Michael Stasik
In Ghana, public road transport is not a public undertaking but is largely in the hands of small-scale entrepreneurs, and it has been so since the advent of mo-torised transportation in the early twentieth century. The related technologies (above all, roads and vehicles) and the very model of motorised mass trans-portation were imported from the North Atlantic regions, mainly from Britain.
During the first decades of what Polly Hill has famously coined as the ‘lorry age’ (1963b: 234) – which alludes to the great transformations brought about by the motorisation of Ghanaian society since the 1910s –, the ‘original’ model of public transport got adopted to the cultural syntax of West African practices of travel. In the course of this process, Ghanaian modes of road transport began to ‘deviate’ significantly from the forms of public transport in the British ‘moth-erland’ and the North Atlantic regions at large. In the North Atlantic regions, public transport follows bureaucratically administered models with high lev-els of regulation, standardisation and formalisation. The European railway sys-tems, for example, epitomise the cogwheel rigidity of Western states’ public transport planning and organisation through their centrally-controlled routes, schedules, fares, as well as meticulously differentiated set of scripts devised for both its operators and its users.
Ghana’s privately run public road transport, by contrast, is characterised by conspicuously low degrees of central planning and regulation. Being an arti-sanal ‘trade’ with decentralised, diverse and bottom-up deployed structures of operations, it is often considered to be emblematic of what is commonly de-scribed as the ‘informal’ economy (e.g. Barrett 2003; Hansen and Vaa 2004; Hart 1970, 1973). The practices of road operators and users do not follow any top-down prescribed set of scripts, rather, its modes of organisation have evolved from distinct repertoires of skilled, often tacit practices and quotidian interac-tions that take place on the road and roadside. The distribution of routes is not centrally allocated, but according to the dynamics of supply and demand.
These routes are served by a broad range of vehicle types; vehicles do not run according to time schedules, but only depart once the last seat has been taken;
although fares are fixed according to officially set rates, in practice they are
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1 Van der Geest hints at a possible explanation for that ‘lorry park-desideratum’ by pointing to the ‘dismal farsightedness’ of (Western) anthropologists: ‘What originates in their own culture is too familiar to be visible in another setting: schools, factories, hospitals, pharma-ceuticals and cars – all these exports have – until recently – been overlooked by Western anthropologists doing fieldwork in other cultures’ (2009: 259).
As in most countries across Africa, such forms of informal collective road transport account for the main means of motorised transportation in Ghana (mrh and ssgh 2009; Trans-Africa Consortium 2010). Most inner-city, inter-regional and international travels, in turn, are organised in urban bus stations, called ‘lorry parks’ in Ghanaian English. This is where travel communities are formed and ‘channelled’ into their journeys by various roadside communities of the station. Lorry parks are hubs in the full sense of the word: they are piv-ots of travel and trade, gateways between urban and rural areas and interre-gional and international intersections. They are kept running through diverse networks of loosely-structured group economic activities, the constituents of which are far from clear to all of its participants. As most road-bound travels begin in urban bus stations, the practices of the station communities – who
‘dispatch’ passengers and goods, thus bringing traffic onto the roads – figure as central elements in the overall ‘making’ of road transportation.
With regards to the decisive role of bus stations within the complex opera-tions of public transport in Ghana, and similarly in other African contexts, it is surprising that they have not received much attention from scholars dealing with related phenomena (roads, travel and transportation). This apparent lack of interest is particularly striking in relation to the work of anthropologists.
Since the advent of automobility in Africa, many if not most anthropologists working in Africa must have spent considerable amounts of time at bus sta-tions. Sjaak van der Geest, for example, reflecting upon the three and a half decades of his returning visits to the continent states that in ‘those years I spent countless hours in lorry parks waiting for my bus or taxi to leave’, during which he ‘killed time by talking to drivers, “bookmen”, mates and fellow pas-sengers’ (2009: 269). Van der Geest’s long-lasting, albeit not deliberate, bond with African bus stations is certainly not an exception among fellow Africanist fieldworkers both within and outside the scopes of anthropological research.1 And still, as Paul Nugent has recently noted with reference to the comparably vital locales of African markets, while ‘markets have received their fair share of academic treatment, lorry parks have not received nearly enough attention as interactive spaces’ (2010: 96).
Most noteworthy among the few studies dealing with Africa’s bus stations are Polly Hill’s portrayals of Ghanaian trade and transport systems in the 1960s
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2 There is an enormous amount of policy papers, analyses and reports on African urban trans-port provisions (and ‘problems’). Yet, as these only tend to mention stations, rather than ex-amining their workings, I include references in which inner-city bus stations are dealt with more explicitly and beyond the mere scopes of stakeholder analyses. For Ghana, see Fouracre et al. 1994; ibis 2005; Kwakye and Fouracre 1998; Turner 1996. For urban stations in other African countries, see Barrett 2003; Coulibaly 1993; Hawkins 1958; Jordan 1983; Khayesi 2002;
Lopes 2009; Ndiaye and Tremblay 2009.
3 Albert 2007; Bähre 2014; Cissokho 2012; Czeglédy 2004; Horta 2013; Jalloh 1998; Jennische 2012;
Joshi and Ayee 2002; Khosa 1992; Lewis 1970; Peace 1988; van Walraven 2009.
4 Clark 1994; Grieco, Apt and Turner 1996; Klaeger 2012; Ntewusu 2012; Stasik and Thiel 2014.
5 Ademowo 2010; Daniel 2012; Lamote 2007; Simone 2004: 410; Titus et al. 2010.
6 Beisel and Schneider 2012; Clayborne 2012; Feld 2012: 159–197; Hart 2011; Jordan 1978; Klaeger 2014; Mutongi 2006; Olubomehin 2012; Sesay 1966; van der Geest 2009; Verrips and Meyer 2000.
7 Asiedu and Agyei-Mensah 2008; Davies 2008; Klaeger 2009; Mashiri 2001; Okpara 1988; Seck 2006; Tambulasi and Kayuni 2008; wa Mungai and Samper 2006.
8 Collections and interpretations of car inscriptions in Ghana make up the largest part of these works: Awedoba 1981; Date-Bah 1980; Field 1960; Kyei and Schreckenbach 1975; Lewis 1998;
Quayson 2010a, 2010b, 2014: 129–158; van der Geest 2009. For Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania
(1962, 1963a, 1965, 1984) and Paul Stoller’s ‘deep reading’ of social interactions in a bush taxi station in Niger (1989: 69–83). Many other writings related to bus stations appear to have emerged rather as subsidiary products of research on other subjects, with studies on urban transport infrastructures accounting for the largest share.2 Descriptions of stations can be found scattered in literature dealing with the politics of transport and the transport economy,3 with trade and market places4 and with urban lifeworlds more generally.5 In a number of anthropological (and anthropologically-inclined) studies, the significance of stations is touched upon via discussions of some of its central figures and technologies; mainly commercial drivers and vehicles,6 as well as touts, hawk-ers, passengers and itinerant preachers.7 Finally, a surprisingly large amount of literature deals with car inscriptions, or ‘minivan poetics’ (Weiss 2009: 49), the collections of which were largely compiled during researchers’ ‘idle time’
at stations.8
In this chapter, I expand upon this scattered body of works on African bus stations. In my approach, I put the ‘interactive space’ of the station at the cen-tre of attention, rather than attending to it parenthetically. I do so by way of a minute exploration of the practices and the ‘practitioners’ in a long-distance bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra, the so-called Neoplan Station. I draw on twelve months of fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013, during which I engaged with the roadside communities of the station mainly by means of what Gerd Spittler (2001) coined ‘thick participation’. Thus, in addition to the
ethnographic toolkit of observations, interviews and conversations, my re-search involved sustained participatory experiences that were gathered via apprenticeship and employment in various divisions of the Neoplan Station.
My main aim for this chapter is to complement this volume’s focus on the
‘production’ of African roads from the perspective of a roadside institution that serves as a vital ‘feeder’ of roads, which is the bus station. I frame this perspective by drawing on the notion of ‘involution’ (Geertz 1963): an inward-bound process of organisational change (best contrasted with the unfolding changes of ‘evolution’) that is characterised by increased institutional com-plexity, ‘elaboration and ornateness’ and ‘unending virtuosity’ (Geertz 1963:
82). This kind of ‘static expansion’ (Geertz 1963: 79, borrowing from Boeke 1953) provides a useful concept for making sense of both the intricate arrangements that structure the workings of the roadside institution of the station as well as the practices that make these arrangements work and that keep the traffic moving up and down the roads.
I suggest that the station’s involution and the orders of the roads are consti-tutive of each other. On the one hand, the station ‘feeds off’ the road: the more diverse and dense the station-bound traffic is, the more intense and elaborate the trajectories of organisational involution of the station’s roadside commu-nities become. On the other hand, the station also ‘feeds’ the roads. Represent-ing a nerve centre for transportation where travel routes begin, intersect and end, it is in the station that the density and diversity of flows on the roads are enabled, sustained and, at times, also disrupted. It is in here that a large part of motorised road traffic is deployed, maintained and dispatched; that a multi-tude of road users other than drivers and passengers (hawkers and itinerants, for example) is integrated into a system of transportation; and that the spe-cific rhythmicities evolving on the roads are structured and timed (see Stasik 2015). Ultimately, the involuting structures of the station serve to accommo-date, channel and expand the very diversity of road traffic that its own inward-bound expansion co-creates. The perspective from the station highlights that – in Ghana and similarly in other African contexts – roads and roadsides are inextricably linked together.
Accra’s Neoplan Station
The Neoplan Station9 is located near Accra’s main road intersection, the Kwame Nkrumah Circle (or simply ‘Circle’ as it is called in the urban vernacular).
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9 The station owes its somewhat odd name to a joint venture that the Stuttgart-based bus manufacturer Neoplan initiated with the Ghanaian government in the mid-1970s.
10 11
German-produced coachworks and chassis were exported to Ghana and pieced together there, fabricating the Neoplan Tropicliner. Well-adapted to the adverse road conditions of the West African tropics, the coach represented the most prestigious type of bus to be found on Ghana’s roads. At the opening of the station in 1979, it became its flagship vehicle and name giver.
10 The Neoplan Station is one of three main lorry parks in Accra. These three parks have roughly ‘partitioned’ major routes in Ghana along three so-called ‘corridors’: the ‘western corridor’ served by the Kaneshie Station in Accra’s west; the ‘eastern corridor’ served by the Tudu Station located in downtown Accra; and the ‘central corridor’, which is served by vehicles from Neoplan. This partitioning of routes is not particularly strict and there are overlaps on significant sections of the corridors between these three stations. Further-more, many of the routes are also served by vehicles from other, smaller stations in Accra.
11 There is no centralised accounting system at the Neoplan Station. I collated the figures by counting, re-counting and cross-checking the number of cars (with the number of seats and thus passengers) departing from the station over extended periods of time.
Resembling Ojuelegba in Lagos, Circle functions as ‘a vortex for all the flows’
(Bakare-Yusuf and Weate 2005: 326) within Accra – a property it owes to host-ing Accra’s main inner-city bus station (the ‘Circle Station’). The Neoplan Sta-tion complements Circle’s role as a vital transportaSta-tion hub that supports the overall economies of Accra and Ghana, stemming primarily from Neoplan’s role in plying the most important route in the country, that which connects Accra with Ghana’s second biggest city, Kumasi.
34 destinations are directly served from Neoplan’s yard by 2013. These desti-nations are mainly scattered across the country’s central and western regions and link Accra to the port cities of Tema and Takoradi as well as with Lagos in Nigeria, among others. Neoplan thus acts as Accra’s central gateway to all the major commercial centres in Ghana and, through the feeder routes branch-ing off from its destinations, to the West African sub-region at large.10 Accord-ingly, the station is frequented by many travellers from diverse backgrounds and with a variety of travel purposes; this includes people from all the regions in Ghana and neighbouring countries as well as from much further afar, such as Senegalese salesmen (and women) traversing overland to Central Africa, southern African migrants on their way to Europe’s southern shores or Euro-pean and American backpackers trekking across the continent.
The numbers of vehicles – and of seated passengers – that are dispatched daily from the station further highlight Neoplan’s role as one of Accra’s main hubs of travel and transport.11 Although its daily turnover is subject to con-siderable fluctuations of weekly, monthly and seasonally conditioned rhythms and to aperiodic perturbations (e.g. heavy rains, major sport events), three main instances can be distinguished: during particularly quiet days (usually
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12 The emergence of the first associations occurred at the same time the first lorry parks were established in the Gold Coast, which the British colonial administration enforced in order to increase the regulative leverage on the motor transport sector. The first main parks opened in Accra, Sekondi and Koforidua in 1929, in 1930 in Kumasi and in 1931 in
Sundays and mid-week), about 10,000 passengers flock into the station’s yard;
the number doubles on other days of the week to about 20,000 people; and during peak times, as on the last weekend of the month (after payday) and holidays, the number of travellers rises to some 30,000 and more.
Neoplan’s fleets of vehicles range from small five-seater saloon cars to old 39-seater Benz buses through to brand-new coaches carrying 50 people. The figures vary between 700 cars on quiet days up to 2,500 departing from the station on exceptionally busy days. Not included in this count are the taxis, delivery trucks and (hand) truck-pushers entering Neoplan’s yard every other minute and supplying its ‘channelling machinery’ with new passengers and goods. Neoplan’s yard covers an area of approximately just one hectare, stretch-ing over some 150 by 60 meters. Framed by two L-shaped sstretch-ingle-storey con-structions that demarcate its spatial boundaries, the yard is the same size as a single railway platform of a secondary city train station in Europe. Measured against its quantity of incoming and departing passengers and vehicles, it is remarkably small and narrow.
Besides being a ‘channelling machinery’ for the bulk of travellers that are dispatched by hundreds of vehicles, the station attracts all sorts of traders, ven-dors and hawkers as well as itinerants, sex workers, beggars, thieves and deal-ers. Its narrow yard accommodates diverse services and institutions, some of which are directly linked to the needs of travel and transport (e.g. workshops and spare parts dealers; shops selling provisions and merchandise; eating par-lours and drinking spots), while others have emerged through less direct links (e.g. herbalists, pharmacists and hairdressers; football, cinema and video game centres; a church, mosque as well as the odd insurance company).
The 34 destinations served from Neoplan are run by 13 sub-stations that are locally referred to as ‘branches’. These 13 branches form part of larger bodies of nationwide operating transport associations. Neoplan is split between two of the largest associations: ten of its 13 branches belong to the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (gprtu), whilst the other three branches are affiliated with the Progressive Transport Owners’ Association (protoa). These associa-tions – which have little in common with the trade unions of employees but rather resemble kinds of guilds – evolved from indigenous drivers organisa-tions in the aftermath of Ghana’s (then Gold Coast) ‘road revolution’ in the late 1920s (Wrangham 2004; see also Hart 2014).12 Emerging from this long-standing
Figure 2.1–2.4 A cross-section of Neoplan’s vehicle fleet (clockwise from top-left): ‘resilient’
Lagos Volvo; ‘common’ Toyota minivan to Nkawkaw; ‘well-preserved’ Benz bus to Ashaiman (long chassis); ‘1st class’ Kia coach to Kumasi
Source: M. Stasik, 2012
Figure 2.5 Neoplan’s station hawkers, here peddling meat pies, fried rice, biscuits and bread to passengers seated in a departing car
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Cape Coast. The first associations included the Gold Coast Motor Union (established in 1929 in Accra), the Drivers’ Association of the Western Province (Sekondi, 1929) and the Ashanti Motor Union (Kumasi, 1930). This suggests a causal rather than a coincidental relationship between the formation of lorry parks and drivers’ associations. Archival sources are, however, inconclusive in this regard.
13 The owners of vehicles registered in the Neoplan Station, for example, include civil ser-vants, military personnel, clerks, traders, teachers, college students and a South Korean businessman, among others.
position is their power to control access to the country’s main lorry parks, which in effect carries out the only entry controls to the public transport market.
Entry controls are organised on the basis of a vehicle registration system, which is subject to the branches of the park. Vehicles are registered through the payments of a range of fees levied by the branch, parts of which are passed on to regional and national representatives of their respective associations. In principle, there are no prescribed conditions as to what kinds of vehicles qual-ify (or not) for registering with a branch. In practice, however, it is the kinds of routes that are plied by a given branch – and the respective quality of the roads – that make for a pre-selection. On Neoplan’s highly frequented shorter routes, such as the well-developed connection to the neighbouring town of Ashaiman (35 km on a two-lane highway) upon which several hundred com-muters are dispatched daily, preference is given to vehicles with a large car-rying capacity, with little consideration for the vehicle’s condition. Small and
‘resilient’ cars are preferred on less frequented longer routes, such as the con-nection to Lagos (500 km, including six border controls) that poses an unpre-dictable variety of roadway ‘irregularities’ (e.g. roadblocks, petrol shortages).
Some branch members own vehicles themselves, either as ‘owner-drivers’ or as senior members who commission junior members as drivers. Yet the major-ity of cars belong to private entrepreneurs who are unrelated to the branches and who hire their cars out to drivers on a commission basis, with usually one vehicle per owner only.13
The station branches and their personnel hence serve as brokers between passengers, vehicle owners and the larger bodies of national transport asso-ciations. As such, they represent a crucial element in a much-fragmented sys-tem of operations, which is as powerful in generating revenues as it is divided over the distribution of gains. These divisions stem primarily from competition over the most lucrative routes that the branches are engaged in. As there is no overall route licencing system, the distribution of routes is structured mainly through market demand and the capacities of each branch to serve those
The station branches and their personnel hence serve as brokers between passengers, vehicle owners and the larger bodies of national transport asso-ciations. As such, they represent a crucial element in a much-fragmented sys-tem of operations, which is as powerful in generating revenues as it is divided over the distribution of gains. These divisions stem primarily from competition over the most lucrative routes that the branches are engaged in. As there is no overall route licencing system, the distribution of routes is structured mainly through market demand and the capacities of each branch to serve those