FOUR

OF PIRATE DRIVERS AND HONKING HORNS

ON MAY 31, 1940, THE president of the Accra Town Council (ATC) wrote to the colonial secretary, complaining that “pirate passenger lorries” were plying the roads between the Gold Coast’s capital, Accra, and the eastern suburb of Labadi:

I have the honour to inform you that for some time there has been considerable competition by ‘pirate’ lorries from Labadi with the Council’s buses, and efforts made to put an end to this competition have been only partially effective in view of the fact that certain roads not covered by the Municipal Bus Service routes, which were approved by the Governor-in-Council on the 11th August, 1927 are used by the “pirate” lorries as a means of avoiding the restrictions imposed by the order in Council. In consequence of this, in a number of cases it has not been possible for the Police to institute prosecutions. Since the routes mentioned in paragraph 1 were approved, new roads have been opened and it is now possible for a lorry to convey passengers from the centre of Accra to practically the other side of Christiansborg without traveling over route 1 of the Schedule of roads appropriated to the bus service.¹

A heavily traveled route, the road between Labadi and Accra was used to lorry traffic. Labadi functioned as an eastern gateway to the capital—the first stop for lorries bringing produce and people from the productive eastern interior. Labadi was also seen as a headquarters for drivers. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of Labadians had taken up driving work, and the suburb emerged as a primary (perhaps preeminent) center for training drivers in the colony. Thus, it was not the presence of lorries on the road itself that troubled colonial officials. The drivers that caught the attention of colonial officials were troublesome because they blurred the distinctions of colonial urban space and order—goods versus passengers, public versus private, commercial versus residential—and threatened the colonial state’s power to command the road, control revenue, and effectively regulate the mobility practices of urban residents. They were mobile urban “pirates” who skirted the established order and subverted the authority embodied in state-run urban bus services. In picking up passengers along the roadside, these drivers brought the problems and challenges of motor transportation to the heart of colonial power.

The president of the ATC’s complaint was only the latest in a long-running debate about “illegal competition” in the municipality’s transportation system, dating back to 1932. Even more broadly, however, this concern about “pirate passenger lorries” and “illegal competition” was part of a much larger technopolitical contestation over African mobility and spatial practices in the colonial capital—an unfolding but highly contested process of informalization in which the colonial state sought to use regulation to exert authority over the spatial and social landscape of the city in new ways. By invoking the language of piracy, colonial officials highlighted the deep unease with which they operated in the city and the tenuousness of their authority. The dominance of African owner-operators in the motor transport industry of the Gold Coast enabled drivers and passengers to assert control over how and where they moved, empowering them to act as autonomous entrepreneurs that provided real and valuable alternatives to state-run services. However, in defining their movement within the city, these drivers and passengers also found themselves in direct conflict with representatives of the British colonial state, whose attempts to normalize and rationalize the city had created an alternative framework of laws and practices. Based on British practices and values, this urban plan failed to account for African understandings of the city.² As a result, motor transportation was situated at the center of larger technopolitical debates about urban life, mobility, and spatial practice in the colonial capital.

This chapter explores two high-profile examples of conflict—horn honking and “pirate passenger lorries”—as a way to understand the issues at stake for colonial officials, elite Ga Town Council representatives, and the African drivers and passengers who dominated the commercial motor transport sector. These colorful examples were certainly not the only nodes of contestation. As I have detailed elsewhere, drivers regularly protested licensing restrictions and fares, and city residents complained about the conditions of roads and access to affordable transportation services.³ However, these issues of horn honking and pirate passenger lorry service stand out from the more general policy discussions of the archival record, giving us a glimpse into the practices of African mobility and colonial anxiety over the limits of British authority often obscured through more mundane policy documents.⁴ The often-emotional reactions and frustrations of British colonial representatives highlight both the symbolic and practical importance of technology and mobility practice in the city. British officials and ATC representatives clearly understood mobility as an extension of the state’s efforts to develop the spatial and technological infrastructure and culture of Accra. But Accra residents also had their own unique visions of urban life—what Garth Myers calls “the local frame of awareness.”⁵ Rather than merely resisting an imposed colonial order, African urban residents actively shaped that very order by asserting the validity of long-standing and widely embraced spatial and mobility practices.

This chapter looks beyond what Mavhunga describes as the “banal mobility” of objects to a broader understanding of mobility that sometimes shaped but was not defined by technological objects.⁶ Infrastructural technology like roads and motor vehicles both produces and are produced by the “untheorized practices of everyday life,”⁷ through which urban residents negotiate the use and meaning attached to space. Through mobility politics, Accra residents asserted their own visions for their city and negotiated colonial politics within and outside of the formal elite structures of elected town councils, legislative assembles, or chieftaincy politics. To capture these overlapping processes of technopolitical rhetoric, technological planning, and technology-in-use,⁸ I place archival sources in conversation with oral histories from drivers and passengers who began their careers in the late-colonial period and whose lives and work shaped the culture of urban mobility in question in the debate over pirate passenger lorries.⁹ Many of these drivers came from La, where they identified as the sons, grandsons, nephews, and cousins of drivers. Their history of driving, in other words, was a profoundly personal history, and their narratives highlight the importance of motor transport technology to the occupational and social lives of both themselves and their passengers. Drivers who narrated their own life histories as drivers provide an important counterpoint to the archival record of regulation and infrastructural development that dominated the concerns of British colonial officials. By framing their technological practice through the movement of their passengers, these drivers also push us to think about space—not just the objects that operate within space—as both political and technological.

While we do not have many records of the voices and stories of individual drivers and passengers, their actions speak loudly through the complaints and frustrations of colonial officials and town ouncil members. Through motor transportation, a range of African residents in Accra spoke to and interacted directly with British colonial officials; in debating how the road should be used and how space should be defined, these two means of “enframing the city” came into conflict and conversation.¹⁰ In doing so, urban residents shaped the emergence of a distinctly Accra culture, embracing the possibilities of cosmopolitan technologies while remaining firmly rooted in local practices and values.

MOBILITY, REGULATION, AND MOTOR TRANSPORTATION IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY GOLD COAST

As a preeminently European introduction, colonial officials in the early twentieth century felt relatively comfortable with their control over motor transport practice in Accra. Longer histories of urban residence and Indigenous politics placed Africans in a position of power in Accra, often undermining European attempts to redesign the city as the new colonial capital at the end of the nineteenth century.¹¹ However, motor transportation was new and unfamiliar to both the Indigenous Ga population of the city as well as to the migrant labor populations who were increasingly attracted to the colonial capital. Government officials believed that this newness would allow them to shape African appropriation of the technology from the very beginning—a confidence rooted in colonial control of railways, which dominated colonial communications and transportation infrastructure beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.¹² Building on practices throughout Britain’s African colonies, representatives of the colonial state sought to encourage the development of the railway, both as a means of resource extraction and revenue generation as well as a tool for controlling African mobility.¹³ At the same time they discouraged the development of motor transportation, resisting calls to build roads in the colony and creating road breaks and neglecting maintenance on existing roads to discourage their use throughout the 1910s and early 1920s.¹⁴

However, colonial officials grossly underestimated African interest and enthusiasm for motor vehicles, as well as the influence of spatial patterns and mobility practices that had predated the advent of motor transport. Europeans were ambivalent about the usefulness of motor vehicles in both metropole and colony after their introduction at the turn of the twentieth century. As Jo Guldi demonstrates, this ambivalence was rooted in eighteenth-century British infrastructural politics; however, European ambivalence to motor transportation was echoed in other parts of the continent as well.¹⁵ The focus on railways over roads contrasted with American reactions to the new technology; in the United States, roads had been readily embraced as an expression of not only technological modernity but also American identity, particularly after the introduction of the Ford Model T, which had democratized access to motor transport technologies in America by the 1930s.¹⁶ However, as late as the 1940s, automobile cultures and regulations were still relatively inchoate in much of the world. European colonial officials who sought to reorganize urban space according to the new technologies were doing so through a process of experimentation and debate at home as well as in their colonies. And yet, the possibilities provided by motor transport technologies—and particularly the promise of autonomy and mobility that accompanied the new technology—took on a different form of urgency in colonies where governmental authority and legitimacy were far less secure and autonomy and mobility represented threats to tenuous order rather than the promise of a new future. Instead, in colonies in India and Africa the British sought to construct narratives of modernity rooted in the railway, even as railway policies differed significantly across the British Empire in terms of cost, scale, accessibility, passenger versus freight, and so on.¹⁷

In the Gold Coast, however, diverse groups of Africans appropriated the technology of motor transport in rapidly increasing numbers and used motor vehicles to reshape the control of mobility and space in the colony. As I’ve argued elsewhere, motor transportation provided an important alternative to the railway, which allowed African entrepreneurs to assert and maintain control over the flow of goods from rural production zones to coastal ports, increasing their profits and resisting British attempts to control trade in the colony. A few elites in coastal society used their wealth to purchase private vehicles. However, many other Africans embraced motor transportation as a new form of commercial investment—providing goods and passenger transport between and within rural and urban areas. Vehicles numbered only 16 in 1908. By 1932, there were 4,141 commercial motor vehicles and 1,618 private cars and taxis registered in the Gold Coast. By the end of the 1930s, there were over 5,501 commercial vehicles and 2,076 private cars and taxis.¹⁸ The number of drivers in the colony also grew and, in fact, even outpaced the number of registered vehicles. By 1945 a single vehicle could have well over twenty-five different licensed drivers associated with it, as well as potentially a much larger number of mates (or apprentices) who helped the driver maintain the vehicle and its cargo (goods and/or passengers).¹⁹

This rapid pace of growth occurred in spite of mediocre road conditions.²⁰ When the first car was imported at the turn of the twentieth century, it was barely usable on Accra’s uneven road surfaces. A few decades later, things had scarcely changed. As one observer wrote in the Gold Coast Independent:

Accra in 1918! What a spectacle its streets present! So far as the business quarter of the city is concerned, not town planned streets remember, but roads carried along the foundations of age worn Bush tracks impressed by the feet of men when houses were few and other shelter, none; And the journeyman’s main aim was to cut across anywhere and anyhow to gain the brief shade of a friendly tree somewhere in the vicinity of this course. With the knowledge that the High Street and other roads in Accra grew in the manner indicated, their abrupt corners and bends, as it were in deference to every point of the compass, should not cause greater surprise than the fact that little improvement—certainly no appreciable improvement, has been affected in the march of years²¹

Figure 4.1. The driver, Murphy, waits patiently for his turn while his mate cleans the bonnet. A Day in the Life of a Tro-Tro Driver. Photograph by Ben Kwakye. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra PS/1877/6.

And yet, as this same commentator noted, the diversity of vehicles on the road was immense—“a clash of medievalism and of the 20th century!”—as buses and trucks with large six-cylinder engines and motorcycles by Harley Davidson and Triumph operated alongside sheep and goats. It was a veritable “war zone” in which all—people and animals alike—are “turned loose by someone who is responsible for their welfare” with few safeguards for protection.²² Regulation, the writer argued, was necessary to bring some order to the roads and minimize the related risks: “Why are these obsolete methods in Accra not done away with? Why has the municipal or other authority responsible not brought us up to date? Why is the traffic not regulated. Why are the sheep and goats allowed to remain? Is it because the risk is negligible as compared with the illustration of danger resulting from lack of foresight or judgment at the seat of war?”²³ “The bad management of traffic in our streets” led to accidents like the one that killed Reverend John Edmund Boggis when his motorcycle collided with a car driven by Mr. Soper, acting agent of Messrs. Cadbury Bros.²⁴ However, “A Citizen” argued in the pages of the Gold Coast Independent that the advent of motor cars also led rulers to be more disconnected from the people—a different kind of danger. If previous governors had walked or ridden horses or carts through the streets of the capital and had to directly encounter their citizens, the speed of motorized transport made that much more difficult and increasingly insulated colonial leadership from public opinion.²⁵

This early twentieth-century account depicts a highly dynamic form of street life in the city, which incorporated Africans as both drivers and passengers. In other parts of the continent, the high cost of motor vehicles and the low wages and limited economic opportunities available to Africans restricted African access to motor transport technologies; at the same time, colonial policies—or, in the case of settler colonies, the policies of white minority rule—were attempting to control African mobility.²⁶ In the Gold Coast, European companies and the colonial state imported the earliest motor vehicles in the first decades of the twentieth century.²⁷ However, access to the new technology was not restricted to the colonial elite. In the interior of the Gold Coast, wealthy Akan cocoa farmers in the early twentieth century, who benefited directly from the colonial economy of extraction, often invested the profits of their farms in lorries, marking the beginning of what Polly Hill calls the “lorry age” (post-1918).²⁸ Initially, cocoa farmers purchased motor vehicles to transport cocoa to train stations and buying agents. Echoing an earlier use of head carriers to transport produce, however, farmers were soon bypassing colonial railways altogether, using motor vehicles and roads to take their produce directly to coastal ports where they could maximize profit.²⁹ Motor transportation provided a new way to connect urban and rural areas within the colonial economy, facilitating the emergence of new trading practices and opening up new possibilities for rural farmers and villagers, even as the new technology built on much older networks.

While peripheral roads often connected farms and small villages to regional markets throughout the colony, the larger paths of automobility led to Accra, as the political capital, major market, and international port. People from all over the colony traveled through the city as they made their way to the central lorry park with goods and passengers from rural production zones or regional markets. Unsurprisingly, then, these commercial drivers reflected the broader diversity within the colony. By the 1930s and 1940s, drivers had been registered in all regions of the Gold Coast; however, registered drivers were particularly concentrated in the southern half of the colony where agricultural production and the cocoa industry motivated the construction of roads, financed the purchased of imported lorries, and provided steady work for drivers.³⁰

In Accra Indigenous Ga people dominated the motor transport industry. The suburbs of La and Teshie were considered headquarters for drivers, where generations of families entered the industry through apprenticeship and professional training and regulated the professional standards of the industry through trade unions that governed driver behavior and negotiated working conditions with the government. Drivers came from all over the colony to be trained in La, which was considered the home of the colony’s first and most respected drivers.³¹ As they came to Accra from other regions, these young men were absorbed into the Ga community and the professional community of drivers in Accra through apprenticeship networks. For drivers—many of whom had left their hometowns and defied their parents to pursue driving work—it was this occupational identity as drivers that mattered most as they made decisions about their economic, social, and political lives.³² Technological expertise, professional skill, and occupational experience served as a shared language among the ethnically diverse and mobile population of drivers in Accra and throughout the Gold Coast.

Some expatriate firms operated motor transport services in the early twentieth century. In 1906 Messrs. Scheck and Barker began operating three-ton Daimler motor lorries on the Dodowah Road.³³ Messrs. Miller’s Motor Transport Department began running a regular service between Accra and Christiansborg in 1918, leaving from both their commercial headquarters and the post office and operating until 8 p.m.³⁴ By the early 1920s Elders Road Transport Company had begun using lorries to transport cocoa from the railway station to the coast, eliminating the need for cart operators. Still others, like the Basel Mission Trading Company ran their own transport departments and operated throughout the colony, moving goods between rural production zones and urban markets. However, the vast majority of the colony’s transport industry lay in the hands of African entrepreneurs who either drove their own vehicle or, if they had been particularly successful as drivers or businessmen, owned a small fleet that they let out to young drivers, often still in training. The tremendous growth of the industry, in other words, was a reflection of African entrepreneurialism rather than expatriate or government investment.

Colonial ambivalence to motor transportation in the early part of the twentieth century necessitated retroactive attempts at regulation during the 1930s. Having failed to stem the rising tide of commercial motor transportation, colonial officials in the 1930s sought to regulate and rationalize a motor transport industry that had emerged outside of the restrictions of colonial policy. Africans shaped motor transport practice to suit their own social and economic interests, drawing on older systems of Indigenous transportation such as head carriers to organize the industry and create standards for training and expertise that reflected understandings of how to be a (good) driver.³⁵ British colonial officials, by contrast, were influenced by European expectations and practices of motor transportation, as well as by broader concerns about control and authority over the emerging industry.³⁶ New efforts to regulate driving culminated in the 1934 Motor Traffic Ordinance, which dictated not only road conditions and standards for vehicle maintenance and operation but also attempted to define who could and could not be a driver.³⁷ Literacy requirements, physical examinations, and certificates of competency challenged African understandings of the skills required to be an effective driver, resulting in protests from newly emerging motor transport unions throughout the colony.³⁸

BUILDING MOBILITY INFRASTRUCTURE

These regulatory efforts followed a broader pattern of governance in Accra. Ato Quayson argues that early resettlement efforts were “reactive” in response to crisis (e.g., disease, earthquakes, rapid urbanization).³⁹ As we’ve seen, by the 1930s and 1940s, however, Town Council members and colonial technocrats had begun to articulate a more rigorously organized and coherent government policy in Accra and other Gold Coast towns, rooted in concerns about sanitation and public health and evidenced in wide-ranging regulations on trade and housing. The plan for the town, which was supported by the ATC and the British colonial government in the early twentieth century, reflected the shifting priorities of the colonial state in providing social welfare. Rather than one central policy statement, the plan for Accra was a set of interrelated policy efforts that reflected what historian Fred Cooper calls “development colonialism.”⁴⁰ Building on the reformist work of Governor Gordon Guggisberg in the 1910s and 1920s, the British administration increasingly invested in infrastructural, economic, and social development projects. In the city itself, building projects and road construction sought to reshape patterns of urban residence and sociability by changing the built environment. The city’s expanding boundaries and investments in infrastructural development raised new questions about urban mobility, particularly for members of the ATC, which held primary responsibility for urban development and infrastructure.⁴¹

Road construction was of central importance for both mobility and public health infrastructure. Wider, well-planned, well-built roads enforced proper distances between houses and reduced the incidence of mosquitoes. But roads also facilitated the movement of people and goods into and out of the city. The multilayered function of roads complicated questions about the responsibility for building and maintaining them. When Councillor de Graft Johnson highlighted the poor condition of main roads in Accra in 1930 and questioned whether the money being spent to build the Labadi-Teshie Road might be better used to build roads in the town, the acting senior public health engineer noted that government was responsible for the construction of roads and drains.⁴² However, in the context of the “prevailing financial stringency” of the Great Depression, Public Works Department funds for road construction and maintenance were dwindling.⁴³ Funding shortages meant that offices were forced to balance basic infrastructural provision with pressing public health concerns, and maintenance costs only increased as the road network grew. By the mid-1930s, the combination of incomplete and poorly maintained roads in the city had created a crisis.

Incomplete roads were a particular subject of discussion and complaint, echoing broader patterns of incompleteness and obsolescence that hampered colonial development efforts and undermined British arguments about public welfare. The ATC and the Public Works Department were unable to keep up with the rapid pace of urbanization in the city by the 1920s and 1930s, and road infrastructure was often not completed due to a lack of funds. In 1932 Councillor Kojo Thompson complained that a large gap remained at the end of Boundary Road. Councillor Dr. Reindorf had himself paid to have the road built, at a cost of £150 and several lawsuits from residents who accused him of trespassing. Having now taken on the road as their responsibility, Thompson argued, it was only fair that the government should complete the work since they had not paid for the original construction.⁴⁴ When the Council debated the condition of Boundary Road again in 1933, Akilagpa Sawyerr described the state of the road as “disgraceful” and urged the members of the Council to protest. The municipal engineer said that he had made three requests for funds to complete the three hundred yards of road and had been turned down repeatedly. The president once again wrote to the government. African councillors were diligent in their complaints about road maintenance, particularly in African middle-class neighborhoods like Adabraka.⁴⁵ These kinds of complaints rarely manifested in changes, however. By 1934 the ATC convened a small committee to assess the state of city streets and get the attention of the government. The committee, led by the medical officer of health, listed more than twenty-three streets in Accra, Adabraka, and Korle Gono.⁴⁶

Funding debates within the ATC took place within the context of a reorganization of funding responsibilities within the colonial government. While the ATC sent requests for road construction, the governor consistently decreased the Council’s “grant-in-aid” and increased its annual contribution to the maintenance of town roads. Instead, government increasingly directed their funds to the construction of new neighborhoods outside the congested quarter, echoing broader patterns in colonial housing policy. When the ATC president asked the director of public works about infrastructure plans for the town, it was clear that the construction of a new layout in Christiansborg and a new road to the cemetery—spaces that were central to colonial plans for the reordering of urban life—were more important than more established neighborhoods.⁴⁷

MOVING THROUGH MODERN SPACES

Elected members’ concerns about road construction highlighted many of the concerns of their constituents who demanded equitable access to infrastructure. However, ATC transport policy, often shaped by the interests of official members, was primarily focused on how people moved—the technology of mobility practice. While the city’s urban elite embraced the ostentatious display of horse-drawn carriages and, later, private motor vehicles as a way to show off their wealth and status throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most residents of Accra had been walking from their homes to the markets and workplaces of the relatively compact old town core (Jamestown, Usshertown, and Osu). Market traders, who carried large quantities of goods from their homes to market stalls, often operated in nearby markets rather than the larger markets established in the center of town (e.g., Salaga Market, Makola Market).⁴⁸ Wage laborers walked along roadsides or cut through fields and neighborhoods using well-trodden paths. The conditions of the dirt roads led residents of Station Road to petition the governor, demanding that the roads be watered down multiple times a day to avoid “the dust arising from the powdered condition of the roads, which by all means when swallowed into the air passages is dangerous to health and may likely spread consumption.”⁴⁹ By the 1920s and 1930s, even those office workers who possessed bicycles to aid in their travel to and from work complained that the long distances and rough conditions meant that they arrived to work late, hot, and dirty—a condition that often resulted in sanction by employers. In response to public discontent and in order to supplement Town Council revenues, the ATC created a municipal bus service in 1927.⁵⁰ Based out of a lorry park near the central post office, this bus service ran along all of the major thoroughfares in the city, connecting residents of central Accra to its newly developing suburbs (especially Adabraka and Ridge) as well as some of the broader Ga littoral to the east (e.g., La, Teshie).⁵¹

The municipal bus system quickly became a symbol of colonial visions for the city in the interwar period. The British-style buses, bus shelters, lay-bys, and lorry parks evoked an urban modernity considered suitable and respectable for the capital of Britain’s “model colony.” The system of bus stops facilitated the emergence of a new spatial awareness in the capital, now increasingly determined by bus shelters and routes, and encouraged debates about visibility and safety, which culminated in the acquisition and expansion of street lighting.⁵² This new spatial awareness also necessitated the construction of lorry parks throughout the city, decentralizing both commercial and passenger transport and placing greater emphasis on local markets and urban commuters.⁵³ Bus passengers from all walks of life queued at bus stops and purchased tickets from ticket collectors and bus conductors at established prices. In a culture where barter still dominated most economic transactions, the municipal bus system marked a new form of sociability, both in terms of the economic exchanges it encouraged but also in the social interaction that the buses facilitated. Seen as a suitably “modern” transport system, the bus service even occasionally attracted European residents and tourists who negotiated the expanding city alongside African residents of varied classes, genders, and ethnic groups.

For town councillors, these new spaces and forms of sociality created new demands and opportunities for revenue. Much like public markets, the bus stations themselves were commodified spaces. In 1931 the ATC leased the entire bus station across from the General Post Office to Anglo-African Aerated Waters, Ltd., converting their old refreshment kiosk into an open-air refreshment garden that would provide significant additional revenue (£120 per year) for the Council.⁵⁴ In the same year the Council granted permission for the German Drug Company to erect more than one hundred “illuminated advertisement columns.” As the company described it, the signs, which were supposed to be made of cast iron and glass, stood “8 feet high and 18 inches square with the words ‘BUS STOP’ embossed on each of the four side of the roof. One side of the panels would be reserved to the Council for the Bus Time Table whilst the other three would be used for advertisement purposes.” The German Drug Company would pay for the installation, upkeep, and electricity, keeping the signs lit until 10 p.m. every night, but they also reserved the right to sublet the three advertisement panels. After seven years they would transfer ownership to the Council, who would rent them for £1 per column per year.⁵⁵ In 1934, the president of the Council attached advertisement boards to buses to increase revenue. The contract arranged with Messrs. Shaul and Coy for £50 per year was perhaps smaller than the Council had hoped, and the president noted that commercial firms had been slow to take advantage of the opportunity.⁵⁶ However, the Council managed to secure a new client the following year: West Africa Publicity Limited.⁵⁷ Importantly, the leasing out of bus signs for advertising also represented a new phase of commercializing public space—a public instantiation of the overlapping interests of government and commercial firms, selling a private company sole rights to advertising on public property. Similar sorts of advertising boards were placed at bus stops and stations and leased out accordingly. Advertising on buses themselves, however, took the quest for profit on the road as public buses were transformed into mobile billboards that brought advertising and commercial interests to all parts of the city. By utilizing their authority over public lands, infrastructure, and services, the Council granted European firms access to land and created important footholds for expatriate enterprise in the middle of important African commercial and residential districts, expanding and protecting the interests of European capital. Collaboration with corporate interests—an early form of public-private partnership—allowed the Council to secure more funding for public works in the midst of ever-tightening budgets. However, in securing additional advertising opportunities for companies, the Council advanced a particular kind of capitalism.

The new system also demanded new infrastructures to support the safety and comfort of residents. African councillors like Akiwumi argued for public seats to be installed at bus stations at intervals along the Accra-Christiansborg Road because, as he observed, “It was a long distance from Accra to Christiansborg, and it would be a relief for people travelling on foot on that road to rest on the seats.”⁵⁸ Roads and bus systems, in other words, were not just about passengers. Official members of the ATC were less sympathetic about the needs of the pedestrian public; the expenditure could not be justified without a revenue. When Councillor Akiwumi appealed that the “matter was an urgent one as far as the users of the road were concerned,” the president dismissed the urgency and argued that the question should wait—a refrain that reoccurred repeatedly throughout the 1930s.⁵⁹

Other infrastructure demands were less easy to dismiss, however. The provision of street lights in neighborhoods like Sabon Zongo and Abossey Okai, for example, were about more than mere convenience. As Akiwumi noted, police reports in local papers had highlighted issues of crime in these neighborhoods because “Sabon Zongo and Abossey Okai had afforded hiding places for thieves and all sorts of rogues; and because of the absence of lights in those localities, the police had been experiencing great difficult in tracing them.”⁶⁰ The installation of lights would facilitate the work of the police and guarantee the security of private property—two key pillars of “liberal imperialism” in Accra.⁶¹ But, as Councillor Kitson Mills noted, the residents of these neighborhoods were also ratepayers who deserved to be protected, particularly since residents were investing in the growth of their neighborhoods and the construction of “many good and substantial buildings.” It was “only fair” that they received investment.⁶²

For residents, however, the modern appeal of a bus system and its attendant infrastructure competed with the realities of cost and convenience. As early as the 1930s, African councillors called for reductions in fares by roughly a third on underperforming lines in order to attract more patronage.⁶³ Rate reductions began in 1932 on the underperforming route between Labadi and the post office as part of a one-month pilot program. The Council engaged in a publicity campaign to spread knowledge about the change in bus fares. Manchemei beat the gong gong, Council staff put up notices, and local newspapers ran stories announcing the news.⁶⁴ These pilot programs exceeded expectations. After a fare reduction proposed by Kojo Thompson to encourage ridership on new bus routes along Boundary Road in 1935, the municipal engineer noted that fare reduction actually led to a 25 percent increase in revenue—30 percent of which was profit. The Council approved a plan to extend the reductions to additional lines as deemed appropriate and feasible by the Engineering and Accounting Departments, and the municipal engineer congratulated Councillor Thompson on his excellent proposal.⁶⁵

These fare reduction experiments were part of a broader project to encourage African residents to regularly patronize the bus system. Councillors also proposed adjusted and extended routes that reflected the needs and daily patterns of residents. Given the extraordinary foot traffic on Boundary Road—eighty-four-hundred passengers over four days in 1935—councillors agreed to an experimental bus service, which was later extended in 1936 as part of a new regular bus route between the post office and the booming suburb of Adabraka.⁶⁶ But fare reductions seemed to be the only intervention that significantly improved ridership. As councillors noted in 1931, “The falling off in the bus takings was due to people not having enough money to use on them.” Councillors Booth, Quartey-Papafio, and Thompson “were certainly sure that more people could not travel on the buses now as they could not afford the high rates.”⁶⁷ In taking up their proposals, the Council dramatically increased the profits generated through the bus service, from £2,553 in 1931⁶⁸ to £4,160 in 1936—pure profit that constituted 10 percent to 25 percent of the Council’s total revenue.⁶⁹

Conversations about bus fares and the profitability of the bus service differed significantly from other financial debates within the Town Council. Town councillors, technocrats, and residents alike often cast ongoing controversies over ratepaying for property or basic utilities like water as a question of civic responsibility. The difficult financial realities of the Council and the constant need for revenue were recast as an investment in the welfare and growth of the city. Every ratepaying resident contributed to the future that the Town Council sought to build—a future defined by modern self-government. In conversations about bus fares and the revenue of the bus service, however, councillors were often much more explicit about the profit motive behind this public good. Profits from the bus service far outpaced those collected at markets and lorry parks, providing a critical source of revenue for a Town Council that had been overwhelmed by the financial responsibilities of town planning and maintenance since the governor’s office transferred responsibility for town roads and decreased Council subsidies in the late nineteenth century. At a minimum, the Council needed to recoup its costs in the municipal bus service. Ideally, however, the bus system would generate profits that could supplement the Council’s meager budget, funding road construction and maintenance among other infrastructural costs.⁷⁰

Questions about fares and ridership were only one part of that calculation. Expanding new routes, purchasing new buses, and providing benches for waiting passengers were all part of the cost of operating and maintaining an effective public service.⁷¹ While infrastructural costs often dominated Council discussions, African councillors also highlighted the investments of labor that kept infrastructure like the bus service in operation. As the global depression dragged on, Councillor Kitson Mills called for an end to the levy on bus employee wages and improvement in the employment conditions of employees in a 1935 meeting, stating that “the bus service contributed a great deal towards the revenue of the Council, and therefore the people engaged in the bus service should be well paid. They received fair wages before but they were reduced during the depression days and levies laid in some cases. They were quite willing, so far, to help in the economic situation which faced the Country. When prosperous time came it was considered that they should receive back what they had contributed, but that had not been the case.”⁷² Kitson Mills and the employees he represented embraced the rhetoric of public service, responsibility, and shared sacrifice that had been so central to government rhetoric in the midst of global and financial crisis. African councillors argued that higher pay would “encourage them to give good service” and annual leave would enable these essential workers to “recoup their health.”⁷³ Official members, however, seemed unmoved by these arguments. Councillor Roberts dismissed the need for leave by pointing to the workers’ status as day laborers who, he argued, “were not entitled to annual leave. . . . They could not be placed on the same basis as clerical staff.”⁷⁴ If the Council were to increase wages and introduce an annual leave for bus service employees, “it would create awkwardness to both Government and mercantile firms when artisans and labourers would demand vacation leave with full pay.”⁷⁵ Councillor Sutherland pointed to his own firm—the United Africa Company, Ltd.—who paid lower wages than the Council without complaint. After all, Roberts noted, “The bus service was, at present, being run on a very narrow margin. During prosperous years the Council subscribed heavy sums to the depreciation fund, but that had not been the case during the past three years—in fact, no moneys had been paid in as the vehicles were old.”⁷⁶ Roberts argued that increasing wages would make it difficult to generate a profit on the bus service, which was “being run on a very narrow margin.”⁷⁷ Old buses could not be replaced, and private companies provided competition for municipal services. While councillors were willing to invest projects that advanced their visions, they were often reluctant to spend smaller sums to address issues of public concern. Councillors readily manipulated fares to convince people to use poorly sited markets or expensive bus services but would refuse to raise wages, provide appropriate seating and street lighting, or extend electricity to communities. In a pattern that echoed through other parts of the socioeconomic sphere, employees and passengers were stuck between the demands of social hierarchy, private sector interest, and public sector profitability.

These concerns about the cost of the bus system were further complicated by what town councillors and other government officials often referred to as “competition.”⁷⁸ Municipal buses were certainly not the only motor vehicles present in the city. Alongside numerous private vehicles owned by the town’s wealthier inhabitants, taxis and mammy lorries (or mammy wagons) were seen plying city streets. Drivers of both taxis and mammy lorries reflected broader patterns and practices of motor transportation in the colony. Outside of the municipal bus system, African owner-operators dominated commercial motor transportation in Accra and operated largely outside of any system of comprehensive regulation (beyond basic requirements of licensing, speed, and vehicle condition established through the 1934 Motor Traffic Ordinance and its subsequent amendments). Any car could operate as a taxi, providing it was registered with the government, its driver possessed a taxi license, and the driver displayed a lighted taxi sign on the top of the vehicle. The limited physical markers for taxis enabled drivers to easily move into and out of the taxi industry; however, this subtlety also caused significant confusion when a passenger sought to hail a cab, unable to distinguish a taxi from a private car.⁷⁹ More commonly, it seems, passengers of means called for taxis when they needed to carry large, heavy or unwieldy goods, rather than attempting to utilize the municipal bus service.⁸⁰

As a center for trade and a major coastal port, Accra also served as a transportation hub for mammy lorries from all over the colony. With their imported metal engine and chassis and locally constructed and painted wooden body, mammy lorries ferried goods (and some passengers) from rural production areas to urban markets. Mammy lorries were frequently used by market women (“mammies”) who traveled with drivers into the interior to trade dried and salted fish for other foodstuffs like tomatoes and yams, which could then be sold in Accra. However, farmers also employed mammy lorries themselves, as farmers of cocoa and other products transported their produce directly to Accra’s port for sale and export. While lorries shared the road, they were expected to travel directly to the city’s central lorry park to load and unload goods and passengers.

Thus, Accra’s streets were busy and diverse, catering to a wide range of motor transport users through a system of overlapping networks. Drivers and passengers alike moved freely between these networks, in response to shifting socioeconomic circumstances. In setting up the municipal bus system, Town Council members assumed that passengers would prefer the slick cosmopolitanism and technological sophistication of new, imported buses and that drivers would value the economic stability of waged employment in the “formal” sector. In practice, however, for many passengers like Felicia, a trader from Keta who traveled to Accra for work, deciding whether to ride in a municipal bus or a lorry was a question of convenience and accessibility:

Everybody at all can take any of the car that he wants. If you want to take the bus and you get to the bus stop and it’s full up and it can’t stop, if you want you wait for another one to come. But if you don’t want to wait you just go and look for a lorry and go wherever you are going. Everybody joined the buses. And if you go to the market and you buy food and you have a load that is not too much, then you feel you can join a bus and put it on your thighs. Or if it’s too much you can go and join a lorry.⁸¹

Drivers, likewise, often used salaried positions (or what they referred to as “company work”) driving for the municipal bus service, government agencies, or private companies to save money to purchase their own wooden-sided mammy lorries—a testament to the value attached to economic independence of entrepreneurial driving. Drivers and passengers alike identified mammy lorry drivers as the real professionals—“real drivers,” as men in La referred to them—due to their knowledge of the vehicle and their skill in negotiating the dangers of the road. However, a catastrophic accident, family misfortune, or financial emergency could easily bankrupt drivers who often operated based on small profit margins. As a result, throughout their careers, drivers might have to shift back and forth several times between taxis, company cars, municipal buses, and mammy lorries in response to available work and capital investment.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, members of the ATC and even the colonial governor expressed concern about possible competition with the municipal bus service. The bus service provided a sizable proportion of the ATC’s revenues, and the Council sought to protect their interests in the bus service by restricting alternative forms of public transportation and claiming urban public transportation as a site of colonial control and authority; this would limit African drivers’ participation in the urban transport sector.⁸² These colonial justifications for the protection of the municipal bus system reflected the dual concerns of colonial governance—capitalism and civilization.⁸³ The municipal bus system was inextricably bound up in this project, moving residents in the capital of Britain’s “model colony.” In laying out bus routes; establishing bus shelters, lay-bys, and lorry parks; and importing British-style buses, the ATC attempted to regulate and shape the mobility patterns and practices of urban residents while also soliciting new forms of revenue from Accra residents to fund their visions for the city’s future.

THE PRACTICES OF MOBILITY: HORNS, BRAKES, AND RESIDENTIAL SPACE

Even as they negotiated bureaucratic solutions and maximized profits, town councillors felt their control over the practice of mobility slip further in the growing city. In response to demand from the rapidly growing and increasingly suburbanized populations of Accra, new primary and secondary roads were cut through emerging residential areas, incorporating urban residents into a mobile network. While such roads were intended to provide more direct and efficient routes to the city center for city residents, drivers of mammy lorries, who sought to avoid traffic congestion on older roads that directly connected the city to rural areas, quickly appropriated these new urban roads. For municipal bus and taxi drivers, residential roads were central to an emerging practice of urban mobility, marked by slower speeds, frequent stops, and shorter distances. Buses and taxis were integral parts of the new spatial imagining of the city, facilitating the mobility of urban residents from their homes to the city’s various commercial, entertainment, industrial, and governmental districts for work and pleasure, and urban residents walked from their homes to sensibly placed bus stops. They were, in short, uniquely urban forms of mobility and sociability.

The drivers and passengers of mammy lorries, by contrast, had a markedly different relationship to the city. Unlike municipal buses and taxis defined by their role in urban mobility, mammy lorries connected village and city, carrying goods and passengers from rural production zones to urban centers of trade and consumption and back again. This sort of periurban mobility was central to the lives of both rural and urban residents and facilitated economic, social, and cultural connections between areas that were considered politically and administratively distinct within the British system of indirect rule.⁸⁴ Food, family members, imported goods, and ideas were all transported by mammy lorries, bridging the socioeconomic and sociocultural distance created by the “bifurcated state”⁸⁵ of indirect rule and bringing rural and urban areas into regular conversation.

Ultimately, however, neither the drivers nor passengers of mammy lorries associated mobility with residency. For many of the traders who patronized mammy lorries and markets and the drivers who carried them to and from the city, Accra was a space moved through or visited, not lived in. Even for those who did live in the city, the constant movement of trade meant that many saw the city as a sort of node within a periurban sphere of circulation and exchange, connecting rural and urban areas through social, economic, and cultural ties. These alternative spatial understandings and mobility practices, in turn, shaped very different understandings of the relationship between motor transportation and city space. Colonial police and members of the ATC regularly complained about lorry drivers who parked along roadsides and impeded the flow of traffic or drove too quickly through streets and around corners in urban areas where pedestrians frequently walked in, along, or across the road.⁸⁶ In 1935 the commissioner of police announced the introduction of new parking regulations in Accra “owing to the increasing number of motor accidents in the busy thoroughfares of the town.”⁸⁷ While the new regulations caused some councillors to worry about the impact on the loading and offloading of goods in front of business premises, such infractions proved easy enough to police as the Town Council and the Legislative Council imposed reduced speed limits for Accra and urban areas, and the colonial police force introduced a Motor Traffic Unit, tasked with enforcing local traffic laws and regulations. Rather, the most vexing problems for colonial officials—both police and legislators—was not the danger and inconveniences of urban motor transportation itself but the politics of respectability, order, and control that were threatened as mammy lorries transgressed the boundaries between rural and urban, commercial and residential.

Emerging structures of mobility and new spatial understandings came into direct conflict at urban crossroads and intersections. The construction of new roads that accompanied the development and expansion of residential areas provided alternative pathways for the drivers of mammy lorries traveling to the capital. In an effort to bypass the traffic and rough conditions on major roads, drivers explored new residential streets as shortcuts. Accustomed to limited foot and vehicle traffic outside of the city and attempting to increase the time and fuel efficiency of their driving, lorry drivers employed common strategies to ensure safe passage along these new routes. Rather than stopping at intersections, drivers merely slowed down and honked as they approached, warning other vehicles of their passing. Widely accepted and often recommended on rural roads and in smaller towns, such honking quickly proved to be both a nuisance and a danger in the more urbanized capital.⁸⁸ By 1936, the inspector general of police noted, “It is beyond dispute that many local drivers make excessive and unnecessary use of the horns on their vehicles, and that this is markedly so in the case of a few lorry drivers who regularly use the Dodowah Road in the early hours of the morning.”⁸⁹ These observations were punctuated by noise complaints from a number of European civil servants living in bungalows within earshot of the road.⁹⁰

In response to complaints, the director of public works was ordered to widen major streets, such as the Dodowah Road; the conservator of forests was asked to evaluate the whether foliage obstructed visibility at intersections and to plant hedges and trees to dampen the effect of traffic noise on nearby residents; and the inspector general of police placed traffic constables at major intersections to direct traffic.⁹¹ When none of these tactics reduced traffic noise, colonial officials were confounded. For the inspector general of police, these failures raised questions about race and the capability of African traffic constables.⁹² For others, the persistence of horn honking in the city defied all understanding. The commissioner of the Western Province complained in a letter to the colonial secretary in 1936: “I should like to point out, however, that it is not always a fact that drivers of motor vehicles sound their horns owing to lack of visibility. For instance, there is a stretch of road behind the Residency over which it is possible to see a long distance ahead and in the early morning lorry drivers appear to sound their horns out of the sheer joy of living apparently, the noise at times being terrific.”⁹³ It was not necessarily the horn honking itself that confused colonial officials. Government officials had also been puzzling over the issue of horn honking in Britain—a reflection of the relative newness of motor transport practice and the necessary negotiations and regulations that would define expectations of drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and the state.⁹⁴ Rather, it was the inability of the colonial state to regulate and reform the practices of African lorry drivers that frustrated colonial officials. The failure to regulate drivers and curb the practice of horn honking highlighted fundamentally different cultures of urban space and mobility, as well as the tenuousness of colonial authority. In this particular case, African lorry drivers used horn honking not only to communicate warnings to pedestrians and other motorists but as the basis for a broader system of communication between drivers.⁹⁵ While honking in this particular context was undoubtedly a safety strategy, drivers used their horns as part of a fairly wide-ranging system of communication: to warn about police officers ahead, greet fellow drivers, or express appreciation for a vehicle’s appearance or the drivers’ skill and reputation. Drivers were closely identified with the vehicular inscriptions and decorations on their vehicles, and drivers honked to greet each other when they saw someone they knew on the road. Some drivers looking to pick up passengers along the roadside might honk to alert pedestrians. And in rural areas or small towns where there were few vehicles and roads were often used for walking as much as for motor transportation, drivers would also honk to encourage pedestrians to clear a path in the road. As I’ve documented elsewhere, failure to do so sometimes resulted in catastrophic accidents and death.⁹⁶ In some cases (and in the absence of indicators or efficient mirrors), honking alerted other vehicles that a driver was about to pass. Drivers also used horn honking as a form of protection, alerting each other to the presence of police, or scaring off wildlife while repairing a vehicle in rural areas. Some of these systems of horn honking were transformed over time into unique cultural practices.⁹⁷ However, horn honking also pierced the social boundaries between the road and residential space. In the process, it placed European expectations about urban residential space and African cultures of the road into unanticipated conversation and conflict, requiring a revision of urban plans and assumptions about the organization and function of urban space.

Figure 4.2. Accra Views, 1958. Photograph by Paul Anane. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra R/6208/2.

CONTROLLING SPACE: PIRACY, MOBILITY, AND AUTHORITY

Archival documents suggest that government officials spent most of their time puzzling over how to regulate lorries; however, photographs and the memories of Accra residents indicate that the municipal bus service was used on a regular basis by people from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds. There was always anxiety among ATC members, the governor, and other colonial officials about the revenues generated by the bus service, and passengers seemed to move freely between municipal buses and lorries—motivated more by convenience and utility than class, prestige, or other sorts of socioeconomic markers. Drivers, likewise, often moved between municipal buses and lorries depending on what employment was available. However, the bus service regularly turned a profit throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Such profit was guaranteed by a monopoly system established under the Omnibus Authority Act in 1927, which limited the participation of independent vehicle owners in the urban public transport industry by refusing to grant commercial licenses to vehicle owners who sought to establish independent bus services in the capital.⁹⁸ Such protectionist policies preserved the “handsome revenue” of the ATC in the short term; however, even as late as 1943–44, colonial officials recognized that the state was unable to introduce a “complete and comprehensive general transport system.”⁹⁹ The expansion and reorganization of the city’s residential areas led to greater demands for alternative and expanded forms of public transportation by the town’s African residents. Meanwhile, colonial officials were complaining about the difficulties involved in organizing and regulating such a system given African practices that blurred the boundaries between goods and passenger transport and the difficulty of enforcing new regulations due to staff and funding shortages. The frustrations of colonial officials over regulations indicated more fundamental tensions in the ATC’s vision for and understanding of the urbanity and mobility practices of Accra’s population.

In the realm of public transportation, as elsewhere in colonial economy, society, culture, and politics, colonial officials often failed to take into account African practices when crafting policies that restricted and regulated African lives.¹⁰⁰ For many of Accra’s residents, the municipal bus service did not adequately reflect how they experienced and negotiated urban space. In other words, as colonial officials obsessed over how they moved, Accra residents made technological choices based on why they were moving. Wage laborers and office workers might have found the bus services’ routes convenient, connecting the city’s residential neighborhoods with centers of business and administration and facilitating transportation to and from work. Still others might have traveled at night or on weekends to partake in the enticements of urban popular culture in dance clubs, cinemas, and football pitches.¹⁰¹ However, for many Accra residents, mobility was intimately connected to their activities in the city’s numerous markets. Traders traveled daily between their homes and markets throughout the city with their sales goods in tow.¹⁰² The wealthiest traders hired taxis to transport their goods directly from their homes to the market stalls. Others who lacked the means to regularly hire a taxi attempted to carry their goods on the municipal bus, either holding their goods on their lap throughout the ride or cramming bundles in the small boot at the rear of the bus. When the storage available on the bus proved insufficient, some traders carried their goods to market, with the help of assistants, children, and other family members and dependents. Women who purchased foodstuffs and other goods in the central market likewise faced difficulties in securing adequate public transportation.¹⁰³ Thus, the municipal bus service proved insufficient or unusable for a large number of the city’s most mobile residents.

Figure 4.3. Women climb through the open sides of a tro-tro in Accra. Feature Stories on Transportation in Ghana, 1966. Photograph by George Alhassan. Source: Photographic Archive, Information Services Office, Ministry of Information, Accra R/R/7179/10.

The blurring of boundaries between goods and passenger transport reflected a more fundamental understanding of urban space and mobility among Accra residents. In contrast to the system of indirect rule, which assumed strict divisions between rural and urban authority, the residents of Accra understood their town as an extension of the countryside, bound together by close ties forged through trade, transportation, and sociability. The highly educated African men who comprised the ATC were wealthy ratepayers with very different opportunities and priorities in relation to the city and colonial government. These manbii were financially invested in the welfare of Town Council investments—their taxes (or rates) went to pay for these services. But they were also invested in a particular sort of symbolic spatial culture in the city—Westernized, living much like European residents in similar parts of the city, early to move into the newly developing suburbs. Drivers, by contrast, were largely drawn from the nonratepaying class of people, from the bush or kose—the regions that lay outside of the core of Ga urbanity (Kinka, Nleshi, and Osu). They were often “school leavers” (individuals who had dropped out of school, often for financial reasons) who were connected to city life through the networks of farming, fishing, and trade, which had facilitated movement in the region for generations. They did not own property, but lorry drivers, at least, did often own their vehicles, and they dedicated themselves to securing the highest profits possible with their investments. Their priorities were influenced by their own profit motives, as well as those of their passengers—often market women who were traveling between Accra and the rural hinterland and within Accra itself.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, market women and other urban residents began pursuing alternative forms of urban transportation. Mammy lorries, which entered the city carrying goods from the farms of the interior, made initial stops and unloaded goods at the outskirts of the city, moving between markets and wholesale yards to distribute produce for farmers and traders. La, also known by colonial officials as “Labadi,” was one of the most important gateways into the city from the cocoa-producing eastern interior. As one of the first major urban markets as well as a center for motor transportation, La was a node connecting rural and urban transport networks. Drivers stopped at La as one of the first in a series of stops as they made their way along the main coastal road to the central market and lorry station in downtown Accra.¹⁰⁴

Both market women and drivers who had long-established relationships in long distance trade and transportation, seized on the possibilities of the mammy lorries in forging new motor transport practices in the city that better suited local patterns and practices of mobility and urban residence. For drivers who offloaded goods at a peripheral market like La, driving through town with a partially empty truck highlighted lost potential profit. As their lorries emptied, some enterprising drivers sought to replace their loads by offering their services to urban traders who were attempting to transport their trade goods to the central market. For market women, the opportunity to arrange cheaper transportation that was closer and more convenient proved appealing. By the 1930s, colonial officials reported that one could see traders standing with their goods at the roadside waiting to hail a passing lorry.

ATC members and other colonial officials viewed this practice as an extension of a perceived laziness on the part of lower-class African urban residents. In the context of a colonial urban plan, such practices made little sense. Bus stops had been placed within easy walking distance and buses ran at regular intervals; there seemed to be no need to wait on the roadside for a ride on a mammy lorry when bus shelters and modern buses were available. Furthermore, mammy lorries charged more for their services (as much as three pence within Accra city limits) than the municipal buses, whose fares were just over one pence. However, colonial logic failed to take into account the cost and trouble of headloading goods from homes to bus stops and again from lorry parks to market stalls. For many traders, the ease of use more than compensated for the elevated cost, providing traders with a more affordable alternative to the taxi and a quicker alternative to the municipal bus, for which passengers often waited in long lines during peak traffic times at the beginning and end of the workday. Lorries, which were built to transport goods, also provided necessary storage space that was absent for municipal buses focused on passenger transport. Thus, in appropriating mammy lorries into the urban transport industry, traders highlighted the conflation of categories of goods and passenger transport in the mobility practices of Accra residents.

As early as 1932, such practices began to raise concerns among members of the ATC, who feared that mammy lorries would cut into ATC revenues provided by the municipal bus services.¹⁰⁵ Echoing colonial fears about the role of independent motor transportation as competition with colonial railways in rural areas several decades earlier, the ATC immediately sought to limit the operations of “innumerable lorries . . . plying for hire for the carrying of passengers within the Municipal Boundaries.”¹⁰⁶ By 1940, much of this illegal competition seemed to be located on the road between La and Accra—a route dominated by well-organized and highly skilled Ga drivers.¹⁰⁷ That the center of this practice seemed to be La only strengthened colonial desires to restrict it. La’s role as a market and transportation center was paralleled by its reputation as a site of unrest for colonial administrations as far back as the 1920s when La residents allegedly attempted to bomb the colonial governor.¹⁰⁸ ATC members lobbied the governor to introduce new transport regulations that not only restricted passenger transport to the municipal bus services but also criminalized practices like stopping to load and unload along roadsides. Passenger transport along the routes of the municipal bus service was restricted to that service alone, while mammy lorries and other commercial vehicles were expected to proceed directly to the central lorry park in downtown Accra without stopping.

As the president of the ATC’s letter attests, drivers quickly found alternative routes that bypassed colonial attempts to protect the municipal bus service through road scheduling. Passenger transport operations other than the municipal bus service were banned on major transport arteries that ran through the city. ATC members assumed that police enforcement on scheduled roads would eliminate the practice. While scheduling and enforcement did succeed in limiting the operation of alternative passenger transport services along municipal bus routes, it did not eliminate the practice entirely. Instead, lorry drivers merely moved onto Accra’s expanding residential road infrastructure, crafting alternative pathways through the city that ran through the heart of the emerging residential districts. There, concerns about honking horns and pirate lorries overlapped in the complicated web of frustrated urban governance.

The language of piracy suggests the degree to which these passenger lorries threatened the authority of the colonial state and the foundations of the colonial order. Regulatory measures like road scheduling failed to halt the actions of mammy lorry drivers and passengers. For colonial officials and Accra residents alike, these failures highlighted the tenuousness of colonial control over urban mobility and space. British colonial officials freely admitted the limitations of their direct authority in rural areas, where they negotiated with chiefs who served as the indirect enforcers of colonial power. But in the city, colonial officials sought more direct control over African residents, seeking to influence the institutions and practices of politics, economics, society, and culture in pursuit of their “civilizing” mission. Particularly at the center of colonial power—the capital—the actions of drivers and passengers who used mammy lorries as passenger vehicles provided a direct challenge to colonial authority and asserted African ownership over Accra as a social and economic space. Africans not only worked around colonial restrictions in ways that were meaningful and useful to them, creating spaces for themselves to succeed and live that often defied expectations of colonial authorities, but their persistence also fundamentally reshaped colonial policy and the expectations of colonial authority.

CONCLUSION

The drivers and motor vehicle passengers in Accra provided important challenges to colonial authority at precisely the moment that the British colonial state sought to extend its influence over African lives and African spaces. After decades of conflict over urban residential redevelopment, state officials at the end of the 1930s finally began to reshape the city to reflect modernizing visions of sanitation, efficiency, and order. But new residential patterns raised new questions about the way that Africans lived in and moved through urban space. The tenacity of African drivers and passengers who sought alternative forms of urban mobility in order to better fit their needs and values, and the inability of the colonial state to suppress these alternatives, highlight the degree to which, even in the colonial capital at the height of investment in “development colonialism,” colonial hegemony remained elusive. Even as Africans embraced the technologies and spatial practices of modernization—the physical and social symbols of “civilization”—they did so through local frames of awareness and practice.¹⁰⁹

While market women and drivers did sometimes go on strike or protest as a form of political expression during this period, horn honking or the operation of pirate passenger lorries were not expressly political acts. However, in unapologetically embracing technology to pursue their own interests, lorry drivers and their passengers did shape a different kind of technology story. In a colonial context, European officials often ignored, underestimated, denigrated, or denied African capacity to operate effectively and on their own terms in “modern” society. British officials in the Gold Coast and European colonial agents around the continent saw their role as that of “civilizers”—bringing light to a dark continent. In cities like Accra, spatial networks and technological systems embodied the promise of a colonial modernity just as much as churches and storefronts. British officials and the Ga elites who served as their representatives on the ATC assumed that technology operated effectively only within a predetermined Western set of values and practices.¹¹⁰ Drivers and passengers who embraced the utility of lorries in urban settings, however, challenged these assumptions and shaped a new vision for urban mobility.

Telling stories of what Clapperton Mavhunga calls “everyday innovation” in Africa is critical in order to understand African experiences outside of these colonial frameworks.¹¹¹ As the debates over horn honking and pirate passenger lorries highlight, these quotidian practices often had political consequences, even if African agents did not frame them as political acts. As such, they reshaped the life of the city far beyond the mundane realities of daily life—going back and forth to the market, traveling to work, transporting goods, picking up passengers, making money. In using vehicles and roads in ways that Europeans could never have envisioned, drivers and passengers in Accra highlighted the limitations of British control and asserted a uniquely African practice of motor transportation and mobility. In the process, they reshaped the urban plan. In other words, Accra was an African city not only because of its precolonial roots but also the persistence of Africans in shaping the plan for the city long after it became the colonial capital because, as Myers argues, “The decisions of ordinary, low-income citizens are the creative heart of African urban form.”¹¹² In some cases, those decisions were part of an intentionally political engagement that spawned factions and debates around town. In others, as we see here, the actions of urban residents, united in their pursuit of mobility and prosperity, were less controversial for urban residents than they were for British representatives, who often failed to consider the interests and aspirations of the city’s lower-class population.

In Accra, “pirate passenger lorries” and honking horns were the early foundations of an emerging African urban mobility, simultaneously rooted in the past, the constantly evolving present, and competing visions of the future. By the time British colonial rule was effectively consolidated in the 1920s and 1930s, Accra was both a colonial port city and a Ga town. As Parker argues and as the struggles over pirate passenger lorries suggest, these were not distinct forms of urbanism. Nor was the African influence on urban life suppressed by the technological wonder of the “colonial sublime.”¹¹³ Rather, debates over the infrastructure and use of motor transport and urban planning technologies and the persistence of pirate passenger lorries highlight the existence of a distinctive Accra culture, which, by the 1930s and 1940s became a touchstone for the entire colony.