THE PRIVILEGE OF SCALE

“You see the power of names? These people didn’t want to live in Nanakrom. Then they changed the name to ‘East Legon Hirrrrlls’ and now the Burgers are sending money from London to buy houses.”

I laugh at the cab driver’s disgust as I exit his beat up Corolla near a bank in East Legon. In the trotro later, I will think of how often he finds himself in ‘East Legon Hirrrrlls’ and other suburbs like it, penetrating these inverted prisons for as long as it takes to drop a passenger off at their high-walled, well-maintained destination. He likely knows the area better than you do, resident; knows what route to take when Lagos Avenue is choked, knows that one place you can buy tuo zaafi near the Underbridge.

Knowledge does not always translate to access.

The suburb does not belong to him, as a whole, even while he is in it. His scope of access is firmly anchored to the four wheels that carry him, as his sole reason for being in the area in the first place; his footprint is a mobile, temporary, fluid microcosm of the whole.

—

The hot and angry street vendors chase the hot and angry street kids away from the hot and angry trotro commuters who are arguing over 10 pesewas with the hot and angry mate. I am sitting in the back of the trotro, legs tucked under the seat in an attempt to alleviate the discomfort of crushed knees on bumpy roads. The trip will take close to two hours, and the discomfort of the small space allocated to me and the intimate proximity to the other commuters, street vendors, will ensure that I am — headphones or not — present for every minute of the journey. Each minute will be defined by present location — the traffic light where one can buy burkina, the congested stretch with no trees to protect you from the sun, 37 station where mates compete in volume for the benefit of potential passengers. I will see the condensation on the pure water packet run down the seller’s arm, mingling with her sweat as she runs to the next customer at the intersection. I will smell the gutters as we pull in to Tema Station.

My every sense and sensibility will be swept up in the various stimuli; my every thought will be related to it. My focus will be on this one experience on this one day; my present eternal.

—

This is a girl. She is going to the Market.

(Accra! Accra! ThirtseLegoAccra!)

—

Accra City Hotel is too quiet, don’t you think? A stone’s throw away from Tudu, Makola, on the final stretch to Tema Station — the silence amazes me. The first time you pass the obroni-friendly security checkpoint and walk through the foyer to the insular courtyard, you expect the sound of traffic and life to return. It does not. Maybe it is the luxury of having had the room to build the hotel at a relatively large distance from the road — a rarity in competitive urban centres. Maybe it is that the courtyard is surrounded by the tall hotel structures, shielding visitors’ senses from the imposition of the city. Maybe it is that you can not see what is happening outside, the absence of visual stimuli to make cognitive connections to the sounds that must surely be floating on the periphery of your senses.

The hotel is one of the last ‘oases’ of silence on the way to one of Accra’s busiest commercial and transport hubs. Without the sensory overload that is the inner city, the oasis allows you to pause, reflect, strategise; you can think beyond the next day, beyond the CBD, think big.

But I do not feel welcome here. Perhaps it is the tall palisade fence, that allows me to see but discourages interaction with the guarded green grounds, lonely trees with no tired pedestrians to warm their feet. Maybe it is the sheer size of the building, looking down on the little pedestrian, like the Movenpick, like the Octagon. Large structures forming hard, exclusive thresholds.

Whose utopia is it, anyway?

—

Back on the street, my thoughts return to navigation — jumping open gutters, sidestepping vendors, pushing past slow pedestrians in my mission to achieve the one task that brought me to this one area of Accra. Today the urban fabric is tainted by the appearance of the AMA task force, uprooting the small ‘informal’ stalls, confiscating the small merchandise the vendors have in their possession. You can not help but think of those who authorized this from the safety of their multi-storeyed offices; heading from meeting to meeting in their big V8s, traveling in their large convoys. Sitting in big meetings, making huge decisions about Accra’s great urban development plan — without consulting the ‘little’ person, who represents the majority of the populace. Pure ‘big-manism’ lies behind government mandated development.

Their big ideas do not accommodate our small, individual needs.

—

Over half of humanity lives in urban centres. In the Global South, almost half of that urban population lives in ‘informal’ settlements. You can call the informal anything but small.

Who is building your cities? Who is defining them?

The ‘informal’ is so defined by Western expressions of urbanism, which seek to violently trivialize then eliminate anything that does not fit the model.

It is a neoliberal construct, designed to further push the agenda that — in this our postcolonial, post imperial era — seeks to extract without compensation that which is valuable from the disadvantaged, the poor. The disadvantaged, the poor, are so rendered by capitalist needs and globalised standards and thus, in this free, new world, are de-liberated by the very construct that claims to free them.

—

It is late afternoon, and I stand at Shiashie trotro station, waiting to board a car for my final leg home.

In front of me is a large billboard, pushing credit by appealing to our vanity, our love for the superficial, our need to keep up with the Ampofo’s — placed at the entry point to East Legon, where the Ampofo’s live. A billboard overlooking the station, boasting massive, air conditioned smiles, pushing luxury — hardening class divides, for aspiration is easily exploited and hugely profitable; a billboard pushing individualistic, unsustainable dreams that won’t build Ghana, thin flexi concealing an abandoned, unfinished building.

So. Who is building your cities? Who is defining them? The big question.