Initially, Accra appears to be a walled city. There are walls everywhere, keeping something out or keeping something in, guarding, hiding, protecting, sheltering. There are tall walls and small walls, sturdy walls, impregnable fortress walls, mud walls, brick walls, cement walls, wooden walls, walls of leaves. There are smug walls, painted soft pastels of yellow and green and pink. There are walls with lovingly wrought iron gates proudly sporting gilded finials of faux gold. There are shabby walls, nothing more that sheets of corrugated iron propped up, standing against the odds, the gate no more than one iron sheet loose enough to pull back and squeeze through. Not unusually these spectacularly different walls stand side by side: for the most part, rich and poor are not separated in Accra’s urban geography, impoverished Christian Village, privileged Achimota and the egregious embassy enclave notwithstanding.
Relying on neither sheer height nor great width, many walls sport nasty dangerous toppers which, in the right light can twinkle like tinsel, outlining the shape of the land they bind. Some are familiar – pointed bricks or broken glass and bottles. Other bristle brutally: barbed wire and electrified wire are prominent. Increasing popular, too, is razor wire, inexplicably favoured by the ubiquitous evangelical non-denominational, conspicuously wealthy churches that serve the poor. Razor wire is a more recent innovation, mandated to surround the dwelling of every employee of the US Embassy, rendering these overly cautious Americans visible to all: vandals, kidnappers or terrorists alike. In Accra’s ongoing Were’s Waldo, in which direction signs, street names and addresses are all eschewed, these razor wire bedecked walls are as effective as searchlights to identify their American inhabitants.
These walls of protection are easily comprehensible but what of the flimsy walls, the walls to low to even cause a tumbling Humpty to break? Walls that are propped up. Walls without any gates at all, wide openings that invite in the world. There are pristine walls and walls that serve as billboards. There are, among the hundreds and thousands of walls, a few with spray-painted messages that at last hold the key to understand the walls, especially that do not enclose or protect. The painted messages: “Family owned land.” “Land not for sale.” “Stop work. Produce permit.” “Remove immediately by order.”
Land ownership in Ghana is not clear. Title offices, deeds, registered mortgages are for the most part inefficient, inconsistent or nonexistent. One of the only ways to prove and enforce ownership is to erect a wall and literally defend it: “Keep off. Family land. Not for sale.” What happens is that unscrupulous people pretend ownership of a parcel of land that does not belong to them and sells it to someone who thinks it is a legitimate sale, but of course it isn’t. But who knows? And when does a person find out that the dream plot of land they have saved their whole life to purchase is not theirs at all and they have been defrauded. This is also why people start to build even the most rickety partial structures: to prove the land is occupied.
Building reveals the astonishing disparity between new Ghana and old. There is an enormous, multi-story Novatel dominating the skyline hitherto limited to about 3-5 stories. And the churches, these are the other big construction projects, immense, elaborate, with detailing, columns, cornices and balconies. They stand in stark contrast to the surrounding neighbourhood echoing the same dissonance that characterized medieval town and medieval cathedral, absent only the gargoyles. But large or small, multinational or evangelical, commercial or domestic, there is one thing that unites in Accra: they are all made of cement, poured cement, moulded cement or towering stacks of cement blocks held together with cement. The roads are lined with cement brick works, where the workers make standard rectangular cement blocks, or coloured decorative blocks, all by hand. Vendors show varied styles and sizes of decorative columns to grace the entrance or hold up the ceiling.
Construction sites dot the roads as owners rush to build some structure that will reify their claim to the plot of land. Workplace safety standards appear to be unknown: the workers don’t wear hard hats; one assumes that steel-toed boots are equally absent. But absent also are safety harnesses as the construction workers stand of frail wooden scaffolding, devoid of railings, presumably too unstable to support a worker in full safety gear. The drop might only be a storey or three and the ground is soft but how many construction workers and cement workers are injured, disabled, killed every year? Occasionally, the walls of the construction sites bear a spray-painted notice “Stop work immediately. Produce permit.” This is how the building inspectors try to impose order on an essentially uncontrolled and uncontrollable industry. There are too few inspectors to return to a site where there is never anyone really in charge or responsible, so they leave their calling card. Wily owners and construction crews, however, not infrequently paint these signs themselves, to trick inspectors into thinking a colleague has already put the site on notice.
If construction sites dot the landscape so, too, do the skeletons of half built structures. Sometimes it seems possible to read the ebb and flow of Ghana’s economy by the age of the building and when construction stopped. This may be fantasy but certainly when the owner runs out of money construction does stop, only to resume when there are again sufficient cedis for a roof or another storey or the external stucco and painting. Suma Court has been under construction for 20 years and there are still plans for additional rooms and amenities as funds become available. It gives one pause the consider that no one in Ghana has a mortgage: but with interest rates having just gone down to 24.9% perhaps therein lies explanation. Certainly, though, some of the skeletons are the result of downward mobility. Across from the WUSC office is a house, grand and walled and crumbling. The window glass is broken or gone completely and an enormous satellite dish, surely the size of the whole roof, has fallen. But even in these hard circumstances, the owner is seeking to enforce his rights; spray painted on a vendor’s booth that has tried to encroach on his wall space is a notice to remove immediately.
So, the booths of the vendors huddle under the walls of the wealthy (though not in the embassy enclave which could blend into Rosedale or Shaughnessy or any similar neighbourhood) who become all the more wealthy for the presence of the vendors who rent their squalid square of boulevard from those behind the walls. The vendors, dependent though they are for their land, are nevertheless independent merchants; they not only own their skills and stock but also their shop that rest on the land of the bourgeoisie.There is something in all this that compels the language of Marx, a radical call to social justice: workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains. Except some of the poorest vendors and the hawkers don’t even have their own chains, no doubt melted down with the global economy.
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