6. 1
Introduction
"The city is nothing."
Peter was standing in front of his work desk in his house cutting some of the fabric
that he was planning to use for a dress later, when he attempted to put his thoughts
about Accra into words for me. The TV was turned on, and the sound of a random
Mexican soap opera filled the air of the room while the children were running back
and forth between the kitchen and his workplace. Peter looked at me as I asked him
my question, shrugged his head and uttered with some sense of hopelessness in his
voice, "The city is nothing.”
Even now, over a year after this episode, his words ring in my ears, and I can still
remember the curiosity and sensation of having completely missed something
fundamental. After only a few weeks of living in a society that to me seemed like a
chaos consisting of more or less everything, I was told by the father in my house that
Accra was nothing. As far as I had understood, one of the main reasons people
actually did move to the big city was that it surely was everything? Was it not the
rural villages and towns that was nothing?
Peter's statement about Accra's position to him made me curious and can in many
ways be considered the starting point for what would become a one and a half year
long journey in search of a plausible explanation. What does it mean that “Accra is
nothing?” If Accra is nothing, why is it so? What can this tell us about the relationship
between Peter and Accra? This thesis is my final product and the end of my journey
for now. It consists of a number of chapters that should be understood as a reflection
of my travelling from my initial confusion in Peter's work room to the final printing
of the document at the press. Through discussion related to the Ghanaian perception
of home, exploration of their perception of Accra and investigation of the relationship
between these two places, I paint a picture explaining that Accra and the hometown
are together two essential parts of the urban existence. To live in the city is seemingly
not an individual endeavour, but rather a social process in a system spanning wider
than the mere urbanite and filled with apparent paradoxes and contradictions. I will
7. 2
attempt to shed light on these issues and suggest a possible explanation of why the
city can be said to be nothing. Accordingly, I ask the following question;
How can we understand the role of the hometown in Accra, and how does it
influence the urban existence for 'normal working people'?
This introductory chapter is written for the purpose of bringing the reader into the
context of my study. Through a thorough methodological discussion, I will attempt to
give an impression of the dynamics between the researcher in the field-setting and
how my fieldwork has led me to adopt a certain theoretical perspective. However,
before I go on with the methodological challenges, I have to briefly present the people
and the places that I have been around during my fieldwork, and make some
introducing remarks of the theory upon which I rely in the text. To conclude the
chapter, I will provide the reader with a reader’s guide in order to understand the why
I have structured the thesis in the way I have.
"Regular workers"
In this work I attempt to shed light upon how a group of regular workers perceive life
in the city, and how the idea of having a 'hometown' influences their urban existence.
However, the terms “regular workers” is in this context not self-explanatory, and
require some exploration.
When I refer to "regular workers" as the focus in my text, I point to a group of adults
aged 30-35 years, all of whom work as teachers in a junior secondary school. All but
one has attended university and holds a Bachelor degree, and each has four years of
training at a teachers training college. The only exceptions are the parents in the house
in which I lived, Peter and Yvonne, both of whom have vocational training from a
tertiary educational institution. Peter works as a tailor and Yvonne as a plumber.
However, due to the current situation Yvonne does not work but instead stays at home
to take care of the children and the cooking.
Despite these differences in occupation, all of my main informants are in a relatively
stable economic situation. All of them are employed and know that their educations
and vocations would most likely provide them with job opportunities in one way or
another. Considering this, we can assume that other people in less stable situations
might have different ideas and perceptions of their surroundings.
8. 3
Aware of the heterogeneity of the city, I stress that the reader should understand my
argument not as an attempt to cover the whole urban scene but as a description of
certain aspects of the life of individuals in the situation that I have already explained.
Despite this, I allow myself to make generalizations and claim my findings to be valid
for a wider group of people than those on which I have focused. As will be discussed
in much more detail, the framework that I employ for the urban existence has room
for a wide spectrum of individual variation and flexibility. Though people might live,
think and eat differently from each other, I believe that we still are able to place them
inside the framework I propose.
Theoretical perspective
In a literature review of African urban studies, Richard Stren discusses Jean-Marc
Ela's "La Ville en Afrique Noire" (1983):
He is one of the first sociologists to systematically draw our attention to the widespread
practice of small-scale subsistence agriculture. In the same way, he discusses the
adaptations of urban house-types to rural models, and the persistence of ethnic eating
habits and other customs, which vitiate complete adaptation to a European style of
urban life. (Stren 1985:1)
Ela's ideas, as presented by Stren, remind us of the perspective of the urban African as
a lost villager who fails to adapt to the ‘European style of urban life.’ His apparent
failure is visible through both his traditional and rural behaviour, which is somehow
understood to be symptomatic for this 'unsuccessful transition' from village life to city
life. Ela's perspective on the apparent paradox of such ‘ethnic’ behaviours in the
urban setting are not new, nor was he the last to make this claim. Among
anthropologists, a common understanding of the urban dweller in Africa was for
many decades that he was somehow 'stuck' between two different life worlds, and the
city as a site for a clash between different societies. Many explanations were offered
to this analytical challenge, ranging from the "de-tribalisation" model, where a move
to the city meant that the person would gradually "rid himself" of the tribal mentality
(see Mair 1938; Malinowski 1945; Southall & Gutkind 1957) to the concept of
situational changing, or the "alternation model" (see Epstein 1958; Gluckman 1960;
Mitchell 1960), where the urbanite was understood to be continuously "switching"
between tribal and urban behaviours. However, as I will argue in this thesis, these
9. 4
ideas are insufficient to establish an understanding of Peter’s statement regarding the
apparent emptiness of Accra, and do not adequately explain the role and position of
'the village' in 'the city' very well.
Based on James Ferguson’s counter-arguments to this dualist paradigm (1999) and
my empirical material from the field, my thesis is built on the idea that we have to
look away from the idea of the city as a site where a traditional world clashes with a
modern world, and instead understand the urban social environment in Accra as one
social system - a social system built on a framework of the mythical figures of the lost
African and the backwards traditionalists.
I will claim that Accra should not be considered a place where the urbanite is either
urban or rural, as if he is to change cultural costume from situation to situation.
Rather, as we will look further into later, the proper and ideal urbanite is seemingly
required to exist in balance between the city and the hometown, in the sense that their
ideas and behaviours should not be too similar of what is conceptualised as
characteristic for the respective locations. Accra is in this sense not a mere location
where two actual worlds collide, but rather a place where ideas of these two such
contrasting worlds function as guidelines in what is proper living in Accra.
We need to follow Geschiere and Gugler and contend that life in the city could hardly
be understood without making any references to the urbanites rural area of origin, nor
would village-life would be possible to understand without consideration of the
village’s ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ in the city (1998). There is a two-way relationship
between the rural and the urban, and it is the reality of this relation that seem to lay
the grounds for the mythical distinction of the "lost African" and the "backwards
traditionalist". Through an exploration of the role of the hometown and the rural allies
in Accra, and the importance of the bonds between the two, I have reached one
understanding of the interplay between the city and the hometown, and how this
relation influence life in the city. Roughly said, if we are to look consider life in the
city, we cannot treat the hometown and the city as to distinct social systems. If we do,
the city does indeed appear as "nothing".
Locus
The thesis is based on a fieldwork conducted in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, from
January to July 2008. Accra is a city of about three million people located on the
10. 5
Atlantic coast of Ghana. It has for many years also been the seat for the British
colony the Gold Coast. The local Ga people first settled the city towards the end of
the 17th century around the colonial forts Ussher Fort (Dutch) and Christianborg
Castle (Danes). Later, the British also established a James Fort in the area, and in
1807 both the Danes and the Dutch sold their forts to the British. In many ways, we
can claim that Accra became an urban center after it replaced Cape Coast as the
capital of the British Gold Coast colony in 1877. Following this event until Ghana's
independence in 1957, Accra prospered as businessmen from Europe and people from
the rural areas of Ghana came there to settle (Njeru 2006). After Ghana's
independence the city exploded demographically, and the population increased ten-
fold in the 50 years. Today we assume that virtually every tribe in Ghana is
represented in the population of Accra, accompanied by tens of different languages
and a high number of foreign investors, NGO's and businessmen, creating a highly
diverse and complicated social scene.
Map of Ghana
11. 6
Israel
During my fieldwork, I resided for the majority of time, in the neighbourhood known
as Israel, located in the outer areas of the city approximately 40 minutes away with a
trotro from the city center. Israel is a relatively new settlement, poor access to water,
relatively unstable electrical infrastructure and dusty sand roads. People living in the
area are mostly Christians, and within the community we can find eleven different
churches, most of which are charismatic. The house in which I lived was inside of a
compound and owned by a small family: Yvonne, Peter, and their biological daughter
Ewura Abena. In addition to this they had two other children who lived with them:
John and Pat. This group of five people was the main core of the household. Inside
the main building there were four spare rooms that the family rented to both family
and friends, and in the annex, referred to as the boys quarter, there were five more
people. However, the total amount of people living there is difficult to state, as people
came and went from time to time.
The main road leading to Israel.
Peter was the father and the main source of income. He was educated and worked
professionally as a tailor or fashion designer as he would call his work. He had had
his main workplace inside of the house. His two assistants, Mawuli and Ama, were
accordingly also to be found in the house during daytime. Mawuli basically lived in
12. 7
the home, as his house was so far away that he slept on the floor in the living room of
the house during the week as opposed to travelling back to his own home.
While Peter was working, Yvonne spent most of her time cooking, cleaning and
tending to the children. She spent the majority of her time in the kitchen, and if she
was inside the house, one could assume that this would be where you would find her.
The family’s two foster-children attended a primary school approximately 30 minutes
to walk away from the house, but helped Yvonne with cleaning and keeping the house
neat while they were not in class. The youngest daughter, Ewura Abena, or "Lady
Tuesday" as it was translated, was only one and a half years old and began nursery
school shortly after I left Accra.
The school
The classroom is on the right, and the teachers "office" is under the tree.
Aside from being in the house, I spent most of my days working at a junior secondary
school (JSS) in Chantan, which was about 20 minutes away from Israel. The school
consisted of only one classroom that was temporarily located in an old kitchen
belonging to a retired pastor who willingly let us use his compound for teaching. The
JSS was attached to a Salvation Army Primary School that had its structures about
100 meters away from the compound and was only one of two public primary schools
in the area. The JSS was however the only of its kind, and was opened just a few
months before I came to Ghana. Only one class had enrolled so far, and the school
itself was very small. However, with 35 students and four teachers, the classroom
13. 8
tended to be very crowded and hot, the teachers were normally found outside the
classroom when they did not have classes. While one teacher had class, the rest of us
would sit around a small desk in the shades of an almond tree, talking and discussing
anything that would come to our mind. I will get back to a brief explanation of my
role at the school in the discussion of field techniques, found in the next chapter.
However, before proceeding to the methodological discussion we need to look a bit
closer at the structure of this text.
A readers' guide
The structure of this thesis is fairly simple. It consists of six chapters in addition to a
table of contents, list of images and a list of references. Of the six chapters, the first
two should be considered introductory chapters where the reader is presented with my
perspectives and methods. The following three chapters form the main argumentation
of the study, as the sixth chapter concludes the thesis with a summary of my
arguments, some conclusive remarks and references to the future. In total, it will
appear similarly to the following:
Introducing chapters
This is the current chapter that gives the reader a general introduction to the thesis.
The second chapter, Methodological Reflections and Field Techniques is devoted to
an exploration of the role of the anthropologist in the field and the way in which my
relatively long process of positioning in the field has influenced my work.
Furthermore, I will make some brief notes on the most significant areas where
ethnographic data was produced in my fieldwork.
Main discussion
The first chapter in my main argumentation is Home and will focus on the concept of
home and how the people in my study relate to the term. I attempt to explain the
significance of the home and in addition investigate its role in Accra today. The
following chapter Perceptions of Accra is dedicated to a brief exploration of the
people's perceptions of Accra and how the hometown in understood in light of the
Accra being a city. I will roughly explore a picture of the two main conceptions that
people have of Accra: first, as a morally deviant site of cultural destruction, and
secondly as a site of unmatchable opportunity for self-advancement.
14. 9
The last chapter in the main section of my thesis The Delicate Balance provides the
reader with my main arguments and ideas of the relationship between the hometown
and Accra. Based on the two previous chapters, the main intent of this chapter is to
explore a perspective wherein the ideas the hometown and Accra together form the
fundamental framework of the urbanite's existence.
Final remarks and conclusive notes
The thesis will conclude with a brief discussion to pull all the loose threads together
and show in a more explicit way how the various aspects of reality that I have
attempted to explain, are related to each other. Following this summary, I will make
some final remarks about my findings and direction towards future research and
related topics of relevance though beyond the scope of the thesis.
15. 10
Methodological reflections and field techniques
The long-term fieldwork has for many decades been understood as one of the
fundamentals of the anthropological study and is in many ways a significant factor
separating anthropology from other disciplines. By living among our subjects of study
for a longer period of time, anthropologists develop knowledge of other people's lives
which surpass that of simple surveys and questionnaires. In articulation of this idea,
Michael Herzfeld states:
"... Anthropology - with its intimate knowledge of alternative conceptual universes and
local worlds - offers one of the few remaining critical vantage points from which to
challenge the generalizing claims of the global hierarchy of value" (Herzfeld 2004: 4)
Through first hand observations, individual narratives and continuous encounters with
the everyday life of people, anthropologists are able to create a more detailed picture
of individual realities and develop what Allaine Cerwonka refers to as "theoretical
insights that take into account the complexities of local specifities," (2007:14-15). We
are able to develop ideas and perspectives from a local vantage point where the
dominant political forces are not as prominent as one may perceive them to be. It is
nonetheless important to keep in mind that despite the classical images and mythical
ideas of the anthropologist in the field, the fieldwork does indeed involve more than
the merely relaxing under a palm tree as the locals approach with valuable
information.
True fieldwork can be a source of frustration, stress and emotional imbalance; the
work can take on many different forms. There are aspects of working in the field that
may not be as apparent to a bystander on the surface, and there are challenges that are
difficult and sometimes impossible for the researcher to overcome. This chapter will
be devoted to a discussion of the role of the anthropologist and how the role of the
anthropologist should be considered an integral part of the development of the
empirical information upon which we base our analysis. In this context, it is important
for me to look further into my own position in the field and examine how this process
can be said to partly influence the knowledge that I accumulated through my
fieldwork. I will continue with an exploration of some of the challenges that I faced
during my stay in Accra and explain how I attempted to solve these problems. In the
16. 11
last part of the chapter I will more briefly discuss the various stages where
information was produced during my fieldwork.
Unpredictability
The unpredictability of the anthropological fieldwork was highly influential to my end
results. An anthropologist can prepare one’s self as much one would like but never
knows what the meeting with the field will be before actually setting foot on the
ground. As so eloquently put it in the words of Douglas Raybeck:
"Beginning fieldwork in a foreign culture is a bit like diving into an unfamiliar pond in
which you suspect there may be underwater hazards. You may examine the surface of
the pond at length (and breadth and width for that matter); you may even review the
observations of others who have swum in the pond, yet when you leap in yourself, you
still have an excellent chance of landing headfirst on a submerged boulder" (Raybeck
1992:1)
Douglas Raybeck's detailing of getting below the surface of the field captures
precisely how I feel about my encounters with Ghana in January 2008. It tells very
much about the sensitivity and the unpredictability of the fieldwork as an open ended
process, and details the fact that the researcher often faces challenges that may have
been unforeseen.
Living with expectations
As I explained in the introduction, it happened that I was located in Accra for most of
my time in Ghana. However, as I touched the ground in Ghana for the first time on
the 11th
of January, my intentions were not to stay in Accra. I initially intended to live
in a smaller town two to three hours north in Akropong in the Akwapim Hills of
Ghana. My original idea was to study collective memory and the role of the Basel
Mission in present day society. As I arrived in Akropong after a troublesome and
hectic journey from Accra, I was placed in a room at the Akrofi Christaller Center, a
research institute for Theology, Mission and Culture with which I had had some
contact with during the planning stages of my fieldwork.
Tall fences surrounded the centre, and the gate was partly watched by a guard. I was
served breakfast, lunch and dinner at the cafeteria connected to the centre, getting to
which required me to leave one locked area and enter another equally guarded facility
17. 12
across the street. The circumstances were relatively comfortable considering the
standards of the facilities and bed, but not optimal for the purposes for my stay in
Akropong. I had planned to be among the people of Ghana, not behind locked behind
gates and bars.
People working at the centre warned me against mingling with the local people in
reservation of their habits of begging for money and attempting to take advantage of
outsiders. As a first-timer in Ghana and Africa in general, these warnings coupled
with the feelings intense detachment from the local community cultivated a particular
ambivalence within me towards my project. I was unsure about my own safety and
afraid of leaving the guarded facilities. My preconceived romanticized notions of
what fieldwork would be like and images of being an idyllic fieldworker fully
assimilated with the local community were slowly vanishing. Either I was doing
something that was causing this gap between what I had envisioned and what was
reality, or there were great inaccuracies within my perception of what fieldwork
actually was.
However, as time passed by I eventually began to establish some contacts outside of
the centre and became more comfortable with moving freely about the area. People
began recognising me as I walked by, and it was apparent that the staff’s warnings at
the Akrofi Christaller were not entirely founded in truth. I eventually recognized that
the centre was, ironically, one of the biggest obstacles for me in completing my
research, not the local people about which they had warned me.
The centre was a tertiary education and research institute, focusing on theology and
mission. Noting that I was residing at this centre, locals associated me with its
purposes and were assumed that I was in Akropong for the study of religion and
theology. As they gleaned further information about the fact that I was a descendent
of Reverend Andreas Riis, one of the founding fathers of the Presbyterian Church in
Akropong, their impressions of me became even more entrenched in believing that I
was there for religious study. Rev. Riis is considered to be a hero in the local
community, as he was the one who brought them the Gospel. As my relationship with
the Presbyterian Church and Christianity is of a relatively limited sort, it was difficult
for me to live up to these expectations based on my family name. These expectations
proved fatal for my original project in Akropong.
18. 13
For some days, the thought of leaving Akropong if not Ghana was in the back of my
mind. I was tired of being locked away and disenfranchised from the local community
and was getting worried about the impressions people had of me. I was surprised and
frustrated, because this was not something I had anticipated happening. I knew on
beforehand that the church was strong in the local community, and I was under the
assumption that my name would help me and provide some networking opportunities
in people's lives. These both proved to be correct observations, but I had failed to
consider one of the fundamental consequences of this. The name "Riis" is indeed my
personal name, and through the associations with the name follows associations to
me. I had overlooked the fact that I was not only to be present in the local community
as a researcher, but also as a person. As it turned out, of the submerged boulders that I
came upon when diving into this pond was actually I.
As I saw it, I had three possible courses of action to take. First, I could stay in
Akropong and be open with my relationship to the church and confront their
expectations of me. Second, I could attempt to live a lie and make the most out of
what that would imply for my work. Third, I could leave the town without
confronting the expectations and begin a new project somewhere else. After a few
days of contemplation, I realised that the first alternative would be out of the question.
As a bearer of the same name as one of the great heroes in this community, I also bore
a certain responsibility. I did not want to drag the name down with me and would
rather leave them with the positive connotations with the Riis name. Furthermore, the
second alternative was out ruled, as living a lie would contradict my own ethical
standards, as well as being on accord with the ethical standards of anthropological
research. I chose the third alternative and managed to get a volunteer position at a
newly established Salvation Army School in the outer areas of Accra through a family
friend of mine working for the Salvation Army in Ghana.
Arrival and the long process of positioning
My encounters and experiences in the beginning of the fieldwork caused my
positioning in the field to be a long process. Not only did I spend a few weeks in
Akropong before I re-located to Accra, but as I arrived Accra I was in a situation
where I did not have a clear focus nor did I have any clue about who and where I was
going to be with or live. I needed roughly another one and a half months before I had
19. 14
finally settled in a location which brought me closer to those I wanted to study, with
an at least slightly clearer picture of what I was doing there.
In many ways my arrival story takes up a very different character than those described
by Malinowski (1922) or Evans-Pritchard (1940), where the lonely researcher arrives
'his people' in a distant world and settle in their villages. With Malinowski's famous
quote stating the researcher is to "grasp the native's point of view” and his
romanticized meeting with the field in the back of my head, I had stepped onto the
grounds of Ghana various ideas and conceptions of what the anthropological
fieldwork would and should be. I was ready to glide into the community and through
what Rosalie H. Wax (1971) refers to as a relatively long duration of participant
observation, affection and mutual trust to give a full picture of how the natives
perceive the world and their reality.
Lise Marie Rønningen refers to these images in her study of arrival stories as a "cult
of fieldwork," deriving from continuous encounters with classical anthropological
arrival stories (Rønningen 2008). She follows Marie Louise Pratt and James Clifford
and contends that the "the arrival story is a superficial production emerged not from
fieldwork, but from a Western writing tradition, ascendant from the tradition of travel
writing," (Rønningen 2008:29). Especially for a first-timer, these ideas of the
fieldwork as a mythical rite de passage can be considered as highly significant in
one's first meeting with the field and might in many scenarios provide the researcher
with a sensation of disappointment and inadequacy. When I arrived Ghana in January
last year, this was exactly what happened.
It seems to be significant in this context to make a brief discussion about the role of
these arrival stories in the ethnographic context. This leads me to another related topic
that is highly influential in my work, and open for an exploration of the
anthropologist’s role in the production of the ethnography.
There is an understanding that these arrival stories described in the classical
ethnography indeed played a certain role in the text and were used as a means of
legitimizing the authority of the writer, as well as being a part of the issue of living up
to the ideal of scientific truths (Rønningen 2008). As Evans-Pritchard writes:
"It may interest readers if I give them a short description of the conditions in which I
pursued my studies, for they will then be better able to decide which statements are
20. 15
likely to be based on sound observation and which to be less well grounded." (Evans-
Pritchard 1940:9)
In other words, when we, after being presented with the scenario in which he found
himself, are aware of the laboratory where Evans-Pritchard conducted his work, it is
up to the reader to consider his seemingly objective findings and whether they seem
well grounded or not. What is apparent is that by leaving the descriptions of the field
arrival outside the ethnographic descriptions and analysis in this sense, the researcher
becomes invisible and the ethnography is portrayed as an impersonal and objective
reality that we are able to describe and analyze. The data presented appears raw data,
harvested by the researcher in the field and supporting the ideal of scientific
neutrality. Malinowski underlines this in his clear statement that scientific
anthropology must be "objective, fully documented, and unaffected by personal and
impressionistic distortion," (1962:194 cited in Kaplan 1984). This idea is
complemented by Kroeber through his idea that, "there is no room in anthropology for
a shred of ethnocentricity," (1964:841 cited in Kaplan 1984:28).
Alternatively, as has been argued by a number of anthropologists, this idea of a
scientific truth in anthropology is not achievable. Based on my own experiences and
arrival story, we should instead of concealing the humanity of the fieldworker, seek to
avoid these accusations with self-reflection. As other critics of the kind of neutralism
that Malinowski and Kroeber contends argue:
"The goal ... is not the impossible one of eradicating value judgments, but the realistic
one of eradicating bias. This is achieved only by recognizing and validating the value
judgments on which the activity of the scientist, like all other rational activity, must
rest" (Kaplan 1984:28)
Value judgments are unavoidable, unless we remove ourselves from the field
altogether. What fieldwork would that be? Instead, by recognising our own value
judgments in the analysis we make it possible to gradually remove these judgments as
best we can. By ignoring them, they lie invisibly in the text. By recognising them, we
have a problem to solve. However, we need to go further than this. The ethnographic
text should not be considered as an unbiased analysis of ethnographic data collected
in the field, but we need to see the empirical foundation of our analysis as a result of
our presence and position in the field. Our interaction with the field is grounded in
21. 16
previous experiences, and it is our position in the field that creates the ethnographic
material we get.
One way of seen my role in Accra is that there is little doubt that my Norwegian
conceptions of either basic issues like gender-issues, waste handling and pets, or more
fundamental ideas like children's rights, influenced my interaction with the field, and
again influenced how people perceived me. Although, I quickly managed to get rid of
this 'dirty' behaviour, people did frown upon my tendency toward greeting women in
the same way as I greet men. I was confused as I rarely found garbage bins and thus
kept stashing garbage in my back pocket. When I was trying to play with the dogs in
the house people asked me why I was doing what I did, as the dogs were not for
petting in that way. My interaction with not only the people but also the environment
of the field is a result of the social environment through which I had been conditioned
earlier. It is likely that people’s conception of me, have also been influenced by the
way I have behaved. It is thus plausible to assume that my own behaviour influenced
the information that people were willing to give me, and how much access I had to
people’s backstage. The anthropological fieldwork should thus be considered as a
meeting between two persons rather than an objective body merely absorbing the
native culture. The ethnography and the ethnographical text are more than a mere
description of the stage or laboratory and an objective analysis of the findings.
In this sense, I would argue that it is essential for the ethnographic text to include the
personal experiences of the researcher, as it is actually from these personal
experiences that the material derives. As Kirsten Hastrup contends:
"Fieldwork is situated between autobiography and anthropology. It connects an
important personal experience with a general field of knowledge. The connection itself
is of generative impact upon the reality of anthropology (Hastrup 1987b). Like other
individuals, anthropologists are also continuous with the space that they constitute (cf.
Ardener 1987:39-40)" (Hastrup 1992:117)
Those who criticise this perspective by claiming the author to be navel-gazing, self-
absorbing or narcissistic seem to forget that the anthropologist is neither in a neutral
nor objective position in the field. Instead, we need to look away from the positivist
idea of hard ethnographic data and turn to the claim that it is in the encounter between
the anthropologist and the people he studies, that ethnography is being produced
22. 17
(Crapanzano 1986; Hastrup 1995). If we are to ignore these encounters and the
personal experiences from the field, we are at the same time removing the context
from which the ethnography actually derives.
Becoming a part of the ethnography
One issue that arose during my fieldwork that should be considered in light of the
aforementioned points is my own presence in the field and how this shaped the
ethnographic material with which I returned. I have recognised my own cultural
values and ideas' influence on people's behaviours, but a further issue is unavoidable
for any researcher who is approaching social interaction and life: the researcher's
presence in his own ethnographic material.
One of the most challenging aspects of my fieldwork in Accra was the establishment
of a sense of continuity and closeness the people in my field - a location that, in
Epsteins words, could be considered "a society inchoate and incoherent, where the
haphazard is more conspicuous than the regular, and all is in a state of flux," (1961:29
cited in Ferguson 1999:18). Accra is, from my experience, a city where movement,
diversity and a constant flow of people are significant aspects of everyday life, and it
seemed more or less impossible to grasp any idea that was meant to represent a kind
of wholeness in the urban society.
I was staying in a hostel where did not know anybody. Though on most days I met
new people, but the idea of gaining any kind of legitimate membership among the
"Accraian community" was unlikely. I was in a situation where every person I met
viewed me as a stranger. I was unfamiliar to him, and he was unfamiliar to me. I had
my ideas of whom I was dealing with, and he had his. I could sit down and talk with
strangers, but I knew that the next day I would have to do the very same thing again. I
could have of course requested to meet some of these people again later, but I pushed
these thoughts away as I had little or no idea of where my project was going at the
time. My uncertainty hindered me in proceeding the discussions to a deeper level than
the standard, "Hey white man, how are you?" type of discussion. To establish this
desired closeness to the field is a challenge when facing such an environment and led
to much frustration in the beginning phase of my fieldwork. It was only after I moved
in with a local family in the outer areas of the city that this intense feeling of
strangeness began to dissipate.
23. 18
Transitory city, transitory data
Hastrup claims that the ethnographer should be considered as a part of the
ethnography and not only the analysis (1995), following the contention that
ethnographic data is to be produced only in an encounter between the ethnographer
and those whom he studies. In this sense, we can claim that my share of the social
experiences with those that I studied has had an impact on the material upon which I
base my thesis and its theoretical perspective. As Cerwonka states, improvising is
essential for the researcher, who is continuously "adjusting one's tactics and making
judgments based on particular contexts that one can never fully anticipate," (2007:20).
In this lies a conception about the unpredictability of the ethnographic fieldwork: the
adjustments made by the researcher are mainly based on the ethnographic
observations that one has already made. I made my decisions, phrased my questions
and wrote my field notes all on the basis of my experiences in the seemingly
alienating and disjointed Accra. After all, if we are to consider the ethnographic
fieldwork as a knowledge producing and hermeneutic process, we also know that we
always have to revise and reconsider our existing insights in the light of new findings,
and vice versa (Cerwonka 2007).
We can thus claim that considering the researcher’s own status as both an
ethnographer and informant, (Hastrup 1995) the direction that my journey in Accra
took was partially shaped by my own personal social experiences. The questions I
asked and the roads I walked were decisions deriving from the existing ethnographic
data I had already observed and experienced. Based on these thoughts, I will
cautiously assume that the transitory and fleeting city that I experienced during my
time in Accra, particularly at the beginning of my time there, influenced and became a
part of the ethnographic foundation for my thesis.
However, this implies that my observation can hardly be said to be anything near an
objective or neutral presentation of the society in Accra, as it is based on the
knowledge and information produced in my meeting with the field. As Gadamer
points out as a critique towards the positivist idea of accumulating objective
knowledge, "We can only ever understand something from a point of view,"
(Gadamer 1999:396). There is little doubt that I could have developed a perspective
of Accra as a more stable location than I have now, through for example building my
fieldwork around the woman selling breakfast around the corner of the school.
24. 19
Considering she has stood there for many years now, and other than the construction
of a new building which forced her to move her stall a few meters, nothing would
change anytime soon, she was a stable part of Accra. From this point of view, Accra
might have looked different.
What is a local?
However, even though I eventually managed to establish a certain kind of closeness to
my field through the family I lived with, there was still one pressing issue that was
very apparent to me both in the field, and after I came home: who really is the local in
Accra? As Accra is a city of almost three million people of different tribes, different
nationalities, different traditions and different perceptions of reality, it is very difficult
to define who the local actually is. Thus, the task of defining my focus is equally
taxing. However, considering the heterogeneity of Accra, it is plausible to assume that
many individuals do not actually understand the actions of others, and the life behind
the curtains might differ from one person to another. Many could probably point at
the urban scene and claim that the social game in the city is of a simpler character
than in that of the hometown, as social relations tend to be more of a uniplex kind,
and one's social role is less complex. However, this also means that people would
have a more fragile foundation in understanding other people’s actions and behaviour.
The apparent simplicity of social relations in the city causes a highly complicated
social setting for the researcher. It is plausible that the explanation one gets from one
person about another person’s actions actually is more of a matter of stereotyping than
actual explanations of people's actions.
I actually found myself from time to time in a setting where "the local" was just as
ignorant as me when it comes to understanding others behaviours. James Ferguson is
also noting this challenge in urban fieldwork, and asks:
"What happens to anthropological understanding in a situation where "the natives" as
well as the ethnographer lack a good understanding of what is going on around them?
What if "the local people," like the anthropologist, feel out of place, alienated, and
unconnected with much of what they see? The sharp line between the natives and the
ethnographer, the locals and the foreigner, under such circumstances, becomes
blurred." (Ferguson 1999:19-20)
25. 20
Needless to say, this situation provided me with a sense of methodological anxiety in
Accra and an idea of finding myself in a "knowable community" (Peters 1997)
seemed very distant.
However, I believe that this sense of not being able to find the local contributed
significantly to the process of creating the perspective that I have used in my thesis.
After all, these people were actually living in Accra and existed in a highly urban
society. They shared the social space in the city, and there had to be some ideas that
they had in common. I realised that this sense of alienation and being, as Ferguson
phrases it, "in the midst of rapid social transformation" (Ferguson 1999: 20) could be
considered as a very important facet of life in Accra. It should not be ruled out as a
mere methodological issue, but rather considered as something that these people
simply had to cope with as an urban reality of Accra.
As we will see later, this conception of the alienating and disconnecting city, and the
lonely and purely modern urbanite, seem to function as a reference point to what a
person in Accra should not be, irrespective of tribal identity, and thus encourages a
reconstruction of tradition in order to maintain a certain familiarity and local identity.
In this sense, we can see that what at first appeared to me as a major source of
frustration with the progress of my work and urban fieldwork, actually can provide us
with valuable information about people's perception of reality. After all, this is the
reality for the city dweller in Accra, and it is noncontroversial to claim that a sense of
alienation is a part of people's everyday life there. I will return to this in a later
discussion, where I will explore social and moral centers in Accra.
Considering these two sub-chapters, I will claim that I found myself in a situation in
Accra where flux, pace and changes were a highly significant factor. These have
resulted in my work focusing on the very same concepts, as the ethnographic data and
information forming the foundation of my work is produced through my encounter
with the city. In the following, I will look closer at the various locations and people
that have been of importance in the production of data, and discuss the various
techniques that I have used in this process.
Producing data
With a more nuanced picture of the role of the researcher in the field and some ideas
of the challenges I faced during my time in Accra, I will now continue with a brief
26. 21
exploration of how I approached Accra, and the different techniques and positions
that were relevant for the production of the data I present in this thesis.
Using the school as a gateway to understanding
Throughout my time in Accra, I was assigned as a volunteer teacher at a junior
secondary school in Chantan, a small community located approximately 20 minutes
away from Israel. For the first few weeks at school, I was given the opportunity to
teach the children in Social Studies. I requested this assignment because I wanted to
be able cultivate a closer relationship with the children and get a first-hand experience
of the teaching situation in Accra. The other teachers agreed and assigned me the
responsibility for organising tests and teaching the classes in Social Studies. The
experiences I took with me from teaching provided me a good vantage point in having
discussions with the teachers. I asked them questions related to the contents of the
curriculum and managed to broaden my understanding by combining the individual
teacher’s reflections of Ghanaian history and society with the government’s
presentation of the same material. After a few weeks of teaching I gradually
developed a stronger interest in the teachers’ positions and their relation to work life
in Accra, and eventually I ended my time as a teacher. I would prefer to spend my
days sitting with the other teachers and discuss and observe their daily life at the
school. As the school was new with only one class, the teachers had plenty of time to
sit and chat about anything that concerned them. We spent most of this time having
normal conversations, though I tended to bring up topics that I found to be relevant
and interesting for my study. These conversations form a central part of the data that I
have with me back to Norway and became one of the main arenas in which I
accumulated knowledge of the everyday life for an average worker in Accra.
Interviewing the teachers
As I was getting towards the end of my fieldwork, I also conducted a few informal
and unstructured interviews with the teachers. I chose to delay this as long as
possible, as I find the interviews to be more valuable when the teachers know me
better and I have developed a more precise focus for my study. At the time, I had a
clearer focus for a while and was able to conduct interviews that were more closely
related to my topic than I would have been able to a few months earlier.
27. 22
The interviews were conducted with the help of a digital recorder. I had already
considered the pros and cons of using the recorder and decided that considering the
teachers knew both my project and me and had been very helpful throughout the
entire fieldwork. A small digital recorder, though possibly a slight disturbance, would
most likely not have a profound influence on what I was told.
However, while life at the school in Chantan was a large part of my days during the
fieldwork, it was far from the only location where I was engaged in people's lives. In
the following I will describe some of the other arenas where I engaged in people's
social life.
Living in Israel
One of my main sources of information for my research actually came from outside of
the school, in the house in Israel where I lived during most of my stay. This
accommodation provided me with many advantages for my fieldwork and was
undoubtedly of high importance for my research.
By staying in this house, I was now able to be a part of the everyday life for a
working family in Accra. I could participate in daily activities and observe people's
daily routines. I chose a very relaxed and unstructured approach while I was inside
the house and did not engage in much public note taking. Most of the time in the
house with the others was spent sitting in a couch talking with Peter while he was
working, chatting with Yvonne as she was preparing food or playing with the
youngest daughter in the house. I would also occasionally socialize with the younger
adults in the house, discussing anything from football to women. In this way, I
attempted to find a role for myself in the household where I was not necessarily
treated merely as a guest. This effort proved to be quite difficult, but it was important
for me to be viewed as a person who also took part in the daily life in the house.
Accordingly, I did not focus much on formal interviews with the members of the
family, with the exception of one interview I did with Peter later in the fieldwork.
Lack of shared time
My aim was to spend as much time as possible with the family in the house, but this
was far easier said than done. Peter was a workingman who spent most of his days
outside the house travelling to his clients’ locations. Yvonne on the other hand was at
28. 23
home more often, although, she also left the house from time to time to go to church,
to shop at the markets or to visit friends. This occasionally created problems with
having incomplete access to information on my informants, an issue shared by many
fieldworkers in urban centers (Palriwala 2005, Cerwonka 2007). On certain days I
would be around the house for the entire day and not see any of the family members
besides the kids and some of the others living in the boys quarter in the compound,
while on other days they would be too busy to even talk with me. In one particular
week, I did not talk with Peter for over four days because his work required him to
wake at four o’clock in the morning and would not return until late into the evening.
This situation was difficult for me to understand, and I attempted to involve myself in
his work mostly without success. His schedule was unforeseeable, and considering the
fact that I was normally at the school during daytime, I would not be able to be
around as the family or at least Peter would leave the house.
However, if Peter returned home at a reasonable time, we would spend hours sitting
down in his work room talking about the day, the work, the weather, and life in
general. These conversations were important to me not only because I gained insight
into his perception of life in Accra, but also because he gradually came to know me
better as an individual and thus opened more of himself to me.
Travelling with friends
Another aspect of my fieldwork of which I should make mention are the various
travels, made mostly for the purpose of visiting friends and family, that I took while I
was in Accra. These travels oftentimes were included taking part in celebrations in
rural homes and villages and proved to be absolutely essential for me in my creation
of an understanding in some of the dynamics between people in Accra and their rural
kin. The few travels I made were not for more than a few days at a time, but they
nevertheless they put me in a situation where I could observe my urban friends in a
new context. This was a brand new circumstance in which to socialise with them, and
I became aware of perspectives of their existence that was not so obvious and visible
in Accra.
Experiencing the city
When I was not spending time in the house, travelling or working at the school, I
spent most of my days walking around in Accra in attempt to get a real feel for the
29. 24
place. There were mainly two motivations behind this. First of all, it was my only way
to get a sense of privacy. I would be able to walk around in areas with fewer people,
and I would find the time and the opportunity to reflect and think about the situation
in which I found myself. Secondly, as my focus began to shift towards people's
understanding of the city, I saw it as entirely necessary to obtain a more complete
visual of the physical outlook of the city, how people moved around and anything
relevant to the idea of city life. I needed to become a part of the city, in the sense that
I had to experience the reality of existing in the midst of this apparent chaos. My
impression was that many of the working people of Accra spent hours moving around
in the city during a given day, and I felt it imperative that developed an impression
and firsthand experience of what this was like.
Terms and notions
Before I continue with the main discussion of the thesis, there are a few terms and
notions that need some brief clarification and discussion before we proceed to the
next chapter.
The first term that requires some clarification is the concept of identity. I use the term
mainly in two contexts: relating to the modern Ghanaian nation and to the traditional
hometown. To distinguish the two, I will in the context of the traditional hometown
refer to their identity as the local identity. This identity carries an idea that one
belongs to a tribe, their rural kin, and is to be considered a full member of an ancestral
hometown. The local identity can in many ways be said to revolve around the
concepts reciprocity, communality and hometown moral, and can also be referred to
as an ethnic identity. I, however, opt not to use this term, as the ethnic groups tend to
span over a much wider and undefined area than the hometown, and thus would not
be very fruitful in the context of this thesis. This local identity differs from the
national or modern identity, a 'new' post-colonial identity which appears through the
building of the Ghanaian nation and processes of modernising the country. While the
former refers to a more precise location and people, the modern identity refers to a
much wider area delimited by the national borders, and is a more individual focused
kind of identity as it does not rest on the shoulders of intimate and close relations in
the same sense as in the local identity.
30. 25
Furthermore, another notion I need to clarify further is the distinction of etic and emic
understandings of modernity. If we are to consider modernity from a extraneous or
independent (etic) point of view, we can look at what Giddens refers to as, "a
shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization," (1998:94) associated
with ideas of the world as open to human transformation, complex economic
institutions, and some certain political institutions like mass-democracy and the nation
state (1998). There are clear ideas of what constitutes a modern society, and there is
little room for altering these ideas. However, more significant in this thesis is the emic
perspective, where we consider modernity based on the subject's own terms. How do
my informants understand modernity, and how does this term give meaning to them?
In chapter 5, I will refer to this discussion in more detail, and look at how notions of
modernity are understood by my informants in Accra. This brief exploration was for
establishing an understanding that I will, throughout the thesis, mainly operate with
the emic perspective, where modernity seems to be used in a relatively unproblematic
way, associated with invention, new ideas and change.
In the next few chapters I will draw on the empirical data from produced throughout
my fieldwork and attempt to build up an argumentation that will provide us with some
insights into and awareness of some of the experienced realities of urban Accra,
focusing specifically on the concept of home, and how this notion together with ideas
of modernity appears as a fundamental aspect in the urban existence.
31. 26
Home
Every society around the world operates with the notion of 'home' in one way or
another. It is an unavoidable concept in discussions about someone's identity, and it
often takes part in shaping peoples’ realities, sometimes in a more profound way than
others. One place the notion ‘home’ can be referring to is the geographical location
where one was born, while in others it might make reference to a seemingly random
mud hut in rural Cameroon. A home can be a studio apartment in downtown San
Francisco or be below deck on a boat on the Baltic Sea. A home, it seems, can be
anywhere. However, where exactly someone’s home is, whether in California or West
Africa, is a question that is relatively easy to answer. It is merely a matter of stating a
question. On the other hand, if one dives into the problems of what this home is and
what the home means to the persons involved, the issue becomes more complex. In
this chapter I will investigate the role of 'home', and in which ways the concept
appears as meaningful in the context of Accra. First, I will briefly discuss some of the
ways in which anthropologists have approached the notion 'home' in the past.
Through this I will show the complexity of the term, before I indicate how I would
define it in the context of my study. I continue by introducing the concept of
hometown, the location where most people seem to find their home in Ghana, and
show how this location appears meaningful for some people, while being less
significant for others. Drawing upon empirical data from the field, I explore the
various ways in which the concept of hometown is challenged in Accra today. I will in
particular consider the people who relate to their hometown as the base for their
identity. These challenges are, as we will see on a later point in the thesis, significant
for understanding some of the central aspects of the social world in Accra. They are
closely related to the processes of urbanisation and modernisation, and need to be
seen in a broader perspective rather than as mere challenges to an existing concept.
I continue by discussing the importance of maintaining the bonds to the hometown
and some of the ways in which these bonds are maintained. In the last section of the
chapter I will investigate further the notion home and shed some light on another
aspect of it: the house. I will argue that there is a qualitative difference between the
house in Accra and the house in the hometown and attempt to explain this by referring
in part to my own empirical data, but also to other research that has been done in
32. 27
areas and topics beyond the scope of this thesis.
Home: A multidimensional concept
For many years academics have debated over ideas of ‘home’, and there have been
many attempts to define the term in order to use it as an analytical tool. However,
these attempts have mostly been insufficient as the researchers in question have had a
tendency to define the concept merely in the context of their own study, thus limiting
the discussion to only one aspect of the term and neglecting the multidimensionality
of the concept (Mallett 2004). Some argue for a romanticised view of the home, a
location for nostalgia, harmony, moral and sense of belonging, the home as a haven of
pleasure and comfort (Moore 1984:328 cited in Mallett 2004), building on the idea of
a private and public sphere where the private sphere represents a comfortable, secure
and safe space. This implies that people view their home as a sanctuary, as a place
that they can retire to and live comfortably. These conceptions have been challenged
by researchers like Julia Wardaugh who argues that these presentations of the notion
of the home contrast with many people's actual reality at home (1999). The home is
not only a haven where one can exist in harmony with one's surroundings in a place of
nostalgia and memories, but is also a venue for oppression, abuse and violence. It is
apparent that the idea of the home as a haven is not necessarily a reflection of reality,
but rather a dream of what an ideal home should be.
Others distance themselves from the idea of the home as a haven and focus instead on
the different elements that comprise a 'home'. Two common elements of the idea of
home are the physical house and the family, and many researchers have been
discussing the home as almost a conflation of the two. However, the house and the
family are merely two of the aspects of what might possibly be defined as home.
Gilman discusses the home as the place where one is born, nurtured, and raised, and
that the home becomes only a house without the family (Gilman 1980 cited in Mallett
2004). This might be relevant in many situations, but it is dependent firstly upon how
wide one defines the term family. In most cases, a person’s home is related to a
family, but not necessarily in the sense of the close and tight bonds of the nuclear
family. As we will see later in this chapter, there are people who conceptualise the
home in relation to their ancestors, grandfathers, and so forth. If these are also to be
understood as family, then the idea of a home without family is difficult to imagine.
33. 28
The second reason why Gilman’s idea may be invalid as an applicable definition of
home for the purposes of my study is the focus on the house. As we will see later, a
person's home does not necessarily have to be connected to a certain house, but can
rather be related to a piece of land, a village, and even a town.
These attempts to make home a useful analytical tool might be worthwhile in certain
contexts, but they are still, as we have already seen by discussing two understandings
of the concept, far from being valid in general. I would argue that it is necessary to
have a more phenomenological and emic perspective on 'home', since what is
considered home and whether the home appears as meaningful is a highly subjective
matter dependent upon the individuals in question. One might be able to create an
image of a common idea of what is a home represents a particular culture or society,
but not without doing the necessary generalisations and presenting a culture as a more
or less homogenous entity. This implies that one cannot reduce the notion of home to
a one-dimensional concept where home means either this or that for certain people.
Rather the opposite: a society consists of a multitude of individuals. There are many
factors involved in defining what a person can consider a home and how a person
perceives the home. These factors can vary from political sentiments, to gender, to
education, to economic status, and so on. Saunders and Williams illustrate this by
showing how different political backgrounds influence what the home represent:
… for feminists, who see it in the crucible of gender domination; for liberals, who
identify it with personal autonomy and a challenge to state power; for socialists, who
approach it as a challenge to collective life and the ideal of a planned and egalitarian
social order. (1988:91)
As we see, there are many aspects that influence what a home is, and it is not
necessarily a question of a shared "cultural idea and meaning of home", where one
single over-arching "cultural understanding" of home is forced on to the people. One
can claim that the home is a haven, but then we need to look further and ask who is it
a haven for, and in what ways is it a haven? For a Western liberal the home may be a
haven simply because it represents liberal values. It is a venue where his or her ideas
of the ideal society is actually living, and in this way makes the home a place to feel
comfortable in. However, for the feminist it might actually not be a haven at all,
because gender inequality and male domination is embodied in many
conceptualisations of home. This shows that a haven for one person might not be a
34. 29
haven for another person, and that it is not possible to claim that a home is simply a
location where people find harmony and pleasure, not only because of personal
experiences, as shown by Wardaugh, but also because of personal opinions. Due to
this complexity regarding people's perception of home, it is necessary to avoid
including qualitative features in a definition if one is aiming at using 'home' as an
analytical tool. Furthermore, as shown, attempting to relate 'home' to certain physical
structures might also prove to make the term inapplicable in certain cultural contexts.
Nigel Rapport attempts to define 'home' without pointing at what exactly makes up
the home. Instead he suggests that home could be, “the environment in which one
best knows oneself, where one’s self-identity is best grounded,” (1998:21). This quote
leads us towards a more generally applicable definition of home as it opens up for a
multi-dimensional home, not limiting it to one or two particular aspects of it.
Rapport's definition can include houses, land and villages, in addition to not limiting a
'home' to the idea of being a haven, but also including the suffering that can be
involved in the home. A person who has gone through traumatic experiences in
relation to their ‘home’ would most likely be ascribing negative characteristics to the
it, if not avoiding the term all together, and rather see himself as 'housed but
homeless'. However, these negative experiences are nevertheless a part of one's self-
identity, and can be traced back to a certain environment - and this environment is
what Rapport here refers to as the home.
However, as Rapport himself points out, this perception of the home leads to an
understanding that the home is environmentally fixed. This, according to Rapport, can
in many ways be understood as a 'traditional' anthropological way of discussing
'home', referencing Sahlins (1972) who discuss this certain environment as a centre of
morality and con-sociality. Concentric circles fan out of this centre, and the further
you distance yourself from the centre, your 'home', the less valid would your own
ideas of morality become (Rapport & Dawson 1998). Sahlins condors up an image of
the 'house' as the centre, its position representing that fact that it is thereby morally
‘better’ than the 'lineage'. The lineage is better than the 'village'; the village outranks
the 'tribe', and so forth (1972). As we will see in this study, we are seemingly dealing
with people who by their residence in Accra are distanced to from moral centres, and
thus appear as morally inferior to their rural allies. However, I would claim that this
perspective is not as relevant as it might seem on the face of it. All well, if a person in
35. 30
Accra were judged on the basis of the moral standards in the hometown (which is, as
we will shortly get to, the closest we get to such an environment that Rapport refers
to), this idea would be relevant. However, it is important for us to note that Accra also
entails a certain sense of morality, and that morality springs out of many locations in
the city. Although people refer to their 'hometown', this does not automatically
presuppose that their moral life is founded in the hometown. Rather, as is one of my
main arguments in this thesis, the conditions in Accra requires people to operate with
a certain distance from these morals and ideals represented by the hometown, and
thus the 'morally right' in Accra would be to actually appear as 'morally inferior' to
those of the hometown. I will in a later discussion argue that people might look
towards their hometown in search of their local identity, but that the social
circumstances in Accra does not allow them to base their urban existence solely on
the values the hometown represent.
Another perspective on the 'home' that I see as vitally important here is Jackson's
conception that a home might also be seen as a kind of a relationship that can, "evoke
security in one context and seem confining in another" (Jackson, 1995). This
statement further underlines the arguments above, that the home is not a one-
dimensional thing, but rather a referring to complex and shifting experiences and
identities (Wardaugh 1999:93). In one moment the hometown is positive, and in the
next moment it is negative. In this chapter I will mostly lean on these two conceptions
of the term 'home', as they in contrast to more precise explanations of 'home', appear
as more applicable and generally valid than many others. In addition they also seem to
cover the grounds of the locus of my thesis more thoroughly than other definitions.
In Ghana, the self-identity Rapport mentions is normally situated in a person's
hometown, but although this is where one finds one's local identity, it is still a space
filled with ambivalence. The relationship to one's 'home' is complex, and I will
investigate this further in the chapter. Firstly I will give a brief introduction to what a
'hometown' is in the traditional Ghanaian context, before I continue by discussing the
role of the hometown today, and in what ways this 'home' can appear meaningful to a
person living and working in Accra. In a later chapter I will investigate further on the
importance of the hometown and its people, and explore how certain constructed
images of the hometown appear as significant in Accra. However, to be able to do
this, we need to get a clearer and more nuanced picture of what exactly the hometown
36. 31
is and how it is perceived among people.
Hometown
In traditional Ghanaian belief your home is the location of the village or town in
which you can trace your maternal or paternal linage. Your hometown is from where
your family stems; it is something you can't change by your own will. Through the
ability to trace your roots to a particular village or town, you are considered a full
member of it. It follows that most people living and working in the area we today
know as Accra would not claim that they are from Accra, but rather refer to a smaller
town or village in a different part of Ghana as this is from where their family
originates. Peter Geschiere explains that this "continuing involvement of urban
migrants with their village of origin is generally considered a special trait of processes
of urbanization in Africa," (1998:70), and further states, as pointed out by Dan
Aroson already in 1971, that the choice of urbanisation is far from being definite: for
Africa we should rather speak of a "rural-urban continuum.” People’s relations to the
city and the hometown in Accra take up a characteristic very similar to the
explanation of Harri Englund in regards to Malawi:
…the city is rarely thought to provide an adequate place for belonging, and even those
who have lived most of their lives as labour migrants, or who were born abrad as the
children of labour migrants, usually have no difficulty in stating their village and
district of origin in Malawi"(Englund, 2002, s. 137)
I argue that there are three main factors that are essential in creating an understanding
of this phenomenon: one, the family, as discussed above, two, the fact that it is just in
the last few decades that Accra have grown into a cosmopolitan melting pot, and
three, the notion's close ties to people’s tribal identity. As the first point is already
mentioned above, I will go straight on to the second, as this is intricately related to the
family aspect.
Accra is a city that was founded by the Ga people in the 1600s, and from 1877 it
functioned as the British capital of the Gold Coast. Despite being a place with a long
history, it is only in recent decades that the population and size of the city have
exploded. Due to the building of the Republic of Ghana and the rather extensive
urbanisation that followed, the city saw itself growing rapidly during the last half of
the 20th century. Considering this relatively short history as an urban cosmopolitan
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centre, it is obvious that most of the people living in Accra today either have migrated
there themselves, or their family migrated two or three generations ago. Hence it is
said that the city simply is "too young" for anyone to trace their ancestors there.
However, even though most of the population of Accra are migrants in one way or
another, and therefore not claiming Accra as their hometown, the Ga people who
founded the city are still living there. This implies that there are some people that
would actually claim full membership of Accra and refer to it as their hometown, but
these are a minority of the population.
The third point related to why people rarely refer to Accra as their hometown is
closely connected to both aforementioned points. This factor is related to tribal
identity, and how a tribal identity presumes that your hometown is located in a
specific area of Ghana. Just like one’s hometown, a person’s tribal identity is an
ascribed status, a status one is given from birth involuntarily, and includes
expectations of belonging and contributions in the collective. As the tribal identity is
inherited, like the hometown, it is presumed that the people of your tribe have their
hometowns in more or less the same area of the country as do you. If you are an
Ashanti, you are likely to find your hometown in the Ashanti-area, as this is where
you can trace your roots. In the same way, an Ewe will find his hometown in the area
where the Ewes are settled. The tribal identity and hometown follows the same linage,
and is thus difficult to separate and treat as two distinct aspects of a person’s identity.
This implies that a person who sees himself as a member of a certain tribe at the same
time claim some kind of belonging to a town or an area in the region where his or her
tribe is living. In other words, where a person is from most likely will indicate what
tribe he belongs to, and vice versa. In the context of why people do not claim Accra as
their hometown, this point shows that considering most people still carry a tribal
identity, they will not be able to easily distance themselves to their hometown. It is
not possible to claim belonging to a hometown, without at the same time
communicating a certain tribal identity. Judging by these arguments we can see that
Accra does not appear as very significant when it comes to people's local identity, and
that the city in this sense is nothing.
Hometown: The home of Ghanaian tradition and culture
Accordingly, we can see that the hometown is a location where people seem to trace
38. 33
their local identity, or what could also be understood as their true identity. In this lies
the conception of the hometown as the location where we can trace the behaviour and
values that is representative in the Ghanaian tradition and what is understood as the
authentic Ghanaian culture. A typical situation for me during my fieldwork was that
in which people offered to take me to their village and show me what Ghana was like.
Accra was apparently not the place to be if I wanted to learn about the real Ghanaian
culture. One day, Jamal, one of the teachers at the school, took me to meet a man
living not very far away from the school. He grew pineapples and had a small
pineapple-juice business running in his backyard, providing the teachers with drinks
once in a while. After some minutes of talking and greeting, the man learned that I
was a student of anthropology. He lit up, looked at me and told me that I had to go
with him to his village, "I will take you to my hometown and show you what our
culture is!" This was not a unique situation as these types of situations occurred with
me on a relatively frequent basis. In many ways, people's idea of the hometown and
the rural villages resembles Jocelyn Linnekin's observations from Hawaii where
“Traditional" may mean times long past or what one's mother did. Many modern
Hawaiians believe that isolated rural villages exemplify the traditional way of life. But
the present and the past, space and time, are collapsed in this perception." (Linnekin
1983)
In this sense, it is clear that tradition is a concept understood as connected to ideas of
the past, and in the case of Ghana of the pre-colonial times, but still often believed to
be present in the rural villages. Although Linnekin here refers to a certain perception
among Hawaiians, it does indeed have some similarities to how tradition and the
authentic culture in Ghana are understood to be located in the more remote towns and
villages. When people stated that they wanted to take me to their village (a common
way of referring to their hometown) and show me the real Ghana, they were at the
same time proposing a travel in both time and space. As Nana, another teacher at the
school, referred to traditional ideas he would often begin his statement by referring to
“in those days...", implying that this behaviour was not present today. However, as we
will see later, the very same ideas that were discussed as something of the past are
also understood to be found in the hometowns.
Based on this, we can claim that the hometown appears as a location of cultural
39. 34
importance, defined by factors outside the individual, and as a place that is understood
as qualitatively different from Accra. There is something lacking in Accra, something
that removes Accra's possible status as a hometown. This lack seems to be closely
related to ideas of an authentic culture and the values embodied in this culture can
mostly be found in tradition, the past and the hometowns.
Considering the points made in this discussion, we can understand that people's local
identity and belonging is connected to a certain hometown, and is something that a he
is not able to change simply by will. We will see, however, that even though the
hometown is something you are given and cannot change on your own, there are still
processes going on that have impact on the traditional notion of ‘home’ in Ghana.
A changing concept?
Despite the fact that there are some clear, neutral ideas of what makes a town a
hometown, there are still variations in how people perceive this place classified as
their hometown. I will in the following sections discuss how the concept of hometown
is being challenged in Accra today and how many people now seem to distance
themselves from their hometowns. These changes in the concept must not only be
considered as people's mere wish of not being associated with their ancestral
hometown and tribal identity, but should also be understood as responses to the
challenges of the urban environment, where a certain distance to the rural kin and
behaviour is required in order to establish a sense of coping with the intensity of
urban residual. To highlight these issues, I will focus on one particular situation at the
school where I worked, and draw on this to show how various circumstances can
influence one's relationship to what many people refer to as their 'home', as well as
how a distanced relationship to the hometown can be understood as a negative
characteristic. In a later chapter I will discuss more in detail how the urban
environment somehow encourages you to upkeep a certain distance, and for now
leave the discussion to people's direct relations to the physical hometown.
As Ghana is rapidly proceeding in the course of development and the influences from
outside get stronger, it is plausible to assume that the idea of having a ‘hometown’ in
this traditional sense will gradually appear as less significant in people’s lives. This
will most likely be a development most apparent in a cosmopolitan city like Accra, as
Accra in many ways stands out as the place with most connections to outside Ghana
40. 35
and being exposed to foreign influences. Already today there are many people with
limited knowledge about their hometown and some that have never even visited it.
Some might have lived there for a few years of their lives, and others only have
visited a few times during their lifetime. However, the idea of a hometown in the
sense of the ancestral home still seems to be the dominating understanding of the
notion of home in Accra, and those claiming to belong somewhere else would be seen
by most as becoming “too urbanised”, or to use an expression people often used in
describing this to me, lost Africans; people who lost their connection to the rural
Ghana, and thus lived with a distance to what I have explained to be the real
Ghanaian culture. He is understood to not belong to any kind of authentic culture, but
rather to a mixed up and foreign society, where modern inventions and new ways of
thinking have washed away his traditional notions and ideas. Considering this,
avoiding this classification seem to be of importance to the urbanite, and one of the
strategies that people are using to do this is to look at their hometowns, and
maintaining of their bonds to the hometown and rural kin to it reaffirm their Ghanaian
and tribal identity, both for themselves and for others. Admitting to not have such a
hometown can, in Englunds words, be considered as revealing, "a great social
predicament," (Englund 2002).
To be home in Accra: Losing tradition
To lose touch with what is understood as the Ghanaian culture seems to be an issue of
much concern, and the concept of hometown is no exception. A person’s hometown
is, as we have already seen, significant in many aspects of Ghanaian traditional
values, including the family, commonality and tribal identity. Thus, a lack knowledge
and interest in one’s hometown can be understood taking your feet out of the
Ghanaian culture and distancing yourself to the true Ghanaian identity. The friend of
mine that was most concerned about this was Nana, one of the teachers at the school
where I was assigned. Rarely did a day pass without him making remarks about the
negative development concerning knowledge about tradition, and in one particular
situation the negative connotations of not knowing about your hometown became
clear.
As usual, we were sitting under the almond tree killing time while one of the other
teachers was having class. The sun was hot as usual, but luckily the leaves of the tree
41. 36
had started to grow again, providing us with some shade to keep our heads cool. In
the midst of the conversation between Nana and me, we heard the teacher in the
classroom start shouting at one of the children before the sound of the cane striking
his bottom filled the air. Seconds later, one of the pupils, Billy, came out and situated
himself in the sun outside the room. He had apparently been disrespectful to the
teacher and was told to stand in the sun until he was allowed back to class. Nana
looked at him before he leaned over to me saying, “Look at that boy. There must be
something wrong with him!” Billy was known as a troublesome kid with a difficult
father, with a past that he had himself regarded as ‘being a vagabond-boy’. Upon
request, Billy further explained to me that a 'vagabond boy' is a boy who moves
around a lot and appears almost as a rootless stray dog. He does not relate much to his
home and preferred being away from his family and rather with friends. “Look at his
hair, his father don’t even bother shaving his head!” Nana continued talking about
Billy and the problems with him and his father before he shook his head and told me
“… and he doesn’t even know his hometown!”
In this situation Nana’s referral to Billy’s lack of knowledge of his hometown can be
seen in two ways. Firstly, Nana is using Billy’s amount of knowledge of the
hometown as a way of judging his character. Not only is Billy a shabby-looking child
with longer hair than most others, but also further, he doesn’t even know his
hometown! Billy’s lacking knowledge about his roots is understood as a bad
characteristic, and is used to underline the difficulties related to him. Secondly,
Billy’s ignorance towards his ancestry and local identity is understood as contributing
to the shaping of his bad character, as if his actual lack of knowledge is one of the
reasons why he is a difficult kid. If only he had known about tradition and his
hometown, he would be a better boy.
The episode with Billy stands out, as it revealed an attitude towards the hometown of
which I had not yet been aware. The hometown is presented as a contrast to Accra, in
the sense that the social environment in Accra is preventing the children from
accumulating knowledge about the respect, moral and traditional values that is
necessary to be seen as a good person. This problem is closely related to the issue of
urbanisation and modernisation, which was a concern not only for Nana, but also for
the other teachers. On several occasions we discussed these phenomena, and someone
would complain about how people don't even know their own neighbours, problems
42. 37
related to traffic, issues with pollution, and the amount of violent crime and armed
robberies. In this situation, we can see that Accra is imagined as a place with no moral
rules, where values like respect, caring, sharing and compassion are essentially
absent. To put it in the reaction of my friend Juliana in Akropong to new that I was
moving to Accra; "Accra?! Did you know, in Accra they are all armed robbers?!"
supporting the idea of this extreme stereotyping of the urbanite who seem to be
swallowed by the city.
The aforementioned situation with Billy provides us with a good example of how an
apparent lack of moral values can be contrasted with what life in the hometown is
like, drawing an image of 'home' as a place where a certain kind of morality is
regarded as important, where people live in harmony with each other and the
environment. This idea of 'home' reminds us here about Moore’s (1984) notion of the
home as a haven, a safety net, a form of security, and seen as a sanctuary where one is
able to find the values that represent a good person. The city can thus be said to be
drawn up as the hometown's negative contrast, in regards of morality, 'homeliness',
and traditional values, and as an actor gradually working towards a destruction of the
real Ghanaian culture.
About one week before this incident with Billy, I had already had a longer
conversation with him where we among other things discussed his hometown and
related issues. It turns out that Billy’s lack of knowledge about his hometown is not
only caused by ignorance and absence of interest, as Nana was assuming, but also
because he have been caught in something which can remind us of what many would
characterise as a clash between the traditional and the modern.
Billy: A boy from Accra
On the question of where his hometown is, Billy explained to me that his hometown
is in the Volta Region, but that he did not really care about it. He had never visited,
and he didn’t have any plans of going there either. To him, he saw himself as a boy
from Accra New Town, the area where he was born and lived the first few years of
his life. Accra was his home, and this was where he was from. I continued by asking
him why he had not visited his hometown, and why he did not have any desire of
going there. Billy explained to me that his father is from the matrilineal Ashanti tribe,
while his mother was from the patrilineal Ewes, and this caused confusion for him
