Of Pirate Drivers and Honking Horns: Mobility, Authority, and Urban Planning in Interwar Accra

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Venue
Faber Building
Room
FG01

About this event

Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University

Throughout the 1930s, the Accra Town Council complained repeatedly of the presence of “pirate passenger lorries”, which were said to be plying the roads between central Accra and the eastern suburb of Labadi.  A heavily traveled route, the road between Labadi and Accra was used to seeing lorry traffic. However, the drivers that caught the attention of colonial officials were troublesome because they blurred the distinctions of colonial urban space and order.  They were mobile, urban “pirates” who skirted around the established order and subverted the authority embodied in state-run urban bus services. The dominance of African owner-operators in the motor transport industry of the Gold Coast enabled African drivers and passengers to assert control over how and where they moved.  However, in defining their movement within the city, these drivers and passengers also found themselves in direct conflict with representatives of the British colonial state, whose attempts to regularize and rationalize the city had created an alternative framework of laws and practices. Through motor transportation, Africans in Accra spoke to and interacted directly with British colonial officials—in debating how the road should be used, these two means of “enframing the city” came into conflict and conversation.

Organiser: Dr Marie Rodet

Contact email: mr28@soas.ac.uk