Contentious connections: infrastructure, dignity, and collective life in Accra, Ghana

Pauline Destrée

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.13654

Abstract

AbstractInfrastructural systems have emerged as productive ethnographic sites for analysing political subjectivities and rationalities. Through the case of shared electricity and prepaid meters in the compound housing system of Accra, Ghana, I suggest that infrastructures’ political potential lies in their imaginative and hermeneutic abilities to foster desires for dignity, sustain well‐being, and question moral ideals of collective life. In contrast to recent anthropological work that has emphasized the material basis of infrastructures as ‘techno‐political’ devices materializing certain logics of rule and governance, I reclaim a poetics of sociality whereby infrastructures mobilize a politics of (unwanted) collective life. Through the ‘electricity stories’ circulated by tenants, I chart how the moral economy of infrastructure in a context of collective precarity redistributes marginalization and freedom in ways that always exceed political rationales of energy reforms and policies.

Highlights

Desires and dependencies on the grid Kwame had an unusual, but highly entertaining, strategy for exposing neighbours whom he suspected of tampering with his electricity meter for their own use
As tenants depend on their neighbours’ ability to pay for the increasingly elevated cost of electricity bills, they find themselves in a situation of precarity that is caused not so much by perennial difficulties of access or reliability, but by the socioeconomic relations of dependence and obligation generated by the shared electricity meter
While this is quite a unique feature of the electricity network in Accra, in part caused by the particularity and prevalence of compound housing, I want to suggest that it reveals a more general aspect of infrastructure as the systems of connection undergirding and mediating collective life

Summary

Introduction

Desires and dependencies on the grid Kwame had an unusual, but highly entertaining, strategy for exposing neighbours whom he suspected of tampering with his electricity meter for their own use. Is what he would do: in the evenings, when people had retreated to their room to watch the latest telenovela In the housing system of Accra known as compound housing, where several people or households share infrastructural facilities like electricity meters, infrastructure does more than supply vital goods: it creates an urban network of dependency that exposes

Pauline Destrée

Conclusion