Ato Quayson is one of the most original and skilled critics of the African condition of our time. A truly transnational scholar schooled and working in Ghana, UK, and Canada, he is best known for his remarkable studies on postcolonialism and the diasporic imaginary (see, for example Quayson and Daswani 2013). In his new book Oxford Street, Accra, Quayson analyses the dynamics of Ghana’s fast-growing capital city by focusing on the bustling, vibrant and globalized shopping street in its Osu district. Oxford Street is based on more than a decade of research in the field, during which Quayson studied the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism. These include sights, sounds, and spatial interactions in Accra’s urban street life. As the reader is taken on a compelling journey through tro-tro slogans, billboard advertisements, salsa scenes, and gym culture, s/he is invited to go beyond the superficial spatial cues of this seemingly typical African urban street.
The idea of the book originates from a day out in Oxford Street. As he strolls down the street in company of an old friend, Quayson realises that despite growing up in Accra, he knows more about Shakespeare than the city that had shaped his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood (page x). After many years studying and working in Western countries, he is now coming back to Ghana to research the familiar street. Starting from this minor episode, the book sets out a true brainstorm spanning from urban theory to studies on performative streetscapes and transnationalism.
Oxford Street is divided into two parts. Under the general rubric of “Horizontal Archaeologies”, Part I traces the city’s evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. It explores its migrations – of Ga, Osu, Afro-Brazilian, Danish and Lebanese, and today’s traffic of Ghanaians and expats – and the social, economic and political forces that make the Osu neighbourhood. Part II “Morphologies of Everyday Life” is more ethnographic in scope and mainly focussed on fieldwork findings. Here the author investigates local inhabitants’ experiences and interactions in Oxford Street, and how these cumulatively create a sense of place. As a whole, this section provides an anthropological framework for examining Accra from the ground up: not its concrete structures, but its people and the relations within it.
“Horizontal Archaeologies” has three chapters. In Chapter 1, Quayson studies the formation of Tabon (Afro-Brazilians) and Ga Akutso (a military group) as a way into Accra’s hybridity. Multi-ethnic polities, multiculturalism and hybridity play an important role in the ethnicization of Tabon and their change of status into Ga. Chapter 2 uses the Trevallion and Hood Plan (a town plan of 1958) as a case study to explore Accra’s colonial administration, disaster management, and land-use distribution in the early and mid-twentieth century. Here the author highlights the contrast “between power and penury that is made evident when we see the city from the perspective of the aggregation of differential ecologies grounded in space” (page 66). Quayson finds that the various planning systems that have shaped the city—and had their stratifying effects intensified by the IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s—paved the way to the early-1990s transformation of a largely residential neighbourhood into a kinetic shopping district.
Chapter 3 focuses on Euro-Africans (especially Danes) to study the transculturation of Oxford Street. The ultimate objective of this chapter is to revisit current definitions of transnationalism to account for the multi-coloured and insistently hybrid aspects of Osu’s history. Through this history, Quayson finds that Osu as a buzzing business district has long and variegated roots, and has always been the spatial conduit for transnational circulations. In other words, it is not just “the magical product of the late twentieth century” (page 125).
Chapter 4, with its tro-tro slogans (tro tros are privately owned minibus share taxis that travel fixed routes leaving when filled to capacity) and cell phone advertising, acts as a sort of conceptual bridge between the strictly geographical concerns of Part I “Horizontal Archaeologies” and the more ethnographic emphases of Part II “Morphologies of Everyday Life”. In Chapter 4 Quayson studies the messages and images of transnational provenance which jostle with traditional mottoes, sayings, slogans and proverbs inscribed on all available surfaces on Oxford Street. He reads mobile phone advertisements on Oxford Street from 2005 to 2010, and draws conclusions on how “multinational company advertising deploys transnational imagescapes to reconfigure local processes of meaning making and their attempts at converting locality into an instantiation of the transnational and vice versa” (page 130).
In Part II “Morphologies of Everyday Life”, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 study two aspects of youth culture in today’s Accra – salsa dancing (which itself is a transnational symbol) and gymming. Chapter 5 focuses on transnationalism and the shaping of Accra’s Salsa scenes. It provides a timeline of salsa in Ghana and also tells stories of individual salsa dancers. I found the story-telling style in this chapter especially compelling, as it really gives readers a feeling of melting into Accra’s everyday life. Quayson finds that the transnational dimensions of salsa provide an excellent education for Accra young people’s desire to be globalized and transnational, in other words, to “be cool”.
Chapter 6 is based on interviews and focus group discussions in six gyms in the Legon-Madina area and on one-to-one interviews conducted over the summers between 2009 and 2011. Focusing on gymming and the cultural economy of free time, Quayson finds out that the background of gymmers is very different from salsa dancers. Unlike salsa dancers, gymmers tend to have a heavy Western-style (transnational) education. The multi-scalar dimensions of both salsa and gymming scenes in Accra are contrasted in order to unravel and gain insight into their different intersections with transnational leisure cultures. In Chapter 7 Quayson uses Amma Darko’s realist novel Faceless (2003) and Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother… (1972) to study the literary representations of Accra. This chapter focuses on novelistic narrations of urban space. Here the author argues with an intense opposing attitude towards commercialism and economic inequalities. Oxford Street, he shows, is a microcosm of historical and urban processes that have made Accra the variegated and contradictory metropolis that it is today.
Quayson takes the argument beyond Accra as to embrace other African cities. In the concluding chapter, he further proposes to situate Oxford Street and Accra securely within the discourse of urban studies of the developing world more generally. Quayson cleverly uses critical theory to shed light on the rapid transformations of African urban cultures. He effectively shows that places like Accra should hold portents about the “city yet to come”, to echo the title of Abdou Maliq Simone’s book (2004). I especially liked the way in which Quayson organises his narrative. He firstly presents a large-scale ambiguous background, and subsequently allows the small-scale story to naturally unfold in the book (e.g. the Brazilians of Otublohum and the Danish-Africans of Osu of the past, and today's tro-tro inscriptions, salsa and gymming). These two interrelated ways of presenting history make the book a true pleasure to read.
A problem of transnational writing is that there are many nouns that cannot be effectively translated. Some meanings which the author takes for granted might confuse readers who come across them for the first time. But on the other hand, this ambiguity might be useful to the author. For example, the first part of Chapter 3’s title “Osu borla no, sardine chensii soo” is a saying that roughly translates as “at the Osu garbage dump all you find are sardine cans”, which is used by Ghanaians from other parts of Accra to insinuate that the people of Osu have historically been overly eager to absorb European influence. Quayson does not provide a translation (or explanation) of the title until the next page, thus inviting the reader to find the answer to the riddle (page 99). A similar strategy is adopted in Chapter 5.
“Accra’s transformation reminds me forcefully of the many parts of myself that have been lodged there, here, and elsewhere, but which come together in the retelling of this great African cosmopolis”, Quayson writes (page 33). By coming home, the author shows the extent to which the future of urban theory might well lie in the global South. Oxford Street is an erudite and extraordinary book. After reading it, I was amazed by how much a street can teach and inspire. I would recommend this book to geographers, anthropologists, and to anyone who is interested in African culture and transnationalism. Easy to read and compelling in many parts, the book is an excellent companion for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and it makes for an interesting read for any transnational scholar.
References
Awoonor K (1972) This Earth, My Brother... London: Heinemann.
Darko A (2003) Faceless. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers.
Quayson A and Daswani G (2013) A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Simone A (2004) For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press.
