On today’s episode, we discuss transportation infrastructure in Ghana. Who goes where, when, and how in Accra is political, informed by urban geography, colonial history, culture, and technology. What ideas of progress and nation are embedded in roads, and how do ordinary citizens navigate the political economy of transportation infrastructure?

To find out more, Enoch Osei Koduah sat down with Jennifer Hart, associate professor of African history at Wayne State University. Her research challenges modernist visions of technology and infrastructure in Ghanaian history, emphasizing instead, how Africans imagined alternative futures for themselves, and appropriated technologies for indigenous use. Her 2016 book, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation, details the development of Ghana’s cultures of automobility, throughout the 20th century. Her current work on DIY urbanism in Africa attends to vernacular uses of infrastructure, in order to explore decolonial models for urban planning.