“Nkrumah’s Baby”: the Akosombo Dam and the dream of development in Ghana, 1952–1966

Maintenance Space: The Political Authority of Garbage in Kampala, Uganda

“…3 Because infrastructure is central to the establishment and exercise of state and corporate power (Cowen 2014;Easter-ling 2014), and infrastructural repair is situated within, and productive of, changing social relations of production, control, and belonging, it is insufficient to simply "hail" maintenance and necessary to understand its spatial and political effects. Recent ethnographic work on African infrastructures, for example, has examined the construction and historical maintenance of large-scale sociotechnical systems to theorize changes in modes of governance and power, be it the role of the transnational oil companies in defining development (Leonard 2016) and exacerbating social differences between those on or off the grid (Appel 2012), the importance of the technical devices in calibrating the meanings of democracy, citizenship, and freedom in the context of racialized processes of privatization (Von Schnitzler 2008), or the way huge megaprojects provide a collective temporal orientation and political horizon that constitutes national publics (Miescher 2014). Waste management infrastructure is especially relevant to these debates because it is so intensely laborious (Fredericks 2014), making apparent the extent to which infrastructures are predicated on routine work in addition to the materiality of pipes, wires, dams, and concrete.…”

Dam Building by the Illiberal Modernisers: Ideology and Changing Rationales in Rwanda and Tanzania

“…High-modernist aesthetics, authoritarian politics and even individual projects then became the blueprint for postcolonial development as "African intellectuals adopted [such] modernisation as a means of transforming material conditions in order to advance historic iniquities" (Bloom et al, 2014, p 2). High modernism therefore informed late-colonial and independence-era attempts at 'Development from above' (Havnevik, 1993), often through flagship 'modern' infrastructure like Mozambique's Cahora Basa (Isaacman and Isaacman, 2013) and Ghana's Akosombo (Miescher, 2014b) dams.…”

“…A prominent example here is the Akosombo in Ghana, President Nkrumah's pet project. 8 Its energy was supposed to found an aluminium industry, 9 electrify the country and even support regional independence by providing power for neighbouring countries to develop (Miescher, 2014b). As Miescher (2014b, p 343) writes, "building the Akosombo Dam, Nkrumah sought to realize his dream of creating a modern … African nation that would join the industrialized world shaped by the parameters of science and technology".…”

Plantation Development in the Turkana Basin: The Making of a New Desert?

“…In the wake of the Tennessee Valley Authority project, river-basin-wide systems of dams became a template for export after the Second World War, promoted by the Bretton Woods institutions and by European and American engineers and development advisors [18,19]. Post-independence governments in Africa, such as the administration of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, promoted dams as a centrepiece of national economic strategy [20]. In Ethiopia after the restitution of Haile Selassie by British forces, the government promoted a similar model, with the first river basin engineering scheme launched in the Awash Valley in the 1960s [21,22].…”