The book on which this blog is based, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation, is now available for pre-order via Indiana University Press and Amazon. The book will be released in October 2016.

Check out “Automobility, Technopolitics, and African Histories of Technology-in-Use in Twentieth Century Ghana”, a short piece I wrote for the October issue of Technology’s Stories, the website of the Society for the History of Technology:  http://www.technologystories.org/

Ghana on the Go:  African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation is receiving some pretty amazing reviews:

Sarah Kunkel, “Africans on the go to make do:  Making local sense of global developments”, Labor History (2017):  1-7.  DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2017.1285532.

“Ghana on the Go is a central contribution to the understanding of how African commercial enterprise contributed to the overall economic development in the twentieth century. “

“Ghana on the Go is as much the history of the rise of African commercial enterprise as of the development of neoliberal politics. Hart’s focus on a specific enterprise allows us to detect the changes not only from colonial to independent politics, but also emphasises the shift from state capitalism to neoliberalism in the independent period, reminding us of a more differentiated use of the term ‘post-colonial’ politics.”

“Ghana on the Go is African history of work in its most literal sense, and is contributing to an expanded notion of what that history of work entails (Bhattacharya, 2014. In S. Bhattacharya (Ed.), Towards a new history of work (pp. 300–316). New Delhi: Tulika Books. [Google Scholar], pp. 3–5).”

Gordon Pirie, The Journal of Transport History 38(1) (forthcoming)

“Jennifer Hart’s text sweeps triumphantly across a century of automobility in colo­nial and post-colonial Ghana. The thoroughness of her analysis is marked out by lengthy field work in Ghana that involved travel in modern trotros and in an iconic ‘mammy wagon’, conversations in lorry parks and elsewhere (noted in the Acknowledgements), some 70 interviews, and an impressive range of archive and library sources.”

“Ghana on the Go is a sophisticated, clear and inspiring account of how the technology of motorised transport has been used by ordinary and diverse drivers and passengers to achieve entrepreneurial goals and meet aspirations for moder­nity. It is also a study of how a predominantly commercial automobility took root and was grafted onto a pre-existing set of mobilities and mobility values.”

“Hart’s well-informed monograph glides expertly and dexterously across historic periods, technologies and governmentalities. Five imaginatively titled chronologi­cal chapters work with the notion that Ghana’s automobile drivers (mostly male, but not exclusively) have been cast variously as ingenious and indigenous workers, admirable and honest, as public servants, as modern, as criminals and as agents of development. They, their vehicles and their infractions have featured continually in media and in private and public discussions about service, roads, fares and safety.”

“Straddling past and present, Ghana on the Go is meticulously researched, richly detailed, beautifully composed and elegantly constructed. Its alert and deep scho­larship is luminous. It reveals splendidly the complex layers and overlaps in trans­port provision, delivery and use. It is a marvellous book. It takes its place among the most insightful and rewarding analyses of transportation in Africa and helps lifts studies of (past) transport there onto par with fine mobility research anywhere.”

Ghana on the Go is a 2017 finalist for the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association!!!

From the description in the Annual Meeting Program:

“This book addresses a topic of great importance in the popular economies of Africa in the twentieth century. Ghana on the Go is an empirically-rich study that looks at the history of motor transportation in Ghana starting from the earliest days of British colonialism and ending in the 21st century. In what she refers to as ”automobility” and “auto/mobile lives,” Jennifer Hart deftly charts how drivers built on existing commercial trade routes to expand the scale and increase the speed of motorized transport. Weaving together stories of passengers, drivers, and commerce, she offers a nuanced account of the contradictions and tensions that surrounded the growth and development of motorized transportation in Ghana. The text balances ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and interviews. The strength of the book is that it focuses on the contradictions and conflicts pitting transport workers, passengers, and owners against one another at various times while recognizing their shared interests at others. In what she calls “vernacular politics in the postcolony,” Hart ends with a sanguine assessment of the challenges of automobility for the future.

Ghana on the Go was featured in a review essay by Cidy Cissokho (Center of African Studies at the University of Ediburgh) in the October 2017 issue of Politique africaine (no. 147), along with a recent monograph by Matteo Rizzo (Taken for a Ride:  Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labor, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis, Oxford University Press, 2017) and an edited collection by Michael Stasik, Kurt Beck, and Gabriel Klaeger (The Making of the African Road, Brill:  Leiden, 2017).  Check it out here.

Listen to Jennifer talk about Ghana on the Go and Accra Wala with hosts Peter Limb and Peter Alegi on the Africa Past and Present podcast, recorded at the 59th African Studies Association Conference (2016):  http://www.africanstudies.org/annual-meetings/asa-annual-meeting-podcast-series