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Rush and Relax: the Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanaian Roadside

2012; Routledge; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450101.2012.718936

1745-011X

Gabriel Klaeger,

Migration and Exile Studies

Abstract Abstract In this article, I provide ethnographic insights into the lifeworld of roadside entrepreneurs who sell bread to motorists and travellers passing through Ofankor, a suburb of Accra traversed by one of Ghana's main arterial roads. I show that the daily work of Ofankor's hawkers in and alongside traffic is marked by their continuous engagement with differential speeds, rhythms and related time frames. These are at the same time constitutive of the hawkers' entrepreneurial tactics, their corporeal-kinetic practices, including what I call 'dromocentric' movements, and the distinct socialities that emerge from their interactions on this urban road section that forms an intrinsically moving workplace. Keywords: HawkersRoad/roadsideTrafficMovementSpeedRhythmGhana Acknowledgements I greatly appreciate the comments and corrections which Richard Fardon, Michael Stasik and the guest editors of this special issue provided on an earlier draft of this article. The issues I present here were also discussed in conference panels at the VAD (2010), ASAUK (2010) and AEGIS (2011), as well as with my colleagues with whom I work on the research project 'Roadside and travel communities' (funded by the German Research Foundation). Ph.D. research on which this article is based was supported by a Research Student Fellowship (SOAS) and by grants from the Central Research Fund (University of London), for which I am most grateful. Notes 1. As part of my PhD programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), I carried out 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2006–2007, and briefly in 2009. During that time, I was based in Kyebi and Suhum, two provincial towns in Ghana's Eastern Region that are traversed by the AKR. 2. If hawkers were indeed making use of spiritual powers (juju), it would be nothing unusual since small-scale entrepreneurs and traders in Ghana are widely known to employ such practices in order to improve and protect their businesses (see Field 1960 Field, M.J. 1960. Search for security: an ethno-psychiatric study of rural Ghana, New York, NY: W.W. Norton. [Google Scholar], Parish 1999 Parish, J. 1999. The dynamics of witchcraft and indigenous shrines among the Akan. Africa, 69(3): 426–447. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Klaeger 2009 Klaeger, G. 2009. "Religion on the road: the spiritual experience of road travel in Ghana". In The speed of change. Motor vehicles and people in Africa, 1890–2000, Edited by: Gewald, J.-B., Luning, S. and van Walraven, K. 212–231. Leiden: Brill. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3. See Evans and Frankling (2010 Evans, R. and Frankling, A. 2010. "Equine beats: unique rhythms (and floating harmony) of horses and riders". In Geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities and bodies, Edited by: Edensor, T. 173–185. Farnham: Ashgate. [Google Scholar], pp. 178–180), Löfgren (2008 Löfgren, O. 2008. Motion and emotion: learning to be a railway traveller. Mobilities, 3(3): 331–351. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Sheller (2004 Sheller, M. 2004. Automotive emotions: feeling the car. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(4/5): 221–242. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 2) and Tolia-Kelly (2008 Tolia-Kelly, D.P. 2008. Motion/emotion: picturing translocal landscapes in the nurturing ecologies research project. Mobilities, 3(1): 117–140. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) on the nexus, and intertwining, of motion and emotion in different contexts. 4. 'Dromocentric' is my attempt to denote both people's concern with and their practices involving speed in the sense of rapidity, a term which is derived from the Greek dromos (running, race, race course). Dromos is used in a similar vein by Virilio (1986 Virilio, P. 1986. Speed and politics, New York, NY: Semiotext(e). [Google Scholar]) who coined the terms 'dromology' (the science of speed) and 'dromocracy' (the condition of modernity with its every increasing speed). 5. Most of these foodstuffs are sold next to the southbound lane of the road, since travellers going to Accra are more likely to buy them as provisions than those going north i.e. into the rural parts of the country where such foodstuffs are locally available (and cheaper). 6. Of course both categories are at times blurred, and different hawkers often mingle in one and the same place. A further category of informal traders is the so-called traffic vendors who operate at inner city junctions and road sections, mostly within the AMA jurisdiction, such as on the Kanda High Road/Achimota Road intersection or along Liberation Road (Akuafo Circle, 37 Hospital) and Osu's Oxford Street. See Asiedu and Agyei-Mensah (2008 Asiedu, A.B. and Agyei-Mensah, S. 2008. Traders on the run: activities of street vendors in the Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift [Norwegian Journal of Geography], 62(3): 191–202. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Brown (2006a Brown, A. 2006a. "Challenging street livelihoods". In Contested space: street trading, public space and livelihoods in developing cities, Edited by: Brown, A. 3–16. Rugby: ITDG Publishing. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Quayson (2010 Quayson, A. 2010. Signs of the times: discourse ecologies and street life. City & Society, 22(1): 77–96. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) for different attempts to classify different forms of street/traffic trading. 7. What facilitated my entry into the milieu of hawkers in Ofankor was a huge sacrificial ritual that the local chief and some ritual experts performed in the middle of the through road, right next to the hawkers, in November 2006 (see Klaeger forthcoming Klaeger, G., forthcoming. Dwelling on the road: routines, rituals and road blocks in southern Ghana. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. [Google Scholar]). When I enquired into the circumstances of the ritual, the hawkers were more eager to discuss them with me than their (seemingly banal) work practices. For me, this was an opportunity to become friends with some of them. 8. See Clark (2010 Clark, G. 2010. Gender fictions and gender tensions involving 'traditional' Asante market women. African Studies Quarterly, 11(2/3): 43–66. [Google Scholar]) and Lyon (2007 Lyon, F. 2007. "Institutional perspectives on understanding street retailer behavior and networks: cases from Ghana". In Street entrepreneurs: people, place and politics in local and global perspective, Edited by: Cross, J.C. and Morales, A. 164–179. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) for the role, responsibilities and authority of 'market queens' in southern Ghana. 9. The number of vendors, varying between approximately 40–80 in 2007 (on weekdays), started decreasing in early 2009 when heavy construction works for a multi-lane flyover resumed at Ofankor and made vending increasingly difficult. 10. After the redenomination of the Ghanian Cedi in 2007, and due to inflation, prices in 2009 had completely changed: one Christ bread was now sold for 1 Ghana Cedi (about 70p) while the profit remained 20% (i.e. 20 pesewas). 11. Similarly, women who sell roasted plantain etc. in places like Oxford street 'for strategic reasons [...] often choose a corner' (Quayson 2010 Quayson, A. 2010. Signs of the times: discourse ecologies and street life. City & Society, 22(1): 77–96. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 78). 12. This sales pitch is equally employed by hawkers at bus stops or lorry stations whose swift attending to arriving and potentially soon departing vehicles is not simply about competition and limited time, but about advertising and encouraging travellers to buy their products. 13. One example for parallel time frames is Carrier's (2005 Carrier, N. 2005. The need for speed: contrasting timeframes in the social life of Kenyan miraa. Africa, 75(4): 539–558. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) account on khat production and transport in Kenya, which involves the slow growth of khat trees, the perishability of khat as drug, and the resulting 'need for speed' of khat transporters. 14. 'Instant trade' is my adaption of 'instant sacrifice', a notion apparently used in Nigeria to describe drivers running over, and thus instantly killing, an animal on the road, an act that is seen to fulfil the same sacrificial purpose as killing an animal in a more elaborate sacrificial ritual. The phenomenon of something usually complex now occurring in a rather quick and condensed way can be observed in various other instants (and instances) where road users engage with, and adapt to, transport technology, mobility and movements (e.g. fleeting sociability, sudden anger, quarrels en passant, ephemeral attribution of blame, etc.). Investigating the idiosyncratic temporalities of such instances may enrich the often merely theoretical approaches to phenomena such as acceleration (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009 Rosa, H. and Scheuerman, W.E., eds. 2009. High-speed society: social acceleration, power, and modernity, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. [Google Scholar]), instantaneous time (Urry 2009 Urry, J. 2009. "Speeding up and slowing down". In High-speed society: social acceleration, power, and modernity, Edited by: Rosa, H. and Scheuerman, W.E. 179–200. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. [Google Scholar]), immediacy (Tomlinson 2007 Tomlinson, J. 2007. The culture of speed: the coming of immediacy, London: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) or suddenness (Sheets-Johnstone 1999 Sheets-Johnstone, M. 1999. Emotion and movement. A beginning empirical-phenomenological analysis of their relationship. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(11–12): 259–277. [Google Scholar]).