Place-Making, Regulatory Politics, and the Roots of Informality in Colonial Accra

Abstract

At a meeting of the Accra Town Council on January 8, 1940, councilors engaged in a long discussion about an unauthorized corn mill that had been erected at the house of Mr. K. Armah Kwantreng. The Medical Officer of Health – a British colonial officer – “expressed the opinion that the corn-mill in question was situated in the corner of a very dirty compound which was full of shacks and old lorry parts and other filth and was therefore injurious to health”.1 The conversation that followed reflected fissures within the town’s governing body, as the “African Unofficial Members objected to the opinion expressed by the Medical Officer of Health that corn-mills in general were a nuisance”.2 The debate over Mr. Kwantreng’s corn mill exemplifies in many ways the influence of prevailing public health rhetoric on the processes of town management and planning in colonial cities like Accra. As John Parker notes, “‘sanitation’ and ‘order’ became linked by an emerging imperial ideology in which the new concern with tropical medicine contained a variety of encoded messages about wider social control”.3 As the “envisaged urban showcase of expatriate enterprise and ordered modernity”, colonial officials sought to shape the built environment of the city and the practices of its residents through new forms of spatial organization and regulation, using sanitation as an excuse to “rid the town of activities deemed unsuitable for the seat of imperial power”.4 These strategies had their roots in the earliest years of British colonial governance in Accra, motivating the construction of new markets and slaughterhouses and the implementation of new regulatory standards that sought to ensure the cleanliness and order of the new colonial capital. By the 1930s and 1940s, Town Council actions had become increasingly intrusive, as the Medical Officer of Health and other councilors used the fear of disease to motivate regular sanitation inspections within compounds and homes of African residents and mobilized the regulatory powers of the Accra Town Council to demolish undesirable structures.