While forms of authority that descend from social or cultural tradition are commonly understood as archaic, traditional authorities often survive and occasionally even thrive during the formation of modern states. Chieftaincies do not only endure in the Ghanaian countryside but also proliferate in new neighbourhoods on the peripheries of Ghana's fast-growing cities. We develop an explanation for the endurance of traditional authorities, based on extensive fieldwork in one recently developed neighbourhood in a previously uninhabited part of Greater Accra, where we conducted interviews and analysed documents from the archives of the chief's Divisional Council. We show that the formation of a modern state has restricted the chiefs' discretion as sovereigns but afforded them greater power as managers of the land and gatekeepers of the state bureaucracy. Traditional authority is not overwritten but rather refined, transformed and stabilized in the process of state formation.

This paper examines the dynamics of fragmentation and integration in Accra's water infrastructure. Inspired by figurational sociology, we analyse infrastructure as both reflective and constitutive of interdependencies between different class fractions and parts of the urban region. We draw on historical archives, the indepth ethnographic study of one suburban neighbourhood, a survey of eight additional neighbourhoods, and statistics from Ghana's census to investigate the mechanisms and drivers of infrastructural integration as well as fragmentation.Our analysis shows that, following Ghana's independence, the piped water network gradually expanded to integrate different class fractions and parts of the urban region. But this process has more recently hit its limits on Accra's peri-urban fringe, where the wealthy are disconnecting from the public piped water network and, by implication, from those who still depend on it. The progressive expansion of the pipe network thus grinds to a halt, giving way to a fragmented constellation of water infrastructures.

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In sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana is considered a beacon of success because of its high electricity access rate: 84.3 per cent as at 2018. Despite this success, the sector is entangled in a crisis. Crisis as used here refers to the crisis of electricity supply where supply deficits results in prolonged periods of blackouts and load rationing. Between 2012 and 2016, blackouts christened dumsor (Twi word for off/on) became a regular experience in Ghana with more blackouts than electricity supplied: 24 hours lights out, 12 hours light supplied. Using a historical narrative, this article provides a summarized account of how dumsor unravelled- the momentous cascading socio-economic interruption dumsor caused, the dramatic user responses it evoked and the ways in which it became the subject of intense political debate. Primary data was gathered from ethnographic fieldwork and secondary data from online and archival sources. This narration reveals the generative potential of uncertain infrastructure and its ability to foreground the “under the radar” interdependences between infrastructure and political power. It details how an “imperfect” electric infrastructure produced new user subjectivities, challenged the conduct of electricity governance and revealed electricity provisioning to be a starkly contested technopolitical process. Keywords: Technopolitics, Blackouts, Dumsor, Infrastructure

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