ONE

“FRUITY” SMELLS, CITY STREETS, AND THE POLITICS OF SANITATION

IN 1902 THE EDITORS OF the Gold Coast Leader published an editorial voicing widespread frustration with the politics of sanitation in Accra and other towns in the Gold Coast:

Whoever places about these [refuse] boxes always takes fine care to do so near the houses of the natives, keeping them yards from European Houses, which in itself shows clearly that he is conscious of the fact, he is creating nuisance and offensiveness, and of course for the native anything will do; for a government so solicitous about the sanitation of our Towns, to put such boxes in prominent streets, and actually encourage the people to create nuisance and render the Town unhealthy, really smashes us to smithereens. It may not be so, but it would seem, as if it is a principle with the local Authorities to make provisions of some sort for the necessities of the people either to justify what is said it reports, or to be able to claim some justifiable ground to dole out heavy fines to the people. They think the towns ought to be lighted and street lamps we must have though they may be “miles” apart: the necessity of latrines arises and latrines of some sort are provided, where no decency is taken into account, male and female almost mixing up together (!) a provision must be made for the refuse of the people, and look at their boxes offensively staring at you in the streets. Whether all this is the fault of the Health Inspector or the D.C. or the Authorities at Accra, we are at a loss to say. But there the scavengers are, actually vying with each other in the number of people they may pounce upon for the D.C.’s Court for nuisance—and heavy fines too. But we must keep crying, Sanitation! Sanitation. Then be on the war-path after mosquitoes, then talk of segregation, and a thousand things more!¹

For these prominent African intellectuals, government rhetoric about the importance of sanitation rang hollow when confronted with the realities, inadequacies, and contradictions of sanitary reform. Investment was limited and unequally distributed in ways that privileged European neighborhoods, and African residents disproportionately shouldered the more insalubrious by-products of inadequate sanitary infrastructures. The smells and health consequences of poorly maintained refuse boxes and latrines, which overwhelmed the compounds of many residents living in the African quarters of town, were compounded by the sociocultural indignities and constant prosecutions for sanitary violations to which African residents were regularly subject. Sanitary regulations that blamed residents for the town’s perceived problems failed to acknowledge the degree to which the state—through a combination of both inadequate investment and inappropriate implementation—often created the very conditions they were supposed to regulate. As the editors noted, “It would seem, as if it is a principle with the local Authorities to make provisions of some sort for the necessities of the people either to justify what is said it reports, or to be able to claim some justifiable ground to dole out heavy fines to the people.”² Sanitation, they argued, was a means through which the state justified its existence through a combination of intentional underinvestment and regulation. The “public interest” advanced through sanitary reform, it seemed, was about the well-being of the state rather than the townspeople.

The editors’ suspicion was a reflection of widespread debate about the purpose and implementation of sanitary reforms on the Gold Coast. Accra was, in many ways, ground zero for these debates, and its residents felt the full force of sanitary regulation, reform, and disinvestment. Sanitation was at the center of new forms of colonial urban governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anchored by a series of regulations that expanded government authority over land and created new institutions of urban governance, taxation, and planning that justified unprecedented intervention into the lives of African residents. As the new colonial capital, Accra received the greatest attention and investment, as colonial officials sought to reshape the city’s landscape of power and authority. The formation of the Accra Town Council (ATC) and the introduction of a new system of rates sought to decentralize financial responsibility for urban development and maintenance while creating new opportunities for representative government. However, as elected African town councillors, journalists, and urban residents complained, these new structures of governance were merely an illusion of representation and democratization. In practice, sanitary regulation, taxation, and Town Council politics placed the responsibility for implementing colonial visions on townspeople who could not afford it. In their repeated complaints to the Town Council, petitions to the governor, and editorials in the newspapers, residents asked: Who benefits from sanitation? In whose interest are sanitary regulations advanced? At whose cost? By whose definition or standards?

These questions were more than mere public health debates. They were fundamental questions about the state of urban governance and development in Accra and throughout the Gold Coast. The ATC and its system of ratepaying was a test case, and other towns were slated to undergo similar political and regulatory reform in the early twentieth century. As such, Accra and other Gold Coast towns were drawn into broader colonial infrastructural politics that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. As John Parker notes, by the early twentieth century, “‘sanitation’ and ‘order’ became linked by an emerging imperial ideology in which the new concern with tropical medicine contained a variety of encoded messages about wider social control.”³ Issues surrounding epidemic disease were of immediate and obvious concern to everyone, even if the methods deployed in response were politicized and contested. As a public health concern, however, sanitation was more slippery. Informed by new understandings of public health and disease, government officials sought to remove sources of contagion through careful urban planning and improve hygiene through education and decongestion. In the process, Black bodies, which were often associated with disease, were pathologized in new ways through public health reforms, and sanitation shaped the way that colonial officials and elite African representatives experienced the city and interpreted the values and practices of its residents. Colonial sanitation schemes, like other forms of urban sanitation and public health in the metropole, transformed physical and cultural practice into a “technological problem,”⁴ which was interpreted through both the racial politics of the “civilizing mission” and the political economy of extractive capitalism and indirect rule.

What appears on the surface to be a relatively straightforward conversation about public health and urban infrastructure obscured more fundamental cultural fissures over both the relatively mundane details of daily life and the long-term plans for urban development. Questions of drainage and sewerage connected a diverse set of public works projects: from the provision of water, removal of trash, and building of latrines to the layout of new urban neighborhoods and the construction of new roads, railways, and ports. Beyond considerations of health, then, sanitation often indexed more expansive visions of urban development and urban form. Colonial officials sought to shape the built environment of the city and the practices of its residents through new forms of spatial organization and regulation; these officials would use sanitation as an excuse to “rid the town of activities deemed unsuitable for the seat of imperial power.”⁵ In Accra, this project was particularly urgent as British officials sought to establish authority over the Ga town and transform it into the “envisaged urban showcase of expatriate enterprise and ordered modernity” as the new capital of the Gold Coast colony.⁶ The process of implementing these sanitary visions, however, was far from straightforward. Accra’s sanitary regime produced and was produced by debates over the categorization of space, the ability of the colonial government to control land, and the responsibilities of various colonial and Ga institutions to provide and maintain infrastructure for residents. In the process, it generated questions about belonging, authority, and responsibility in the city: Who belonged in the city? To what degree should they have a say over its form and function? What rights did they have to make demands on the state?

Between the 1870s and the 1940s, the answers to these questions—about sanitation, regulation, and infrastructure and about belonging, authority, and responsibility—shaped a new political reality marked by a contradiction and seeming arbitrariness that united African residents across class, gender, and ethnic lines. Formed in 1894, the ATC played a central role in colonial imaginaries about Accra’s development. Tasked with implementing government sanitary mandates and engendering a democratic culture of engagement and ownership among the citizens of Accra, members of the ATC played a simultaneously powerful and liminal role in the development of the town. Sanitation, in particular, was at the center of this new form of urban governance, creating a powerful connection between the macro-level questions of infrastructure and planning and the much more intimate issues of hygiene and conduct in both the private and public spheres. The Town Council was the result of the devolution of responsibility and authority in colonial Ghana that effectively extended the logics of indirect rule into urban areas and, in the process, created new forms of electoral politics and representative democracy in the town. The ATC and its sanitary debates epitomized an emergent form of urban indirect rule in Accra, organized around seemingly straightforward colonial visions of decentralized authority, representative government, and taxation but struggling in reality under the weight of “considerable internal hybridity.”⁷

Robust infrastructural politics in the first half of the twentieth century transformed the Town Council into both a beacon and a lightning rod in the midst of ongoing contestations over responsibility and authority in the Ga town. Decentralization created new forms of opportunity, but it also presented challenges of responsibility within a complex web of authority that limited the ability of African residents to shape the town’s development. The frustration expressed by the editors of the Gold Coast Leader echoed not only within the elite spheres of journalism and politics but also on the streets and in the markets of the Ga town. Overlapping bureaucracies, fiscal austerity, and regulatory uncertainty shaped a form of urban governance marked by contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness—a “dual colonial city [that] was formed through the complex interplay of material realities and ideological forms, fixity and fantasy.”⁸ For Bissell and others, the inconsistency and incompleteness that marred colonial urban development was an inevitable by-product of indirect rule, both as a political structure and a pattern of investment.⁹ British colonial officials who envisioned “hegemony on a shoestring” underestimated the complexity of African urban realities, particularly in cities like Accra, which had a long history of urban settlement and trade that predated its position as the colonial capital.¹⁰ As the editors of the Gold Coast Leader suggested, however, these inefficiencies were just as often a product of design.

This chapter traces the politics of regulation and taxation, construction and maintenance, responsibility and authority, representation and oppression through debates about the practice and infrastructure of sanitation in colonial Accra. While much of this debate focused on the activities of the ATC, multiple constituencies vied for influence over the city’s sanitary affairs. Elected town councillors, local political leaders, colonial officers, merchants, market women, and family members alike shared an understanding of how important sanitation was to the city’s development. The reality of how that vision would be implemented and who would benefit, however, was much more complicated. The illusion of democracy and local authority, embodied in the urban extension of indirect rule through the Town Council, created new tensions between the colonial government and Accra residents in ways that both flattened and magnified differences among the town’s diverse African populations. British officials often utilized failed or incomplete infrastructure projects, coupled with rigorous regulatory enforcement, to criminalize or pathologize large portions of the city’s residents and justify increasingly intrusive colonial authority over both public and private space. Ratepayers and their elected representatives quickly realized that decentralization was no guarantee of democratization; the “official” majority in the Town Council, buoyed by other colonial officials, used disorder to limit investment, marginalize African residents, and protect colonial financial interests. This chapter places two subjects of vibrant public debate and contestation—sewage and drainage—in the broader context of the political economy of sanitation in twentieth-century Accra. In a tropical port city, water—its provision, flow, treatment, and disposal—was a central sanitary concern, and colonial technopolitics sought to reshape both the form and practice of urban life to correspond with the prevailing sanitary wisdom of technical experts in public health, engineering, and urban planning.

SANITARY RESPONSIBILITY

The obsession with water and sewerage in Accra was part of a broader transformation in sanitary policy, spatial politics, and municipal governance in the colony. The British captured Accra in 1874 and quickly set about laying the groundwork to move the colonial capital from Cape Coast to Accra. The transformation of Accra from a relatively decentralized trading town under the leadership of the Ga Manche to the capital of the Gold Coast Colony required legislative reform that would reorder the political and spatial landscape of the city and establish the authority of the new British administration. Land was central to this urban reimagining, and British officials quickly introduced legislation that would give them unprecedented control over urban lands in the name of a newly defined “public interest.” The 1876 Public Lands Ordinance gave government the power to seize lands “required for the service of the Colony.”¹¹ These powers were extended further by the 1892 Towns Ordinance, which clarified responsibility and expanded authority for the development and maintenance of towns in the Gold Coast. The director of works was placed in charge of streets and granted the authority to “from time to time cause any street to be levelled, drained, altered, and repaired as occasion may require.”¹² The colonial governor was granted the power to seize land (with compensation) “for the purpose of widening, opening, enlarging, draining, or otherwise improving any street, or of making any new street” and the director of works was empowered to take materials without compensation from private land to complete public works and to regulate the construction and condition of buildings in Gold Coast towns.¹³

The ordinance marked a dramatic expansion of the government’s power to control land in the colony and also marked a significant departure from what the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) described as “one of the main principles guiding the administration of the Gold Coast.” In a petition protesting the implementation of the Towns Ordinance in Sekondi, the ARPS argued that in seizing and later reselling land that belonged to residents, the government overturned decades of community-government relations rooted in “the protection of the rights of the people to their ancestral lands.”¹⁴ In expanding authority over the naming of streets and numbering of houses, abatement of fires, regulation of slaughterhouses and markets, colonial officials sought to seize control over the shape of the town.

Importantly, however, the Towns Ordinance—which was formally named the “Towns and Public Health Ordinance”—also sought to reshape the colony’s sanitary policy by “devolv[ing] responsibility for sanitation to local town councils” and “declaring open spaces by the Government with a view to the promotion of the public health.”¹⁵ Sanitary policy was backed up by a new understanding of “public nuisances,” an expansive list that included:

1.Any street, house or premises in such a state as to be a nuisance or injurious to health;

2.Any pool, ditch, gutter, watercourse, privy, urinal, cesspool, drain, or ashpit so foul or in such a state as to be a nuisance or injurious to health;

3.Any animal so kept as to be a nuisance or injurious to health;

4.Any work, manufactory, trade or business, injurious to the health of the neighbours, or dangerous, or so conducted as to be dangerous or injurious to health;

5.Any growth of weeds, prickly pear, long grass, or wild bush of any sort;

6.Any hole or excavation, well, pond or quarry, in or near any street, which in the opinion of the Director of Works is or is likely to becoming dangerous to the safety of the public;

7.Any well, pond or tank, the water of which is so tainted with impurities or otherwise unwholesome as to be injurious to the health of persons using it;

8.Any house or part of a house so overcrowded as to be dangerous or injurious to the health of the inmates; and

9.Swine.¹⁶

As we will explore further in chapter 3, the implications for this new category of “public nuisance” touched many areas of daily life in cities like Accra. In marking off these spaces or practices as “nuisances” it also allowed the state, through its newly appointed sanitary inspectors and backed by law and the power of the courts, to intervene in private African spaces and prosecute offenders. As representatives of the government, the ordinance granted unspecified numbers of new sanitary inspectors unprecedented authority over both the public spaces of shops, warehouses, manufacturing sites, and workshops as well as the private spaces of households and compounds: “Any inspector of nuisances, health officer or Director of Works, or any person or persons authorized in writing by any health officer or Director of Works, together with any assistant or assistants bearing any official badge or token, may enter and inspect any premises at any time between six in the morning and six in the evening, for the purpose of examining as to the existence or continuance of any nuisance therein, or of abating any nuisance.”¹⁷ These powers were backed by the threat of prosecution and fines for anyone who refused entry to inspectors.¹⁸

If the Public Lands Ordinance gave the government the right to shape the physical space of the town, and the Towns Ordinance created new systems of sanitation and oversight in residents’ public and private spaces, the 1894 Town Councils Ordinance created new political structures that devolved responsibility for the implementation of sanitary guidelines. In creating a new institution of local government that had at least some elected representatives chosen by newly designated ratepayers, the ordinance sidestepped chiefs who, under indirect rule, were responsible for local governance and empowered a new class of urban residents who were identified solely on the basis of property ownership. Town councillors—half “official” (i.e., appointed by the governor) and the other half “unofficial” (i.e., elected)—and an appointed president (the district commissioner) and his town clerk were responsible for overseeing the improvement and maintenance of the town and collecting property taxes (or rates). While expectations of improvement were left undefined and subject to revision over time, the Council’s sanitary responsibilities were explicitly laid out in the ordinance:

In any town to which this ordinance is extended the Council shall have the power

a)To provide for the removal of night soil and refuse from every house.

b)To provide public latrines and bathing places.

c)To make wells and otherwise to provide a good and sufficient supply of water for the use of persons in the town and to keep in good repair all public drains, aqueducts and tanks and to preserve the same from contamination.

d)To perform any duties for the time being lawfully performed by any officer of the Colonial Government which the Governor may from time to time declare by notice in the Gazette to be transferred to the Council.

e)Generally to do such acts as may be necessary for the conservancy of the town and the preservation of the public health therein.¹⁹

The president also appointed “Inspectors of Nuisance, Health Officers, and Surveyors” who were responsible for duties laid out in the 1892 Towns Ordinance.²⁰ Ultimately, however, the system of rates also placed sanitary responsibility on property owners, who were expected to maintain their properties under threat of prosecution and fine.

Colonial officials often heralded the new Town Council structure and the introduction of taxation as an important step toward local government. Rates, they argued, encouraged city residents to take responsibility for the financial, political, and social welfare of the town. For many residents, however, the rate system was an example of the colonial state’s deep hypocrisy. The editors of the Gold Coast Chronicle noted the following amid public protest over the new system of taxation in 1896:

Once more this horrible nightmare looms before us, with its iniquitous taxation, self-contradicting offers of self-government, one-sided provisions, impossible promises, and the oppressive and destructive grinding of the poor, for the simple purpose of putting more money into the coffers of the Government which according to the provisions of the Ordinance is practically to represent itself first, and then the people whilst as many salaries of officials as can on one pretence or other he conveniently saddled on the new fund is to be clapped on, leaving just a sufficient margin as an excuse for fresh imposition of taxes. Water works, Roads, Sanitary measures, Drains, Latrines and what not are to be laid on the shoulders of the luckless Municipality. Of course it will be division of labour, the Government as usual draws the money and the people are now to have the privilege of attending to their own wants. The people pay the taxes and the exempted officials enjoy the honour, salaries, fees and the casting vote to boot. Though this Ordinance purports to allow the people some measure of self government as in other Colonies and the term “Town Councils” is applied to it, the voice of the Town is studiously forced into the background. As in the Legislative Council the three or four unofficial members are to be dummies to all intents and purposes. One cannot understand why this institution is not named “Official Council” as it is in point of fact, with mock representations of a voiceless people.²¹

The rate system created new burdens on the city’s property owners, which included not only the merchant and professional classes but also chiefs and family heads. Appraisers surveyed the town annually and assessed rates based on estimated property value. This new system of taxation sought to elevate the status of private property owners in the city and undermine the control that chiefs had over town lands. But it also created new financial burdens on residents, sparking widespread protest, particularly since taxpayers would still be in the minority on the Town Council. As one resident complained:

This Ordinance imposes fresh taxation of the most objectionable character in as much as it is far from being equitable. The Community is to pay a certain percentage on such annual value of each house as the owner would derive from rentage, whether the house in question is under rent or not. Business houses are placed on the same footing as dwelling houses, whilst the dwellings of the class which is to form the majority of the Council being Government property would be free of taxation. We would not consider it fair that this class in whose interests, alone we might almost say—sanitation at least is to be rigidly attended to, should be free from taxation. But whilst they are exempted as a class they are made the majority on the Council to disburse Funds to which they have not contributed a farthing.²²

Editorial complaints in newspapers were backed up by more direct forms of popular protest.²³ The “kings, chiefs, and people of Accra” sent petitions to the governor protesting the Town Councils Ordinance in 1895 and 1898.²⁴ When Ga leadership failed to speak out strongly enough against the notion of taxation, asafoatsemei organized more public protests that put pressure on both the Ga Manche and the governor and forced a meeting to resolve the dispute.²⁵ In embracing more popular forms of protest, urban residents argued that property taxes (or rates), licensing fees, and other forms of municipal taxation created an undue burden on urban residents who, by the late nineteenth century, were suffering from an economic depression. As European firms sought to exert more direct influence on the coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even wealthier merchants and traders who owned grand houses in the city found themselves unable to pay taxes.²⁶ The financial burdens of taxation were compounded by new sanitary requirements. Residents whose properties ran afoul of sanitary inspectors faced fines and demands for building improvements; the Town Council seized or demolished property that violated regulations.

Town councillors also struggled to balance the physical and financial requirements of town maintenance and sanitary regulation. Within the context of indirect rule, the Town Council was supposed to use collected taxes to pay for town maintenance, reducing the financial burden on the colonial state and creating new forms of local investment. In some ways, this mirrored models of colonial governance in rural areas, where local chiefs collected taxes and maintained law and order as a representative of the governor (via the district commissioner). In Accra, however, the demands of a colonial capital city, the costs of modern infrastructure, and the rapid growth of the city beginning in the twentieth century placed increased financial burdens on the Town Council’s relatively meager resources. In the first several decades of its existence, as town residents protested taxation, the Town Council relied heavily on government grants to fund infrastructural and sanitation initiatives. By the 1920s, however, residents had largely accepted the idea of taxation, which meant that the Town Council had more regular revenue.

This shift, which might seem abrupt and contradictory given the fierce resistance of the 1890s, evidences a persistent underlying strategy in British colonial governance in cities like Accra. While proposed changes often provoked resistance, those changes were rarely dramatic enough—fundamentally undermining the welfare or well-being of residents or abruptly subverting the power of their leaders—to provoke widespread outrage or prolonged resistance. As with the Public Lands Ordinance and the Town Councils Ordinance, British colonial leadership often played the long game, courting local elites and building coalitions of support until proposals were more tenable. In other cases, however, they simply waited out the initial outrage and ignored objections, which they often viewed as further evidence of “backwardness” or conservativism among Ga people. The persistence of the day-to-day implementation of a new “order of things” through inspection and enforcement was—more than grand construction projects or spatial interventions—the real power of colonial governance, expanding piecemeal over time through regulation. Expanding regulation, however, was also accompanied by expanding bureaucracy. This bureaucratic expansion took place via specialized offices and new categories of professional experts who oversaw regulatory implementation and enforcement and created increasingly complicated and expensive systems of governance, which added to the Town Council’s fiscal and organizational burdens.

Acquiescence to the political reality of the Town Council structure and its attendant taxation, however, did not mean that Ga people passively accepted the new regime’s mandates. Residents frequently used their position as taxpayers to pressure government to invest more heavily in the growing city. In the 1920s when Governor Guggisberg sought to reform the Town Council and make it more self-sustaining, Accra residents took to the streets again to protest excessive taxation and limited development.²⁷ Meanwhile, the ATC constantly negotiated with the governor and the director of public works to determine who held financial responsibility for town development. Town councillors sought to balance the demands for infrastructure and planning with the long-term financial costs. Councillors were concerned about “setting a precedent” that would leave the Town Council in an impossible financial position.²⁸ African members of the Town Council, in particular, worried that assistance in infrastructure provision during periods of general economic crisis would “sanction a broader decentralization of government responsibility over infrastructural development in cities.”²⁹ But they were arguing against a broader colonial bureaucracy that saw Accra as merely one point within a larger imperial scheme, which simultaneously required efficient management in the march toward “civilization” as well as sacrifices “for now” in light of economic forces at play across the empire and around the world. As town councillors’ frustrations made clear, these calls for “economy” and “efficiency” rarely impacted the salaries of British officials or metropolitan government expenditures and did little to enforce accountability when expenditures were wasted through inefficiency or incompetence.

As the ARPS petition regarding public lands in Sekondi suggests, these legislative and regulatory changes upended long-held understandings over who controls land and who defines how people live on it.³⁰ For elite residents who were more likely to hold property, new regulations increased the responsibility they held for the maintenance of their properties. But regulations also generated new kinds of conversations about sanitation as an infrastructural and social right/obligation. Residents, Town Council members, and colonial officials alike debated how the new regulations would be enacted and what they might mean for the city’s future. Residents who engaged in the politics of placemaking did not reject colonial infrastructural and sanitary improvements outright. In fact, resident complaints and petitions often demanded more access to urban infrastructure and technology—a demand for equity in urban development. While colonial officials and town councillors often pointed to finances as the source of their struggles over uneven development, scholars have also highlighted the inefficiency, incapacity, and incompetence of colonial governance.³¹ However, as residents’ petitions, protests, and obstructions made clear, the “unruliness of urban life”³² was more an organized assertion of control over the future vision of the city as a social, economic, political, and cultural space that had its own history and logic.

THE POLITICS OF WASTE

Water sat at the center of these debates. Community leaders in Accra and other major urban centers had long complained about the lack of water and its adverse effects on the health and welfare of residents. As one resident, writing under the name Vortigern,³³ complained in 1894,

About 4 years ago, we commenced advocating in the columns of this paper for a water supply for each of the principal towns of this Colony; and when we come to consider that Accra is the Headquarters of the Government, the question, why there are no water works here, forcibly presents itself to us. But it could be answered, “That to bring water to Accra would cost £40,000, and that the matter was still under consideration of the Secretary of State.” Since return to the Colony from leave of absence of the surveyor, who some time last year was sent to Beulah, the source of the intended water supply, we have been anxiously waiting to hear what has to be done, but until now we have heard nothing more on the subject. If hope is the anchor of expectation, our anchor has neither dragged, fouled, or parted chain, our sea is however exhausted and our ship is left on dry land, while scarcity of water is staring us in the face; and unless we make our voice heard at this critical juncture, and sometimes is done to aver the impending calamity, the blame will lie at our own door. We have lived and thrived under most fascinating promises heretofore, and is it possible without any assurance at this stage, to rely any longer on such promises and which are never intended to be fulfilled! Our duty now is to demand water, and it is but just and fair that we should do so, because the authorities have not the courage to speak their mind.³⁴

For this commentator and many others who wrote to the newspapers that proliferated in Gold Coast towns throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demands for water were more than elite calls for Westernized infrastructure like piped water and indoor toilets. Gold Coast towns like Accra faced increasing water shortages that endangered the lives of inhabitants, particularly in the dry season. In Accra, proximity to the sea meant that well water was brackish and largely undrinkable; even wealthy residents could not dig their own wells to compensate for infrastructural inadequacies. With the growing population of the town, existing reservoirs were quickly depleted, and open reservoirs were easily contaminated by livestock and waste. In one extreme circumstance, Ga residents continued to use water from Opoohu even after a corpse was left floating in the water for several days.³⁵ Residents who regularly used contaminated water may have been unaware of the deleterious health effects. But in the absence of water locally, households were forced to expend significant time and labor walking to fresh water sources farther inland—a luxury that many could not afford. Even the colonial state, which at one point experimented with hiring carriers to transport water from fresh springs, could not afford such a luxury.³⁶ Colonial officials and African residents of all classes made strategic choices in adapting to scarcity, “for want of something better.”³⁷

The deep frustration expressed by journalistic commentators and echoed throughout Gold Coast towns was exacerbated by a seeming hypocrisy in both the rhetoric and practice of colonial policy. Despite the governor’s repeated recognition that “effective sanitation including a good water supply . . . is still the most urgent need of the Gold Coast,”³⁸ the provision of water was repeatedly postponed because of cost, even as construction of new government buildings in Accra continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Delays in state investment in a water system coincided with new demands from colonial officials for urban residents to shoulder the financial burden of urban development, claiming that the colonial administration could not afford to continue providing infrastructure and maintenance for the growing town. Responding to the new Municipal Ordinance in 1896, one resident echoed the complaints of many in the pages of the Gold Coast Chronicle:

Whether the policy persued [sic] is sound or otherwise, it is not for me to say, but how long have we been paying an ad valorem duty of 10 0/0 and specifics as 6d on the wine gallon, and yet our thirst is unbearable. I am far from grudging the Government the levy of duties, but what I say is this, as we pay the taxes willingly you must give us water—the most important need which should have been considered first before Bungalows and what not. If the Colony were poor, one might excuse this blind economy, if economy it can be called of those in power; but with the Revenue of this Colony at their command need there be any excuse for this . . . policy?”³⁹

The hypocrisy of the colonial officials, who prompted growth by appointing Accra as a new colonial capital and encouraged further growth through at least some limited investments in economic development (while blaming African residents for the increased population resulting from that growth), rankled Accra’s tax-paying residents and highlighted many of the inconsistencies in urban colonial governance.

As Accra residents began paying house rates more regularly in the early twentieth century, these complaints were redeployed as a critique of the Town Council structure. Residents pointed to the “foul water into which all sorts of refuse has been, and is being thrown, the awful stench of which is, from its situation wafted, over almost the whole Town.”⁴⁰ As Quashie, an Accra resident, pointedly questioned: “Are these the great benefits we were to receive from the Government Town Council and for the rates of which the poorest of the Town are being driven to all sorts of subterfuges to meet?”⁴¹ These demands for accounting were part of a broader critique of power in Gold Coast cities like Accra, rooted in the economic contributions of residents who viewed taxation as a form of investment in the state that was expected to produce tangible returns in their community. In critiquing colonial administration at both the colony and municipal level, residents laid bare the blatant profiteering and uneven investment that sat at the core of the British colonial project and raised important questions about governance in the city—Who belonged in the city? To what degree should they have a say over its form and function? What rights did they have to make demands on the state? These questions were directed just as much at British colonial officials as they were at the increasingly diverse African population of the town.

Figure 1.1. Street Scenes, 1955. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra R/2200/5.

After more than a decade of “costly experiments including experts at nothing,”⁴² Governor John Rodger announced that “the Accra Water Supply has been definitely settled and the whole scheme is expected to be completed including a connected scheme for draining Accra within the next three years.”⁴³ Debates about cost continued, however, as colonial officials weighed the difficulties of implementing the scheme and the implications that investment in Accra would have for future infrastructural development in other parts of the colony.⁴⁴ Work commenced in March 1910, including the construction of support infrastructure like a light rail to bring equipment to the site and the development of new harbor works. Plans continued to change even in the midst of construction, as engineers debated whether the dam could include turbines for electricity generation—a proposal that was ultimately abandoned.⁴⁵ This lack of clear planning and leadership from the Public Works Department led to delays in the project and undermined public confidence, having “failed to give satisfaction to the public with respect to the ability of their officers to discharge well and efficiently their public duties.”⁴⁶ A combination of poor construction quality, delays, and waste of funds led the editors of Gold Coast Leader to declare the Accra Water and Harbour Works “practically failures.”⁴⁷ Residents’ annoyance with the slow speed of construction was amplified due to persistent water shortages. By the end of 1912, there was “a great scarcity of water in town and those who are fortunate in having tanks are reaping a rich harvest.”⁴⁸ Patience wore thin as residents relied on the rains for renewed fresh water supply.⁴⁹ Finally inaugurated in 1914, the Accra Water Works directed raw water from the Densu River through a series of filters to a large reservoir. Town residents drew on that water over the course of a day, with pumps driving more water from the Densu into the reservoirs as needed, connected by cast iron pipes, twelve inches in diameter, to the distribution mains in Accra. In 1918, the government began to treat water with lime to remove impurities and, coupled with the filters, produced water “of a very high standard of purity.”⁵⁰ Town water lines serviced all of the “important buildings”⁵¹ in Accra, including colonial bungalows, government buildings, commercial spaces, and the homes of the town’s merchant and educated classes, as well as supplying public stand pipes placed around the city.

Water usage expanded with the growth of the city. The town had 20,000 residents in 1913; by 1932 the population had tripled to an estimated 60,000.⁵² By 1924, daily demand exceeded 500,000 gallons of water per day. In response, colonial officials doubled the capacity of the water works. Government again took advantage of the Colonial Development Fund to lay a second line of pipes in 1932 to improve the water pressure, and they replaced pumps in 1935. Few of these investments reflected African patterns of building and demand, however. By the time officials proposed an extension of the Water Works in 1936, they noted that “building activity in the environs of Accra is proceeding rapidly and it therefore becomes necessary to extend the system of distribution mains in conjunction with extensions at the headworks.”⁵³ Korle Bu, Abbosey Okai, Adabraka, North and East Christiansborg, Labadie and Teshie—all areas that had witnessed significant (often government-sponsored) growth over the first decades of the twentieth century—remained without reliable access to water.

THE POLITICS OF WASTE

While colonial officials sought to provide and protect the flow of water in the city, they were often obsessed with waste. Within the water system itself, officials acknowledged that some changes in the behaviors of individual residents—like the introduction of private water carriage sewage systems on their premises or the increase in gardening activity using hose pipes—could account for the dramatic increase in domestic consumption among “unofficial” (i.e., private/nongovernmental) consumers. In the abstract, these activities represented new forms of African investment in sanitary domestic spaces, which officials encouraged. Private water carriage sewage systems, in particular, were “a development worthy of encouragement because it will be some years hence before it will be possible to extend a general water carriage system to the residential areas of the town.”⁵⁴ However, this autonomy also posed the risk of waste. As one official report noted, “Gardening activity . . . is most desirable when it is reasonably developed, but waste water inspections have disclosed the fact that the unintelligent use of hose pipes is a very considerable source of water. A hose pipe used with care is of great convenience, but consumers generally leave the use of them to illiterate labourers who have very little idea of what they are doing.”⁵⁵

If using natural resources and infrastructure required a particular form of intelligence and education, many colonial officials saw regulation as an important form of public protection against waste. The Accra Water Works opened their doors to the general public, provided lectures to school children, and utilized the broadcasting system as part of a broad-based public education project. However, one official argued, these educational measures “rely purely on the good-will of the people to render them effective.”⁵⁶ The majority of waste, they noted, occurred at stand pipes used by the general community and only loosely controlled by either the Water Works or the Town Council. Other egregious examples motivated more deeply rooted concern about African capacity to appreciate and operate new forms of public infrastructure. In justifying the adoption of the Water Works Ordinance in 1936, for example, officials pointed to a 1933 report from the District Foreman in Accra of an African laborer watering the lawn of an official compound during a heavy rain: “The labourer had been instructed by his employer to put plenty of water on the grass and appeared to consider either that this order was to be obeyed slavishly or that pipe water possessed virtues superior to those of rain water.”⁵⁷ These extreme instances of waste generated cynicism among many government leaders and justified the extension of legal powers that would authorize police intervention. “Such appeals,” one official noted, “have no meaning for a large proportion of the community but when the Water Works Ordinance is brought into operation will be possible to exercise control over wastage generally.”⁵⁸

Colonial narratives about wasted water, however, often ignored or minimized the impact of waste and water on urban communities. While the Water Works received sustained investment and attention from the government, sanitary inspectors, medical officers, town councillors, and residents alike complained about the government’s persistent failure to construct an adequate waterborne sewage system in the town. As Governor Sir Hugh Clifford noted to Secretary of State for the Colonies Harcourt in 1913, even in colonial bungalows that were early recipients of pipe-borne water “the sanitary benefits to be derived from a pipe-borne water supply will be only partially reaped until such time as water can be laid on to these houses in the ordinary way, and carried off by a proper system of drains and sewers.”⁵⁹ Even if, as Clifford argued, the provision of pipe-borne water and adequate drainage facilities was “the most important sanitary measure which can be taken for the improvement of the Public health of any town of this Colony,” the large expenditure on the Water Works and town drainage would be wasted if not accompanied by “an efficient drainage and sewerage scheme for Accra.”⁶⁰

The importance of a sewerage system, then, was not in doubt in early twentieth-century Accra; by 1913 it was, as Clifford noted, “no longer a question of expediency, but one of sheer necessity.”⁶¹ Colonial officials’ interest in sewage may have cited theories of sanitation and public health in justifying the sewerage scheme, but in their debates about its urgent necessity, it was more often the sensations associated with waste rather than the outbreak of disease that provoked the most urgent conversations. The 1913 drainage and sewerage scheme was never implemented, and in the absence of a proper sewerage system, waste was discharged into the Korle Lagoon from the main surface drains. The water was “purified” during heavy rains when the lagoon overflowed the sand bar separating it from the sea, bringing in fresh salt water. By 1929, however, it was clear that these measures were insufficient. As J. E. W. Flood noted:

Sixteen years ago I was getting into the position of knowing something about the drainage of Accra, which was then considered to be a very urgent matter in view of the introduction of the pipe borne water supply. Since then many things, including the Great War, happened and such money has been spent; but Accra is still without its drains and the Korle Bu Lagoon has been becoming more of a nuisance than ever. The position is that the surface drains of Accra empty into the lagoon at its north end. In the wet season when there is a lot of water about this does not matter much, but in the dry season surface drains really carry nothing but sewerage and as the lagoon is not very deep and the sun is very hot, the result is getting too much even for an African nose.⁶²

Located between the town’s most densely settled area and the Korle Bu Hospital, the concentration of sewage in the lagoon was both an olfactory discomfort and a public health hazard. The politics of waste and debates about what to do about the Korle Lagoon was further complicated by the lagoon’s status as a sacred site among Ga people, tended by a priest and his followers.

African town councillors also evoked smell in calling for reform of the town’s sanitary policies. Councillor Kitson Mills argued that “owing to the prevailing financial stringency it had not been possible to carry on the sewerage system contemplated some years ago, and asked whether it could not be possible to carry out the removal of night soil in the evenings instead of in the day.”⁶³ Kitson Mills’s appeal in 1932 was not the first—the president of the ATC noted that the question had been brought up before for discussion—and it would not be the last. Throughout the 1930s, African councillors noted the offensive smell associated with the pan latrine system that had been adopted in the absence of a water carriage sewage system. Waste removal by night-soil workers required removing, cleaning, and replacing galvanized iron buckets that collected refuse in public latrines. Doing so in the middle of the day aggravated the already strong smells associated with the latrine. But scheduling that was more sensitive to the daily life of African residents entailed costs that exceeded the Council’s financial and logistical capacity. Reporting on their investigation of the matter in1935, the acting municipal engineer and the medical officer of health reported that the scheme was “impracticable for the following reasons”:

a)Absence of lighting both in public latrines to ensure effective cleansing, and in certain of the streets through which the conservancy lorries would have to pass.

b)Disturbances to the general public owing to the noise of lorries being unloaded of their clean pans, and also from the passage of lorries through the streets of the town when the inhabitants are asleep.

c)Additional cost of maintenance and supervision, European and African involved, since Health Officers, Health Inspectors, Engineers, Fitters and Drivers would have to be paid at special rates or overtime for being on duty between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. (breakdowns, petrol filling, cleansing, etc.).

d)Additional cost of lighting required in latrines and streets.⁶⁴

For Kitson Mills and many others, the impossibility of the current system created renewed urgency for investment in a proper sewerage system: “One had only to be near any of these latrines when the pans were removed, and one would understand the situation,” he argued.⁶⁵ Others noted that the conditions of latrines rendered their surroundings unsanitary. Councillor de Graft Johnson noted the “terrible stench in the vicinity” of the latrine on Horse Road.⁶⁶ In some cases, the stench of public space caused discomfort, which, though significant, was a by-product of living in crowded urban quarters. The Adabraka Market, Councillor Odamtten complained, “was bounded by latrines on one side, [and] the stench from them when the pans were being removed in the morning was too much for the people.”⁶⁷ With an incinerator blowing “foul smoke when in action” on the other side of the market, patrons were inundated and inconvenienced by the odors of urban waste.⁶⁸ In other cases, however, inadequate waste disposal had real health consequences for urban residents. In calling for the construction of more public latrines, the medical officer of health noted that in 1933, twenty-five cases of typhoid were traced to houses that had no private latrines.⁶⁹

As residents of the town, African town councillors were undoubtedly drawing on their own experiences in complaining about smells and other sensations that arose from inadequate sewerage infrastructure. In calling for more consideration of sanitary sensation, however, town councillors also echoed the complaints of their constituents who lodged complaints directly with their representatives and through the pages of coastal newspapers. As “Pexbroke Playfair” wrote to the editors of the Gold Coast Independent in 1922,

Our principal towns are extremely filled with bad odour, and Accra ranks first in this. The stench arising from the latrine buildings is appalling and I should like the Governor to prove this statement by going round the town once at a slow drive. Here in Akuse the latrine pans are removed by prisoners who do this work without applying any Jeye’s Fluid or any other disinfectant fluid whatever except where the European latrines in the bungalows are concerned, and surely one cannot expect these poor prisoners to clean these latrine pans under this condition; and so it happens that these pans are only emptied of their contents and put back again willy-nilly, and flies and bad smell that arise into the air beggars description. From this you will realize how annoying it is to a sensitive citizen of the country to witness a poor old woman being sent to the Court—if I were to call it a Court—to answer a charge of having allowed water to stand in an old cigarette tin in which the Sanitary Inspector has discovered two or three mosquito larvae wriggling merrily about.⁷⁰

In writing under the pseudonym “Playfair,” this resident’s thoughts exemplified a broader public discourse that connected the indignities of sanitary smell and the condition of latrines with questions about the Town Council’s legitimacy and effectiveness. Throughout the first several decades of the twentieth century, African politicians and residents regularly pointed to the Town Council’s sanitary failures—evidenced by the physical and sensational experiences of the city—as justification for abolishing the Town Council altogether.⁷¹ If the Council did not have sufficient funds to fulfill their primary responsibility—sanitation for the town—then why were they paying taxes? Where was that money going? Critics frequently pointed to the large number of highly paid European employees and sanitary inspectors who spent most of their time conducting home inspections and dragging residents to court for minor violations of sanitary laws. These fines generated yet more revenue for the Town Council. In the absence of significant infrastructural improvements and education, sanitary regulations appeared to be nothing more than yet another mechanism to extract revenue from residents. These inspections particularly targeted women who generally did not pay taxes as property owners.⁷² In questioning the fiscal responsibility of the Council and the effectiveness of its regulations, residents directly challenged colonial constructions of the “public good.” As Playfair noted,

It is a disgraceful sight, apart from being gross inconvenience, that in the morning especially, to witness the long queue of our male community ranging from boys of five up to the bearded and grey haired men at one entrance of a latrine room, and at the other entrance opposite, our female folks ranging from blooming girlhood up to withered old womanhood waiting the ‘tide’ because of insufficient latrine pans. And our doctors advise us that it is dangerous to health to linger about after one has felt to go to latrine—we should attend to nature’s call as soon as we felt it.⁷³

This persistent lack of investment in town infrastructure—forcing men and women, often of the same household, to use the same latrine building with inadequate partitions (often nothing more than a partial swish wall or a piece of corrugated iron)—was an indignity that violated both Ga social and cultural norms as well as European expectations of gendered propriety. This sort of construction-driven social indignity was a more subtle form of much older infrastructural danger, produced through active disinvestment in African sanitary infrastructure that dated back to 1896:

Another distressing accident occurred on the 23rd ult [sic] when a man attending the call of nature was overtaken with a fainting fit and dropped into a latrine on the beach; before help could be afforded. Coming into contact with the rocks beneath the skull was fractured to such an extent that he died on the spot. This is not the first latrine accident. An old infirm woman fell into one of those dug outside the Town and there being none on the spot to lend a helping hand came to an untimely end, by the horrible process of drowning in the latrine. Since then another woman met with a similar accident but was fortunate enough to escape with a bleaching of many parts of the body which has made her a hideous object to behold presenting as she does, the speckled appearance of yellow and black more like the colour of a cat than of a human being. One would suppose after these two terrible accidents that the ‘Powers that be’ would have taken steps to prevent any further occurrences but our parsimonious Government—parsimonious in every thing concerning the tax-paying could only afford the masses the squatting surface of a three inch beam with sufficient space behind, which one losing his or her balance may easily fall through—in the first instance; and now holds the lives and limbs of the Governed so cheap as to allow this state of things to continue to exist. May we ask who is responsible for the lives thus lost, and how much longer this sort of thing is to last?⁷⁴

Sanitary investment (or disinvestment), at the expense of human life and general well-being, seemed to contradict the espoused goals of sanitary regulation. The smells and dangers of latrines were compounded by that of dustbins, placed around town for the disposal of rubbish, which “aside from their evil effect on the public health, they are unsightly.”⁷⁵ A commentator in the Gold Coast Nation echoed the complaints of many: “The Town Council should justify their establishment in this country by giving better attention to the real needs of the municipalities than appears to be the case at present.”⁷⁶

Public complaints about sanitary regulations, malicious prosecution, and underinvestment did little to change state practice. As one commentator noted, “After the outbreak of Plague at Accra in 1901 and the great outcry of inefficiency of the Town Council as a Sanitary authority, it was thought that the Government would take off the mask, put a stop to the pretext of teaching the people self-government, take matters into their own hands, and abolish the Town Council. But this was not done. The same old jugglery goes on, and with the trump cards in the hands of the Government, the game of fooling and bamboozling the native continues as merrily as ever.”⁷⁷ Particularly in the cramped quarters of the old town, demand clearly exceeded the infrastructural capacity of the city’s sanitation system. In 1933, the most populous parts of the city, including James Town and Asere, had as many as 67 people/pan; other areas had 37 people/pan.⁷⁸ Newly developed parts of the town were disadvantaged in different ways. Councillor Kojo Thompson noted in 1934 that there were only two public latrines to serve the entire community of Adabraka.⁷⁹ If the latrine system needed to be doubled in 1912 “in order to secure any approach to efficiency,”⁸⁰ the lack of sustained investment in expanding the city’s waste removal system over the decades that followed meant that by 1942 the town’s 78,000 residents used public latrines that were “thronged with ever-increasing crowds of people” and the Council maintained a fleet of conservancy lorries that were “continuously employed in emptying the pans.”⁸¹ The daily influx of people from surrounding districts into Accra—particularly around commercial districts and markets—meant that some latrines were emptied two or more times per day, a practice that would have to continue until more public latrines were constructed or the sewage system was otherwise improved.⁸² These same densely settled communities, however, afforded little space for the construction of additional public facilities.⁸³

SANITARY DEMOCRACY

In their complaints, African councillors certainly sought to represent the constituencies who elected them, often in protest against the misrepresentations of colonial sanitary and medical officers who constituted the bulk of the “official” membership of the ATC. The more politically radical councillors like Akilagpa Sawyerr regularly questioned the neglect and mismanagement of colonial officers and European officials, and all of the African councillors pushed at various times for the extension of major infrastructure in their communities and demanded that the central government take African concerns seriously through repeated funding requests, petitions, and protests. Particularly in relation to the town’s sewage system, councillors used their positions to advocate both for a comprehensive sewerage scheme and for funding to expand the number of latrines in the town.⁸⁴ These complaints evidenced a limited form of representative democracy.

The “constituencies” that African councillors represented were, in many ways, members of their same socioeconomic class of ratepayers and property owners. Their class position and cosmopolitan aesthetics often complicated questions of representation. Councillors repeatedly called for various forms of public education, which when combined with free access, would help Accra residents learn how best to use “up-to-date and sanitary” public services.⁸⁵ In doing so, they often sought to forestall ATC action against residents and support the success of Council projects. As a barrister himself who sometimes defended residents against the actions of the ATC, Councillor Kitson Mills regularly pushed the medical officer of health and his sanitary inspectors to embrace the possibilities of education rather than “take out summonses indiscriminately against offenders.”⁸⁶ Councillor Kojo Thompson, likewise, argued that “money was scarce, and people had to be educated that it was to their own interest” to listen to the advice of the Council’s technical and medical staff.⁸⁷

To some degree, calls for education were rooted in a desire to make regulatory systems more just. As early as 1894, coastal elites complained that

There is no system of Ethics in any civilized country which would justify in these days punishment for an offence where there was admitted or demonstrated ignorance of the law. A man, in plain words, should not be punished for the breach of law where there is ignorance—involuntary ignorance—of it. Now, without giving into an investigation as to the merits or demerits of this or that principle of morality, or of this or that system of evolutional ethics, it is sufficient for our purpose simply to say that as the Laws of this Colony are not known by all the people in it, those who don’t know then should not be punished for any involuntary breach of them. Look at the thousand and one ordinances of the Colony! Are they known by all the illiterate kings and chiefs? Are they thoroughly understood by the illiterate people of the colony? To say that each of these questions can be answered in the affirmative is to place on record what we know to be false. As a matter of fact, the majority—say without exaggeration 90%—of the people on the Gold Coast have not the slightest conception of the nature of nine tenths of the laws that the authorities pass. And when we look at the Calendar in the Supreme Court, and occasionally at the lists of cases in the District Commissioners Courts, we may well express surprise where the offenders are illiterate and the offence is virtually an infringement of some Ordinance that perhaps was never known.⁸⁸

For these elite critics, education transformed oppressive impositions into a comprehensive set of regulations that generated new publics and a new civic consciousness. Educating the public about new regulations would decrease pressures on the courts. The sanitary regulations that were inscribed in towns, police, and public health ordinance generated “constantly recurring nuisance cases.”⁸⁹ How would people know to obey the law if they did not even know the law existed? Yet the numerous cases in front of the Magistrate’s Court in the 1930s suggested that little had changed in the intervening forty years. Limited representative government—complicated by class politics in coastal towns like Accra—was unable to significantly democratize governance in the town.

Education also often highlighted some of the gaps between Town Council representation and the values and practices of urban residents. In 1934, members of the local press condemned “Health Day”—an educational program that worked with schools to teach children about sanitation—for endangering the health and safety of children. The ensuing debate among ATC members highlighted fundamental differences among the African councillors. Kitson Mills, who had served as a schoolmaster and teacher for over twenty-five years, argued that “there was no better way [than Health Day] in teaching sanitation to the children.”⁹⁰ In siding with the president of the ATC, he set himself apart from both the local press and other elected African councillors. De Graft Johnson argued, however, that “not every parent wished his child to be a ‘scavenger,’ and suggested that the views expressed by Councillor Kitson Mills should not be taken as the opinion of all the people in the country.”⁹¹ In asking children to pick up trash, Kojo Thompson said, “There was the danger of children coming in contact with some infectious disease, and it should not be done.”⁹² These kinds of concerns reflected a flattening of African community interests in ATC policy and action. Councillors themselves expressed concern about how they themselves would fare under the watchful eye of sanitary and building inspectors.⁹³ No one, it appears, was immune.

Figure 1.2. Scenes in Accra, 1955. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra R/2342/8.

The regulatory pressures faced by African councillors and the debates over the relationship between education and governance highlighted the limits of their political power within the Council. Even if they voted as a bloc, elected African councillors remained in the minority and had to convince the “official” members to join them. In the relatively low-stakes Health Day debate, the ATC president demonstrated a willingness to listen to the concerns of African councillors. In matters of personnel, finances, and regulatory policy, however, the “official” members often banded together and used their slight majority against the protests of African members.⁹⁴ The efforts of African councillors were supported by members of social organizations like the Korle Gonno Improvement Society, who petitioned councillors to expand access to public services and agitate for the development of the town.⁹⁵ However, the broader “urban mob,” which included market women and fishermen, asafoatse, and renters had long expressed skepticism about the leadership and priorities of African councillors. As Parker notes, “Notions of urban improvement shared by the government and indigenous intelligentsia were not necessarily endorsed by the townspeople of Accra.”⁹⁶ Just weeks before the Municipal Councils Ordinance (MCO) was announced by Governor Gordon Guggisberg at the opening of the capital’s new Selwyn Market in 1923—a symbol of the new system of municipal governance—a large group of angry market women marched on Christiansborg Castle (the seat of British colonial government) to protest their forced removal from the old Salaga Market. “Youngmen” (asafoatsemei) also mobilized to protest the 1923–1924 Municipal Councils Ordinance. New forms of taxation introduced by the ordinance, the asafoatsemei argued, were an excessive burden on town residents who could not afford to pay more to the ATC. In the absence of more concrete improvements in the development of the town and its public infrastructure, the MCO seemed like a money grab orchestrated by elite leaders in collusion with Governor Guggisberg’s administration.⁹⁷

Their actions were also constrained by the financial realities of the Town Council. Ratepayers, African councillors agreed, deserved to see improvements to the town based on their contribution to the purse. However, those rates proved insufficient in the face of the high cost of major infrastructure works and other maintenance and public services. The creation of the Town Council had been motivated by a desire to decentralize responsibility for sanitation and infrastructural development and create new cultures of investment and democratic governance in the towns of the colony. The extension of a sewer system would dramatically expand the financial burdens on the Town Council, which would be expected to cover the cost of caretaking, upkeep, lighting, toilet paper, and disinfectants.⁹⁸ These additional expenses seemed impossible, given that in 1913, the Town Council could not even afford to pay water rates for existing buildings. Even Governor Clifford noted, “As regards the fixing of meters, and payments by the Town Council . . . I may point out that the revenues of the Town Council of Accra, even at the present time, are insufficient to defray the cost of more than a small part of the duties which should properly be assigned to it, although they are annually supplemented by a substantial grant-in-aid from Government. Any payment for water by the Town Council, therefore, will be a purely fictitious disbursement, and Government will really be paying itself for that which it is ostensibly selling.”⁹⁹ Impossible financial realities aside, consulting engineers who helped craft the initial plans for the sewerage scheme argued that “it is essential for the economical administration of the Water Works that water used for flushing purposes must be charged against the Department using it.”¹⁰⁰ In balancing the technical requirements and financial obligations for public infrastructure with models of responsible local governance and sustainability, government leaders often relegated public interest to the background. Well into the 1940s, the Council was negotiating with the governor’s office and other central government institutions like the Public Works Department over who should pay for the infrastructure and maintenance of the town. Even as protesters argued that rates placed an unreasonable financial burden on town residents, the ATC found itself without sufficient funds to execute even minor projects like latrine construction, which could alleviate some of the most pressing sanitary concerns, without appealing for funds from the governor’s office or negotiating with the director of public works for shared responsibility. Despite their legally mandated responsibilities for sanitation in the town, expenditures on sanitation in the 1930s accounted for 20–24 percent of the total Town Council budget.¹⁰¹ That amount, however, was paltry considering the costs of necessary construction and maintenance. The construction of five new pan latrines in 1933 cost £2,385—the equivalent of nearly 25 percent of the ATC’s sanitation budget for the 1932–1933 fiscal year.¹⁰² As the finances of the colony grew tighter, the colonial officials proved increasingly resistant to extend these grants and loans. In reconsidering the sewerage scheme in 1942, government officials argued that “we can agree with the Governor that the Accra Town Council should accept responsibility for the scheme. The proposed loan of £8,000 from Govt with interest at 2 1/2% is to be repayed by annuities over 15 years. The Council will presumably recover this from the rates.”¹⁰³ By 1942, however, the rates were used to fund an increasingly wide range of public infrastructural needs: from markets and roads to bus systems and public lighting. Many larger and more essential projects—like the sewerage scheme—simply languished for want of funds, while the ATC focused its resources on more feasible projects like markets and bus routes.

The position of African members was complicated by both the Town Council’s sanitary responsibilities—laid out in the Town Councils Ordinance of 1894 and updated multiple times in the decades that followed¹⁰⁴—and the persistent failure of government to fund and execute a water carriage sewage system. Despite regular pleas about the urgency of a sewerage scheme and complaints about the state of the Korle Lagoon from all levels, including multiple governors, government plans to build sewage infrastructure were repeatedly adopted and abandoned throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as officials cited the depressions and World Wars I and II, which limited available funds. And yet major infrastructure works, including a major road and rail building project, the extension of the water works, and the construction of Takoradi Harbor continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s, funded by loans that were repaid out of the colony’s annual surplus. Phased projects like the sewerage scheme fell by the wayside: the subject of reoccurring hopes and cynical fears about the colony’s future and evidence of the failures of African residents to adjust to the demands of modern urban life. “Good enough for now” proved to be an inefficient planning strategy in light of the financial difficulties soon facing both the colony and the rapidly growing city.

As Grace notes, the incompleteness of colonial infrastructural systems and this “make do” attitude had enormous consequences for Africans, even when they did embrace new infrastructural systems like sewerage and sanitation. In the absence of “parallel investments in centralized (or bundled) sanitation infrastructure to move and process excrement, the latrine systems adopted throughout the system created a ‘subterranean shitscape’ that produced ‘seepage and toxicity.’”¹⁰⁵ This simultaneous fetishization of waste and unwillingness to invest in waste removal was a symptom of much more deeply rooted colonial expectations for African cities like Accra as timeless and inherently diseased and decaying. As Flood noted in 1929, the proposals for a sewerage system accepted in 1913 were “in principle as suitable for application to modern Accra as they were sixteen years ago.”¹⁰⁶ Official debates about whether Africans could responsibly operate flushing latrines without waste and calls for water regulators and official latrine operators highlighted the degree to which these assumptions were not just spatial but mapped onto the bodies of town residents.¹⁰⁷ Public health officials often blamed this toxicity on “misuse or a pathological form of African urbanization” when it reality it was “an austere colonial technology working as designed.”¹⁰⁸

As William Bissell notes, “Colonial designs on the city, rather than successfully reworking space, repeatedly failed to rationalize the urban sphere. These schemes, sponsored by an overextended and disjunctive state apparatus, foundered precisely in the gap between intention and implementation, hindered by internal disarray as well as the incapacity of legal and bureaucratic instruments to reorder to totality of the everyday.”¹⁰⁹ Bissell rightly argues that this bureaucratic disarray had profound consequences for African residents in the colonial city.¹¹⁰ Sanitation was political, social, and profoundly personal, and the failed struggles in implementing effective sanitations policies or building new infrastructural systems served as a legal justification for colonial regulatory intervention into the private spaces of everyday life among African residents. Sanitation, in other words, was a “racializing technology that affixed growing amounts of shit to African residences.”¹¹¹

SANITARY MOBILITY

In technocratic and governance circles, debates about sewage often went hand-in-hand with conversations about roads. The same drains that would ultimately carry waterborne sewage for waste disposal also played a central role in the maintenance of streets and the mitigation of flooding. Proper road drainage, however, also protected investments in road construction. Heavy rains on poorly drained roads destroyed road surfaces and generated constant complaints. Responsibility for the construction and maintenance of roads, however, was the product of ongoing negotiation between British colonial officials like the director of public works and the members of the ATC. While early roads were heavily subsidized by the governor’s office, that began to change in the 1930s. In 1931, the president of the ATC reported to members that the grant-in-aid they received from the government had been reduced by £1,000 and the Council’s annual contribution to the government for the maintenance of town roads would be increased by £200.¹¹² If the Public Works Department was responsible for constructing roads, the cost of maintenance increasingly fell on the ATC, particularly as the Council expanded into new forms revenue generation like the Municipal Bus Service.¹¹³ Revenue from public services supplemented the rates collected from property owners and increased the resources available for public works in the town.

In urging the Town Council to take greater responsibility for the construction and maintenance of town roads in the 1930s, the colonial government evidenced a clear shift in the financial prospects of the Gold Coast. The economic boom of the late 1910s produced excess revenue that was redirected to infrastructural development across the colony. Roads had occupied a prominent place in Governor Gordon Guggisberg’s Ten-Year Development Plan, inaugurated in 1919. By the end of his term in 1927, Guggisberg had tripled the road mileage in the colony.¹¹⁴ Accra clearly benefited from these investments. Between 1913 and 1930, the government engaged in a consistent program of constructing main and subsidiary surface drains and making up new roads in Accra.¹¹⁵ Roads connected the town to other centers of trade, particularly in the cocoa-growing regions that lay to the north and east. But road construction also played a central role in the modernization of the town as a colonial capital and commercial hub. While much of the early investment was made in areas of concentrated European settlement or governmental and commercial activity, road construction was also part of broader plans to decongest the city center and lay out new neighborhoods for African residents across the socioeconomic spectrum. In the early 1920s, the Public Works Department introduced tarmac road construction to Accra, which produced more durable road surfaces, along with extensive road drainage systems. These new investments simultaneously created more reliable infrastructure and greater responsibility for maintenance and upkeep. “If the sealing coat [on tarmac roads] is allowed to break up,” the director of public works argued, “the road is doomed and entire reconstruction is the only remedy.”¹¹⁶

With the global depression in 1929, however, revenue-fueled infrastructural development collapsed just as quickly as it had grown. The regular program of road construction, drainage, and maintenance was shut down in 1930 due to a shortage of funds.¹¹⁷ In the estimates for 1932–1933, the director of public works acknowledged that increased traffic and delayed maintenance meant that “the entire reconstruction of some of the most highly trafficked streets must be undertaken an early date.”¹¹⁸ However, decreased revenue meant that large-scale reconstruction was now impossible. He focused instead on a small section of road in the elite neighborhood of Christiansborg. Austerity also extended to town planning. When the governor’s attempt to cut expenses from the 1932–1933 budget led to the complete elimination of all funding for the layout of townships, the director of public works argued that “the cutting out of this item will preclude practically all work on Town Planning, as no funds will be available for necessary survey labour and demarcation.”¹¹⁹

While the Town Council was not directly responsible for road construction, these financial decisions had implications for the Council’s work. As early as 1930, Councillor de Graft Johnson noted “the deplorable condition of some of the main streets and roads in Accra” and called for the redirection of funds from the “less important” Labadi-Teshi Road to the roads in Accra itself.¹²⁰ The acting senior public health engineer noted that the construction of roads and drains was the responsibility of the government, but he suggested that the Council should forward proposals and suggestions for town roads for consideration.¹²¹ Early Town Council action focused on areas in middle-class African neighborhoods where councillors had direct experience and investment. In 1931, a yearlong campaign began to pressure the government to complete Boundary Road, which had been completed at either end but was left with a big gap in the middle that often proved dangerous. Councillor Dr. Reindorf had provided land for the road free of charge and had funded its construction himself, and Councillor Kojo Thompson was also building a house along the road and would give the government the land it needed without being compensated.¹²² Councillor Akilagpa Sawyerr echoed the sentiments of other African councillors when he condemned the state of Boundary Road as “disgraceful” and argued that the Council “should raise a protest.”¹²³ Similar protests were raised regarding nearby Castle Road.

The dedication and persistence with which town councillors pursued improvements for Boundary and Castle Roads were certainly influenced by their personal connections to the dangers and inconveniences of undrained, unfinished roads. As elite and powerful property owners, African councillors could afford to give up land for road development, and they had access to power that allowed them to agitate for action. While their privilege directed more attention to the condition of Boundary Road, it did not necessarily produce results. In 1931, the director of public works expressed his sympathies for the Council’s position but reported that all financial provision for surface water drainage had been cut out of the estimates as part of austerity measures.¹²⁴ The situation did not improve in the following year. There was no provision made for roads in the estimates. Between 1931 and 1933, the municipal engineer proposed improvements to Boundary and Castle Roads three times, only to find his proposals denied.¹²⁵

Motivated in part by petitions and protests from constituents and emboldened by public pressure on the governor’s office, the Town Council did ultimately expand its efforts and attention related to road construction and drainage. Both official and unofficial members of the Council raised concerns about the condition of town roads. The medical officer of health (MOH) reported in 1934 that “many of the streets in Accra were in very shocking state of disrepair.” Road conditions worsened significantly in heavy rains when “some of these streets were little less than quagmires” and “there were many depressions full of liquid mud which was splashed on pedestrians by motor vehicles.”¹²⁶ The MOH named twenty-four individual streets in addition to all of the streets in Adabraka. Councillor Kitson Mills insisted on adding all of the streets of Korle Gonno to the list. It seemed like the entire town was suffering from deteriorating roads and untamed water.

Motivated to act, the ATC formed a subcommittee in 1934 that sought to “investigate the condition of certain roads in Accra.”¹²⁷ In intensifying their action, members of the ATC were responding to both their legislative responsibilities to provide for the sanitation of the town, their own interests in the welfare and infrastructure of the town, and increasing pressure from town residents to see meaningful development of town infrastructure in exchange for their taxes. This sort of public pressure was far from unusual; residents regularly consulted with their ATC representatives, encouraging them to intervene in disputes, clarify policy, advocate for legal rights, and complain about a lack of infrastructural investment. The decline in government funding, evidenced throughout the 1930s, brought renewed protests about the pace of urban development. The depression that inspired austerity in government budgets also impacted the incomes of Accra residents who saw taxes as an extraordinary burden during a time of financial hardship. Residents were indignant about the government’s piecemeal approach to development in the city.

Figure 1.3. Images captured decades later in the Old Town illustrate the same kinds of underdevelopment and uneven development debated by Accra residents and officials in the colonial period. Various Places in Accra, 1975. Photograph by Ben Kwakye. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra PS/1834/5.

Residents also complained about sewage, as well as the insalubrious effect it had on their daily life and work. Roads, however, generated new forms of protest, particularly as poor drainage put homes at risk and made physical mobility difficult in the city. Some of those complaints appear in the archives as generalized appeals from African councillors like Kitson Mills who pointed out that people living in areas like Korle Gono, which had suffered particular infrastructural neglect, “were taxpayers also, and they should have the same degree of attention as paid to other parts of the town.”¹²⁸ Other residents, however, took their complaints directly to the government, demanding immediate improvements. When residents of Kofi Oku Road in Jamestown found themselves left out of neighborhood improvements in 1932, they wrote to the director of public works (DPW):

We the undersigned, owners and occupiers of houses in Kofi Oku Road in James Town, beg to invite your attention to the condition of this road which has apparently escaped the notice of those responsible for its maintenance. The importance of the Road can be appreciated from the fact that it runs from the Horse Road near the Palladium to the London Market; but for a number of years no repairs whatever have been done to it and at every rainy season old cavities are deepened while new ones are cut and the road has consequently become dangerous not only to pedestrians but also to vehicles especially at night. The Road also boasts of a number of modern buildings and a few motor vehicle owners but the approaches to some of the houses, particularly those on the West of the Road are rendered increasingly dangerous year by year by surface rain water owing to the absence of proper drainage and it is feared that the safety of the houses themselves is likely to be affected. We respectfully ask therefore that this road be now given the attention it deserves; if it cannot this year be made a tarmetted street with side gutters, it should at least be made safe for those who use it. A year or two ago we were glad to notice the improvement to the neighboring Adedenkpo Road and we expected that a similar improvement would be extended to Kofi Oku Road but we were disappointed. We hope however that this our petition will receive favorable consideration for which we would assure you of our deep gratitude in advance. We respectfully invite inspection by a representative of your Department and, if you would let us know the time of his visit, two or three of us would be glad to meet him on the spot to explain the matter more clearly.¹²⁹

In passing off the petition to the acting colonial secretary, the DPW noted that Kofi Oku Road had fallen between the cracks of responsibility and authority in colonial governance. The road had been laid out as part of urban redevelopment plans, and individuals had built homes, encouraged by government officials who were eager to decongest the older districts of Jamestown and encourage residents to relocate to new, planned neighborhoods. Plans, however, did not guarantee funding. The road had never been properly constructed or drained, and Public Works Office estimates for the year only accounted for the maintenance of already constructed town roads. As a result, no one seemed to be responsible for Kofi Oku Road. Expressing frustration over both the financial limitations of his office and the protest of town residents, the DPW argued that “having laid out a system of town roads, and allowed people to build on these roads, I suggest that it is not unreasonable for the people who build to expect the Government to maintain the road surfaces in passable condition, even though the roads have not been properly made up and drained.”¹³⁰ Kofi Oku Road, described by the executive engineer in 1932 as “badly scoured and cut up by water courses” was still on a list of deteriorated roads in 1935, noted as “not drained or carriage-way formed.”¹³¹

While the petitioners from Kofi Oku Road did not include Town Council members, the language of their petition and their representation by Mr. James Godfrey Tetteh O’Baka Torto, MBE, a recognized public servant who had connections across British West Africa, suggest that they were well-positioned and well-resourced residents of Accra. If their relative class position got them a hearing with the governor, it did not ultimately change the outcome. Merchants, likewise, sought to use their position within the colony to agitate for infrastructural investment. In 1935, the Rumball Street Trading Company wrote to the municipal engineer of the ATC highlighting the absurdity of prevailing maintenance policy:

Passing along High Street today, the undersigned saw a squad of PWD [Public Works Department] repairers getting ready to do further work on a road surface which is already in almost perfect condition. Such very shallow declivities as they are apparently leveling off would contain little or no water after the heaviest rain. Orgle Street, as you already know, is a long expanse of humps and hollows which becomes an area of stinking quagmires after rainfall. In the Minutes of the Town Council Meeting held 14th May last, the MOH stressed the danger to public health arising from street pools in the rainy season, and whilst private individuals can be prosecuted for harbouring mosquito larvae on their premises, the authorities responsible for road maintenance are outside the law. Such a situation could be considered Gilbertian were it not such a serious matter. We have today had a conversation with Mr. Sutherland, and have his assurance that he is doing everything possible to direct early attention to the needs of Orgle Street.¹³²

The proprietors of the Rumball Trading Company sought to leverage their position as business leaders to agitate for more immediate action. They wrote to the municipal engineer and spoke to the ATC president numerous times over the course of several months. In doing so, they argued that “quite apart from considerations of health, the residents of Orgle Street have equal rights with those more fortunate rate-payers who have houses and stores in those thoroughfares which are blessed with constant attention by levelling and tar-spraying squads.”¹³³ Orgle Street was, indeed, added to the long list of town roads and was reported to the governor as needing critical attention. Despite having unanimous support from Accra officials, the government took no action. The Rumball Trading Company took their complaints a step further, writing directly to the governor that “the rights of ratepayers are secondary to the considerations of health, and we do assure you that in the rainy season, Orgle Street is a menace to the entire town, being a vast area of breeding pools for mosquito larvae.”¹³⁴ Much like Kofi Oku Road, Orgle Street seemed to slip between the policies and plans of government infrastructural development. Not yet “made up,” the street was not eligible for maintenance.

Given the persistent difficulties posed by the Depression, colonial officials saw complaints from both Accra residents and Town Council members as both frustrating and annoying. Viewed within the broader system of indirect rule, the requests of the Town Council seemed presumptuous to some. “Accra characteristically asks for more money for a purely local service,” wrote one official, “while the unfortunate up-country chiefs nowadays maintain long stretches of trade-road and consider themselves lucky if they get 5/- per mile dues for doing so.”¹³⁵ Others complained that “Accra is very lucky to have had so much money spent on it, and the Town Council should be reminded of what they have authority do if they so wish. Until the country is better off financially people must be content to be splashed occasionally by passing lorries!”¹³⁶ These comments seemed to reverse a discourse of improvement, modernization, and sanitation that had been the norm in Accra for decades. At the very least, colonial officials used technicalities of categorization to pass off responsibility to the Town Council. As the DPW noted, because Orgle Street had not yet been constructed, the government could not be accused of neglecting maintenance. If the ATC wanted to see improvements, they had to arrange for residents to give property free of charge for the widening of the street. In the meantime, he argued, “If this street is so full of holes which holds storm water and breed mosquitoes, I suggest the ATC might dump ashes from their incinerator to level up the ground.”¹³⁷

The DPW’s dismissive suggestions in response to the situation in Orgle Street suggest that this particular case had become a significant annoyance to central government officials. Only a few years earlier, the DPW had characterized the decreased investment in roads as a temporary setback in light of economic challenges. “It must be realized,” he argued in 1931, “that a yearly programme of reconstruction, in future, will have to be provided for.”¹³⁸ In response to many other ATC proposals for road maintenance or construction, he regularly offered to construct the road if the ATC would construct the drains¹³⁹—a compromise that allowed the road program to continue, even if the pace remained slow. For town residents, like those on Kofi Oku and Orgle Streets, however, these delays were “disgraceful.”¹⁴⁰ Residents could not reach their homes or use their motor vehicles, their houses flooded in heavy rains, and they risked illness and injury on the streets of the town.

Targeted investment meant that, while some would be frustrated by a lack of progress, other residents would see their protests and petitions finally paying off. Throughout the mid-1930s the Public Works Department did continue to work on a pared-down program of road construction. Most of the resources for the reconstruction of roads were focused on Christiansborg, but the government also dedicated significant energy and investment to constructing a road to the new cemetery, opened in 1920, that would connect Hansen Road to the Ring Road. Introduced as early as 1933, the question of a new cemetery road was of pressing interest to all residents in Accra.¹⁴¹ The long distances mourners had to walk to reach the new cemetery constituted a “hardship and inconvenience.”¹⁴² “Looking at it from the African point of view,” Councillor Akilagpa Sawyerr argued, “it seemed to him that African feeling regarding their dead should be considered. He had known of cases where many of the people got sick after walking to the Cemetery and back.”¹⁴³ While not strictly a question of drainage, African councillors and residents alike considered the road a safety issue, both due to the dangers of flooding on the existing path and the danger that mourners would have to face as they passed on more congested town roads to reach the cemetery.¹⁴⁴ Sawyerr’s comments also suggested that the circuitous routes also posed spiritual danger to mourners. European councillors, however, struggled to understand why the cemetery road was so important. The president of the ATC noted that the estimated £6,000 cost could supply Labadi with electric light, fund the construction of a moderately sized town hall, or contribute to decongestion efforts in the old quarters of the town.¹⁴⁵ But, with African councillors insisting on urgency of the matter and residents relaying “many complaints and much dissatisfaction”¹⁴⁶ to their representatives, government agreed to support the construction of the road (i.e., providing culverts and gravel) as long as the Town Council would use ashes from the incinerator to form banks to keep the road above the lagoon flood level.¹⁴⁷ While the new road was ultimately celebrated, the long process of negotiation took a toll on everyone. As Akilagpa Sawyerr noted as construction on the new road was negotiated, “The feeling of the community on the matter was very strong indeed. European members of the Council could not know how much elected members were worried by the people with this question.”¹⁴⁸ The Town Council, as both the representatives of colonial power in the town and the mouthpiece of its residents, found itself forced to compromise—as with the sewage system—in fulfilling their responsibilities. They were both agents and impediments in the town’s development.

CONCLUSION

The politics of water and waste—and the sanitary infrastructures, both physical and regulatory—that shaped politics in twentieth-century Accra were marked by highly contested processes, both within and outside of colonial governance structures. As “the built forms around which publics thicken,”¹⁴⁹ sanitary infrastructures certainly generated new debate about the purpose and responsibility of the state, the meaning of representation and self-governance, and the visions for urban governance and city life in Accra. This was in part by design; urban governance was, in the minds of British colonial officials, both a means to achieve sanitary goals and a way to decentralize or devolve responsibility for the construction and maintenance of the town onto African residents. Accra municipal government was formed as (and remained) a sanitary state throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Municipal revenue funded the salaries of sanitary inspectors, engineers, and other public health officials. As we shall see, urban development and colonial administration was in many ways driven by sanitary priorities—from the planning of the town to the organization of the economy. However, sanitary politics also highlighted the persistent ambiguities of colonial rule.

In creating and maintaining incoherent, inconsistent, unreliable, and often overlapping structures of authority in the town, colonial officials often blurred boundaries of responsibility and complicated the organization of town affairs. In part, as many town residents argued, this confusion evidenced a broad-based incompetence within the colonial administration, exacerbated by constantly changing personnel. For African contemporaries and present-day scholars alike, this incompetence highlighted the failure of a colonial state that never could realize its grandiose visions of “civilization” in model towns like Accra. As one (possibly sarcastic) writer argued

Four or Five Hundred Years’ contact with the Continent of Europe ought to give us at the present day, at least, one model Town, one Mecca, to which Fantis, Twis and Gas may go to for inspiration, instruction and improvement in the materialities of life. In this respect, the Government has been an egregious failure; the Authorities have come sadly short of the glories of civilization. With all their big talk of Sanitary Inspection and Mosquito expeditions, with all the fat emoluments connected with these high-sounding terms, with all the rigorous Sanitary precautions vigorously applied and carried out by an army of inspectors of all grades and colour, even Accra, the modern capital of the Colony is still full of filth and caked with dirt such as may not be found in other places away from the natural centre of light and progress. The whole system pursued in administering the Government of this Colony requires overhauling; the policy in vogue is too extravagant for a backward country like the Gold Coast and we look up confidently to His Excellency with his fine sense of proportion and moral fitness of things generally to put matters right for all concerned.¹⁵⁰

For some, this was a question of responsibility. Having extracted taxes and other forms of wealth from the colony for many years, these residents argued that the British administration should be financially responsible for constructing infrastructure in the town before it attempted to hand over maintenance and governance to local authorities.¹⁵¹ For still others, inadequate sanitary infrastructure and persistent underinvestment in African quarters of the town evinced an underlying infrastructural segregation, driven by underdevelopment, through which European residents were the primary beneficiaries of investment drawn from African taxation.¹⁵²

African leaders in Accra and other Gold Coast towns, however, questioned whether all people in the town did or should share that burden equally. If British administrators insisted on maintaining a majority of “official” members—and thus ultimate authority—in town governance, many residents argued that they and they alone were responsible for the mismanagement of sanitation in the town, having “failed to discharge efficiently.”¹⁵³ Town councillors, members of the Legislative Council, and journalists who complained about the hypocrisy of colonial urban governance and the inadequacies of indirect rule recognized what many scholars have not. The seeming “failure” of regulation and implementation was not the result of mismanagement; it was written into the very structures of urban governance. Writing and protesting actively in front of British officials, African residents made clear the consequences of urban underinvestment and oppressive, capricious regulation. In refusing to productively and proactively respond to public complaints, Town Council leaders and British officials transformed infrastructural questions into a debate about African rights to the city and its resources, in which the use of infrastructure itself was a potential violation that required regulation, policing, and punishment.

As the local arm of colonial bureaucracy in the city, the ATC implemented and enforced the regulatory visions of the British colonial state, and its “official” majority ensured that state interests would remain at the center of urban governance. However, the Town Council also created important new spheres of political debate and contestation. Through their elected town councillors, in the pages of newspapers, in petitions to government officials, and on the streets in protest, African residents helped shape this infrastructural politics in important ways. In some cases, that meant resisting government plans altogether, including protests against excessive prosecution, taxation, and fines. More often, however, residents protested to increase access to infrastructure and more evenly distribute investment in the colonial capital. As one resident complained in 1900:

To send scavengers at five in the mornings to lurk about for the apprehension of people who may be throwing nuisance at places where prisoners also may be seen ditto-ing, or at the dusk of the evening for the “capturing” of poor strangers who may not even be committing any nuisance, to huddle poor innocent boys, girls, men and women before His Worship’s Magisterial bench for throwing water here and there as the scavengers somewhere allege, or for not sweeping their gates, when they will be muleted in fines ranging from five shillings to thirty shillings and more, to bury at times the seasoned fish of some poor women at the beach, may be considered fair means of giving us a clean, healthy Town, whereas in our humble opinion, to give us a clean, well-swept and watered streets, with clean drains and gutters, to have the outskirts of the Town well cleaned, and not made reservoirs of, for what dirt the Scavengers may collect from the Town, and from certain firms, to give us decent latrines far away from the Town and not nearly in the Town, to give us good water to drink, and not the wretched wells we see about, with other good things, and the kind of attention such a subject demands at the hands of the Authorities of which they are very well acquainted, may go some way to improve the sanitation of this place, which is one of the needs of the hour.¹⁵⁴

Colonial officials who invoked “public health” as a justification for these changes were increasingly met with alternative questions of public interest—whose health was being protected? Why? Who was paying for it? Who was deciding? These issues were fundamental questions of the meaning and practice of governance in the colonial capital. Asking them did not guarantee an answer, however. Even as the state began to increase investments in the 1930s and 1940s, it was increasingly clear that state power lay not in big infrastructural projects or in their ability to physically remake the town but rather in the power and willingness to regulate and prosecute. In policing and prosecuting African behavior in both public and private spaces, the Town Council and other regulatory bodies consistently placed responsibility for the unsanitary state of the town on African residents. Backed by the power of the police and the courts, the regulation and enforcement of sanitary measures marginalized and criminalized African behaviors and bodies in new ways and enshrined new forms of state authority over both public and private space.