INTRODUCTION

A FIRE BROKE OUT ON MARCH 31, 1894, in Accra. Burning through the night and into the following day, a large section of the town’s oldest and most heavily populated quarters was destroyed, and several lives were lost. George Robinson, the marquess of Ripon and secretary of state for the colonies, wrote from Downing Street noting “the ready and valuable assistance given by the various public officers mentioned, by the Police, the Hausas, the Volunteer, and the other sections of the Community.”¹ While Ripon expressed “special admiration” for Mr. Stuart, the assistant inspector of the Civil Police, he also recognized that the Native Police Sergeant who saved Mr. Stuart and the Hausa Regimental Sergeant Major who were involved in relief efforts “deserve great praise.”² The diverse community in the new colonial capital came together, it seemed, to ward off further disaster at mutual risk. And yet, in dealing with “the settlement of the various questions arising in connection with the fire,” British officials saw an opening to rebuild the city according to new logics.

In October of that same year the Legislative Council of the Gold Coast passed an ordinance “to provide for the establishment of Town Councils in the towns of the Colony.”³ Popularly known as the “Town Councils Ordinance,” these new rules called for the establishment of town councils with equal numbers of “official” (appointed) and “unofficial” (elected) members. As the colonial capital, Accra was an early adopter of the town council model. Appraisers assessed the annual value of houses in the town and created a series of rates (or taxes) that property owners would pay to support the work of the Council. Those same ratepayers voted in elections to determine who would represent the interests of their quarter on the Council.

While in theory these actions gestured toward the advancement of mutual self-interest and democratic principles, in practice the interventions of 1894 marked the beginning of a new phase of colonial urban governance in Accra, defined by the power of regulation, the interests of capital, and modernist conceptions of order. In physically altering and remaking the built space of the city—not at its margins but at its core—British officials saw the possibility and power of planning and regulation firsthand. Empowered by the new Town Councils Ordinance, the expanding regulations that governed urban life in Accra reshaped the organization of space and the social, cultural, political, and economic practices of daily life for residents.

In many ways, these actions—and the values and goals underpinning them—were not new. British colonial officials had attempted to assert control over spatial order and governance in Accra before 1894, and the implementation of these new plans was far from smooth or self-evident. Officials were unable to translate their rebuilding efforts beyond the fire-damaged areas, and local residents vehemently protested the imposition of new taxes. To some degree the failures and inconsistencies of colonial strategy were a reflection of the underlying contradictions of the colonial project itself. But importantly that resistance was also part of a much longer and more complex history of interaction between Indigenous Ga people and the various “strangers” who had come to settle and trade in their midst over the course of several centuries. Accra, as John Parker argues, was a Ga town long before it became a colonial capital.⁴ Even as the economic and political power of the Ga waned in the late nineteenth century, the political, economic, social, and cultural patterns of urban settlement and urban life in Accra proved difficult to alter. But even if colonial officials were unable to radically remake the city, the regulatory power of new institutions like the Accra Town Council (ATC) and the technocratic and bureaucratic offices of new urban governance did fundamentally shift the power dynamics of the town. New colonial order was inscribed not necessarily in the physical organization or form of the city but rather in the systems, infrastructures, and practices of everyday life—from sanitation and health to trade, mobility, and housing.

This book traces the history of that regulatory expansion and technopolitical contestation in Accra from the early years of colonial consolidation: the late nineteenth century through the beginnings of independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Far from mere words on paper, technocratic rules and regulations—backed by the power of the police and the judicial system—defined the boundaries of colonial order that had real consequences for the daily lives of city residents.⁵ In defining a wide range of perceived “nuisances” as illegal acts and setting out new parameters for acceptable urban living, members of the ATC, and the technocrats and bureaucrats who alternately reinforced and supported their work, sought to enshrine a new order on the growing city. “Order” certainly meant physical planning, as officials struggled to build infrastructure and housing in ways that would serve the needs of a rapidly expanding population. But “order” also implied a new way of living, defined by emerging technocratic fields like engineering, public health, social work, and development inspired by new advances in science and technology. In using regulation and infrastructural development to implement and enforce these new expectations of urban life, ATC members and employees fundamentally reshaped the town, marginalizing long-standing African practices by marking them as “illegal” and targeting development and investment in sectors that aligned with the interests of (often white) expatriate capital. The history of technology and regulation, in other words, is a history of informalization, reinforced by the power of the colonial state and the theories and practices of emerging technocratic fields. But the form and function of this technocratic colonialism was rarely straightforward. Diverse constituencies debated what urban life should look like in Accra. “Official” British representatives sought to balance local demands with policy prescriptives from London. Technocrats sought to reconcile the certainty of formula and theory with on-the-ground realities. African elected representatives sought to balance their own aspirations with the needs and demands of their constituencies. Accra citizens sought to embrace technological advancement and economic opportunity while protecting their own social, cultural, and economic autonomy. These contestations and negotiations constituted a form of “making” that shaped the foundation for a new kind of African city and a new model for technocratic urban governance that continues to resonate today.

GA TOWN

The shifting dynamics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were simultaneously new and yet another manifestation of Accra’s “long history of urbanism,” which was characterized by centuries of cultural exchange, interaction, and adaptation.⁶ Archaeological evidence suggests that the area around contemporary Accra has been inhabited since at least the fourth millennium AD. Guan speakers and Ga-Dangme speakers migrated to the region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Guan likely arrived first, absorbing indigenous Kpeshi populations.⁷ Oral traditions suggest that the Ga-Dangme peoples migrated from the north and east to present-day Accra.⁸ Though archaeologists have not found enough evidence to support an exact point of origin, Ga origin stories point to Yoruba and Dahomey.⁹ Rather than one single migration, it seems more likely that various groups of Ga-speaking immigrants migrated from the eastern interior down the coast and settled among Indigenous Kpeshi peoples beginning in the fifteenth century.¹⁰ The descendants of these original migrants are known as Ga mashie, or “true” Ga (Ganyo kron), as distinguished from other Indigenous peoples and later settlers.¹¹

As early as 1557, the Ga Mashie had established an extensive commercial network, which connected coastal and interior trade. Scattered in decentralized communities across the plains that extend from the Akwapim Hills to the coast, Ga leaders increasingly sought to consolidate their political and economic might to compete with their Guan neighbors for control over trade with Europeans, who arrived at the coast near Accra in the mid-sixteenth century. This consolidation culminated in King Ayite’s founding of the Ga state—Great Accra—on the Ayawaso Hill in the late sixteenth century. The smaller settlement at the coast (at Aprang) was known as “Little Accra.”¹² While the Ga were early and enthusiastic traders, they were less interested in allowing Europeans to build structures in Ga territory. Individual European traders had engaged with the Ga as early as 1557, but the Portuguese did not build a fort in Accra until several years later, and that fort was quickly destroyed in 1576.¹³

Ga traders took advantage of the economic possibilities that Great Accra and the new European trading interest provided. Ga Mashie built on their strengths in farming, fishing, and salt making as well as their new connections with European traders at the coast to expand their control over long-distance trade. As Parker notes, “Salt, preserved fish, and European trade goods from the Ga coastal outposts were exchanged for gold and ivory from the north, while slaves moved in both directions.”¹⁴ While the Portuguese had controlled most of the trade on the Gold Coast from the fifteenth century, European mercantile expansion increased considerably during the seventeenth century. In Accra, European trading companies sought to build forts. After a long negotiation, Ga leadership allowed the Dutch West India Company to build Fort Crèvecoeur (later Ussher Fort) at Little Accra in 1649. King Okaikoi granted the Danish permission to build Fort Christiansborg at Osu, two miles east of Little Accra, in 1661. The Royal Africa Company built James Fort in 1672–73, only a half mile from Fort Crèvecoeur.¹⁵

The settlements around these forts grew alongside the expansion of trade. The area around Fort Crèvecoeur was called Kinka (later Usshertown). James Fort was associated with Nleshi (sometimes Jamestown). Fort Christiansborg was connected to Osu. These three nshonamajii or seaside towns formed the core of the coastal Ga settlements, which also included Teshie, Nungua, Tema, and La,¹⁶ and their residents became powerful middlemen, “mediating a variety of transactions across geographical, political, and cultural frontiers”¹⁷ and providing important connections between the forest and the sea.¹⁸ While European goods played an important role in the economic power and wealth of Accra, it is clear even as late as the 1730s that the Ga maintained tight control over trade at the coast.¹⁹ John Barbot wrote in 1732 that, while the three villages were each “under the cannon of a European fort” that were “reckoned among the best on the coast,” Europeans held little power:

The three European forts have but little authority over the blacks, and serve only to secure the trade, the blacks here being of a temper not to suffer any thing to be imposed on them by Europeans; which, if they should but attempt it, it would certainly prove their own ruin. On the other hand, considering the boldness and warlike disposition of those blacks, it is strange they ever permitted Europeans to build three such good forts so close together: but so great is the power of money, as well in that golden country, as in all other parts of the world, that the late king of Accra, about forty years since, being gained by considerable presents the Danes and Dutch made him, for each of them to build a stone house, to settle a factor in, under the obligation of seven marks of gold yearly for each house.²⁰

While Barbot’s accusations of greed are unconfirmed, Accra’s power was tied directly to its commercial position, which required its leaders to maintain good relations with European traders even while maintaining careful distance. The success of these relationships also attracted the interest of other ambitious states in the region. Beginning in the 1680s and extending through the 1820s, Accra found itself under the control of a succession of Akan states.²¹ The Akwamu attacked the Great Accra settlement and destroyed the centralized Ga state at Ayawaso in 1677.²² The survivors fled to the seven nshonamajii at the coast, where, protected by the canons of the European forts, they continued the resistance until the final conquest in 1680–81. While some Ga leaders fled the region, others remained under the rule of the Akwamu. In 1730, the Akwamu themselves were overthrown by the Akyem and pushed east toward the Volta.²³

Even outside observers like Barbot could see that the conflict and control from outsiders hampered trade in Accra.²⁴ And yet, the skill of Ga traders and politicians, who were adept negotiators, preserved the city’s commercial dominance and relative autonomy against these competing forces. Santi, an African intermediary described by Barbot, was said to “manage the commerce by the king of Nungwa’s appointment”: “He settled the prices of slaves according to their sex and age, as also of the European goods; then hostages being given on both sides, he sends the slaves aboard the ships by degrees, as they are brought down from the inland country to the town, and receives goods from the Europeans in proportion to the number of blacks shipp’d off at each time, and thus a ship is often furnish’d with four or five hundred blacks in a fortnight or three weeks.”²⁵ More than a hundred years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sir Henry Huntley wrote with a similar reverence for James Bannerman, an Afro-European merchant and politician. Bannerman, who Hawthorne described as “the principal merchant here,” transacted “a large business with the natives, who come from two or three hundred miles in the interior, and constantly crowd his yard.”²⁶ Huntley described twenty or thirty people entering into trade with Bannerman at a time, enduring long negotiations marked by patience and what Huntley perceived as an indifference to wasting time.²⁷ While there were significant similarities between the intermediary roles that both Santi and Bannerman played, there were also significant differences that in many ways symbolize the dramatic changes in the social, cultural, economic, and political life of Accra between 1732 and 1845. If Santi, an African, represented the king of Nungua (one of the secondary nshonamajii) in trade negotiations in 1732, by 1845, much of the trade was headquartered in Accra. This mercantilism was controlled by independent African or Afro-European merchants like Bannerman who were connected to Europeans both through their participation in government—Bannerman helped created the Legislative Council, served as a member, and later served as the Lieutenant Governor of the Colony from 1850–1851—and because they were the descendants of early European traders.²⁸ By the mid-nineteenth century, travelers noted several stone houses in Accra and remarked on the educational status and residential grandeur of the city’s merchant class.²⁹ That wealth—fueled by the trade in palm oil, gold, and slaves—enabled merchant families to send their children abroad for education. The merchant class grew to include Sierra Leonean and Brazilian families who migrated to the Gold Coast beginning in the 1830s.³⁰ It also allowed Ga elites to invest in agricultural enterprises, including coffee and cocoa plantations.

Chiefs, too, were often traders—or employed traders—in order to directly benefit from the wealth of Accra’s networks.³¹ But chiefs also benefited from the taxes and fees generated through trade and the various disputes that resulted from it. As early as the eighteenth century, the three townships that constituted coastal Accra “were the political, economic, and sacral epicenter of Ga state and society.”³² Each township, developed around one of the three European forts, was organized into quarters or akutsei and headed by a mantse (“father of the town” or chief). Usshertown (or Kinka) grew up around the Dutch Fort Crèvecoeur (later renamed Ussher Fort) and was divided into four akutsei: Abola, Gbese, Asere, and Otublohum. Jamestown (or Nleshi) was connected to the British James Fort and was divided into three akutsei: Akan-Maji, Sempe, and Alata. Osu had only one akutsei and was connected to Christiansborg Castle.³³ The development of the akutsei reflected what Ato Quayson describes as “the tensions between ethnicity, multiculturalism, and hybridity.”³⁴ Whereas indirect rule and the concomitant invention of tradition, tribalism, and custom (and early ethnographic studies) often reduced ethnic identification to a single origin story, the incorporation of outsiders or strangers played an important role in Ga social and political development and the development of Accra as a “multi-ethnic polity.”³⁵ The prominence of Afro-Europeans in Accra—often with European surnames and foreign connections and, at least before 1857, through their active role in colonial government³⁶—were perhaps the most obvious example of that multiculturalism. However, the Ga also readily incorporated other outsiders—Akwamu and Akan settlers, slaves from Allada, returnees from Brazil, traders from Sierra Leone. Unlike the zongos of Akan communities, these akutsei were readily incorporated into the core of Ga social and political life, and their leaders often quickly took on prominent roles in the Ga state.³⁷

Power in the town was shared among members of three institutions: the mantse (or chiefs), the asafo (or sociomilitary groups³⁸), and the wulomei (or priests). In addition to these three “official” institutions was the oblempon or “big men, who exercised power not through an established office but through the authority conferred through wealth and influence.”³⁹ These different groups constituted a system of checks and balances that governed the social, political, economic, and spiritual life of the town, and their symbols of power—borrowed from both Akan and European sources—highlighted the city’s multicultural roots.⁴⁰ Power, and particularly judicial authority and responsibility for law and order, was further complicated by the presence of European forts and the various Akan overlords who controlled Accra for much of its history. Accra residents navigated complex and often contradictory systems of regulation and authority, paying fees and fines, negotiating access to resources and opportunities, and participating actively in the responsibilities of the town through public court proceedings and other “benchmark[s] of civic status”⁴¹ like the asafo.⁴²

These leaders exercised their power within an increasingly complex urban milieu. While wealthy traders are more prominent in the archival record, their trade was impossible without the agricultural products, smoked fish, and salt produced by the farmers and fishermen who constituted the vast majority of Accra’s population. However, with the establishment of the Basel Mission Society’s industrial schools and factories in the 1850s, Accra residents increasingly took on new kinds of occupations. Engineering/mechanic work, carpentry, brick-laying, shoemaking, and sewing joined petty trade, transport, goldsmithing, and other older artisanal work to form the core of an emergent modern working class in Accra.⁴³ As Parker notes, “In 1891 only 814 people in Accra—about 5 percent of the total population of 20,000—were classified as farmers, compared to the 1,190 ‘mechanics’ and 2,103 engaged in commerce.”⁴⁴

While the authority of the Ga state extended into the countryside and the welfare of the city increasingly depended on close connections with inland traders and farmers, Accra residents clearly saw themselves as “townsmen”⁴⁵ or “children of the town” (manbii)⁴⁶—a status that indicated full civic rights and was contrasted with kosebii (“bush people”).⁴⁷ The Ga word for town (man., pl. majii) can also mean people, nation, or state, suggesting a degree to which the urban nature of settlement pervades both the culture of the people and their political system.⁴⁸ Indeed, while Accra itself was quite cosmopolitan, the social relations of Accra residents were almost entirely contained in the town, eclectic though they may have been.⁴⁹ This distinction between man (town) and kose (bush) highlights not only the importance of urbanity and urban culture for Accra residents but also a vested interest in urban order and management—a set of values and practices that defined “urban civility” (in contrast to the wildness of the “bush”), which contrasted sharply with European perceptions of the town that were published in traveler’s accounts, circulated in colonial correspondence, and reported in newspapers: all of which constitute much of Accra’s written history.⁵⁰

The dynamism of the city was in many ways a function of its origins. Parker argues that Accra leaders’ incorporation of outsiders reflected the desire to rebuild and grow the Ga polity after its destruction at Ayawaso.⁵¹ But as trade grew, so did the power of Accra’s political, spiritual, and economic leaders. As Kilson argues, urbanization in Accra was “dependent upon its commercial and administrative functions.”⁵² As a site of cosmopolitanism and opportunity, urban coastal centers like Accra provided attractive opportunities for refugees, freed slaves, artisans, and traders who circulated along the West African coast.⁵³ Of course, Accra’s history is not one of constant growth. But in many ways Accra was significantly different at the end of the nineteenth century than it was at the beginning. The decline of the slave trade and the shift to legitimate trade reshaped Accra’s commercial and political landscape in significant ways.⁵⁴ The expansion of British authority over the Gold Coast and the declaration of Accra as the new colonial capital had significant implications for Accra’s political leaders, who found their authority over land, labor, law, and wealth severely circumscribed as colonial officials established new institutions of order in the city.⁵⁵ Merchants similarly found themselves marginalized in Atlantic commercial networks as European trading houses sought to consolidate control and maximize profits through the import-export trade.⁵⁶ Fires, earthquakes, and disease also hampered urban growth in significant ways from the second half of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, and colonial officials often seized these opportunities—as with the fire in 1894—to assert greater control over the town.⁵⁷ However, as Sackeyfio-Lenoch and Parker have argued, these changes marked a shift in, rather than a destruction of, power in Accra. Residents who engaged with the new systems and institutions of order in the British colonial state did so not to replace existing power relations but to renegotiate their place in the shifting landscape in ways that would preserve their autonomy and protect the interests of themselves and the town.

In Making the Town, John Parker argues that Accra was “an indigenous core community for which colonial rule was but one—albeit important—thread in the fabric of urban life.”⁵⁸ He rightly notes that the expansion of colonial authority in Accra was “characterized by subtle continuities and discontinuities, rather than an abrupt rupture.”⁵⁹ The protests, contests, negotiations, and failures detailed in this book serve as testimony that this process of continuity and discontinuity persisted even at the height of colonial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And yet, 1894 (not 1877) seems to mark a significant shift in the nature of colonial governance in Accra, implemented through the new Town Council and the courts and marked on the landscape through new kinds of infrastructural interventions and built/planned spaces that embody new visions of urban life. Regulation was, in other words, the backbone of a new form of power and authority in Accra, which substantively reshaped the possibilities of urban life for Accra residents. Many residents continued to live in the same kinds of houses, organized in the same neighborhoods, and engaged in the same kinds of economic activities and patterns of mobility and sociality that they had before. But the balance of power seemed to have shifted; the impact of residents’ actions and the relative freedom they had to live in and profit from urban life were significantly circumscribed. The cosmopolitanism that had defined the city in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries had transformed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accra was still a Ga town, but it was also, increasingly, a colonial capital in a way that felt more consequential in the daily lives of residents at the beginning of the twentieth century than it did at the beginning of the nineteenth.

COLONIAL SPACES

This introduction and the chapters that follow explore what it meant to create colonial spaces that simultaneously embraced and disrupted the past and fostered competing visions of an urban future in Accra. The city has long been a site of interrogation through which scholars of Africa sought to better understand the limits of colonial authority and the power of African agency and autonomy—what constitutes a “colonial space” and to what degree is that “colonialism” consequential for the people living there? For early scholars, these questions were intimately connected to the imperatives of colonial governance and economic development. Anthropological and sociological studies, both from organizations like the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia and through the work of individual scholars, sought to better understand local societies and urban dynamics in order to better control land and labor and counteract the corrupting influences of urban life.⁶⁰ Underlying this scholarship was a belief that African agency and autonomy, in the context of colonialism, was something to be controlled in order to advance the aims of the colonial state. “Modernity”—a vision of a liberal, ordered, and technological future, which the British were so eager to bring to cities like Accra—also came with the risk of corruption and degeneration if African engagement was not carefully monitored and controlled.

In the Gold Coast, fears about the possible corruption of city life informed the development of social welfare programs, urban planning schemes, public health campaigns, and educational enterprises. But coastal cities like Accra—the product of four centuries of dynamic development, which incorporated but was not defined by European influence—differed significantly from the urban colonial constructions of eastern and southern Africa.⁶¹ If the goal in cities constructed in settler colonies like Nairobi or Johannesburg was to control African access to mobility and urban life—so as to preserve the city as a zone of European power and authority—in cities like Accra that was impossible.⁶² In Accra, colonial officials grappled with how to alter, rather than restrict, African urban life. Cities like Accra challenged the assumed structures of “decentralized despotism” that characterized practices of colonial governance in many parts of the continent. Lugard’s strategy of indirect rule, taken up in various forms across the continent, assumed the rurality of African states.⁶³ Cities, Mamdani argues, were the province of the colonizer, subject to direct rule and direct investment and dominated by colonial officials and settlers, while rural areas were left to Africans under the leadership of “traditional chiefs” or “native authorities.”⁶⁴

As a Ga town, Accra blurred these distinctions, which often frustrated colonial officials who were convinced of the power of scientific classification and social order, and necessitated innovations in the structure and practice of governance. The ATC and the technocratic and regulatory structures deployed through the ATC represented an urban application of indirect rule thinly disguised as proto-self-government. Earlier efforts to establish a municipal council in 1858 had been withdrawn after only a few years when townspeople refused to pay taxes or participate in elections for a body that they believed would undermine their own autonomy, while placing the financial burden for the development and maintenance of the town on local residents. By the 1890s, however, conditions had clearly changed. As we shall see in chapter 1, a series of lands bills and towns ordinances redefined the legal jurisdiction and responsibility of the colonial state in cities like Accra. While these lands bills may not have ultimately been effective in establishing public lands, they did generate new kinds of “publics.”⁶⁵ The Aborigines Rights Protection Society and other proto-nationalist organizations were founded to protest the new laws and generated a new form of political consciousness around colonial urban governance. It was against this backdrop that the new ATC was formed in 1898. Despite persistent complaints about taxation—and an initial unwillingness on the part of property owners to pay taxes—the institution did hold the promise of at least limited self-government, allowing elected African representatives to have a direct say in the governance of the city.

As the debates of the Town Council make clear, however, the promise of elected representation and self-government was rarely realized in practice. The “official” or government-appointed members of the Town Council constituted a majority, which they regularly used to push through legislation that advanced the interests of the colonial state or shut down proposals from elected African representatives. This imbalance came to the fore when, in 1936, the Accra town clerk, Mr. J. W. Blankson Mills, was arrested for falsification of accounts and dismissed from his office, and the ATC president appointed Mr. Duncan MacDougall (formerly of the Basel Mission) as the town clerk. African representatives and Accra’s rate-paying class protested. In a petition sent to the governor, rate payers argued that “to take away from the African at this time of great economic distress in the country the only highly paid post occupied by him in an institution designed to educate him in the art of self-government and maintained by revenue contributed by him will generate in him the bitterest of feelings and create in him such a sense of unfairness as would eventually end to undermine that confidence which he has always reposed in the wisdom and justice of the British Administration.”⁶⁶ While this protest, which went on for months, was undoubtedly fueled by the growing anticolonial sentiments of the interwar years, African representatives and rate payers had been complaining about similar action from the earliest years of the ATC’s founding. The colonial state—as represented by the British-dominated Town Council—frequently mobilized the regulatory and technocratic power of the state to target development, planning, and investment in ways that advanced colonial priorities, undermined the power and autonomy of African communities, and attempted to reshape the daily life of urban residents to better fit the “urban imaginary” of colonial officials.⁶⁷

In navigating this tension between the demands for autonomy and opportunity in daily life and the realities of colonial regulatory power, African residents in Accra participated in a form of dynamic urban politics found in cities across the continent. For at least the last forty years, historians of leisure and African urban social and cultural history have used popular culture, oral history, material culture, newspapers, and other sources to detail the powerful ways that men and women asserted their “rights to the city,” creatively fashioning lives that embraced new opportunities and possibilities emergent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶⁸ As these scholars have made clear, African urban residents shaped the physical space, economic networks, and sociocultural practices of the urban environment, within, against, and outside of the asserted power and control of colonial states. Leisure activities, fashion, trade, entrepreneurship, and mobility formed the foundation of a powerful form of grassroots urban politics and asserted alternative visions of city life.

Residents of Accra, informed by their long history of urbanism, were no exception. Over the course of the twentieth century, Accra residents used the strength of their urbanity to protest colonial legislation, reshape physical space, appropriate and redeploy infrastructural technologies, and craft dynamic and cosmopolitan urban cultures. The creative agency, insistent ambivalence, and outright defiance of African residents provided a powerful challenge to a colonial state that, even in the best of times, was “marked again and again by incoherence, incapacity, and incompleteness.”⁶⁹ The failed colonial visions of urban modernity, in other words, were often a testament to the resilience of Indigenous urbanity. This book explores the persistence and creativity of urban residents across the twentieth century, articulated through debates about sanitation, health, economy, mobility, and housing. As the following chapters describe in greater detail, colonial plans were rarely fully realized. Lack of funding, capacity, understanding, and popular support frequently hampered colonial visions for Accra in practice. On the ground, in other words, the “modern city,” as described and envisioned by colonial officials, never fully materialized. Rather, I argue that the real impact of colonialism was felt less in the built form and infrastructure of the city than in the systems of regulation that reinforced broader structures of inequality through the policing of everyday life. These regulations shaped Accra as a colonial space in ways that had profound impacts for African residents on both a local and global scale.⁷⁰ Colonial space, in other words, was less about the built form of the city and more about the access and opportunities of its residents. In creating and enforcing regulations, backed by the power of the courts and the police, colonial officials marginalized African values and practices within both local and global networks. Colonial officials, technocratic experts, and African representatives on the ATC utilized regulation to advance the interests of expatriate capital and advance new visions of institutionalized, systematized “modernity” in Accra. In the process, regulation—and the Eurocentric forms of order and industry that it sought to engender—effectively informalized African urban cultures and advanced a new understanding of the “African city” within emerging structures of global governance and technocratic expertise.

TECHNOCRATIC COLONIALISM

This new colonial “urban imaginary” was informed by a modernist faith in technological progress and a commitment to the expansion of capitalism. Colonization was, in the words of Timothy Mitchell, “not simply . . . the establishing of a European presence but also . . . the spread of a political order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.”⁷¹ British explorers and colonial officials’ observations about the state of cities and towns in Africa were marked by a profound ethnocentrism. Accra and other cities in the Gold Coast were certainly no exception. Henry Morton Stanley’s 1873 description of Accra as “a town of native and European buildings jammed” between the port and the lighthouse is perhaps the most infamous.⁷² However, just a few years before the Sierra Leonean physician and scientist James Africanus Horton wrote in his famous call for African self-government that Gold Coast “towns contain a few large houses, but the majority of the native huts are so completely jumbled together that they present a confused mass. There are no properly laid-out streets, but the towns are intersected with crooked lanes.”⁷³ Here, Horton draws on language frequently found in Western accounts of cities that predated European influence. Similar to the kinds of complaints from Euro-American observers that Bissell documents in Zanzibar, these writers frequently objected to irregularity and “haphazard” development in cities and insisted on the universal superiority of regularity and geometric order without any particularly power supporting evidence of its effects on health, society, or living standards.⁷⁴ These differences in temporal and spatial perception were often explained by observers steeped in the values of Western science and technology as a symptom of the “general disregard on the part of Africans and Asians for the accuracy and precision that had come to be valued so highly in western culture.”⁷⁵ As Adas notes, many of these observers interpreted the differences in human settlement patterns as “chaotic.”⁷⁶ British complaints about Africans as “hopeless when it came to measuring a distance or drawing a straight line” were part of a broader set of stereotypes about Africans as “sloppy, prone to exaggeration, inattentive to details, devoid of uniform standards, and incapable of quantification beyond (and sometimes including) elementary counting.”⁷⁷ These critiques also often took on moralizing tones that justified a kind of politics in which “deficient” spatial layouts were evidence of Africans’ general inability to rule themselves “properly.”

European expectations of technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were tied to notions of progress and a faith in the importance of measurement as a tool of regulation, order, and rationality.⁷⁸ Measurement made it possible for scientists and members of emerging technological fields like engineering and architecture to “control” the natural and social worlds, “containing” and thus rendering them legible and malleable.⁷⁹ Surveying, mapping, and planning utilized the tools of measurement, combined with assessment of social and spatial form to organize the present and plan for the future.⁸⁰ As a space of perceived disorder and degeneracy, the modern city—and emerging European notions of it—were defined by a concern with the measurement, planning, regulation, and ordering of built space, the infrastructure and buildings within it and the way individuals interacted with it. These concerns both grew out of earlier (seventeenth- and eighteenth century) forms of colonialism in North America, the Atlantic, and India and were uniquely constituted by the emergent metropolis and modernity of nineteenth-century Europe.⁸¹ Emerging fields of architecture, engineering, public health, social work, and town planning sought to bring order to the perceived chaos of rapidly growing cities and address “social ills” and environmental contaminants that offended the sensibilities of the bourgeois classes and injured the social, economic, and cultural health of the nation.⁸² Science and technology were seen as both a testament to the superiority of Western civilization and a tool in achieving civilization, both at home and abroad.

Colonial policy toward cities like Accra, then, were unsurprisingly imbued with these notions of technology and progress. Early explorers, traders, and government officials often viewed colonial territories as “empty land” where they could finally realize their visions for ordered modernity, which were too difficult to achieve in the midst of social and material chaos of the built environment of the metropole.⁸³ Government officials and experts often viewed colonies—and particularly colonial cities—as “laboratories of modernity” or “experimental terrains.”⁸⁴ Accra both reinforced and challenged these systems of urban governance. Colonial projects to reimagine the physical space and systems of governance in Accra in the wake of the fire in 1894 coincided with major shifts in British approaches to the administration, development, and maintenance of their colonies.⁸⁵ As secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain integrated science and technology into decision-making and strategy at every level of the Colonial Office in the late nineteenth century, recruiting scientific and technical experts and expanding the bureaucratic power of the CO. In the interwar period technocratic methods were further consolidated and professionalized. Town planning, in particular, took on new importance in colonial strategy under the leadership of Lord Passfield (Sidney Webb) as colonial secretary (1929–1931). Passfield sent a circular to colonial leaders recommending planning “as an orderly and scientific method of controlling work already in progress or inevitable in future, in a manner which secures the best and most far reaching economic results from current expenditures as it takes place.”⁸⁶ This new era of technocratic colonialism was rooted in notions of civilizational superiority and committed to the advancement of global trade and expansion of industrial capitalism through “development,” both at home and abroad.⁸⁷

This book recognizes the power of technocratic colonialism in shaping African urban spaces and experiences in twentieth-century cities. As Carlos Silva notes, across the continent there was “a clear lineage from colonial-military engineering to civil service architects and urban planners in the first decades of the 20th century.”⁸⁸ In Accra, technocratic colonialism was implemented through the ATC and the bevy of advisers, consultants, technical officers, and inspectors who identified, implemented, and reinforced technological solutions to address perceived urban disorder and advance colonial visions of urban development. The power of the ATC was, at least in theory, rooted in the Town Councils Ordinance, which granted the Council authority over a wide range of issues related to sanitation, infrastructural development, and spatial order. That power was backed by the colonial government, the courts, and the police, as evidenced by extensive inspections and prosecutions for even the most minor infractions. But the very act of building and maintaining infrastructure was, in itself, an exercise of power. Monumental buildings, roads, railways, harbors, markets, and residential neighborhoods were often designed to convey authority and organize urban space, mobility, sociality, and economic activity in ways that advanced colonial priorities.⁸⁹ As the “built forms around which publics thicken,”⁹⁰ infrastructure was an important means of interaction between citizens and the state, a point of contact and access through which standards and ideas were made concrete in the world.⁹¹ In establishing, reinforcing, and reproducing the rules governing the “space of everyday life,” Keller Easterling argues that infrastructure constitutes a form of “extrastatecraft”—“accidental, covert, or stubborn forms of power . . . hiding in the folds of infrastructure space.”⁹²

In Accra infrastructural projects certainly reinforced various forms of social and economic privilege. The ATC was never successfully able to replan or rebuild the city center to conform with colonial expectations, but they were able to strategically use infrastructural investments and policy prescriptions to legitimize new visions of urbanity and modernity in Accra. Backed by regulation and the power of the state, infrastructural investments created new forms of social, economic, and spatial inequality in the city and created new structures that urban residents had to navigate in order to access resources and opportunity. This “colonial dualism” was, on some level, a representation of the tendencies toward segregation embodied in the Dual Mandate and reinforced by early scientific theories of town planning and sanitary health—what Garth Myers describes as the “intrinsic racism of urban space.”⁹³ However, William Bissell argues that the actualization of this intended dualism was marked by “incompleteness and inconsistency”; colonial officials never could fully segregate cities across the continent.⁹⁴ Particularly in Accra, where long histories of cosmopolitanism were central to the development of urban forms and the everyday realities of urban life, that level of social, economic, and spatial segregation was impossible and even undesirable. In Accra, rather, infrastructural development was often marred by intentional underinvestment, which directly contradicted the British claims to superiority through reason. British officials increasingly insisted that the ATC and Accra residents fund the development and maintenance of the city themselves, gradually withdrawing grants-in-aid in the decades after the Council’s founding and refusing to invest in major infrastructure projects at a level that would provide equal access to all residents in the growing city.⁹⁵

In tracing the rising power of the “rule of experts” in shaping modern development practice and urban governance, scholars of technology and empire have often highlighted the frequent gap between rhetoric and reality, or “distinctions between what was real and the forms of its representation.”⁹⁶ As James Scott notes, “Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.”⁹⁷ The universalizing assumptions of technological theories and forms and the technological arrogance and ethnocentrism of many technocrats, even in the face of contradictory evidence or popular protest, meant that infrastructures, development initiatives, and town plans frequently failed to achieve their goals. Colonial development policy was shaped by the interaction of various levels of colonial administration who had different understandings of and solutions for the challenges they faced—a “complex and dialectical intersection of ideas, expertise, and bureaucratic power” that, Hodge argues, was “torn by inconsistency, indecisiveness, and objectives falling in divergent and often conflicting directions,” a symptom of the “friction and paralysis of late colonialism.”⁹⁸ The increasing segmentation of colonial bureaucracy and its regulatory regime created a system in which the purportedly more “professional” and “modernized” system produced its opposite—an unwieldy structure full of cracks that allowed both large and small issues to remain unaddressed or ineffective.

Even in these gaps, technocratic practice often aligned all too easily with the stated and unstated aims of colonial governance.⁹⁹ If colonies were “laboratories of modernity,” the technocratic practices they engendered took on new forms in the professionalized societies, fields of study, and professions of practice that emerged over the course of the twentieth century, sitting at the core of the new field of “development” as the operationalized arms of emerging theories of modernization. On the ground in Accra, however, the daily practice and lived realities of colonialism often diverged from these lofty goals. Technology broke down, infrastructure was unbuilt or allowed to decay, plans were undermined, and regulations were avoided. For many, the incompleteness and inefficiency of the colonial state simultaneously created space for continuity and opportunities for innovation. But, in focusing almost exclusively on technological failure and colonial incompetence, scholars of colonial planning and urban development have often failed to recognize both the structural consequences of classification and regulation and the power of Indigenous technological systems. As Clapperton Mavhunga argues for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship broadly:

The task of doing STS in nonwestern contexts need not be one of simply tracing the mobility of Western artifacts and practitioners, situating them in the Global South, and commenting on their behavior in different environments, but taking seriously what technology means from the perspective of people of the South. It requires not merely looking at how people respond to incoming things, but placing the latter’s arrival, meanings, knowledges, and materialities within the locals’ technological longue durée. The arbitrary restriction of what constitutes technology to measurable things and experiments in the built laboratory performed only by those with mastery over them constitutes not just an epistemological exclusion, but also an ontological and sociological one.¹⁰⁰

In Accra, the organization of neighborhoods, construction of houses, production of food, conduct of trade, movement of goods and people, and other critical practices of urban life reflected long histories of interaction and adaptation with dynamic natural, social, and economic environments. These forms of knowledge, skill, and practice were more than the “practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of uncertainty” championed by scholars like Scott.¹⁰¹ They constituted local technologies that formed the foundation of a resilient urban civilization. Accra residents who embraced new technological introductions—from streetlights to piped water to motor vehicles—did so within the context of these broader systems of technological knowledge and practice. But Indigenous technological knowledge just as often informed protest, criticism, and resistance as Accra residents balked at the failure of imported technologies and technicians to account for local realities and rebelled against forms of infrastructural development or regulation that unnecessarily infringed on local autonomy—a form of technopolitics at the foundation of what Frederick Cooper called the “struggle for the city”¹⁰²

The lines within this broader contestation, however, were often blurred. African technopolitics was complex—a reflection of the high degree of socioeconomic diversity within Accra’s Ga population. Individual self-interest and class solidarity often inspired opposition to proposed plans or infrastructural interventions, suspicious of colonial plans given persistent evidence of inadequacy, incompetence, failure, or planned obsolescence and the expanding range of regulations, categorizations, and classifications associated with colonial technological interventions that often pathologized African bodies and practices. Residents in some Accra neighborhoods demanded electric lights while others destroyed them in protest. Traders demanded improved market structures but often refused to relocate or change their practices. Drivers wanted vehicles and passengers but did not want to obey traffic laws. While Western-educated elites sought to embrace what they saw as “development” and “civilization,” even they had their limits and pushed back against plans that infringed on their autonomy, undermined their right to property, or questioned their ability to participate actively in processes of governance.

Blinded by ethnocentrism, colonial officials and ATC members, who often interpreted these protests as further examples of “backwardness” and renewed calls for education and acculturation, fundamentally misunderstood the issues at hand. This book argues that, far from the thoughtless, irrational acts condemned by colonial officials, local response to technology and planning constituted a vernacular culture of technology.¹⁰³ In adapting the objects, forms, and ideas of modern technology to meet local needs and values and pushing back against imposed agendas in the face of colonial failure, residents highlighted the inherent ethnocentrism of colonial technocratic practice and British expertise and challenged the projected superiority of Western “modernity.” If machines were the “measure of men,” the British were found wanting in tropical regions like the Gold Coast. More importantly, however, in pushing back against the inadequacies of colonial development, residents also highlighted the systemic or structural inequalities that lay at the core of modernist, technocratic principles and practices, articulated often in Accra through the lens of race, class, and gender.¹⁰⁴

Contemporary scholars of technology, urban development, and colonial governance who point to examples of urban resilience as evidence of the ingenuity of local residents in the midst of dramatic change have done a great deal to refocus urban history on the agency of African urban residents. But the actions of African urban residents were much more than mere reactions or responses to imported technological systems and colonial logics.¹⁰⁵ This book follows Mavhunga’s lead by “locating Africans between their locally generated and inbound ideas, instruments, and practices.”¹⁰⁶ In doing so, it seeks to resituate twentieth-century African urban politics as a form of technopolitical contestation, which recognizes both the power of technocratic colonialism and the historicity and resilience of Indigenous urban technologies. It also raises questions about the constructed universality of technological models, standards, and practices by exploring the history and politics that shaped their development through the lens of Accra’s unique urban history and advances alternative interpretations of African urban development rooted in much deeper histories of the values and practices of local residents.

INFORMALIZATION AND THE MAKING OF AN “AFRICAN CITY”

Colonial obsession with order required a construction of its opposite—disorder. As Mitchell notes, “The identity of the modern city is created by what it keeps out. Its modernity is something contingent upon the exclusion of its own opposite. In order to determine itself as the place of order, reason, propriety, cleanliness, civilization and power, it must represent outside itself what is irrational, disordered, dirty, libidinous, barbarian and cowed.”¹⁰⁷ To some degree, colonial officials sought to implement order through interventions in the built environment. As the chapters of this book document, colonial officials and their technocratic allies proved generally incapable of fundamentally altering the built form of the old Ga town beyond the opportunities afforded by natural disasters like fire and earthquake. Preexisting forms of spatial organization were deeply rooted in locally meaningful urban histories, social networks, economic activities, and cultural practices that not only helped define what it meant to be urban (vs. the “bush” or kose), but also what it meant to be Ga—an identity and form of urbanity that had already adapted in many ways to the dynamic, cosmopolitan realities of coastal life. Accra, then, posed challenges similar to those faced in metropolitan cities in Britain itself: How to create the city of colonial urban imaginaries in the middle of a preexisting urban settlement?

In some cases the “othering” described by Mitchell took the form of alternative settlements, built outside of the old town to model European visions of ordered urban life and provide “safe” and suitable spaces for British officials.¹⁰⁸ As we will see in chapters 1 and 2, these new urban spaces were influenced by misguided and often racialized concerns about sanitation and health, which often pathologized African bodies and practices as not only “filthy” but also dangerous.¹⁰⁹ However, new settlements also served as sites of imagination where colonial officials could implement ideal technocratic urban plans and provide alternatives to the model of the old town. These very physical and material forms of intervention in the built environment were perhaps the most obvious examples of urban planning in Accra, marked by new kinds of infrastructure, housing, and municipal services. But, as the chapters of this book demonstrate, the built environment was only one component of a much larger technopolitical strategy, rooted in the emergence of a new culture of regulation, articulated through ordinances and backed by a series of inspections and trials, fines and prison sentences that sought to reinforce order in the city.

In tracing the unfolding regulatory framework of governance in Accra, regulation, as Janet Roitman argues, operated as “political technologies that serve to constitute ‘that which is to be governed’ or . . . a field of regulatory interventions based on a set of suppositions about the nature of economic life and economic objects.”¹¹⁰ The economic regulation that Roitman describes is part of a broader system of “political technologies . . . that render aspects of social life both intelligible and governable.”¹¹¹ In Accra, ordinances turned urban life (and thus urban residents) into “problems” that required “solutions.” As such, regulations were “not simply instrumental methods for obtaining or assuming power; they [were], rather, the very material form of power itself.”¹¹² In regulating the way that people disposed of garbage, used the bathroom, stored water, organized their compounds, built their houses and neighborhoods, moved along city streets, and engaged in trade and other economic activities, these ordinances marginalized long-standing African urban cultures in favor of the models and theories developed and implemented by a newly emergent class of technocratic “experts” who shaped the field of modern urban planning.

As Robert Home notes, the term “town planning” did not appear until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the underlying goals of town planning practice had long played a prominent role in colonial governance. Rules devised to control enslaved peoples on Caribbean plantations, Benthamite principles of utilitarianism and the panopticon as a way to organize local government in England and the colonies, the cantonments of India and Africa, trusteeship and indirect rule from Burke and Lugard, and Locke’s philosophy of private property and land tenure all served as important legal and philosophical underpinnings to the emerging legal and regulatory systems of colonial governance.¹¹³ But spatial interventions in the context of global capitalism and the industrial age also required new forms of expertise: forms wrapped in technocratic assumptions about the universality of technological and scientific laws and bureaucratic values of “order” and empowered through the growth of interconnected but competing imperial networks.¹¹⁴ As early as the 1890s, a wide range of increasingly transnational technocratic experts moved throughout and between empires, including “colonial administrators (the British career officials of the Indian civil service and later the colonial service); lawyers, judges, and magistrates; doctors specializing in sanitation and public health; engineers both civil and military; land surveyors; and (relatively late in the colonial period) architects and urban planners.”¹¹⁵

Ideas and practices moved throughout the empire via the central supervision and coordination of the CO, which transferred experts and consultants regularly between colonies and operated regional administrative units.¹¹⁶ However, knowledge was also shared through the networks and associations of newly expanding professions like engineering, architecture, planning, and public health. International conferences, initially in the field of tropical medicine and engineering, allowed British imperial consultants to interact with experts from French, German, Portuguese, and Italian colonial territories. The result was a consolidation of material and building techniques, housing structures, and infrastructural development and policy strategies across the boundaries of empire and colony, giving the appearance of universality and abstract neutrality. The ordered, regulated technocratic systems seen and constructed in the context of British colonial rule was characterized by what Mitchell describes as “a remarkable claim to certainty or truth: the apparent certainty with which everything seems ordered and organized, calculated and rendered unambiguous—ultimately, what seems its political decidedness.”¹¹⁷ It was, in other words, a world reduced to binaries, around and through which both local and global systems were ordered and interpreted: order versus disorder, tradition versus modernity, and formal versus informal.¹¹⁸ These plans rendered cities like Accra “picture-like and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation,” enframing and ordering the city while not necessarily capturing its reality.¹¹⁹

This book argues that, in using ordinances, regulations, theories, models, and plans to problematize and reform African urban practices in Accra, colonial-era technocrats and government officials established systems and structures that privileged the interests of expatriate capital and advanced colonial visions of urban modernity. The process of categorization and classification implicit in technocratic systems reframed African practices as “disorder”—alternatively labeled “illegitimate,” “illegal,” “unsuitable,” “nuisance,” “pirate,” “filthy,” and “unsanitary”—in order to justify policy interventions that reshaped the parameters of urban life in Accra. Even in the midst of colonial incompetence I argue that colonial regulation represented a violence of categorization, which had significant consequences for African urban residents. In particular, I argue that debates over the mundane forms, infrastructures, and practices of everyday life represent early incarnations of a process of informalization—not in name, but in practice—through which both European and African members of the Town Council sought to redefine the boundaries of legality, legitimacy, and morality in the city. Invoking the notion of a “nuisance,” town councillors effectively criminalized long-standing indigenous social, cultural, economic, and spatial practices and reshaped public discourse about city life through the lens of regulation.¹²⁰ This process was inspired by the desire to protect and promote “expatriate enterprise” and “ordered modernity,” as Parker notes.¹²¹ Regulations privileged expatriate capital and sought to marginalize African practices that challenged European expectations of city life. As the British colonial state sought to decentralize financial responsibility for urban governance, the Town Council took on increasing responsibility for the development and maintenance of infrastructure in the growing city. Categorization and regulation became important means of generating revenue for the operation of the city. The regulation of African urban life, in other words, became embedded in both the logics and finances of governance—the “capitalist city” and the “colonial city” intertwined.¹²²

These acts of regulation and categorization initiated a process of informalization that effectively marginalized and criminalized long-standing African economic and spatial practice. In discussing the process of informalization, scholars of the contemporary city seek to understand the ways that urban citizens adapt to changing economic systems in order to “access opportunities and, at the same time, maintain social coherence.”¹²³ This structuralist approach highlights the processes of social, economic, and cultural construction that generate the “reserve army of urban unemployed and underemployed” and shape their economic activities.¹²⁴ Keith Hart and the many scholars that followed him employed “informal economy” as an analytic that helpfully captured the labor and practices who operated outside or on the margins of the wage economy and, thus, “escape enumeration by surveys.”¹²⁵ Much of the work on informal economic activities in Africa and elsewhere expands on this notion, tracing the origins of economic activities like market trading and exploring their significance as a means of both survival and accumulation in the context of persistent precarity and economic uncertainty.¹²⁶

Here I invoke the concept of “informal economy” not as an analytical tool but as the subject of study itself. Informalization is a historical process, with roots in modernist rhetoric about the urban poor. In particular, the process of informalization, I argue, was a by-product of what Alan Mayne calls “slum deceits.”¹²⁷ Mayne argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth- century social reformers and politicians adopted words like slum to “describe diverse social conditions in terms that were comprehensible to the new ruling culture.”¹²⁸ Slum, he argues, was central to an emerging discursive and political strategy, which used stereotypes of urban poverty to shift blame for structural inequalities onto the most vulnerable local communities—“characterized . . . as what the dominant culture regards as being the deficient ‘Other,’ or ‘the other half of society’”—while justifying interventions and investments that privileged the capitalist class and further entrenched the structural disadvantages of poor communities.¹²⁹ This form of bourgeois ethnocentrism obscured complex forms of spatial, social, commercial, and financial organization that shaped urban communities and economies—what Perera calls “the city that is out there.”¹³⁰ While colonial officials and Town Council members did not use the term “informal economy” itself, their actions and policies shaped a process through which African practices were increasingly marginalized within the institutions and systems of social, economic, and political power.

These terms—and the policies and interventions they inspired—were certainly central to the way that British planners and policymakers understood the politics of space in the metropole. Urban reform in British cities targeted low-income neighborhoods and vulnerable communities in public health and social welfare campaigns that highlighted the contradictory dangers and desires of city life. However, the rhetoric around spatial order and social reform took on a particular form in colonies, informed by persistent theories of racism and the demands of industrial capitalism. As Bissell argues, in order to understand these processes, we must engage the realities and legacies of colonial governance, “treating the colonial state as an arena for ethnographic inquiry in its own right [. . .] by regarding colonial rule itself as a form of cultural practice and process” (Bissell 2010, 71). Bissell notes that “by focusing on the inchoate nature of colonial rule, we can begin to rethink the state as an unfolding practice or process of becoming” (2010, 73). In tracing the history of informalization in Accra, I argue that we clarify the historic roots of “informality” as a category of colonial governance that reshaped and relegislated the categories of belonging in cities like Accra and limited global political imaginations about economic possibility in African cities more broadly.¹³¹

Scholarship on and political rhetoric about informality has often interpreted the persistence of African social, economic, political, and cultural practices as a form of resistance—a protest against the exclusionary practices of the formal sector and the misguided or unpopular priorities of government. This is certainly more palatable than early colonial assessments that viewed these practices as evidence of African “backwardness” and did, in some cases, reflect the underlying motivations of residents. Yet, at least in Accra—though almost certainly in many instances across the continent and throughout the Global South—the actions residents took outside of the state-sanctioned structures of social and economic life also often represented a continued investment in long-standing systems of social and economic reproduction in the absence of accessible and meaningful alternatives. Residents embraced infrastructure when it advanced their interests and conformed to their values. They were not antiscience or antitechnology, and they were not incapable of understanding the possible benefits that new forms of sanitation and housing might have for themselves and their communities. They did, however, question the legitimacy and efficacy of new regulations and highlighted the unevenness of investment and seeming double standards in enforcement among African and European sections of the town. Many of the activities targeted by Town Council regulations predated European arrival or, at least, the consolidation of British colonial power in the Gold Coast. Before the new kinds of regulatory action that emerged in the late nineteenth century, market trading, corn milling, and other activities were not part of an “informal economy”; they were the economy. Indigenous housing and residential settlement patterns were not examples of “informal settlement”; they were the settlement. Informality, in other words, is an invention of colonialism, rooted in an assumption that “certain historical experiences of the West [are] the template for a universal knowledge” and backed by the power of capitalism and the “rule of experts.”¹³² But it was also produced through contestation as local residents sought to assert their own rights to the city and tried to shape its future.

While the historical process of informalization certainly has its roots in the colonial period, the binary thinking of technocratic colonialism quickly became entrenched in global systems, fueled by the emergence of new kinds of international intellectual, economic, and political institutions. In the mid-twentieth century, technocratic ideas and practices were further systematized through colonial development and welfare initiatives, which funded massive planning and infrastructure projects across the continent and legitimized new professions of practice. The consolidation of colonial practices into new professional fields in architecture, planning, engineering, and development coincided with the creation of new international professional organizations and fields of academic practice that transformed colonial practices into universal “theories” in social and applied sciences. These new fields were further legitimized by emerging institutions of “international governance,” which embraced theories of modernization and development as universal models for the advancement of well-being for peoples around the world.¹³³ As chapter 5 demonstrates, modernization theories embraced by postindependence leaders and technical experts sought to advance national development and secure economic independence, both inspiring and restricting imagination about the future in cities like Accra.

Rooted in modernist assumptions about the forms and theories of city life, urban history and urban studies are similarly plagued by binaries—formal versus informal, failure versus success, problem versus solution. The persistence of these categories in scholarly analysis highlights the degree to which the technocratic models and frameworks of planners, public health officials, and other policymakers, who sought to simplify the city for the purposes of governance and marginalize the power of residents in shaping its form, have become “naturalized” both within and outside of scholarship.¹³⁴ If, however, these categories were constructed as a tool of colonial governmentality that was never intended to capture the complexity of urban politics and the dynamism of city life, we must rethink our fundamental assumptions and seek alternative ways of understanding the city that are derived not from the perspectives of planners but from the experiences of residents.¹³⁵ This book seeks to begin that work in Accra, tracing the history of informalization through the politics of regulation, planning, and development. This history is, in many ways, profoundly local. Accra’s own unique history of urbanity helps to highlight some of the fundamental contradictions and assumptions of technocratic approaches to the city, making clear the politics and contestations that shaped these emergent systems. In Accra, informality manifested both through the persistence of African urban systems in the face of capitalist expansion and the pursuit of opportunity in the midst of the incompleteness of colonial urban development. We can more plainly see the unfolding of informalization in Accra because it required regulating and marginalizing preexisting systems of social, economic, political, and cultural organization and practice. The “Ga town” described by Parker provided a foundation from which Accra residents could contest plans and advocate for their own interests. The long history of cosmopolitan urban development in Accra meant that Ga Mashie had different kinds of tools and skills at their disposal in navigating this new phase of technocratic colonialism. Even in the face of regulation, Accra residents often used these new systems and technologies for their own purposes.

But this history of informalization in Accra also has implications for the way that we think about cities, broadly—in Africa and around the world—and raises a number of important questions that are beyond the scope of this book but have profound consequences for how we think about both the academic study of cities and the past and present practices of urban development and governance. While cities like Accra are often cast as exceptions to global models of urban development that require additional planning intervention to “formalize the informal city,” this book argues that Accra’s exceptionalism should instead push us to think about the assumptions that inform prevailing theories and normative models of city life. As Steve Marr has argued for Lagos and Detroit, cities that are too often now associated with the detritus of global capitalism and thus excluded from conversations about urban formation have important lessons to teach us about the violence of the past, the systemic inequalities of the present, and the path toward more just futures.¹³⁶ “The history of the present,” the Comaroffs argue, “reveals itself more starkly in the antipodes.”¹³⁷ This book argues that, in tracing the profoundly local contestations over the shape of development and governance in Accra, we can more clearly trace the roots of systemic inequalities and begin to rethink the ways that we imagine and understand city life.

ARCHIVES AND ETHNOGRAPHIES

The ideas that inform this book and the history it tells were inspired by a circular from the Colonial Office about “pirate passenger lorries” (which can be found in chapter 4). The language of piracy that colonial officials evoked in that document led me to delve deeper into the minutes of the ATC and down an archival rabbit hole, tracing policies related to spatial regulation and ordinances related to urban governance and planning in Accra. But it was the minutes of the ATC and the petitions and letters that accompanied those minutes that gave the ordinances and policy documents meaning. There, transcribed directly from the meeting, were the debates and disagreements of British and African Council members who, from their various positions of appointment or election, sought to represent the interests of their respective constituencies and advance a vision for the city’s future. Passed by an “official” majority, the ordinances and policy documents that laid out the legal framework of urban governance in Accra seemed to carry weight and a kind of finality. Revisions to the ordinances were often focused on what seemed like relatively mundane details. But, as the minutes of the ATC made clear, these expectations were far from straightforward in their implementation. Elected African representatives often argued with appointed British officers over inadequate investment, undemocratic actions, and concerning precedent. They also raised petitions from community members who were protesting Town Council action. And yet, ordinances often passed anyway, backed by the weight of the “official” British majority.

At first glance, these minutes seem to tell a story of colonial oppression even in the context of purported self-government. In raising objections and sending petitions, African residents and their elected representatives appeared to be engaging in a futile form of resistance. As African representatives repeatedly complained, British officers would almost always band together to vote in the interest of the state against the wishes of local residents. These policies carried power, both in the attempted policing of the most intimate details of everyday life and in the violence of categorization. But as Stoler and others note, colonial “words on paper” were just as often “affections and attachments” that sought to project authority in its absence.¹³⁸ In invoking language like “piracy” and in complaining about the ineffectiveness of policy and strategy in remaking Accra, British officers conveyed an underlying anxiety about colonial authority in the city.

This book is not a “history from below” in a conventional sense. It relies heavily on colonial archives, but, following Stoler, I turn my attention to the colonial archive itself, not merely as a set of cultural facts to be mined for content but rather as a site of historical production in itself.¹³⁹ As this book argues, it is in the debates, protests, contestations, and failures that we can most clearly see colonialism (and connected concepts like informalization and regulation) in practice, as part of an unfolding process, not a historical fact.¹⁴⁰ In exploring the detailed notes, maps, and plans scattered throughout the colonial archive, we can trace the emergence and consolidation of a particular definition of and approach to Accra as an “African city.”¹⁴¹ The minutes of the ATC allow us to trace the politics of colonial urban regulation as they unfolded in real time, through the words of competing but also often strangely allied agents of power and authority. Importantly, however, the petitions and protests that are often referenced in those documents also evidence alternative visions of urbanity in Accra, rooted in the long history of social, economic, political, and cultural practice in the city. In following their echoes in related files throughout the colonial archive, I seek to advance a more layered and nuanced approach to the complexities of colonialism, assembling an archive through fragments and traces threaded throughout the historical record. Because ultimately, I argue, in its fragments and forms the archive highlights the dynamic technopolitics of urban governance.

If the government documents of the colonial archive often require us to read between the lines, meeting minutes, petitions, and newspapers allow us to hear directly from at least some of the African residents in Accra. The Gold Coast was noted for its high literacy rates and eager embrace of Western education. Afro-European families and other wealthy traders and farmers regularly sent their children abroad to pursue higher education, and students from a wide range of economic backgrounds attended government- and mission-sponsored schools in the twentieth century.¹⁴² As Newell notes, however, like other systems of imported knowledge and technology, Anglo-Western practices of literacy were interpreted within preexisting local practices, and highly literate populations in coastal towns used literary culture and techniques to “play the game of life” and generated new forms of self-fashioning that often challenged the colonial state.¹⁴³ For many, petitions provided an important means of participating in and speaking directly to political leaders. A range of petitioners—from individual residents and business owners to organized groups of ratepayers and Ga political leaders—wrote to both the governor’s office and their elected African representatives to demand access to infrastructure, protest a lack of representation and investment, appeal taxation and fines, and push back against the emerging culture of urban governance in Accra.¹⁴⁴ Petitions also ranged in style from “simple pleas in simple language” to elaborate, highly formal documents in florid language.¹⁴⁵ The latter were often written by professional petition writers employed by local residents who added their “marks” at the end of the petition but who valued the power of formal language to add weight and sophistication to their appeals.¹⁴⁶ Some of these petitions can still be found in the archives, but many others are referred to indirectly or quoted within government files. As a body of sources, Korieh argues, “petitions paint a vivid picture of daily life, of the practical realities of living under colonial control, and of how people dealt with these situations.”¹⁴⁷

Newspapers, likewise, provided an important outlet for residents in coastal cities to express their concerns and mobilize public opinion. The first newspaper was published in the Gold Coast in Accra in 1857. By the twentieth century there were a number of African-owned newspapers in towns along the Gold Coast. As Plageman and Newell note, the owners and readers of these newspapers were members of a fairly elite group based in coastal towns, and they used these publications as a space to debate and critique British colonial policy and organize and advance new kinds of publics dedicated to the cause of self-government and nationalist mobilization.¹⁴⁸ Some prominent intellectuals and politicians used newspapers to expand their reach beyond the Gold Coast and achieve prominence in pan-African or imperial circles. But for many, newspapers provided an important space where contributors could debate highly local concerns about the impact of expanding colonial authority in daily life.¹⁴⁹ The majority of the people who either owned or wrote into newspapers were elite businessmen, politicians, and traders who were highly educated and visible. Their writing, both in terms of subject and content, often betrayed their class status. However, editors frequently showed themselves open to feedback, willingly changing editorial positions on policies related to urban colonial governance when they realized “the masses” were displeased and incorporating anecdotes from family, friends, and neighbors. But, as a relatively democratic space, the editorial pages of the newspaper also sometimes welcomed middle-class and working-class people who could and did write into the newspaper, expressing their opinions and detailing their lived experience in relation to ongoing debates of public concern.¹⁵⁰

Taken together, these sources provide us with an extensive, if still incomplete, window into the politics of urban governance in twentieth-century Accra. In reading the archive closely, we’re better able to disaggregate the different groups claiming a stake in shaping the city—technocrats, colonial government officials, ATC members, African representatives, ratepayers, nonratepaying residents, and urban migrants.¹⁵¹ While existing sources do not allow a detailed accounting of the daily life of any of these groups, in thinking about how they overlap and interact, we are able to better understand the complicated and multilayered nature of politics in the city. More importantly for the purposes of this book, we are able to see how the city was, at least in the abstract, formed and reformed through the technopolitics of space. Far from simple opposition, these various groups often reinforced similar assumptions connected to investment in a particular notion of global capitalism, economic development, and civilizational “progress” and “order,” even if they often differed over who and how those aims should be achieved. Colonial politics, in other words, was something more than mere resistance.

To understand the technopolitics of colonial Accra we must acknowledge an interconnectedness between technocratic fields and the social sciences. History and anthropology often justified or reinforced colonial strategy, eased colonial consciences, and enabled the process of colonization.¹⁵² This book argues that in order to understand the past we have to explore the history of our own analytical concepts: not just to explore the usefulness or salience of those concepts but to interrogate the various ways in which they have become normative.¹⁵³ Methodology, sources, and concepts, then, can just as often become sites of interrogation as the engines of analysis. By contextualizing and historicizing concepts and models that have come to dominate the way we think and talk about cities like Accra, we are better able to highlight the systemic violence and structural inequalities underlying supposedly “universal” and “natural” principles. As this book argues, regulation had a “social life” and informalization was a historical process that was constructed and produced just as much as the forms of technocratic colonialism and expertise that have been more widely studied by scholars.¹⁵⁴ Understanding how that happened, however, requires that we think about Accra simultaneously on multiple scales and consider the numerous people living in and shaping the city interacting in a way that was both profoundly local, continental, imperial, and global.

THE PLAN

The chapters that follow explore the unfolding politics of regulation and trace the process of informalization both chronologically and thematically. The first three chapters focus on the core pillars of twentieth-century colonial urban governance: sanitation, health, and trade. Driven by the desires and imperatives of an emerging system of global—or at least imperial—capitalism and new theories in the field of medicine, government officials sought to reshape cities to better control land and resources, make urban spaces healthier for European residents, and reorder space to advance the interests of expatriate capital—debates over sanitation, health, and trade were moments “in which the particular targets of regulation [were] circumscribed as such.”¹⁵⁵ The ordinances, policies, regulations, and plans championed by technocratic experts and government officials were inspired by new research in Britain and around the empire. However, these processes were also driven by very local concerns, organized through the new ATC, which was tasked with overseeing the physical and economic health of the town.

The first chapter explores the politics of sanitation, which provided early justification for ordinances that extended government authority over land and space in cities along the Gold Coast. Accra served as an early site of experimentation for these emerging forms of urban sanitary governance. The declaration of Accra as the new capital of the Gold Coast Colony and the formation of the ATC created new kinds of energy and attention around infrastructural issues. Far more than mere “words on paper,” Town Council ordinances created a new structure of urban governance, funded through a new system of taxation that was justified by imperial concerns over sanitation. Taxation and representative government generated new kinds of debates in the public sphere over the purpose and practice of colonial order. In contesting sanitary regulations, residents raised important questions about the state of urban governance and development in Accra and throughout the Gold Coast.

Chapter 2 traces the ways that concerns about health and disease informed urban governance. In particular, the chapter looks at the way government officials responded to epidemic disease and malaria in the twentieth century. Guided by imperial medicine consultants like Dr. William Simpson and other experts in the emerging field of tropical medicine, the ATC and other government agencies sought to decongest the old Ga town and resettle residents into newly planned neighborhoods. While Simpson and other metropolitan experts were vocal advocates of residential segregation, local leaders and residents alike resisted plans that would explicitly segregate the city along racial lines. Unequal patterns of infrastructural investment and targeted regulation and policing, however, effectively reclassified old neighborhoods as inferior to new developments, even if the Town Council was never able to fully realize its goals to decongest the city. Importantly, however, this policing of the intimate details of everyday life, exemplified by malaria inspectors who issued fines for improperly stored water or dirty compounds, criminalized the most mundane aspects of urban life in new ways. If sanitation was a public problem, concerns about health looked inside the private sphere of the home itself.

Chapter 3 explores the politics of trade, tracing the consolidation of new forms of economic activity under European control in Accra over the course of the twentieth century. Whereas African intermediaries had long been important conduits to both coastal and interior trade in Accra, by the late nineteenth-century European mercantile firms increasingly sought to assert more direct control over various aspects of trade. In Accra, new regulations to reorganize and move markets were certainly part of ongoing concerns over health and sanitation, but they were also informed by the economic interests of European companies. In moving and rebuilding markets, city officials were pushing out local traders’ market stalls in favor of new company shops selling imported goods. At least in principle, officials argued that these actions were part of a broader reordering of the city to better organize its activities and improve the health and safety of all residents. In practice, however, these policies were riven with contradictions, and local residents actively protested double standards that privileged European firms and marginalized or criminalized long-standing African practices.

The last two chapters trace transformations in late-colonial governance as residents sought out new forms of opportunity in the city. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which new forms of African mobility subverted authority and challenged underlying assumptions about infrastructural order. Entrepreneurial drivers seized the opportunity to expand their business in the city, meeting the demand of local residents by picking them up along the roadside. In the process, however, they provided direct competition with the city’s municipal bus system, which constituted an important form of revenue for the ATC and represented a new form of urban spatial awareness and interaction in the city. Labeled by officials as “pirate passenger lorries,” these vehicles transgressed the official boundaries of city life and, in the process, highlighted the arbitrariness of those boundaries. Organizing their work in response to the practices and values of local residents, drivers shaped a vibrant alternative infrastructure that laid the foundations for entrepreneurial urban transport systems that would emerge in full force after independence.

Chapter 5 traces debates over housing in Accra. Because property taxes constituted the primary source of revenue for the ATC, the condition and quality of property had long been a concern for city officials. To some degree, these concerns were shaped by the theories of health and disease discussed in chapter 2. However, housing also constituted its own sphere of technocratic regulation. Specific ordinances governing the organization, construction, and maintenance of houses served as an important point of contestation between residents and the ATC, and the Council constructed a number of new neighborhoods for both European and African residents in the early twentieth century that served as both tools of decongestion and models of urban living. However, the widespread devastation wrought by the 1939 earthquake created an unprecedented opportunity to remake large portions of the town and create new construction cultures, particularly as increasing numbers of urban migrants sought opportunity in Accra. This chapter explores the development of housing models and ideal homes through new forms of town planning in the second half of the twentieth century and traces fundamental continuities in the policy and practice of Kwame Nkrumah’s newly independent government in the 1950s and 1960s. The brief conclusion considers the implications for these histories within contemporary planning and policy debates and highlights the possibilities of grassroots models of development in light of contemporary concerns about sustainability, systemic inequality, and structural violence in Ghana and around the world.