Until fairly recently, Igor Kopytoff's call for paying attention to the social life of the motorcar in Africa remained unanswered.Footnote ¹ Only in the last decade have social scientists began to examine the enormous transformative impact the car had and is having on African societies. Jennifer Hart's book is an important contribution to this now growing literature on automobile lives in Africa. Hart traces the history of motor transportation in twentieth-century Ghana through the lens of its central actors, the commercial lorry drivers. Drawing on archival documents and oral histories combined with interviews with active and retired drivers, Hart's well-crafted study provides a compelling analysis of the shifting practices, values, and aspirations associated with automobility in a context of rapid social change — of which the motorcar was both a symptom and a cause.

At its heart, this book is a social history of drivers in southern Ghana, and it portrays the work practices, culture, and status of drivers from the earliest years of motorization in the early 1900s to the state-mandated reorganization of urban transport at the turn of the millennium. This history was a turbulent one. It mainly enfolded within the tension-laden relationship between profit sought by small-scale private transport entrepreneurs and the necessities, constraints, and possibilities of providing a public service which the state was largely incapable of performing. Adopting a chronological approach, Hart describes the main developments of this relationship in five substantive chapters, which are framed by a highly readable Introduction and a brief Epilogue.

The first three chapters attend to the emergence, consolidation, and gradual professionalization of the local road transport industry in the then-British colony of the Gold Coast. These chapters offer a nuanced account of the ways in which automobile technologies shaped colonial social and economic structures. It is also notable that Hart pays due attention to the continuities of indigenous mobility systems that preceded the ‘lorry age’. These had a formative effect on the ways the ‘alien object’ of the motorcar was adopted and put to use by diverse groups of African entrepreneurs. Advanced by lorry owners, drivers, chiefs, farmers, and traders, the early appropriations of automobility by Gold Coast Africans contested and complemented the transport infrastructures of the colonial state, which, until the 1930s, gave precedence to railways.

The success by which African automobility enhanced exchanges over distance, connecting communities to each other and to the flows of global capitalism, generated struggles over the control and regulation of the driving business. Hart ably works out the ambivalences that the increasing ‘power of automobility’ engendered in these struggles (63). As drivers saw their commercial autonomy curbed by colonial laws, they reacted by formalizing their work through unionization. Those unions set out to protect drivers’ interests and opportunities for profit, but the institutionalization of this trade also solidified the role and responsibility of drivers in providing an essential public service, which complicated the pursuit of purely economic goals.

The tensions among the profitability, responsibility, and respectability of the driving occupation were further aggravated in the decades after independence, which are explored in the last two chapters. During the ‘era of decline’, which extended from the late 1950s through the 1980s, when economic strictures and political authoritarianism worsened general livelihood conditions in Ghana, drivers’ continued ability to ‘make money’ sparked public debates about the legitimacy and legality of their practice (Chapter Four). Castigated as cheats and criminalized for allegedly ‘profiteering’, the social status of drivers changed from ‘modern men’ to a public menace (95). The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s revalorized entrepreneurialism, casting private commercial drivers as ‘agents of development’ (172). However, increasing competitive pressures resulting from market liberalization and the reorganization of urban labor relations, Hart suggests, simultaneously transformed the once lucrative and specialized profession of transport work into an occupation of last resort and survival.

The Epilogue reflects on the changing significance of automobility in twenty-first-century Ghana in light of the increase in private car ownership and new infrastructural development policies, such as the implementation of a Bus Rapid Transit system in Accra. By assessing these changes against the backdrop of longer historical developments, Hart moves beyond common analyses fixated on Ghana's ‘transport crisis’ to emphasize the continuities of conflict that shaped commercial road transport over the last one hundred years.

Ghana on the Go marks a major step in the understanding of automobile lives in Africa. Its primary focus on drivers tends to sideline the importance of other groups in the negotiation and organization of commercial transport. The central roles of passengers, market women in particular, and of lorry park personnel are only cursorily addressed. But this neglect does not diminish the book's overall achievement of revealing how an African society captured the motorcar and, in the process, transformed the social and economic possibilities associated with mobility.