If you haven’t seen it already, Making an African City – a new book I published with Indiana University Press – is now out and is available for sale on the IUPress website, Amazon, and other typical booksellers. Most exciting, however, is that it is also available open access on the IUPress website as part of a new initiative supported by the trustees of Indiana University and you can access it here: https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/making-an-african-city

Of course, it is important that we continue to support university presses, so I also encourage you to buy the book whenever possible, but this initiative makes it accessible in Ghana and other places where academic monographs can be prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain thanks to international shipping.

Making an African City grows, in many ways, out of Ghana on the Go – both the book and the blog. In the process of researching Ghana on the Go, I stumbled upon the minutes of the Accra Town Council and the very fascinating debates about pirate passenger lorries, which seemed to dominate conversations in the late 1930s and 1940s. The language of piracy struck me as significant, so I tagged the files in my har drive,wrote a post-it note that said “pirate passenger lorries”, and placed it among the reminders of things to return to once the dissertation was done. It might have taken me more than a few years, but I did return to those files and ultimately wrote an article in the journal Technology & Culture. There I began to think about why colonial officials would use the language of piracy to describe African practices and what that helped us understand about the way that British officials and their African counterparts in municipal government thought about the authority of the state and the lived experiences of the city’s residents.

At the same time, I was increasingly interested in the historical origins of allied terms like “informality”, “informal economy”, and “informal settlement”. While those specific terms had their origins in the work of Keith Hart in the late 1970s (also in Accra – no relation), the practices he described and their position vis a vis the state had a much longer history. It seemed clear to me, on the one hand, that the practices that Hart had identified and described in that original article as having “escaped the enumeration of the state” and, thus, informal, had become increasingly criminalized as government officials, technocrats, and others appropriated the term in ways that increasingly seemed difficult to justify. The same practices, when taken up by middle class or elite residents, often resulted in state investment while the settlements and businesses established by members of the urban poor were frequently targeted for demolition. The colonial story of pirate passenger lorries, however, suggested that there was a much longer history of these practices in which informalization was understood as a historical process that unfolded as a byproduct of colonial capitalism, implemented through regulation and backed by the power of the courts, designed to protect the interest of expatriate capital and marginalize the often-preexisting practices of African urban residents. Often labeled as “nuisance”, activities in the realms of health, sanitation, trade, mobility, and housing found themselves particular targets of government regulation under the authority of the relatively new Accra Town Council. Far more complicated than a simple story of colonial oppression and local resistance, Making an African City explores the complex class dynamics, racial tensions, and cultural conflicts that shaped the emergence of Accra as a colonial and postcolonial capital. In the process, it demonstrates the ways in which technocratic fields that we take for granted today as professional fields of applied theory and practice like engineering, urban planning, architecture, public health, social work, and development were formed and professionalized in the context of colonialism and “naturalized” or “neutralized” in the high modernist postcolonial transition. This did not happen in Accra alone but, the book argues, we can perhaps see it most clearly in a city like Accra where African residents maintained a high degree of autonomy, mobility, economic authority, and land rights and where the complicated, often conflicting, layers of the city’s precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history were ever-present. City residents, in other words, were just as important in shaping what an “African city” looks like as technocrats or politicians. “Making” an African city was a process, and thinking about that process should also make us think about the degree to which we perpetuate these historical and systemic inequities and injustices through ahistorical structural and conceptual assumptions. It is, in some ways, a call for a better future through a clearer understanding of the past because, even though the past does not repeat itself, it does re-form in sometimes remarkable similar ways and we play a role in that re-formation.

I am grateful to so many people who helped or supported me in the process of developing this book, and there’s an extensive acknowledgements section detailing much of that. However, I am also incredibly grateful for the reception it has received to date and the opportunities and conversations that it has facilitated. My hope is that it receives a wide readership in technocratic fields, as well as urban history and theory, the anthropology of infrastructure, and elsewhere. If you’re interested in a book talk/conversation/discussion, please contact me at my new email: jenniferhart@vt.edu