Paul Stacey – författare

Home to eighty thousand people, Accra’s Old Fadama neighbourhood is the largest illegal slum in Ghana. Though almost all its inhabitants are Ghanaian born, their status as illegal ‘squatters’ means that they live a precarious existence, marginalised within Ghanaian society and denied many of the rights to which they are entitled as citizens.The case of Old Fadama is far from unique. Across Africa, over half the population now lives in cities, and a lack of affordable housing means that growing numbers live in similar illegal slum communities, often in appalling conditions. Drawing on rich, ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes as its point of departure the narratives that emerge from the everyday lives and struggles of these people, using the perspective offered by Old Fadama as a means of identifying wider trends and dynamics across African slums.Central to Stacey’s argument is the idea that such slums possess their own structures of governance, grounded in processes of negotiation between slum residents and external actors. In the process, Stacey transforms our understanding not only of slums, but of governance itself, moving us beyond prevailing state-centric approaches to consider how even a society’s most marginal members can play a key role in shaping and contesting state power.

Home to eighty thousand people, Accra’s Old Fadama neighbourhood is the largest illegal slum in Ghana. Though almost all its inhabitants are Ghanaian born, their status as illegal ‘squatters’ means that they live a precarious existence, marginalised within Ghanaian society and denied many of the rights to which they are entitled as citizens.The case of Old Fadama is far from unique. Across Africa, over half the population now lives in cities, and a lack of affordable housing means that growing numbers live in similar illegal slum communities, often in appalling conditions. Drawing on rich, ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes as its point of departure the narratives that emerge from the everyday lives and struggles of these people, using the perspective offered by Old Fadama as a means of identifying wider trends and dynamics across African slums.Central to Stacey’s argument is the idea that such slums possess their own structures of governance, grounded in processes of negotiation between slum residents and external actors. In the process, Stacey transforms our understanding not only of slums, but of governance itself, moving us beyond prevailing state-centric approaches to consider how even a society’s most marginal members can play a key role in shaping and contesting state power.

The volume challenges dominant narratives of progress with a rich range of investigations of local struggles from the Global south which are based on original ethnographic research. The chapters take a point of departure in ideas and concepts developed by the pioneering anthropologist Eric R. Wolf in ‘Europe and the People Without History’, and emphasize the relevance and usefulness of applying Wolf to contemporary contexts. As such, the collection contributes to knowledge of dynamic relationships between local agency in the Global south, and broader political and economic processes that make ‘people without history.’ This shows global power as both excluding local groups at the same time as conditioning local struggles and the forms that social organization takes. Contributors are: Paul Stacey, Joshua Steckley, Nixon Boumba, Marylynn Steckley, Ismael García Colón, Inge-Merete Hougaard, Gustavo S. Azenha, Ioannis Kyriakakis, Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro, Tirza van Bruggen, and Masami Tsujita.