Cocoa, Markets, and Mammy Trucks: Indigenous Enterprise and the Emergence of Motor Transport in Colonial Ghana

This paper traces the emergence of motor transport infrastructure in colonial Gold Coast/Ghana. While scholarship on the development of colonial infrastructure in Africa and elsewhere has focused on the role of the state and the economic interests of the metropole in motivating and dictating the development of colonial infrastructure, this paper argues that Gold Coast chiefs, cocoa farmers, market women and urban transport owners pushed the development of motor transport networks, often against the wishes and interests of the colonial government. The colonial government was financially motivated to direct transportation through the railway, which was built by the administration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and served as a primary source of revenue for the colonial state. In a direct challenge to colonial policy and motivated by their own financial interests, cocoa farmers, chiefs and market women financed the building of roads that connected rural and urban areas as early as the 1910s. As urban transport owners directed their business into rural agricultural zones, a new class of African drivers and transport owners emerged. Drivers embodied a new physical, social and economic mobility as they moved passengers and goods between villages and towns in their wooden-sided mammy trucks. Representing a world of opportunity, prosperity, and cosmopolitanism, drivers, their vehicles, and the roads they plied provided access to a world of consumption and prosperity that was not only luxurious but also increasingly attainable in the late-colonial world. The emergence of transportation in colonial Gold Coast/Ghana challenges the characterization of colonial economies as a space of limited opportunities for indigenous entrepreneurship and economic prosperity outside of the structures of colonial bureaucracy, Western education, and Christianity. The history of transportation in the Gold Coast/Ghana suggests alternative spaces for economic opportunity, in which local interests dictated economic development in a colonial context.