Introduction
Given the dense accumulation of plastic debris across the Earth’s stratigraphy, scientists increasingly refer to the latest stage of the Anthropocene as the plasticene (Haram et al. Reference Haram, Carlton, Ruiz and Maximenko2020; Jobin Reference Jobin and Jensen2026; Masco Reference Masco, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021; Rangel-Buitrago et al. Reference Rangel-Buitrago, Neal and Williams2022). Enlarging upon Africa-based contributions to plasticene scholarship (Bredenbröker Reference Bredenbröker2024; Meiu Reference Meiu2020), this inquiry joins other critical social science in unpacking plastic’s moral, material and ontological ambiguities (Abrahms-Kavunenko Reference Abrahms-Kavunenko2023; Liboiron Reference Liboiron2016; Pathak and Nichter Reference Pathak and Nichter2019; Pathak Reference Pathak2025). Via a focus on a common plastic object – plastic water tanks – the work addresses the critical importance of plastics to African urban life in Anthropocene times. By highlighting the work of artisans devoted to plastic repair in Ghana’s fastest growing city of Tamale, a more possibilistic understanding of West Africa’s Anthropocene lifeworlds comes to the fore. Called here the ‘Patchy Plasticene’, it shares the unexpected potentials of the ‘Patchy Anthropocene’ (Tsing et al. Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019) to reveal hidden pathways of renewal amid anthropogenic decline grounded in artisans’ skilled problem solving and abiotic forces and materials.
Addressing the core concerns of an emerging anthropology of plastics (Abrahms-Kavunenko Reference Abrahms-Kavunenko2023: 3), artisans’ perspectives offer a novel vantage point on ‘what is worth knowing about the production and disposal of the [plastic] products’ we consume. Three insights prevail. Rather than treat plastics as indicators of human and ecological damage, artisanal engagements demonstrate plastic’s amenability to care and repair. In contrast to their assumed intensification of global capitalism’s social and economic alienations (Hawkins Reference Hawkins2018; Masco Reference Masco, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021), plastic tanks capacitate fine-tuned skill sets drawing upon historically situated material genealogies and sensoria. Bridging embodied, domestic, urban and industrial scales, artisanal work slows the production of plastic waste and adapts generic plastic objects to local environments and exigencies.
Large-scale plastic water storage vessels are ‘socio-technical signatures’ of Anthropocene times (Papadopoulos et al. Reference Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa, Myers, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021: 10) and are evident across the global South as a bulwark against water insecurity. Made from the world’s most common plastic polymers, high and linear low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LLDPE) (Wang et al. Reference Wang, Liu, Chen, Zhu, Qu and Xu2021), they range in capacity from dozens to thousands of gallons.Footnote 1 In the face of deteriorating climatic conditions and erratic water supply, plastic cisterns are fundamental to urban lifeways, ensuring water access and infrastructural self-sufficiency (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2023b). Ubiquitous, these vessels store water for cooking, drinking, bathing, washing, home-based work, commercial enterprises, food sales, animal care and construction, in order to sustain daily life (Kasper and Schramm Reference Kasper and Schramm2023). Compared to the hidden plasticene of oceanic, riverine and underground terrains (De Wolff Reference De Wolff2017; Haram et al. Reference Haram, Carlton, Ruiz and Maximenko2020), in Tamale plastic tanks perch on rooftops and verandas and line public passageways to mark the urban waterscape.Footnote 2 In this savannah zone city, their popularity and prevalence are rising rapidly along with population growth and climate-change intensified water scarcity. Forming a sea of plastic black cylinders, storefronts and sales depots display rows of tanks for immediate purchase, despite their high cost relative to average incomes (Figure 1).
A sea of plastic water storage tanks displayed for sale in Tamale.
Photograph by Salome Anafu, 2023.
Also important to water security in Tamale are artisanal workshops where damaged tanks undergo repair. The self-representations and knowledge practices of Alhassan Seidu, founder of Al Said Plastic Repair Works, are central to this narrative (Chalfin and Seidu Reference Chalfin, Seidu and Jensen2026). Developed through face-to-face conversations and WhatsApp chats initiated by Alhassan, these exchanges offer an unexpected para-ethnographic register that subverts inherited hierarchies of anthropological storytelling (Collins et al. Reference Collins, Durington and Gill2017; Holmes and Marcus Reference Holmes and Marcus2008). Through ‘patchwork ethnography’, they attest to possibilities unleashed when intermittent fieldwork opens up a space for interlocutors to take charge of knowledge production (Gunel and Watanabe Reference Gunel and Watanabe2024).Footnote 3
Alongside Alhassan’s narratives, theories of relational materiality inform the analysis. Although the agency of things is well argued by many (Bennet Reference Bennett2010; Fontein and Smith Reference Fontein and Smith2023; Latour Reference Latour2005), including theorists of plastic (Davis Reference Davis2022; Hawkins Reference Hawkins2018; Liboiron Reference Liboiron2016), material conditions are never about things alone. They are constituted by persons and things in active and continuous interrelation, as both Ingold (Reference Ingold and Graves-Brown2000; Reference Ingold2007; Reference Ingold2010; Reference Ingold2012) and Alhassan persuasively demonstrate. For Ingold (Reference Ingold and Graves-Brown2000; Reference Ingold2007), the artisan stands as the ideal-typical human actor who manipulates, makes sense of and responds to materials. In contrast to Ingold’s architype, largely insulated from industrial modernity, Tamale’s artisans of plastic – the ur-substance of late industrialism – likewise exhibit deep-seated material attunements.
Unsettling representations of the plasticene as dead and buried matter and further unpacking plastic’s ambivalent yet vital role in human inventiveness and survival (Pathak Reference Pathak2025), a more possibilistic material ontology of plastic is brought to the fore. Revealing differential positionings of persons, places and things in Anthropocene worlds (Yusoff Reference Yusoff2018), evidence from Ghana’s savannah metropole demonstrates artisans’ capacity to note and negotiate the complexities and contradictions of Anthropocene times. Altering hegemonic forms in ways that are environmentally situated and historically informed, artisans craft the Patchy Plasticene on an object-centred and urban scale. Whereas Hecht (Reference Hecht2018) speaks to ‘interscalar vehicles of the African Anthropocene’, artisanal interventions enable intra-scalar possibility.
The discussion here proceeds with an overview of factors driving supply and demand for plastic water tanks in Tamale. An examination of artisanal strategies to mitigate plastic breakdown follows, encompassing plastic’s chemos, geos and atmos and historical links to metallurgy. The subsequent section shows how artisan understandings of urban ecologies turn repair into structural intervention. The conclusion addresses the Patchy Plasticene more generally.
Setting the plasti-scene in Tamale
Although climate-stressed, Tamale’s growth exceeds that of other Ghanaian cities. Plastic’s capacity for high-volume water storage enables residents to weather erratic patterns of precipitation that bring floods and droughts and disturb natural water sources (Boateng et al. Reference Boateng, Tia-Adje and Adams2013; Kosoe et al. Reference Kosoe, Cobbinah, Akongbangre, Addaney and Cobbinah2021: 236). As population rises and urban boundaries shift with unplanned expansion, competition for space and resources exacerbates concerns regarding water for all classes of urban dwellers (Agodzo et al. Reference Agodzo, Bessah and Nyatuame2023; GSS 2019; Oppong and Yeboah Reference Oppong and Yeboah2013).
To view plastic tanks as sentinels of Anthropocene impacts and adaptations in Tamale is not to suggest that their presence is compelled by environment alone. Proliferation of plastic water storage is indicative of the global span of late industrialism, aligning ‘deteriorating industrial infrastructure … climate instability, incredible imbrication of commercial interest in knowledge production, in legal decisions, and in governance at all scales’ (Fortun Reference Fortun2014: 310). Despite a sizeable water grid and a new master plan promising improvements to Tamale’s water infrastructure,Footnote 4 government divestment from public services (Twum and Abubakari Reference Twum and Abubakari2020) spurred by decades of neoliberal reform (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2004; Reference Chalfin2010; Reference Chalfin2023a) combines with climatic pressures to precipitate a perfect storm of what residents call ‘water stress’ (Cobbinah and Kosoe Reference Cobbinah, Kosoe, Cobbinah and Addaney2019: 113).
The privatization of the urban water supply and deteriorating public infrastructure in Ghana (Whitfield Reference Whitfield2006) make municipal water rationing commonplace. In Tamale, piped water flows intermittently, sometimes for just a few hours each week or month (Fuseini and Kemp Reference Fuseini and Kemp2016: 119; Ngben and Yacubu Reference Ngben and Yakubu2023). Residents face little choice but to harvest rainwater, stockpile water from vendors, cultivate household wells and boreholes, or resort to the few remaining open-water sources (GSS 2019: 278; Bugri Reference Bugri2022).Footnote 5 All hasten dependence on high-volume household-based plastic water storage.
Plastic ascendance in Ghana
Aligning plastics, privatization and late-industrial over-production, demand for and dependence on plastic water storage is inseparable from supply. Ghana is a hub of African plastics manufacturing and a nexus of cross-continental plastic supply chains (Babayemi et al. Reference Babayemi, Nnorom, Osibanjo and Weber2019; OECD 2022). The first sub-Saharan nation to achieve independence, Ghana’s founders sought to industrialize rapidly (Apter Reference Apter1966). Given the availability of cheap polymers derived from crude oil prompted by post-World War Two decolonization and free trade (Davis Reference Davis2022; Masco Reference Masco, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021), plastics were among the earliest industrial items made in the sub-region (Freinkel Reference Freinkel2011; Osborn Reference Osborn and Austin2017: 90).
Ghana’s first plastics manufacturer was Ramchand Mohinani, a member of the country’s India-born merchant class. Soon after independence in 1957, he formed a partnership with a Ghanaian businessman importing garments, shoes and polythene products. By 1966, Mohinani established Poly Products Ghana Ltd to fabricate plastics in situ. Although the original production facility had one machine and four workers, the family-run company remains Ghana’s foremost domestic plastic supplier and continent-wide plastics stronghold.Footnote 6 Polytank-branded water tanks joined the company line-up in 1992. They remain the predominant source and national standard for plastic water storage.
Polytank’s product line readily appealed to Ghana’s growing upper class. First-generation tanks fabricated from multiple layers of polyethylene were rotational heat-moulded and easily identifiable by their cylindrical shape, ribbed design and black colour. Removable lids and input and output valves could be attached to external pipes and pumps to receive and dispense water. Both status symbol and urban utility for those who could initially afford them (Yeboah Reference Yeboah2006), they replaced aluminium tanks, steel drums and large clay pots for water storage. Within a few years, the company offered models ranging in capacity from 90 to 2,000 gallons, reaching consumers across a spectrum of needs and price points. Unlike Kenya, where imported plastics are a source of legal regulation and moral debate (Meiu Reference Meiu2020), in Ghana water tanks retain their standing as status symbols associated with modernity and personal and national well-being (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2023b). Successfully weathering disparate ruling regimes and economic circumstances, the company now drives the wider Mohinani Group, overseeing 5,000 employees and branches in seven African countries.Footnote 7
Polytank’s prominence speaks to the high African demand for plastics (OECD 2022). Predicated on South–South connections to sustain industrial production, LLDPE and HDPE and associated machinery for tank manufacture are regularly sourced from the Middle East (UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait) and Asia (India, Vietnam, Thailand) (Ren et al. Reference Ren, Liu, Pu, Chen, Chen and Shi2020; UNCTAD 2025). Valued at US$200 million in 2020, plastics make up 5 per cent of Ghana’s annual imports.Footnote 8 Industrial plastic production is evident in Accra, the nation’s capital, the port city of Tema, and the inland commercial centre of Kumasi. Indicative of growing demand, Polytank opened a factory on Tamale’s outskirts in 2021. It produces approximately 50,000 tanks a year from granules of virgin polymer trucked to Tamale from Tema seaport. The factory makes both traditional rotational-moulded tanks, and, in even greater numbers, less expensive blow-moulded models, transporting them to sales points in Tamale, elsewhere in Ghana’s north, and across the Burkina border.
Plastic artisans in Tamale
Devoted to plastic repair, Al Said Plastic Repair Works lies several miles from Polytank’s gated factory complex. A quick walk from the central market, it occupies a sandy lot claimed by informal enterprises dedicated to vehicle repair – cars, motorbikes, and the popular moto-taxis known as yellow-yellow. Unstable ground for habitation, the location makes a convenient workspace. Master plastic artisan Alhassan Seidu oversees the workshop (Figure 2). Here he trains and supervises a dozen apprentices: young men in their teens and twenties who have attained various levels of expertise in plastic repair in their own right. Alhassan and his assistants can recompose tanks from what appears to be nothing but a pile of plastic shreds. Keeping tanks out of the plastic waste stream and returning them to full functioning, artisans’ ministrations leave only the barest traces of the tank’s prior breakdown.
Alhassan Seidu, proprietor of Al Said Plastic Repair Works, at his workshop in Tamale.
Photograph by Brenda Chalfin, 2024.
The workshop holds tanks in various states of (dis)repair along with other assorted plastic goods: fenders, fans and the like. Alhassan’s apprentices work in the wide veranda surrounded by coal pots, benches, anvils and piles of tools. Telling signs of plasticene deposition, the area is fringed by an expanse of plastic fragments of varied shapes, makes, textures and sizes. Tanks of different designs cluster beside the workshop. Cracks are visible in some. Others are truncated or missing swathes of siding. Others are completely collapsed, with water, dust and algae puddled inside (Figure 3).
A plastic water tank lies shattered in a home’s courtyard after falling from its metal scaffold. Photograph by Alhassan Seidu, 2024.
There are many reasons a tank may fracture, according to Alhassan. Fissures can appear without warning. A full tank can abruptly tumble to the ground and shatter. Indicative of a late-capitalist ‘race to the bottom’, design flaws are a common outcome of industrial over-production as companies seek to attract customers by adding new models and materials and streamline production techniques. The brittle nature of the base polymers used for new blow-moulded models, like those made at the Tamale factory, means that, although they are cheaper and easier to produce, they are also less durable.
During our first meeting, Alhassan showed me around his workspace. He reviewed the faults of each tank, some more obvious than others. Without prompting, Alhassan mentioned tanks’ declining quality. Simply put, ‘the quality of the tanks has reduced’ – a point affirmed by a colleague in environmental engineering, who stated: ‘It’s a known fact that older tanks are stronger.’ For Alhassan, this was not abstraction but object lesson. Pointing to one model, he explained, ‘The tops can be too heavy and put pressure on the sides, causing them to buckle or crack.’ He added, ‘The bottom area can be a problem too now,’ showing me where an indentation on a newly designed blow-moulded tank weakened the wall. He then drew my attention to a long crack travelling from the base, revealing the sharp edge of the centimetre-thick plastic.
Adding fuel to Alhassan’s laments, a Ghana-based website listed the common causes of tank breakdown: ‘Expansion and contraction of a Polytank due to constant overfilling; Heat from the sun; Polytanks erected on poor platforms; Missing Polytank Lids.’Footnote 9 Like Alhassan’s remarks, these indicators capture the convergence of the very drivers of the Anthropocene’s late-capitalist manifestation described by Fortun (Reference Fortun2014): environmental insecurity, state incapacity and industrial excess. Growing demand for plastic tanks across the populace due to climate pressures and state failure simultaneously opens up markets and diminishes tank quality. State and climate-driven gaps in water supply promote extremes in tank usage – overfilling when water becomes available and low capacity when not – leading to tank deterioration. The same climatic shifts that cause people to stockpile water likewise degrade tanks. Self-provisioning of basic infrastructure to compensate for inadequate state services in the face of constraints of space, funds and know-how leads tank owners to build substandard platforms, further prompting tank falls and fractures.
If plastic’s afterlives are treated as an intractable problem and driver of climate change (Ford et al. Reference Ford, Jones, Davies, Godley, Jambeck, Napper, Suckling, Williams, Woodall and Koldewey2022; Liboiron Reference Liboiron2016), the production and consumption of plastic to cope with climate pressures raise a different set of dilemmas (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Wright, Woodward and Fussell2025). In Tamale, Alhassan and his repair crew step into the breach. Seeking a fix both material and structural, recomposing the constituent parts of the urban lifeworld like the classic artisans theorized by Ingold (Reference Ingold2012: 429), they insert tanks into a wider web of relations, both far flung and deeply emplaced. Their efforts stave off decline by capitalizing on plastic’s durability and broad accessibility, attributes largely scorned by scholars and environmentalists (Masco Reference Masco, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021) but recognized by Ghanaian artisans and consumers alike (Bredenbröker Reference Bredenbröker2024: 108). Al Said’s practised interventions thereby turn damaged plastic tanks from markers of political-economic and ecological decline into repositories of intimately experienced geo-chemical and ecological possibility. They thus complicate plastic’s assumed ‘synthetic universality’ (Davis Reference Davis2022: 6) rooted in rote (re)production and the unstoppable spigot of cheap polymer flows (Moore Reference Moore2015) that underwrite their assumed disposability (Hawkins Reference Hawkins2018).
As Alhassan sees it, despite susceptibility to breakdown, plastic tanks are not disposable goods. Integral to the Patchy Plasticene, by playing on plastic’s ontological open-endedness (Abrahms-Kavunenko Reference Abrahms-Kavunenko2023: 13) via distinctive artisanal (re)productive interventions, they are fully amenable to renewal. Complicating the tendency to ‘treat the Anthropocene – especially the African Anthropocene – as the apotheosis of waste’ (Hecht Reference Hecht2018: 111), from an artisan’s standpoint, plastic embodies possibility, not loss.Footnote 10 But, in contrast to earlier icons of African water worlds, such as the Zimbabwe bush pump, designed to be fixed by the average person with items purchased on the open market (de Laet and Mol Reference de Laet and Mol2000), repair is not programmed into tanks’ industrial design and manufacture. Rather, it is the purview of place, product and material-based artisanal expertise. Indicating the relevance of artisanal practice to the liveability of Anthropocene times – a point affirmed by Cross et al. (Reference Cross, Douglas, Grafham, Lahn, Martin, Ray and Verhoeven2019) regarding artisanal modifications to humanitarian goods among climate refugees – artisanal interventions in Tamale mould the plasticene to the exigencies of place. Amalgamating diverse productive logics, this occurs despite tanks standing as generic forms that circulate indiscriminately.
The Patchy Plasticene
Sometimes spoiled tanks are brought directly to Alhassan’s workspace. More frequently, Alhassan and his assistants are summoned to homes, chiefs’ palaces, schools, hospitals, barracks – literally anywhere where tanks are the prime means of water storage and access. Alhassan inspects each tank to trace the locus and process of rupture, identifying signs of stress and where the most serious damage lies. ‘[This] tank is shattered. [I’m] yet to figure out what happened. The owner said he heard a boom and it fell down.’ Inspecting the edges of the cracks, he continued: ‘See the way it has burst. The tip has cracked and the bottom. [It] started from the ground.’ In another case, he noted: ‘You can see the crack in it. It divided into two. We fit the top part of it [and are] now left with joining it. It even affected the other side when it fell.’ He explained that the extent of damage depends on the orientation of the crack: ‘If it is parallel to the lines, the pressure from the water will sit on it and help keep it tight. But if it runs up and down, the pressure will cause it to burst.’
Although plastics – especially thermoplastics such as LLDPE and HDPE – are viewed as low-value, crude materials, tank restoration and repair are carefully honed skills, requiring specialized tools and techniques. Craft-like, these are labour forms in which technical ability, embodied knowledge and control over the means of production take precedence over automation (Hanagan Reference Hanagan1977). Departing from outlooks of Science and Technology Studies scholars such as Jackson (Reference Jackson, Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot2014), repair in such contexts is not just ‘hopeful’ and possibilistic de novo but derives from and thrives on established labour and knowledge systems (Santos Reference Santos and Kopf2025) in accordance with classic definitions of artisanship (Crossick Reference Crossick1997). Premised on deep familiarity and ‘active, attentive perceptual involvement’ with materials (Ingold Reference Ingold and Graves-Brown2000: 65), artisanal repair requires inventiveness and iterative and abstractive modalities of scientific problem solving (Blundel and Smith Reference Blundel and Smith2013; Smith Reference Smith2004) in order to negotiate the interface between industrial plastic fabrication and the realities of urban life.
In Tamale, the viability of industrially produced plastic tanks draws on artisans’ multilayered attunements, placing heterogeneous materials, knowledge systems and urban scales in active relation. Tsing et al.’s (Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019) discussion of the Patchy Anthropocene offers an instructive analytic parallel. Confounding the uniformity of industrial and agricultural mass production – what they call ‘modular simplifications’ – for Tsing et al. ‘patch’ refers to landscapes marked by the eruption of unexpected ‘feral’ outputs driven by a disrupted but ever resilient ‘bios’. Similarly inspired by unexpected admixtures, Tamale’s Patchy Plasticene places patches in a different light. While non-human forces addressed by Tsing et al. (Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019) are mainly living organisms, the Patchy Plasticene includes abiotic forces and materials: chemos, geos and atmos. These plastic admixtures are shaped in tandem with and by artisanal agency. They are not externalities, but coexistent with artisanal materials and practices. As further evidence of how materials are ‘active participants’ in making urban lives (Fontein and Smith Reference Fontein and Smith2023: 5), plasticene patches rely equally on artisanal animation. As Ingold (Reference Ingold2007: 1) argues, ‘the properties of materials are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational’, both ‘composing’ and composed by ‘the lifeworld’, including both people and the environment (Ingold Reference Ingold2012: 429). For artisans and the plastic tanks under their care, these patchy composites exist in concrete form and historical traces.
Material inheritances
For Alhassan and his partners in plastics repair, their refusal of plastic’s disposability derives from longstanding material orientations, culturally and regionally resonant. Tamale is a stronghold of artisanal expertise: weaving, deep-pit indigo dying, smithing and leather work for men (Asinyo et al. Reference Asinyo, Howard and Seidu2021; Goody Reference Goody1982), and pottery, cotton spinning and shea butter production for women (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2004). Tying plastic to this deeper lineage, Alhassan calls his occupation machelligu, ‘metal work’ in the Dagbani language.
From Alhassan’s perspective, metal and plastic may not be identical, but they are more closely aligned in properties, products, personal experience and artisanal practice than conventionally assumed. The means of plastic repair derive from metalworking – high heat, steel blades of different widths, lengths and curvature, shears, hammers and tongs (Figure 4). So do his techniques. Alhassan made the association clear, asserting that ‘anything welders do, we do [too]’. He lamented that he did not have room or sufficient fuel for bellows or a smithing furnace at his workshop. In contrast to what geologists perceive as plasticine rupture (Haram et al. Reference Haram, Carlton, Ruiz and Maximenko2020), the artisanal point of view conceives the seamless amalgamation of plastic and metal, a perspective reflecting the ‘distinct social and cultural constellations’ in which plastic tanks are situated (Abrahms-Kavunenko Reference Abrahms-Kavunenko2023: 13).
Metalworking tools used by Alhassan Seidu and his assistants for plastic repair.
Photograph by Alhassan Seidu, 2026.
A testament to the integration of indigenous and modern metallurgic knowledge in West Africa (see D’Avignon Reference D’Avignon2022 on Senegambia; Osborn Reference Osborn2016 on Guinea), participating in what Iddrisu et al. (Reference Iddrisu, Mano and Sonobe2012) call a ‘metalworking cluster’, machelligu in the present is informed by iron-working traditions developed in northern Ghana before the end of the first millennium (Mustapha Reference Mustapha2022). Well before European influence, regional craft specialists devised a means to work the substantial ore deposits in the area. The history of iron working is evident in remains of smelting, smithing and casting across a wide arc of sites culturally and geographically contiguous with Tamale and the precolonial Dagomba state (Chirikure Reference Chirikure and Mahvunga2017; de Barros Reference de Barros and Aldenderfer2023; Mustapha Reference Mustapha2022), some of which continued into and beyond colonization.
Unlike the artisanal foragers mentioned by Tsing (Reference Tsing2015), situated at the outer edges of ‘capitalist ruins’, plastic artisans in Tamale are enmeshed in logics and materials of industrial intensification. Aligning multiple historical trajectories, machelligu is tied to more recent histories and skill sets of motor vehicle repair (Appiah Reference Appiah, Kpessa-Whyte and Dzisah2023), an occupation in which Alhassan trained. After completing secondary education in Tamale in 2003, he gained expertise in auto repair in Ghana’s commercial capital, Kumasi. Alhassan’s move south retraces the trajectory of earlier generations of northern merchants, scholars and artisans – likewise recognized for exceptional craftsmanship (Arhin Reference Arhin1970). Alhassan readily found work in the city’s Suame Magazine, famous across West Africa for its truck and auto repair. According to Yeebo:
The district emerged in the 1930s around a colonial-era armoury. When Ghana’s economy faltered and a series of economic reforms in the 1970s cut the stream of imported spare parts, skilled mechanics started to work for themselves, learning to make and refurbish spare parts to replace the dwindling supply of imports. To this day, Suame Magazine is where most of Ghana’s mechanics and metalworkers learn their trades. (Yeebo Reference Yeebo2016: 111)
Several claims relevant to plastic repair in Tamale follow from Yeebo’s observations. First, motor vehicles increasingly contain plastic in lieu of metal since it is cheaper, lighter and easier to mass produce. In turn, in Kumasi, alongside learning metalworking, the repair and replacement of plastic vehicle components became Alhassan’s specialty. Second, in much of West Africa, motorcycles eclipse cars and trucks in prevalence due to their affordability and efficiency (Blundo Reference Blundo2023; Khan-Mohammad Reference Khan-Mohammad2022). Part of the same South–South polymer flows (Wang et al. Reference Wang, Liu, Chen, Zhu, Qu and Xu2021) that bolster plastic tank production, motorbikes mass-produced by Asian firms increasingly contain plastic components. Alhassan, like others plying their trade in Kumasi, learned to service motorcycles, including their plastic parts. This served him well when he returned to Tamale in 2010, where motorbikes are the most common mode of personal transportation (Dinye Reference Dinye2013). Prompted to start his own business, there was high demand for Alhassan’s expertise. What he did not anticipate was the exploding demand for water tank repair in Tamale – a form of work he had only occasionally witnessed in Kumasi. Yet, with wide skills to draw on, Alhassan turned his artisanal workshop into a plastics ‘laboratory’ (Chirikure Reference Chirikure and Mahvunga2017).
Plasti-lurgy
‘Patchwork’ of a sort, although it shares elements with metalworking, plastic tank repair is an area of expertise in its own right, incorporating distinct skills, standards and adaptations. While some artisans use metal to repair plastic tanks, Alhassan warned that metals rust, spoiling the water and leaving another hole to fix. This was clear in a WhatsApp entry he sent from the chief’s palace in Jakpa, outside Tamale:
The old men here are complaining: Nka Koom [Dagbani: The water’s stopped]. They don’t have water again and now use bore hole water. They had a river, but the river dried up. They called several people to attend to a tank. This is what I came and met: a ‘destruction’ tank. There is a problem. Cracks on top and bottom. Cracks that go through. Already someone else tried to repair it. They put in iron. That’s not advisable. After they worked on it, the tank continued to leak. We need to remove the iron and see how best we can work. We will fix it for them.
Here, we see that not all repairs or plastic repairers are of the same quality. Alhassan explores and exploits plastic’s unique properties, turning plastic tanks into repositories of distinct forms of material knowledge in which metalwork, machelligu, is a background condition. Propelling new possibilities and foregrounding otherwise hidden material affordances of plastic, intentionally ‘intra-active’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2010), the work is recalibrated to the distinct qualities of LLDPE and HDPE across applications, environments, stresses and scales.
Often combined, a handful of techniques prevail. Most fundamental is ‘suturing’. Widely used but more complicated is ‘patching’. ‘Forging’ is also utilized. Whether sutured, patched or forged, plastic is the basis for mixing and reassembly. To paraphrase Ingold (Reference Ingold2010: 4), the plastic tank is made ‘a place where several “material logics” become entwined’. Per Ingold’s (ibid.: 4) discussion of the intra-active agency of persons and materials, in repair the plastic tank is less ‘an externally bounded entity … but [is rather] a knot whose constituent threads … become caught with other threads … discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them’, including objects’ and artisans’ metallurgical pasts. Contrasting with Latour’s (Reference Latour2005) version of material agency (see also Fontein and Smith Reference Fontein and Smith2023), it is artisans – not things – who carry forward these pasts and actively amend them.
Suturing is used to repair isolated plastic fissures that show promise of containment. Alhassan begins by probing a cracked tank with a metal file to discern the depth of breakage. He ‘opens’ the crack, puncturing the tanks multiple plastic layers to ensure that his blade, hot from the coals, can neatly cut through the tanks inner and outer surface (Figure 5). The opening is worked with a wider blade, also glowing from the coals. Repairing a tank at a local secondary school, Alhassan narrated the work involved, likening it to ‘welding’. ‘First you open and cut with a hot poker. It’s a straight cut that you burn. Give it a cut. The cut is just a straight cut. Before you finish, it holds together.’ On other occasions, depending on the size, orientation and irregularity of the crack, it may be widened slightly by pushing on the edges with a heated blade.
Alhassan Seidu and his assistant Yacubu Abdul Mugis work together to suture a cracked tank using melted plastic and a hot steel blade. Photograph by Brenda Chalfin, 2024.
The fissure is ready to be fused together with molten plastic. Returning to the coal pot, a plastic scrap from a discarded tank is heated until soft. Repairing ‘like with like’, the scrap should come from a spoiled tank of the same style and manufacturer as the one under repair. Although to an untrained eye the piles of plastic discards surrounding the workshop, tucked in beside tree roots and covered with dirt and dust, appear to be a waste heap, Alhassan and his more experienced apprentices use the detritus to ‘harvest’ scrap. Here, they search for the appropriate size and type for a given repair. Apropos this practice and his craft more generally, Alhassan told me, ‘Our work is like something you pull from the ground and turn it into something,’ attesting to his understanding of the artisan’s role as technical and creative problem solver. Even as remnants of plastic’s industrial mass production inundated the urban landscape, his statement captured well the character of his work as built from the ground up and grounded in regionally derived materials and practices.
The qualities of the polymers used to manufacture tanks make them suitable for artisanal manipulation. Both HDPE and LLDPE have low melting points: 275°F/135°C and 250°F/120°C, respectively. They do not liquify when heated but become a pliable mass. Like the artisan cum scientific innovators described by Smith (Reference Smith, Smith, Meyers and Cook2014), plastic artisans develop a ‘feel’ for these qualities in the course of their work and training. Once the plastic scrap starts to melt, Alhassan guides it into the crack. To catch the molten plastic, the blade used is more curved than that used to cut. It must be hot enough to scrape the plastic into the opening and create a consistent seam. The plastic scrap should be small enough to hold in one’s hand, yet large enough to yield a consistent flow of material. As one blade cools, an assistant pulls another from the coals to continuously feed plastic into the opening. At the right temperature and with the right touch, another blade is used to spread and smooth, essentially ‘painting’ plastic. Suturing is repeated on the tank’s interior. Accessing the inner surface of a tank requires climbing through the narrow top opening. Once inside, the repair is identified by streaks of black plastic that have penetrated the initial fissure, contrasting with the white plastic interior layer. With tools and procedures established ahead of time, Alhassan and an apprentice work in steady communication, with one positioned outside to ferry tools and materials to his counterpart inside the tank.
Patching – ‘patchwork’ in its literal sense – requires greater skill, time and familiarity with materials and is employed to repair holes of various sizes. Patching can be used to replace whole sections of tanks several feet square or smaller areas showing signs of damage. Evoking yet another reading of the Patchy Plasticene, tucked into each plastic patch are different labours, sensory judgements and material histories of each component of repair. With patching, as in suturing, the perimeter of the hole is smoothed and squared. This requires cutting into the tank and around the hole to create a uniform void. A heated blade is used to cut into the tank, melting the plastic as it moves vertically and then horizontally to form a rectangle. A patch is prepared. A two-person job requiring careful cooperation, measuring and cutting material from an old tank combines force and precision. Following the tank’s rib lines for accuracy, a longer steel blade is heated to cut out a replacement piece. At the workshop, an electric saw simplifies the job.
The patch is then put in the prepared slot and the perimeter sutured to hold it in place. Sizing is challenging, as the patch must form a tight seal to ensure that the tank can hold water. Gaps may be plugged with smaller fragments of discarded plastic heated on the coal pot to form thin ‘cords’. Devised by Alhassan, this is essentially a technique of ‘forging’ plastic – ‘shaping using compressive force via hammering, pressing or rolling’ (Bharti Reference Bharti2017) – to create a pliable ribbon of plastic. Neither fluid like the molten plastic used to suture a crack, nor hard like the plastic sheet used to make a patch, the technique requires altering the character of the plastic raw material. Activating hidden material affordances, the flexible cord embodies plastic qualities suppressed in industrial production. Using what Smith (Reference Smith2004: 129) calls ‘vernacular science’, here Alhassan employs ‘arts of material investigation’ and induction (Smith Reference Smith, Smith, Meyers and Cook2014: 19), drawing suppressed properties and material histories to the fore.
Plastic sensoria
The knowledge practices employed in plastic repair depend on a distinct range of ‘plastic sensoria’. Similar to the ‘toxic sensorium’ (Stein and Luna Reference Stein and Luna2021) assimilated by African farmers who rely on agro-chemicals, they simultaneously evoke well-being and carry a risk of long-term harm.Footnote 11 Aligning bodily knowledge, materials and environment (Ingold Reference Ingold and Graves-Brown2000: 65), artisans’ plastic sensoria derive from visual, haptic, tactile and other sensory cues. The sensoria operationalized by Alhassan and his assistants capture intimate material knowledge at the same time as they index a wider field of flows and interconnections anchored in the tank’s commercial mass production. Attuned to the properties of plastics on a distinct experiential scale, like the toxicologists discussed by Liboiron (Reference Liboiron2016: 104), this is one way in which artisans mediate plastic’s contradictory position as desirable consumer good on the one hand and problematic industrial detritus on the other (Pathak Reference Pathak2025: 478).
Steeped in the sensorium of mass-produced plastics, Alhassan and those trained in his workshop are well aware of the different uses, properties and origins of the plastics they work with. Demonstrating their sensory acuities, in one video diary Alhassan directed his assistants to line up a selection of plastic pieces and explain their different attributes and melting points. Going well beyond visual cues, they were keen to distinguish plastic’s varied properties, referring to hardness and softness, and an all-important attribute Alhassan calls ‘starchiness’: how well the plastic adheres to itself and to other materials. Transmitting sensoria and sensibilities to those he trains, Alhassan exhibits an artisan’s ‘feel for things’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2012; Marchand Reference Marchand and Marchand2016): both the fine motor dexterity of an experienced maker and the sensory awareness of the look, feel and smell of materials as they change from one phase of the work process to another. Related to starchiness, stickiness, pliability, hardening, bonding and the like, these forms of knowledge depend on direct physical observation and manipulation. A source of personal and occupational pride, like the chemical residues farmers display as a badge of accomplishment (Stein and Luna Reference Stein and Luna2021: 99), plastic sensoria are experienced as portals into new material possibilities. But unlike mastering received standards of agro-chemical use, in the case of plastic artisans, sensory mastery begets material manipulation.
After ‘painting’ and smoothing the melted plastic when suturing a faulty tank, Alhassan uses the palm of his hand to exert an even pressure on the still warm plastic, repeating the gesture to make sure the plastic lies flat and is evenly distributed on the surface. He describes this as ‘compacting’ and explains that it is necessary to properly mix old and new plastic. ‘Compacting allows them to enter into each other and firmly adhere,’ he asserted. ‘The most important thing when working with a plastic tank is compacting.’ Conveying grounded knowledge of the chemistry of polyethylene polymer bonds, Alhassan teaches his apprentices that, without compacting, a suture cannot hold. Merging sensory awareness of molecular chemical properties with aesthetic judgement, Alhassan pointed out the even surface that he neatly modelled on the tanks original form after putting some water on his hands to smooth the area. In another digital diary, he inspected a repair executed by someone else who had used a plastic scrap to cover a small hole but failed to compact the materials. Pulling the knuckles of his two hands back and forth to make his point, he explained: ‘Because the compacting is not there, the work is separating again.’
In these examples, Alhassan translates the surface qualities of plastic and associated sensoria into a deeper understanding of their chemical character and reactivity. Alhassan’s capacity to unlock these elemental affordances – what Papadopoulos et al. (Reference Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa, Myers, Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Myers2021) gloss as chemos – shows evidence of artisanal expertise ‘bringing things to life’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2007: 12) and refutes industrial plastic’s ready disposability and decline. Creating possibility as well as closure, artisans in this way activate the abiotic agency of industrial plastics. Both parallel to and different from bios-based alternatives to late-capitalist disrepair in the Patchy Anthropocene (Tsing et al. Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019), these ‘patchwork’ amalgamations of human and non-human, artisanal and industrial, embodied and elemental, organic and engineered are knowingly mobilized by Alhassan and his apprentices to forge alternatives within the material inheritances of plasticene times.
Artisanal ontologies and plastic ecologies
Combining hard-earned sensory acuity with practised technical skills, Alhassan and his apprentices repeated negotiation of plastic tanks’ recurring faults cross urban, domestic and object-centred scales and turn repair tactics into strategic interventions with structural effects. Their strategies codify environmental knowledge via distinct experiences of plastic properties. Consonant with Ingold’s rendering of relational materiality (Reference Ingold and Graves-Brown2000: 65), such artisanal readings of and reactions to material things, by registering complex environmental arrangements, are ontologically ‘composite’. Central to artisanal awareness is the interplay between the tank’s material composition, the climate and the water it holds. Actualizing the Patchy Plasticene, the climate is known and negotiated by Alhassan and assistants via specific complexes of abiotic elements and interactions spanning atmosphere, geology and living and chemical matter.
Climate as material trace
Further indicating the contradictions of plasticene times in Tamale’s savannah zone setting, the HDPE and LLDPE from which tanks are composed, though intended to be a bulwark against the insecurities of municipal provisioning and climate-stressed water sourcing, are highly sensitive to environmental conditions (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Wright, Woodward and Fussell2025). In Tamale, such conditions include high temperatures regularly reaching over 100°F/38°C during the nine-month dry season, which is also marked by intense sunlight, little cloud cover and wide day-to-night temperature fluctuations, and a three-month rainy season characterized by intense winds, heavy downpours and spiking temperatures (Antwi-Agyei and Nyantakyi-Frimpong Reference Antwi-Agyei and Nyantakyi-Frimpong2021). In Alhassan’s repair work, climatic factors are understood through material ‘traces’ revealed in conjunction with other things (see Figure 6).
A WhatsApp message from Alhassan Seidu documenting changing tank ecologies brought about by the interplay of climatic conditions, the properties of polyethylene polymers and changing water volumes and temperatures.
Such artisanal ways of knowing, and associated modes of noticing, surfaced in Alhassan’s account of his visit to a cluster of flats occupied by state employees and pensioners. A small forest of plastic water tanks of varied makes and sizes fills the spaces between the buildings. Despite the old aluminium tanks on each balcony, residents typically install a plastic tank on a concrete platform in the open area below their unit, connecting it to their home via pipes and pumps. Amid the standard-issue black tanks, Alhassan pointed out a light blue model diversifying an otherwise uniform product range. He scratched the surface with his fingernail and pointed to the white patina visible on the tank. ‘Let’s observe something. Look at this place, the colour is deep. But here the colour is white, and it can peel. It’s a different material altogether and it “expires” because of the sunshine.’ Alhassan earlier mentioned that blue tanks tend to degrade – an exercise in ‘patchy-thinking’ (Tsing et al. Reference Tsing, Deger, Keleman Saxena and Zhou2024: 23) well inscribed in artisanal work. When he came across one, he explained, he looked for the white residue and was sure to find it. A case of plastic chemos interacting with ambient atmosphere, the residue was a reaction to Tamale’s intense heat catalysed by the colour and quality of the polymer base. Here, Tamale’s environmental conditions were experienced as a ‘trace’ manifest in palpable effects on plastic things.
Climate as material process
Beyond leaving a material trace on plastic tanks, Tamale’s unique environmental make-up is evident to Alhassan via the processes it sets in train, including those ancillary to yet inseparable from tanks’ expected operations. Not always apparent from the tank’s external appearance, these processes may unfold via the interplay of the interior surface and the water the tank holds. As opposed to self-contained objects with clear inputs and outputs, insides and outsides, environmental conditions betray tanks’ permeability to forces and substances their industrial design was programmed to exclude. Here again is a ready illustration of Ingold’s (Reference Ingold2010) ontological claim that things inherently exist in relation, not in isolation, with the caveat that not only is material agency relational, from Alhassan’s perspective so too is climate.
These interactions, unprogrammed yet consistently manifest, inform strategies of plastic repair. Providing evidence of artisanal sensibilities attuned ‘not to materiality as such, but to the fluxes and flows of materials’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2010: 3) in relation to one another – and to climate – Alhassan’s repair repertoires stress the importance of the tank’s interior plastic layer. A space few notice, manufacturers tout this layer’s resistance to micro-organisms. For Alhassan and his assistants, however, the interior was a telling gauge of the impacts and interactions of water, plastic and the wider environment. Emptying water from a tank was a required first step in most repair jobs. Executed bucket by bucket, the water was often grey or light brown. Transmuting climatic conditions to material effects, Alhassan told his clients the colour was a direct outcome of the region’s intense heat. The high daytime heat, he explained, raised the temperature of the water. When the weather cooled at night, so did the water. The water’s mineral content – largely alum, aluminium sulphate, a naturally occurring salt – subsequently built up on the tank’s interior. Here, again, for Alhassan, the plastic tank offered a means to decipher chemos and its interface with atmosphere.
Situated in a dynamic environment, ‘where several goings on become entwined’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2010: 4), the tank was also a space where geos came to be known and manifest. When alum mixed with the region’s laterite soils, which inevitably infiltrated water sources and receptacles, it left a gritty residue on the tank’s interior surface. Compromising water quality, it could also block the tank’s outflow. Turning repair into care, once they completed any interior welding and suturing, Alhassan and his apprentices would routinely scrub out the interior of the tank with detergent to restore the interior layer’s neat white finish. Climate here is known and noticed by Tamale’s plastic artisans as a set of interacting effects on materials, not a ‘state’ or ‘condition’ but a force to be grappled with via materials. Beyond the well-known fact that climate factors did things to plastic, from the artisan’s perspective, climate did things to other things through plastic.
Plastic as microclimate
Grappling with environmental impacts during plastic repair was most intense when Alhassan encountered tanks he described as ‘capsized’. Capsized tanks are typically the largest sizes, from 10,000 to 30,000 litres (2,200–6,600 gallons). Due to growing uncertainty about when and at what volumes taps might flow in Tamale, tanks of this size are increasingly popular. Given the city’s status as a regional administrative hub, they are especially desired by hospitals, secondary schools, training colleges and state installations, where reliable access to water at scale is critical.
Besides size, a capsized tank has a distinctive appearance. Rather than the usual convex shape, the top is concave, with a broad depression encircling the lid. The change of shape and surface geometry often transformed the top area into a shallow reservoir. Harbouring rainwater, dust and leaves, a capsized tank’s moist upper surface becomes a microclimate in its own right. It was not unusual for Alhassan to find the upper surface of capsized tanks covered with a mat of green growth. It is tempting to see this ‘patch’ as an example of the sort of wayward or feral bios identified by Tsing et al. (Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019), but it is even more a meeting ground of atmos, chemos, geos and living matter (see Figure 6).
Alhassan attributed the change in shape to the region’s excessively hot and dry climate. Setting two processes in train, industry standards indicate that HDPE/LLDPE can withstand continuous temperatures of up to 170–180°F/75–82°C only. With high air temperatures and intense sunlight baking the black surface, tanks’ base plastic softened. Heat also caused water to evaporate, changing the tank’s internal pressure. Aggravated by low volumes of water in a huge tank, the top of the tank gradually inverted, distorting its original shape and compromising its structural integrity. In this manifestation of the Patchy Plasticene, climatic forces are a dynamic part of material things, actively altering their attributes and functions. Perversely, the very quality that made HDPE and LLDPE plastics easy and inexpensive to turn into desirable objects of daily use also made them vulnerable to the climatic conditions they were designed to manage. Membrane and bellwether, the plastic tank became a microclimate and microcosm of wider political economic and ecological conjunctures. In turn, the technology was pushed to its limits.
Given the processes of plastic expansion and compression set in train by ambient forces made palpably proximate, Alhassan knew that simply repairing the tank and replacing the lid would be insufficient. To prevent further collapse, he took it upon himself to re-engineer the structure. He used welding tools to burn two holes in the surface of the convex top and devised a vent that allowed vapour to escape. Using materials available in the local market, in each opening Alhassan inserted a short length of PVC pipe covered with a conical cap. The idea was to let the hot air out, to allow the pressure inside the tank to equilibrate, and to keep out dust and other debris. Initially provisional, it was becoming a habitual fix.
Reflecting the challenges of artisanal problem solving in a dynamic environment, Alhassan’s repair strategies posed a contest between the tank’s continued susceptibility to heat-induced inversion and the progressive need for more and more vents. Alhassan’s fix might inspire other innovations, unlocking otherwise unrealized potentials of industrial materials to foster interactions and reactions not programmed into the plastic tanks’ original design. By devising systematic responses to an ensemble of environmental effects, the artisan incrementally alters structural outcomes. While Alhassan and his team can do little to change the precipitating conditions of plastic dependence – whether climate, state incapacity or industrial mass production – their work restructures their intersection. Conjoining material scales and histories, artisans adapt plastic materials and technologies to specific environmental and political economic conjunctures, ultimately shaping more possibilistic plasticene futures in Tamale.
Conclusion: artisanal possibilities for the Patchy Plasticene
Attending to plastics ‘caught in the currents of the lifeworld’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2007: 1), rather than through the lens of plastic’s ills and afterlives, brings several issues to light. Affirming artisans’ capacity for innovation in contexts of industrial intensification (Chirikure Reference Chirikure and Mahvunga2017; Blundel and Smith Reference Blundel and Smith2013; Smith Reference Smith2004), Alhassan’s experience demonstrates artisans’ strategic positioning at the intersection of environmental and political economic disruption and their work’s centrality to negotiating the complexities of the Anthropocene. In contrast to Tsing et al.’s (Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019) rendering of the Patchy Anthropocene, the prime impetus of Patchy Plasticene problem solving in Tamale is the potential not of biotic materials but of abiotic ones – notably atmos, geos and chemos. The Patchy Plasticene unfolds not in the space of capitalist ruination and evacuation, but in late-capitalist expansion. Further differentiating one from the other, the Patchy Plasticene is actualized in the last instance not by the agency of other than human matter (cf. Fontein and Smith Reference Fontein and Smith2023), but by persons’ intellectual and embodied activation of historically informed material knowledges.
‘Plastilurgy’ – amalgamating plastic’s materialities and metal-working technologies – is an important case in point. Whether suturing, patching, welding, forging or compacting plastics, artisanal repair involves systematic assessment of the character and interaction of diverse material traces in order to induce properties obscured by industrial production. Cultivating the agency of plastics via their emplacement in distinct environments and associated conjunctures of material practice, the artisan turns the generic plastic tank into a distinctive ontological ‘constellation’ (Abrahms-Kavunenko Reference Abrahms-Kavunenko2023: 13). Bridging metallurgy and polymer chemistry, home and factory, breakdown and renewal, plastic from this perspective is always mixed matter despite the professed purity of the polymer base.
While mediating the disconnect between plastic’s industrial-scale fabrication and deterioration and the desires and dependencies of domestic use, per Pathak’s (Reference Pathak2025: 478) rendering of plastic’s contradictions, expert artisans such as Alhassan intimately know the features and flaws of plastic tanks on an urban scale. At the same time, they develop molecular-level material attunements involving distinct plastic sensoria. A multilayered expression of the ‘articulation work’ common to repair (Jackson Reference Jackson, Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot2014: 223), an experienced artisan achieves a rare convergence of plastic’s multiple ontological and operational scales (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2016: 91). Centred in persons, not things, this ‘intra-scalar’ Anthropocene vantage point (cf. Hecht Reference Hecht2018; Ingold Reference Ingold2010) is integral to the artisan’s capacity to tap diverse plastic agencies. In the face of urban dwellers’ irresolvable dependence on plastic water infrastructure amid state withdrawal, climate pressure, and the risks and allure of plastic overproduction (Fortun Reference Fortun2014), the Patchy Plasticene cultivated by Tamale artisans mitigates and makes more legible and liveable Anthropocene processes already in train. Recomposing materials and curtailing plastic waste, artisans offer structural interventions both imperfect and possibilistic.
Examined through the self-reflections of plastic artisan-expert Alhassan Seidu, the multilayered lifeworlds of plastic water tanks in Ghana’s climate-stressed urban hub provoke larger comparative questions. Crossing the multipronged threshold of state decline, climate stress and capitalist expansion, might other commonplace things serve as ‘iconic objects’ of the African Anthropocene? Eligible items, such as Asia-made motorbikes (Blundo Reference Blundo2023), second-hand mobile phones (Santos Reference Santos and Kopf2025) and solar lamps (Cross et al. Reference Cross, Douglas, Grafham, Lahn, Martin, Ray and Verhoeven2019), are also plastic-bound. What other items occupy the ranks? Are artisans likewise central to negotiating the material and historical convergences driving their proliferation? What other insights, innovations and alternatives to the Anthropocene status quo might these fixes and fixers engender? Revealed by means of patchwork ethnography twofold (Gunel and Watanabe Reference Gunel and Watanabe2024; Tsing et al. Reference Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt2019), like Alhassan’s curation of broken tanks and plastic scraps surrounding his workshop, they require staying both close to the ground and attentive to wider vectors of transformation and material recuperation.
Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the time and generosity of those at Al Said Plastic Repair Works. Elias Mumuni, Zarouk Imoru, Abdul-Mumeen Iddrisu, Ishawu Alhassan and Courage Setsoafia Saba provided an important welcome and space for exchange at Tamale’s University of Development Studies. Salome Anafu and Lawrence Yinee first brought me to the Al Said workshop in October 2023. Their time and support and that of the Nimbo family, Silas Abugri, Karen Joel Nimbo, Akiwele Puswin Nimbo, Susanna Moses, in Tamale is much appreciated. Nii Obadai, Ashmah Gideon and Juliet Shola of Nuku Studio were also a source of insight and encouragement. A preliminary version of this article was presented at Rice University’s ‘Energy, Waste and the Environment in West Africa’ conference in September 2024. Excerpts are included in Southern Anthropocenes (edited by Casper Bruun Jensen, Routledge, 2025). We are grateful for the insightful feedback of the anonymous reviewers. Lawrence Nyarko Fletcher translated the abstract into Dagbani. Alhassan Seidu dedicates this work to the memory of his mother, Hajia Kataru Umar.
Brenda Chalfin is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in West African political economy, material culture and popular infrastructure. She is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Florida. She is the author of Waste Works: vital politics in urban Ghana (2023), Neoliberal Frontiers: an ethnography of sovereignty in West Africa (2010) and Shea Butter Republic: state power, global markets and the making of an indigenous commodity (2004).
Alhassan Seidu is the founder of Al Said Plastic Repair Works in Tamale, Ghana. Specializing in plastic water tanks, motorcycles and car bumpers, he is an expert in plastic repair. He trained at Suame Magazine in Kumasi, Ghana, after graduating from Business Senior High School (BISCO) in Tamale. This is his second academic collaboration.
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