ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WAS INITIALLY IMAGINED very differently. But, like much else over the last several years, plans changed. There were pragmatic realities—the inability to travel due to the quarantine and ongoing health risks that interrupted research, the challenges of my own health and the shifting burdens of work and care that forced a rebalancing of priorities—but there were also changing intellectual commitments. I began writing this book in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, which took place every day for weeks just blocks from our house in Detroit, and I am finishing it in the midst of turmoil within two different related professional associations over what our responsibilities should be as historians and as (particularly white) scholars of Africa. This book is, in many ways, both a conscious and unconscious response to these events. My own position on these issues is not a secret and would probably come as no surprise to people reading this book. I came to history out of a curiosity about the why behind the way of things, and I believe strongly that history can be a powerful tool to inform present debates and craft more just futures. Understanding the historical roots of our assumptions and using the historian’s tools and skills to lay bare the production of systemic inequality and structural violence is, I believe, not only possible through historical research but also responsible. Being honest about some of the more craven motivations of historical actors—even as we acknowledge their complexity and resist the temptation to reduce people to either villains or heroes—can be a radical act, but it doesn’t have to be. It might have radical implications all the same.

In this book, I seek to responsibly deploy historical methodologies, to ask different kinds of questions through the embrace of what I often refer to as “rigorous interdisciplinarity,” and to take seriously what people said and did on their own terms. In doing so, however, I think we come to some conclusions with potentially significant consequences for the way we do our work and the way we live. But rather than being intimidating or negative, I see this as an opportunity, particularly now, to translate historical research for new audiences of practitioners and policymakers who could meaningfully disrupt patterns of inequality and violence and imagine new alternatives. It is also an opportunity to stand with communities as they fight for access and opportunity and to transform the ways we teach in order to empower our students to ask questions rather than make assumptions about the world they live in.

I am in this place at this time because of many people. My grandparents taught me to always respect the dignity of others. I learned from amazing and committed scholars at Denison University who challenged me and gave me the tools to look at the world in new, interdisciplinary ways; to never be content with received wisdom; and to think more carefully about what it means to “do good” and “be good.” At Indiana University I witnessed John Hanson’s excellent example of what it means to be a principled scholar and administrator and was fortunate to learn alongside colleagues who also embraced those lessons and who continue to inspire me. At Goshen College I worked with colleagues and students who showed me what it could mean to be active scholars in and for the world, not just of it. At Wayne State I met a number of scholars (faculty, staff, and students) who sought to use their knowledge, skill, and privilege in service of the communities around them as part of movements that sought equity and justice. In Detroit I learned from extraordinary community organizers, entrepreneurs, practitioners, and social movement leaders who understood that passion for and connection to their community was a strength rather than a liability in achieving transformational change; they were never afraid to challenge the status quo and understood that the world’s problems (and possible solutions to these problems) were complicated. They showed me what hard work looked like and generously embraced opportunities for collaboration. In Accra, I was inspired by the many entrepreneurs, activists, artists, educators, and creatives who are imagining an alternative world for themselves and their communities, and for my friends in the La Drivers Union who continue to remind people of the history, dignity, and creativity of this kind of work. And in the broader scholarly community, a huge network of dedicated teachers and scholars across a wide range of fields showed me what it meant to be an ethical, engaged, compassionate, and responsible teacher-scholar. I am particularly grateful to my friend T. J. Tallie who always challenges me to be better in every way and who has taught me so much about what it means to stand up and stand out (but also, sometimes, stand back or stand aside).

In many ways, this book has grown out of the work I did in Ghana on the Go. That book—and the work of other scholars in the rapidly growing fields of African technology studies, infrastructure studies, and mobility studies—created opportunities I could never have imagined and put me in conversation with a dynamic group of scholars around the world—but particularly on the continent. I am constantly inspired by the work of young researchers in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, and elsewhere who are transforming their fields, and I look forward to following their lead. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Journal of Transport History, and to colleagues like Baz Lecocq, Dmitri van den Berselaar, Samuel Ntewusu, Andreas Greiner, Njogu Morgan, and Ruth Oldenziel who have organized workshops that brought together these diverse groups of scholars in new ways. I am honored that you invited me to join you in that work. It has been extremely gratifying to see this field grow and challenge long-held scholarly assumptions about the role of technology, infrastructure, and mobility in the world. Josh Grace has long been my intellectual partner-in-crime. We’ll probably never be done talking about cars. I have learned so much being in conversation with him and am grateful for the warm welcome and friendship that he, Bre, Si, and Benny always provide.

Making an African City, however, stands on its own and has been profoundly influenced by the work of our interdisciplinary, internationally collaborative research group on DIY Urbanism in African Cities. Steve Marr and I met many, many years ago on a small panel at the ASA where he presented an extraordinary paper on Detroit and Lagos, and we struck up a collaboration that has grown in totally unexpected ways. Thanks to support from STINT and FORMAS, our research group has run workshops in Sweden, Nigeria, and Malawi that brought together highly diverse groups of scholars, community members, practitioners, and policymakers to think about what we learn when we place the actions and innovations of communities labeled as “informal” at the center of policy debates and development plans. Those conversations and the opportunity to work with students in Malawi, Ghana, and Detroit have been hugely influential on my thinking in this book, and I am grateful for everyone in these workshops who have been willing to think through this work with us. I am also grateful to Patience Mususa, Jonathan Makuwire, Martin Murray, Christina Rodrigues, Marwa Dabieh, and other members of the group for taking the lead in making these events possible.

In the pre-pandemic times, Laura Fair, Nate Plageman, Caleb Owen, Josh Grace, and Waseem Bin-Kasim agreed to stir up some good trouble with me at the Urban History Association Conference. Ellen Bassett graciously created a forum in which to think about the book’s arguments about urban planning and infrastructure at the University of Virginia along with Josh Grace and Brad Weiss. Dmitri van den Berselaar, Baz Lecocq, and Andreas Eckert welcomed me to Berlin to present at re:Work even though my connection to labor history was increasingly tenuous. Numerous invited talks at SOAS, Indiana University, University of Witwatersrand’s African Center for the Study of the United States, University of Basel, University of Leipzig, University of Michigan, University of Bremen, and Yale University have helped me crystallize the arguments of this book in important ways. Deborah Pellow invited me to contribute to a new Africa and Urban Anthropology volume that gave me an opportunity to think about the broader story I was trying to tell in this book and what it meant to do an ethnography of the colonial state as a historian. Steve Marr and Patience Mususa invited me to give a talk and edited a special issue of Urban Forum and a book on DIY Urbanism in Africa that helped me think about sanitation. Lauren Morris Maclean gave me an opportunity to think about how the pandemic had changed this work. Tony Yeboah and Nate Plageman helped me write about these issues for public audiences in the midst of the pandemic. Victoria Okoye and Joseph Frimpong helped me think about doing work “in conversation” and push the boundaries of what traditional journal publishing looks like. Carly Goodman invited me to think about the implications of this in light of the real and ongoing challenges of the pandemic in a very public way. Juliet Sakyi-Ansah invited me to participate in her extraordinary TAP Narratives project and do an Instagram takeover that expanded the audience of this work to engage with practitioners in new ways. Norman Aselmeyer and Avner Ofrath convened a fantastic conference on urban conflict and space in Bremen. Kim Yi Dionne and Enoch Osei Koduah invited me to participate in podcast conversations. Steve Marr and I worked with Carl Nightingale to convene a “Dream Conversation,” jointly hosted by our African Urban Dynamics Collaborative Research Group (AEGIS) and the Global Urban History Project, about urban theory from the Global South, and I continue to be inspired by the work presented by participants Prince Guma, Anwesha Ghosh, Wangui Kimari, Rafael Soares Gonçalves, and Abdou Maliq Simone. Michelle Moyd and Ebony Coletu were virtual writing group partners who helped me over the crucial hurdle of the first chapter. Gabrielle Hecht, Bianca Murillo, T. J. Tallie, and Richard Rathbone read sections of the book toward the end and provided encouragement and advice. All of these opportunities to think and write and receive feedback (and many other conference presentations) helped me along the journey to this final product.

This book brings together much of this work over the last six years. A portion of chapter 1 was published in a special issue on climate change adaptability in Urban Forum, edited by Steve Marr and Patience Mususa. Small sections of chapter 3 were published in the edited volume Africa and Urban Anthropology, edited by Deborah Pellow and Suzanne Scheld. A version of chapter 4 was published in a special issue of Technology and Culture, edited by Laura Ann Twagira. A portion of the conclusion will be published in the edited volume DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice, edited by Steve Marr and Patience Mususa. I am grateful for the opportunity to revise and re-present them here as part of the whole they were always intended to be. I am also endlessly grateful for the kind and supportive reports from two anonymous readers who so enthusiastically endorsed this project and clearly saw what it was trying to do.

This book has also been inextricably bound up with the development of the Accra Wala digital humanities project (www.accrawala.com), and I am grateful to Kwabena Agyare at the Nubuke Foundation, Ato Annan and colleagues at the Foundation of Contemporary Arts Ghana, Will Senyo at the Impact Hub Accra, Joey Chase of Accra We Dey, and colleagues at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology for creating space for conversations about the issues that connect these two projects. I’m incredibly grateful to Adam Perkins for his work on this project. I also appreciate the archival staff at the National Archives of Ghana and the Photographic Archive at Information Services in Accra and the Public Records Office in London for their warm welcome, and I am grateful to Yijie Zou for helping arrange permissions for many of the photographs used in this book. I continue to mourn the loss of my friend Nana Osei Kwadwo, and I hope that I can realize some of the visions we had to creatively engage the public with information about the past.

I am always grateful for the support of friends like T. J. Tallie, Jill Kelly, Emily Burrill, Liz McMahon, Nate Plageman, Jeff Ahlman, Bianca Murillo, Jeanne Marie-Awotwi, Victoria Smith-Madjoub, Joseph Frimpong, Victoria Okoye, Jackie Mougoue, Steve Feld, Martin Murray, Laura Fair, Timothy Burke, Misty Bastian, Naaborko Sackeyfio, Ebony Coletu, Lacy Ferrell, Alice Wiemers, Jonathan Roberts, Jonathan Reynolds, Trevor Getz, Wendy Urban-Mead, Saheed Aderinto, Beth Buggenhagen, Girish Daswani, Corrie Decker, Steven Fabian, Tony Yeboah, Ablie Yabang, Brad Weiss, John Aerni-Flessner, Miles Larmer, Julie Cummiskey, James Yeku, Kuukuwa Manful, Elizabeth Perrill, Tavy Aherne, Alex Lichtenstein, Laura Ann Twagira, Michael Stasik, Dagna Rams, and many, many others who have encouraged and supported me over the last six years and connected me to a broader community at a time when I often felt particularly isolated. I continue to be inspired by Garth Myers, and I’m grateful for his work and his generosity. John Parker’s Making the Town inspired this book in so many ways, and, when I first met John as I was embarking on dissertation research many years ago, he generously encouraged me to explore these issues. He’s been a kind and supportive colleague in the years since then, and his comments and critiques have made many parts of this book better. Richard Rathbone is a dear friend and a wise (despite his own protestations) mentor who has always generously offered both a kind word and counsel when I needed it most. I am a better person and a better scholar for knowing him.

At the height of writing this book, I had the honor to serve as the leadership director for WSU’s Young African Leaders Institute. In the process, I got to know twenty-six extraordinary fellows from across the African continent: Ahmad Abdulsamad, Frieda Abilba, Alaa Abusufian Dafallah, Beza Aseffa, Collins Chepkwony, Daniel Demissie, Dinga-Nyoh Mbekuveh, Josian Darwatoye, Anyse Essoh, Florence Fundi, Innocent Grant, Nozuko Hlwatika, Ange Iliza, Onyekachi Kanu, Hend Kheiralla, Joel Kouadio, Stan Maphosa, Selvana Mootien, Muchinga Mutambo, Aphiwe Nkosimbini, Chidiogo Odunukwe, Mildred Okwako, Sophy Phohleli, Fanta Secka, and Cedric Bationo. They helped me think a great deal more about the implications of this book beyond the academic realm and challenged me to join them in advocating for systemic change and thinking carefully about both the value and limits of technocracy. They were also incredibly inspiring and became dear friends. Supporting them on their leadership journeys also, selfishly, helped me rediscover myself. I’m so grateful for them. Lia Paradis created a Historians’ Happy Hour Zoom during the pandemic, which was often my only social outlet during the long quarantine period, and through whom I have met so many lovely friends, including Brian Crim, Susie Steinbach, Jennifer McNabb, Marjorie Levine-Clark, Gary Darden, and Phil Harling. They all helped keep me sane through the long quarantine and continue to be a support system in person. I also gained new friends through HERS who continue to inspire me to advocate for myself and work to make a better future.

Outside of work, Jacob Krause, Steven Davis, David Fluck, Charles Miller, Jeremy David Tarrant, Sam Schaefer, Norm Weber, Katie Else, Mike Shalast, Adam Geffen, Phil Jessel, Elaine Belz, Paula Styer, Jim and Chris Hooker, Nicole Keller, and Scott and Tina Hunter have provided a rich network of friendship and fun over more than a decade. They make Detroit feel like home. Sylvan Geffen supported the writing of the chapter on sanitation with his potty-training insights about the way that poop and toilets and sewer systems work. I was particularly challenged by his question about “real” versus “imaginary” toilets—it was far more apt than he anticipated. I can trust David and Charles to always have my back and cheer me on. Jacob is my adventure friend—sometimes you need to take a writing break to shop the four-hundred-mile yard sale—but he also sees exactly how hard I work and reminds me to be proud of myself. Katie connected me to some great people and was always game to help imagine and achieve structural change. Scott and Tina always see the best in me and helped me remember home. When I was in graduate school, Sita Ranchod Nilsson told me to keep singing because I needed to have an outlet and an identity outside of work. She was so right. Singing in the choirs of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul has been one of the most important and meaningful experiences of my life. I love being able to watch kids grow up through music and to be part of a kind of beauty that can be life-changing. And I love the family I’ve gained in the process. I appreciate Ashley Flintoff for helping me explore pottery as a new outlet and opportunity for growth, and I love that Ashley, Tim Flintoff, and Sarah Brownlee are always up for a good meal and some time on the water. I am grateful to Cathy Barrette, Elaine Carey, Laurie Lauzon Clabo, Annmarie Caño, Kate McConnell, Meg Mulroney, Bridget Trogden, Sara Kacin, Tonya Whitehead, Fareed Shalhout, Jeff Potoff, Christine Jackson, Loraleigh Keashly, and Jeff Stoltman for their mentorship, friendship, support, and encouragement.

My parents always encourage me, even if they don’t always understand me. They also provided a place to escape in the middle of the pandemic where we could breathe and spend time outside, and they came to save our basement so that I could get back to work. I appreciate that they brag about me, even if I act like it’s embarrassing. Lucy and Ella—my beagles—are probably better known and more widely beloved than I am. They are sometimes annoying and inconvenient but also often sweet. They might not read or speak or even know what’s happening most of the time (because they’re normally sleeping), but they have provided the best kind of distraction in the process of writing this.

The period during which I wrote and edited this book was, without exaggeration, the most difficult of my life. The pandemic certainly didn’t help, but it was so much more than that. Being on the other side of it now puts in sharp relief all the people who believed in me, supported me while I struggled, helped me celebrate small wins, and kept telling me I could do it. I look forward to my own new chapter at Virginia Tech with colleagues who have already been so supportive of this project and my broader body of work.