Africa at LSE

This is the third in a series of guest posts from Ato Quayson, Professor of English and the Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In this post, he examines the theatre which adorns Accra’s Oxford Street.

Cars and pedestrians mix freely on the road itself. Even though the notorious and practically ubiquitous open sewage gutter serves as a demarcation line between the tarred road and the pavement, the two are level with each other*.

As you walk along Oxford Street, you are constantly invited to pause and look at things, not in the manner of shop windows in commercial boulevards elsewhere which entice pedestrians to stop, take a quick look at their reflection in the glass, and perhaps enter the store+, but by the constant barrage of vendors of all manner of goods vying to make a sale. Continue reading →

 This is the second in a series of guest posts from Ato Quayson, Professor of English and the Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In this post, he examines the peculiar character of the pavement in Accra’s Oxford Street.

Any temptation to see Oxford Street as an almost postmodern transnational commercial boulevard is quickly tempered by multiple cultural phenomena that go back several generations and that appear in varying forms here as well as in different areas of the city and, indeed, in other urban areas in the country at large.

Frankie's restaurant takes over the pavement on Oxford Street

The young man selling fresh coconuts whose skill for discerning the tenderness or hardness of the inner fruit before deftly splitting off the crown with his cutlass seems purely esoteric. The woman who sells ripe plantain roasted over a slow coal fire under a tree on the lively kerbside corner (for strategic reasons, trees and kerbside corners feature prominently in the life cycle of roasted plantain). Continue reading →

This is the first in a series of guest posts from Ato Quayson, Professor of English and the Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Here, he profiles Osu RE in Accra, which has adopted the name Oxford Street after its London counterpart.

Accra’s Oxford Street is widely considered as the city’s most globalised. The name Oxford Street is partly an improvisation and a fanciful projection of popular desire, as it does not appear on any official maps of Accra.  Rather, it lies in the neighbourhood called Osu RE and is part of a much longer road, officially known as Cantonments Road on city maps.

This is the first in a series of three blog posts which will take us on a walk of the street before posing some questions about the ways in which a reproduction of the global form of the high street experience serves in this context to effectively obscure the inequalities engendered by globalisation.  As I will be suggesting, these inequalities are often spatialised on the streetscape itself, so that special attention is required in the spatial logics of town planning to discern the nature of globalisation’s less savoury effects.

As you enter the Street from the north end, you are immediately struck by how crowded it looks, with both vehicles and people, many large commercial buildings, and a proliferation of huge billboards advertising everything from mobile phone companies (MTN: “Everywhere You Go”; TIGO: “Express Yourself”) to the airline, Emirates; from Nescafe coffee to sanitary pads and the satellite company, DStv with the face of Jennifer Lopez staring coyly from the billboard, among others. Continue reading →