‘Wastelandia’: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana

ABSTRACT

Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. At the heart of the analysis is an expansive privately owned public toilet complex turned hostel, school room, meeting place, communal kitchen, and fledgling biogas plant. Akin to Hobbes’ Leviathan, here we see a putative ‘state of nature’ transformed into an infrastructure-based commonwealth of waste. Replete with political possibility despite its unstable and unfinished form, this ontological experiment re-assembles social relations by making tangible, scalable, and public the collective force of bodily waste.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• infrastructure
• body
• Leviathan
• public goods

Acknowledgements

The author is foremost indebted to the many individuals involved in building, managing, maintaining, and using the facilities described in this article for their patience and generosity in response to research inquiries. Research for this project was enabled by affiliation with the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Marina Ofei-Nkansah provided ongoing research assistance since our initial contact with ‘M’ in 2009. Mustapha Mohammed assisted with focus group discussions in 2013 and interviews in 2014 with the aid of Eliot Chalfin-Smith. Eva Egensteiner conducted video and photographic documentation of the research site in 2014 with the sponsorship of a University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Humanities Enhancement Award. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and 2014 University of Chicago African Studies Distinguished Lecture. The current version benefitted from the input of AAA discussant Dominic Boyer, political theorist Daniel O'Niell, and Ethnos editors, anonymous reviewers, and special issue editor, Casper Brun Jensen. The manuscript was completed with the support of a 2015–2016 fellowship appointment at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Research for this project was carried out via interviews, participant-observation, surveys and photo documentation from 2009 through 2014 including seven months of extended fieldwork in 2011. Names and locations are deliberately obscured in order to preserve the anonymity of research participants.

2. Doxiadis was a founder of UN Habitat and his firm spearheaded the dissemination of post-war urban planning templates worldwide. Tema was one of a complex of cities designed by Doxiadis, many in the recently evacuated spaces of British Empire, including Islamabad & Bagdad) (Bromley 2003).

3. Fuelled by hydroelectric power (Miescher 2012), there were 12 separate planned communities each serviced by streetlights, water mains, markets and parks, all under-girded by a central sewerage system.

4. Standing for Mister, Master, or simply Man, I use the moniker ‘M’ to ensure anonymity and prevent any confusion of a more plausible pseudonym with any real person. Marking many a Men's Room door, the letter's stark geometry equally carries infrastructural connotations in its own right.

5. For a broader discussion of land and chieftaincy in the sub-region see Berry (2001).

6. Acting as an autonomous political agent, M differs from other development entrepreneurs given his distance from established political authorities and lack of previously established tie to residents of the area (Kleist 2011).

7. Hobbes employment of the term ‘Bodies Politique’ is precise and deliberate. Distinguished from private orders, he uses it to characterize political systems ‘made by the authority from the Sovereign power of the Commonwealth (1994: 132).

8. Initially enunciated by Hobbes in De Corpore (1981 [1655]), Hobbes’ plenist convictions continue to be debated by scholars in terms of their inspiration in particular experimental observations and the diverse philosophical traditions of Descartes and Aristotle, and their strictly scientific or more broadly political implications (Schapin & Schaffer 1985; Kroll 1992; Leijenhorst 2002; Malcolm 2002)

9. Political theorist Zizek (2004), for instance, discusses the symbolic resonance of toilet design for understanding national culture.

10. Building upon research in Philippines, Anderson (2006) speaks of the wider formulation of ‘excremental colonialism’. Closer to home, West African literary scholar Esty (1999) reframes this as a broader cultural orientation he calls ‘excremental post-colonialism'.

11. Though this does not conform to what Martinich (2005: 128) calls the ‘non-sovereign covenant’, it signals a different sort of political partiality that could be labelled a quasi- or proto-sovereign covenant.

12. Gupta (2013) makes a related point in his consideration of the lively temporality of infrastructure through the lens of ruins.

Additional information

Funding

Extended fieldwork in 2011 was funded by a Fulbright Hays Faculty Research Abroad award.