Reflections on Ghana’s Informal Economy at Fifty Years

In this essay, the author juxtaposes his own fieldwork in Accra 50 years ago to a photographic essay on metal-workers in Kumasi today. Suame Magazine was a colonial armory, subsequently a corporate enterprise, and now home to 200,000 informal workers facing the contemporary challenges posed by the world economy to Ghana today. The two situations are strikingly different, being half a century and two major cities apart, but they share a resilient informal economy.