One Big Boxy Multicolored Metaphor

My friend Koranteng had a wonderful blog post a few weeks back about the woven-plastic bags, generally plaid, known the world over by various names but in Anglophone West Africa as the "Ghana-Must-Go". I'd seen them too on African buses, and if they had a name in my mind it was probably "South African Street Merchant Bags". A column on the Daily Telegraph points out that, as with just about everything these days, most of the bags are made in China. Koranteng, meanwhile, points out that, apart from that China fact, many of the better details in the Telegraph's column were lifted, without attribution, from his own inital essay.



I, meanwhile, will do my own lifting: Koranteng's photo of a woman dragging her own Ghana-Must-Go through a bus terminal reminded me of the cover image from this month's Atlantic Monthly, an image of a cargo terminal in southern China, stacked with shipping containers. Interesting how both in form and coloration the containers echo the bag, how they're both emblematic of trade and transit, to and from the world's far corners—the one touchingly (or maddeningly) personal and individual, the other anonymously corporate.

(Something to look into: what do those different container colors signify? Are they chosen by container-manufaturer? Shipper? Do they have any relation to what's inside?)