Epifania Amoo-Adare

Who Rules the Waves? A Critical Reading of (An)Other Modern Future 

In this paper, I provide a form of critical spatial literacy (Amoo-Adare, 2006, 2013) on a particular politics of space that is being played out currently along Ghana's coastline. More specifically, I proffer a critical reading of a particular political ecology, within Ghana’s marine landscape in which apopofo (artisanal fishermen), the fish mothers who sponsor them, and the local fishmongers who rely on their catch, are all entangled within a dynamic pattern of “winners and losers” (Robbins, 2012). Here, they endure the problematic impacts of work carried out on foreign trawlers, which have been enabled by local elite and are said to be further empowered by some local politicians - as well as by the limited policing of the waters and a general lack of enforcement of policies instituted to protect local interests within the small-scale fishing industry.

The situation is one in which, today, Ghana's apopofo, in particular, are being squeezed out of an aqua-cultural competition, which is set within a rather peculiar “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 2000, 2007); that is, one in which they are held hostage to continued negative effects from the dark side of a European modernity project—saddled with historic maritime conquest, plus now also, the chinalization of a fishing industry that is undergoing rapid modernization at the expense of many of the indigenous practices and relationships within the industry.

This process of futuring the ocean and the industries (e.g., fishing, oil and so on) in its various territories, is one in which the othering of the apopofo, fish mothers and their fishmongers is palatable and can be seen in the many narrations and enactments of yet (an)other modernity, which has no panoptical time for anyone’s supposedly anachronistic spatial tendencies (McClintock, 1995). Interrogating such a scenario, means beginning to respond to a significant question, which is: who rules the waves along Ghana’s shoreline? And answering such a question is tantamount to also understanding who directs the (national) wave of a modern Ghanaian future; i.e., one in which there are several strange bedfellows—accrued from across borders—and thus, coming to agreements that do not necessarily include several of the country’s own citizens - especially those who do not fit neatly into ideologies about urban waterfront development and, very specifically, neoliberal economic progress.