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ABSTRACT
Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghana's capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes the perspective of two key, ordering actors and institutions in this market – traders associations and police forces – and analyses the manifold and mutually entangled conceptions of order on which these actors draw in their pursuit to legitimise their own and others’ actions. Police officers may not represent the state but act in the light of business interests, whereas market associations follow many more rationalities apart from their members’ economic gains. They perceive themselves as a market family, and enact particular realms of stateness; for example, when assisting with tax collection. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, in which each researcher independently focused on particular actor groups in the market, we analyse how these constellations of actors and their particular conceptions of order play out in everyday practices and interactions.
Acknowledgments
For critical comments, we are grateful to Thomas Bierschenk, Mirco Göpfert, Fabien Jobard, Carola Lentz, Frank Schulze-Engler, the participants of the workshop “Die Aufrechterhaltung der Ordnung in Afrika” at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, and especially to the two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The term Makola – the Ga expression for “go get fire” – refers to the historical origins of the market in a cattle market in the current Cow Lane area (Ntewusu Citation2012). More recently, the term has taken on a political connotation for those rejecting its designation as “31st December market” due to its association with the PNDC regime, which violently targeted the country's major marketplaces. Irrespectively, in general parlance, Makola refers to an assemblage of retail areas specialising in different commodities: 31st December, Kwasea Guasu, Annex II Market and Tema Station Annex (which should not be confused with the Tema Station Hawkers’ Market located in the nearby bus terminal) are recognised as parts of Makola in the local byelaws of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA). In addition, wholesalers concentrate in the Okaishie area and the recently expanded New Makola Mall, while street vendors flock in all parts of the market, including the market's previous location, Rawlings Car park. While the historical experience of state violence doubtlessly has major effects on conceptions of order and ordering regimes within Makola, little can be added to its extensive depiction in the literature (Robertson Citation1983; Clark Citation1994; Awuah Citation1997). Instead, we here focus on contemporary competitions and contestations or order-implementation.
2. Lentz (Citation1998, 48) has shown how individual actors in Ghana combine “different registers of legitimacy” to pursue their aims.
3. When trying to understand the state machinery, such as the police, it may be more productive to understand stateness as a fleeting quality of these organisations, a quality that emerges when actors successfully draw on this ideology (Beek Citation2016, 8; see Lund Citation2007, 4, Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan Citation2014, 15).
4. On 18 August 1979, Makola fell victim to the discursive and outright misogynist move of accusing traders of the country's economic downturn. Soldiers, assisted by a large crowd, demolished the Makola along with other major marketplaces in the country (Awuah Citation1997; Darkwah Citation2002, 30; Oquaye Citation2004; Robertson Citation1983; see also Quayson (Citation2003, 41) for a less victimising representation of Makola market traders’ political agency in that period).
5. Jan Beek's participant observations were part of a 15-month long fieldwork on police work in Ghana. Alena Thiel conducted 10 months of fieldwork on Makola market traders’ claims-making practices.
6. On the ground, leaders are selected not through the bureaucratic procedures invoked in this terminology. Instead, market leadership is crucially dependent on status-bearing processes of redistribution, which take the form of mobilising private capital or forfeiting one's access to resources in favour of others who are considered more deserving due to their personal hardship. Based on these practices, a tacit understanding of market leadership is formed and enacted in everyday interactions. The selection of market leaders does not necessitate elections as in Makola “we know ourselves” (see also Clark Citation1994, 216 for the case of Kumasi Central Market).
7. That is, the presentation of a newborn to the community one week after birth.
8. Interview, Queen of cloth line, 4 January 2012, Accra.
9. Another condition required for market leadership is Ga ethnicity, which is in stark contradiction to the ordering idea of Ghanaian statehood as it formally prohibits the formation of organisations based on ethnic identity.
10. “Mmaa Nkommo” (GTV), 6 December 2011.
11. While quarrelling, for example, may only lead to a report to the association, which then sends executives to mediate in the conflict, physical fighting is immediately punishable with suspension. After three suspensions, the parties sign a bond and if another suspension occurs, they are expelled from the market.
12. Located east of Accra's central business districts, Osu is one of the oldest parts of the Ghanaian capital.
13. Interview, President, Tema Station Annex Market, 2 December 2011, Accra.
14. Interview, GIZ SfDR, 26 January 2016.
15. Interview, Makola Market Mall Management, 28 January 2016.
16. While AMA's existing plans to transform 13 marketplaces under metropolitan management into “market structures with all facilities, four storeys high” (Interview, AMA, 8 December 2011, Accra) are still awaiting funding from the projected PPP, semi-private projects such as the second phase of the “New Makola Mall” (with the public SSNIT National Insurance Trust Fund as main shareholder of the company managing the property) are already nearing their completion in the very heart of the Makola market (Interview, Makola Market Property Management, 28 January 2016). As the case of Makola's wholesale traders in the adjacent Okaishie market section shows, this transformation of the heart of Makola into an economically gentrified space is likely accompanied by changes in conceptions of order. Constrained by the continuous rhythms and routines of capital, Okaishie's traders do not organise under a market queen, although attempts to do so have been initiated in the past. Instead, they mostly refer to the ordering institutions of the state in addition to values of professionalism. The association representing Makola's wholesale traders’ interests, the Ghana Union of Traders Associations, specifically insists on an entry barrier in the form of substantial financial contribution to their credit union. This is not to say that ideas like seniority or kinship are of no importance to wholesale traders’ conceptions of order in the market. Marfaing and Thiel (Citation2013) illustrate how kinship is a key function in the distribution of resources also among wholesalers.
17. There is a long history of opposition between AMA officials and hawkers. Archival sources speak of the “nuisance” of “uncontrollable” street hawkers “congesting traffic by large groups”, suggesting that sanitary inspectors arrested hawkers without warrant up until 1943 when the “proper” procedure was defined as going by summons “and if they do not appear in court, ask for a bench warrant” (“Hawkers Licenses”, PRAAD HQ Accra CSO 20/1/217, and “Arrest of Hawkers”, PRAAD HQ Accra CSO 20/1/218). More recently, in 1991, Nugent noted, “hawkers became engaged in a long-running battle with the Sanitation and Traffic Task Force (TASIT) of the Accra Metropolitan Authority (AMA). In July 1991, after traders had staged a public protest against licence fees and TASIT harassment, the government was forced to suspend Mr E.T. Mensah of the AMA (…) When [his replacement] arrived at the scene of the standoff, he was confronted by some 150 women who stripped naked to protest at the treatment that had been meted out to them” (Nugent Citation1995, 191).
18. We appreciate the comment of one anonymous reviewer that historical patterns of confiscations since colonial times (see Clark Citation2013) potentially feed into suspicions vis-à-vis state officials seeking to enforce laws in the market area. Our observations of the very present distress with which traders recall the state violence of 1979 fully support this point.
19. Interview, Executive, New Makola Traders Union, 22 November 2011, Accra. Revenues paid are made up primarily by the daily market fees, value-added tax in the form of a quarterly tax stamp or contributions to the VAT Flat Rate Scheme, besides market fees collected annually in accordance with the AMA bye-laws for each market in the metropolitan area.
20. For a detailed study of counterfeit drugs in West Africa, see Klantschnig (Citation2014).
21. Indeed, the management of the Ghana Police Service (Citation2010, 39) describes policing of the future as “revenue generation” that provides “customer satisfaction”. This is in line with international trends, in which many government police forces are beginning to understand themselves as vendors of security services (Reiner Citation2000, 209, Ayling and Shearing Citation2008, 27).
22. Police detectives haphazardly store such confiscated goods in their offices for later use in court proceedings. Due to fear, time constraints and costs, civilians often do not try to reacquire these items. Police officers then sell these goods for personal profit. However, this is neither a main objective of these raids nor an important source of income for police officers.
23. For instance, to a large extent, the work of Ghanaian detectives is about debt collection. They pursue these matters either outside their official duties or file them as fraud cases. Naturally, acting according to market rationalities threatens the legitimacy of the police, as shown elsewhere (Beek Citation2016, 117).
24. The raid on the pharmacies was different because the police officers targeted stationary traders. Later, Inspector Thomas professed that going unarmed to these pharmacies was only feasible because the stores’ managers are “known”; in other words, detectives could trace them later.
25. Interview, Treasurer, Tema Station Annex Market, 6 December 2011, Accra.
26. The same rationale is even expressed with regard to human rights, which are generally thought of as more fundamental than any other type of right. “If you don't live according to the law, if you put yourself above the [association's] law, human rights do not apply to you”. Interview, President, Tema Station Annex Market, 29 December 2011, Accra.
27. Diphoorn (Citation2015) has shown that police officers in South Africa dominate security networks similarly (see also Hills Citation2012, 53).
28. Interview, President, Tema Station Annex Market, 2 December 2011, Accra.
29. Interview, President, Tema Station Annex Market, 2 December 2011, Accra.
30. Organisations closely imbued with state authority – such as the military, the police and similar forces – also constantly negotiate their fields of responsibility (Beek and Göpfert Citation2013, 118).
