Millennial Women Traders in Accra, Ghana: New Twists on Existing Social Networks and Technologies

Abstract

Two decades ago Gracia Clark's work (1988, 1991, 1994) on women traders in Kumasi established a benchmark for research on markets in urban West Africa where problems such as sanitation and disease, slum clearance, under/unemployment and poverty dominated public concern and research. Today's concern with sustainability recognizes women's role in food production, marketing and family reproduction. In this paper the concerns of earlier studies connect with the reality of new social networks and technologies in the marketplace: women in same sex intimate relationships and their social practices in Accra. Young sexually non-normative women in Mokola and other Accra markets have struggled since 2006, not only with low incomes, but with an increasingly hostile public discourse on homosexuality and frequent blackmail attempts. Seeing themselves as ‘modern’ urban, 'Afropolitans' they resist social constraints their elders accepted, deploying IT technologies–netbooks, modems, smartphones to facilitate trade, cash transfers, and to build and maintain social networks. Some replicate nuclear families or include biological family who are accepting; many do not and require alternatives to their family homes. Yet, these young—under age thirty-five—traders and craftswomen live in the margins and are frequent victims who resist through self-protective networks, which provide mutual physical, economic, and social support. This paper examines the multitude of strategies—language, susu, parties, funerals, cell phone chains– they use to construct community, claim social belonging, and disrupt public notions of social deviance.