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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'One man, no chop': licit wealth, good citizens, and the criminalization of drivers in postcolonial Ghana
Author:Hart, Jennifer
Year:2013
Periodical:International Journal of African Historical Studies (ISSN 0361-7882)
Volume:46
Issue:3
Pages:373-396
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:drivers
social status
1950-1999
Abstract:While drivers are widely condemned as crooks and cheats in Ghana today, this paper argues that this is a relatively recent public perception, resulting from a process of criminalization by successive postcolonial governments. The independence and entrepreneurial success of drivers, which had once been the foundation of their respect and status as cosmopolitan, modern men, became their greatest liability during the 'era of decline' that lasted from independence through the early-1980s. In failing to prevent road accidents and in engaging in behaviour that was classified as 'economic exploitation', drivers found themselves on the wrong side of an increasingly stark dichotomy between 'good citizens' and 'public enemies' in newly independent Ghana. The author argues that the emerging critique of drivers, played out in the pages of the 'Daily Graphic', the country's most widely circulated postcolonial newspaper, was not rooted in any fundamental changes in driver practice. Rather, the incremental nature of this process of criminalization over the course of nearly thirty years reflects shifting understandings of economic morality, rooted in both the country's changing economic conditions as well as a public rhetoric of citizenship that centralized power and authority in the nation-State. The experience of drivers highlights the degree to which entrepreneurial autonomy - long central to Ghanaian economy and society - was transformed into a national threat by postcolonial State and society. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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