of a cliff on the chart. “Then, when I put a charge on it, instead of gradually climbing, it spikes like a rocket, then it drops as soon as I take the charge off. I can’t get any accurate capacity reading, and the power curve is just nuts. And the really scary thing is, when I test it in the little hand tester, it reads fine. But the customer sticks this thing in a tape deck and it runs right down. They seem to have capacity, but they don’t produce current flow. What the hell does it mean?” said Whit.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Only rhetorically, because you’re an idiot. Frankly, so am I. I only know enough about batteries to be dangerous, and I have no clue what this means.”

  “How many are doing that?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You’re so fucked.”

  “Only if I can’t identify them. Right now I’m just trying to stem the damage to the brand and pull them out of circulation. I’m working on a quick, production-oriented approach to culling bad batteries.”

  “English, please.”

  “I’m starting with Jan’s idea of using the discharge function on the chargers—setting a timer and pulling any that discharge fully in under five hours and putting them in a bin for reconditioning later. The ones that last over five hours, I’ll put on the analyzer and run a medium-high rapid-load test to make sure they can pull a good amp out and still put out at least 1.1 volts. If it passes that test, I’ll put a blue mark on it and send it into the field. Any that don’t pass get shitcanned. When the batteries come back from the field, any that don’t have a mark I’ll run through the test. Eventually we’ll get every battery in the field through this level of certification. What stinks like a dead animal?”

  “A dead animal. I bought an antelope hide in the market today. A bushbuck. I don’t think it’s fully cured.”

  “That’s disgusting. Where is it?”

  “I put it on your bed to air out.”

  “You asshole!”

  “Speaking of bed, I’m turning in. Good luck with those batteries.”

  In fact, if it were my company, I would have locked up the office, thrown away the key, rolled up my antelope hide, and bought a plane ticket home. But not Whit. His nights in the battery room grew later and later. Surrounded by buckets of green Burro batteries and racks of blinking chargers, he worked, bent over his testers and coils of wire, like a mad scientist. Sometimes I could hear him talking to himself—grunting and sighing over his Sisyphean toils.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him one night around ten, after my evening shower—the only time of day you could get clean and hope to stay dry for more than ten minutes in the oppressive humidity.

  “Pretty good. I’m getting a handle on this. It looks like about ten or eleven percent of our stock is failing.”

  “Wow. That’s not good.”

  “Well, it’s certainly not sustainable. I mean, overall we’re hearing customers are very satisfied, but long-term, if you’ve got ten percent of your product not performing, that’s insanely high. It’s not gonna lead to ninety-eight percent customer satisfaction, let’s put it that way. And the problem is, the people it impacts the most are our best customers—the guys with these massive high-powered radios and tape decks that use lots of batteries. You know, these culls can run flashlights no problem—put a little fifty-or hundred-and-fifty-milli-amp load on them and they’re fine. But those boom boxes pull much higher loads; they take six or eight batteries, and it only takes one bad one to shut it down. So let’s say there’s a one in ten chance he’s got a stinker; if he changes batteries twice in an eight-battery device, he’s almost certain to get one stinker. The radio shuts down, and he thinks they’re all stinkers.”

  “Ouch. So you get rid of the
stinkers, but what’s the long-term fix?”

  “Well, chipped batteries would solve the problem.”

  “Chipped?”

  “Add some circuitry to the battery that cuts it off at nine hundred millivolts, so people don’t run them down so low. And if you did that, you could have circuitry that prevented charging in unauthorized chargers, which would eliminate theft issues once we expand to big cities. For that matter, a chip could track cycle counts, capacity, total power in and power out—basically get a running health report. We’d probably have to order like a hundred thousand of them, so it’s big money. And I don’t even know if any of this is possible in a double-A; there might not be any room for the circuitry. I’m pretty sure you’d need another contact point too, for data. To my knowledge nobody else is using rechargeable double-A’s in a rental business model, so I doubt if anybody has even tried to make a smarter double-A battery. But I don’t know.”

  “Hold on, Einstein. Let’s say you can chip these batteries. And let’s say some woman is out hunting snails in the bush at midnight, and suddenly her flashlight battery clicks out when it hits your little voltage cutoff. She’s stranded in the jungle, with the pythons. Oops! Bad idea.”

  “I hear you. But the thing is, by the time that battery’s only pushing nine hundred milli-volts, it’s practically dead anyway. It’s just not giving her much light at all, certainly not for walking around the bush at night. I don’t think she goes out to the bush with a flashlight that weak to begin with. And the time for an LED flashlight to go from nine hundred to four hundred milli-volts is less than ten minutes, so it’s not like the client is getting a lot less use. The client utility at that point is effectively nil.”

  Batteries weren’t Whit’s only worry. During a company meeting the next day, Jan and Whit brought up another looming concern: the potential for counterfeit exchange coupons. The first coupons were simple black-and-white A4 printouts from Burro’s HP Officejet, which were then cut into individual coupons and stapled together. We knew that was asking for trouble, but it seemed like an acceptable risk for the first test market in Bomase, which everyone was anxious to get going. By mid-July, as the pay-go (short for “pay-as-you-go”) offering expanded across the test region, we had added a multicolored hand stamp with the Burro logo.

  “Fortunately the value of a coupon is fairly low,” said Jan, “so the cost of photocopying and cutting may be prohibitive to a thief, but we need to take steps to make it more prohibitive.”

  “I can see all kinds of solutions long-term,” said Whit, “printing in China with the Burro color, adding a watermark, finding a local printer who specializes in security printing. But we need something in three days.”

  For now, Jan and Whit decided to engage the services of a local printer, using colored ink. That came with its own dangers, namely the potential for a dishonest employee at the print shop to take advantage of the relationship. “If we serialized the coupons, that would be a higher bar,” said Whit. “Adam, find out what the incremental cost is for that. And I’m thinking if we put a wavy pattern in the background it would be harder to pull out the stamp image and re-scan it. And maybe the stamp could be in a blue ink that doesn’t photocopy. Let’s see what all this does to our costs.”

  4. Voodoo Economics

  On the road between Nkurakan and Amonfro, about a twenty-minute drive from our office, lived an Ewe fetish priest named Torgbe Ahluame. Fetishism is an ancient belief system that West Africans call Vodun, an Ewe word from which the word voodoo derives. It revolves around one god but with many “helper” deities or spirits—frequently the spirits of ancestors, who exist alongside the living. These spirits are manifested in talismans like animal parts and sculptures—the fetishes around which worship takes place. Voodoo and other fetish religions are still practiced in much of Africa, thriving alongside Christianity and Islam.

  Torgbe’s site was impossible to miss, marked by a six-foot-square painted concrete sign that said POWER POWER on each side, along with his name and two mobile phone numbers. One side of the sign featured a pair of African mermaids with long, straight black hair that tumbled and curved around their exposed breasts. One of the mermaids was holding a white dove in her left hand and a long, straight knife in her right; the other was admiring her visage in a hand mirror. On the other side of the sign were painted two men. One wore a traditional grass skirt and seemed to be dancing, or writhing in ecstasy; the other had a kente robe around his waist and was standing erect. Both were brandishing knives. Between the two men was a bizarre composition whose iconography I can only guess at: a figure in the shape of an African drum, but with a human face and cowry shells for eyes, was balancing on its head two large metal bowls—the type African women carry on their heads to market. The top bowl was inverted over the lower bowl, as if to cover something inside. And here was the strangest thing: the rims of the bowls were clamped tightly shut with a pair of massive padlocks.

  I took a picture of the sign and showed it to several Africans I knew well. None could say exactly what it meant—it didn’t appear to be any conventional symbolism—but the general speculation was that it conveyed great power inside the bowls that had to remain under lock and key.

  I wondered what kind of power this priest could unlock from the spirits. “Hey, Whit,” I said casually one afternoon, “what say we take some of these bad batteries and go see the fetish priest.”

  “The fetish priest?”

  “You know, the Power Power guy—up on the Amonfro road.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Not at all. Maybe he can put more power into these batteries. Look, you said yourself you don’t understand what the hell is happening to the bad ones. They go up, they go down, it makes no sense. So maybe we need some voodoo. That guy who wrote the battery book says every battery has a personality all its own. Maybe this priest can tap into that.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Of course not. Let’s go check it out.”

  “I will do no such thing.”

  “Oh, come on! What can it hurt?”

  “Human sacrifice is what can hurt. I hear it hurts a lot.”

  “They don’t do human sacrifice. Not very often.” I had heard lurid stories of fetish priests demanding blood sacrifices (called mogya sika duro in Twi) from customers who came in search of riches. In most cases, blood was obtained relatively harmlessly—from the menses of a woman, or a small cut—but in some parts of Africa, albinos have been murdered at the behest of fetish priests. Such crimes are rare; fetishism is broadly accepted in Ghana, and you don’t read about humans being sacrificed left and right. Still, in 2008 Ghanaian police arrested two men for selling a sixteen-year-old boy, who was being offered for body parts to fetish priests. At last report the police were having a hard time locating the boy’s family—raising suspicions that relatives had been complicit in the sale.

  “I have no idea what they do, and I don’t feel like finding out,” said Whit. “Those guys are scary.”

  The next day, I asked Kevin what he thought. “Oh, don’t get involved in that,” he said gravely, shaking his head.

  “Why not? What could happen?”

  He thought for a few seconds. “You will maybe get into something you had not expected. It will cost you.”

  “You mean money?”

  “That, and possibly more. Once you visit the fetish priest, it is hard to remove yourself. That is all I can say.”

  This was starting to sound like heroin. I told Whit that if he didn’t come I would go by myself. I was bluffing: I had no intention of going alone. One blazing hot Sunday afternoon he finally relented. “Okay, I’ll go, but only to make sure you don’t do anything incredibly stupid that jeopardizes our business,” he said. “I’m not saying anything, and I’m sitting close to the door.”

  An hour later we pulled into Power Power, partially hidden behind a bamboo fence. At first it looked like a typical rural family compound: metal-roofed square clay huts t
o the left and right were bunted with the usual assortment of drying laundry; children played under the shade of wide eaves. But straight ahead was something out of the ordinary: two more connected huts, their entrances veiled in curtains and shaded under eaves, were painted with more colorful scenes of knife-wielding mermaids and priests; these were obviously the temple rooms. The children shouted “yevu!”—Ewe for white man. A young woman approached. I asked for the priest and she led us into one of the family huts off to the side, where we sat in a bare room and waited for our consultation. On a small table rested three intravenous vials of ampicillin, a strong antibiotic. “There’s your ‘magic,’” said Whit with a sneer.

  “Shhh, he’s coming.”

  “Good afternoon. I am Torgbe Ahluame.” I was expecting a wizened old sage in a robe, but the figure who stepped through the doorway was an athletic man in his early thirties wearing gym shorts and a Nike T-shirt. Behind him followed a slightly younger man whom I took to be the sorcerer’s apprentice. Both shook hands with us, sat down, and smiled.

  “So?” Torgbe asked.

  I told him about Burro and the problems we were having with some of the batteries, extracting two bad ones out of my shirt pocket. “We need more power in these batteries,” I concluded, handing them over.

  “Not just these, but all of them,” Whit whispered in my direction.