A Zongo Ethnography

As part of an ethnography conducted between the years of 2013 and 2017, I immersed myself within Accra’s established Reggae music veterans and emerging Dancehall artist communities, intent on unpacking the phenomenon of the Afro-diasporic cultural exchange that was clearly in progress. As a Hip Hop and Spoken Word artist with upwards of twenty years of experience performing and touring on large and small Hip Hop, Jazz, and Worldbeat festival stages across Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and more recently West Africa, I had within the preceding decade turned to academia in general and anthropology in particular to satisfy my curiosity about performative musical subcultures. Africa in general and Ghana in particular beckoned. I am an admitted heritage tourist of sorts, a Trinidadian Canadian, based in the US, and searching for the “roots” to my Akan birth-name, Osei—one given to me by my unwitting and yet black-conscious student-activist parents in the 1970s, who were young Afro-Caribbeans bent on rekindling their heritage through African child-naming practices. As a transnational West Indian then, the urban music performing communities of Accra, diamond-in-the-rough as they were to my sensibilities, beckoned to me as a site of ethnographic investigation. I determined as my approach to record, perform, and collaborate alongside emerging Ghanaian artists as a way to gain access to insider communities.

I was initially attracted to Ghana’s hybrid Hiplife musical movement, which had already been captured by anthropologists Jesse Weaver Shipley (Reference Shipley2013) and Halifu Osumare (Reference Osumare2013); my Caribbean background further sensitized me to the diamond-in-the-rough Reggae-Dancehall community in Ghana, underpinned as it was by a now generational local Rastafarian community. This local community was of particular interest to me, as in my observation Ghanaian male youth of all classes peppered their everyday speech with Jamaican Patois and within it “Dread Talk” (Pollard Reference Pollard1994), as it was eagerly and yet sometimes crudely picked up from its international musical forms. These versions of Patois were interspersed alongside Ghanaian pidgin, Accra’s indigenous Ga, the nationally dominant Akan Twi, as well as Hausa, the lingua franca of Accra’s zongos. Given my own (un)conscious broadly Caribbean/North American speech patterns, I was of particular interest to male youth who sought to develop their Patois skills as well as their connections to internationally mobile foreigners. Additionally, my birth and official name—pervasive across Ghana’s dominant Akan ethnic groups and the namesake of the nineteenth-century founding father of the Akan nation—consistently intrigued my interlocuters, most of whom were convinced that I was a returning expatriate (or burgher), a second-generation returnee, in need of cultural reeducation. The combination of my purposeful wielding of Patois and internet accessible evidence of my performance background consistently opened doors to Rastafarian, Reggae-Dancehall, and zongo communities in Accra. With the nudging of notable veterans in the field, I became especially intrigued by the manner in which Hausa-speaking, second-generation internal migrant, largely Islamic youth from the Nima zongo, had become the most fervent proponents of Reggae-Dancehall—many of them aspiring artists, as well as hybrid converts to Rastafari. I foreground the experience, postures, and outlooks of both obscure and more renowned artist-proponents less as exceptional personalities and more as individuals whose outlooks were broadly representatives of the communities from which they hailed. And while some of the more successful among these artists, those long ascendant before my arrival, were difficult to approach, everyday gossip and social media scandals surrounding the successes, failures, and politics of emerging local celebrities proved extremely instrumental in unpacking the broader social transformations taking place in a rapidly globalizing Ghana.

Landing in Accra, and situated there through personal acquaintances, I was initially able to access veteran figures in the Accra Reggae-Dancehall scene—most notably Rastafarian Council president and Musicians’ Association of Ghana spokesperson Daddy Bosco. Daddy Bosco thereafter guided me toward other transformative figures in the scene: producers, concert promoters, artists, band leaders, radio hosts, and everyday purveyors—almost all of whom were eager to share their received wisdom of the local movement in both extended formal recorded interviews and informal discussions. The centrally located Akumah Village and Labadi venues, veritable informal institutions of Rastafari culture in Accra, served not only as sites of observation, but also as spaces for extended interviews. I became a regular of sorts at these locations, able to negotiate backstage entrance at concerts through my growing familiarity with the local producers and patrons. Significantly, my taxi-driver-turned-research-assistant Muhammed Jordan, a Ghanaian Northerner and migrant to Accra, devout Muslim and yet local Dancehall enthusiast, ferried me hither and yon, with a keen eye for research. With him I toured from Ghana’s Slave castles through local radio stations to the zongos of Nima and Ashaiman, among other neighborhood spaces. Living during this period in the student hostels of the University of Ghana’s Legon campus, I enjoyed immediate access to the teeming populations of local, regional, and international mostly middle-class youth, all of whom engaged with the local Hiplife, Afrobeat, and Reggae-Dancehall worlds as passionate consumers. Finally, my extensive extracurricular soccer practice with local youth of the surrounding neighborhoods, many traveling in from Accra’s zongo neighborhoods, offered me keen insight into how everyday purveyors regarded the growing Reggae-Dancehall scene and how Rastafari and zongo identification intersected in their lives.

I ponder how circulating embodiments, postures, worldviews, and outlooks, captured in the trope of the Rasta, the rude-boy, rude-gyal, and the collective “ghetto youth,” offer tactical models of personhood as individuals and communities navigate emerging forms of subjectivity under conditions of rapid neoliberal globalization. Following Tuomas Teo’s formulation of homo neoliberalus—an extrapolation of homo economicus—I consider the manner in which neoliberal forms of subjectivity engage a “process of reinforcement, learning, adaptation or internalization, but also…of suture, through which subjects stitch themselves into a larger system, while experiencing a kind of agency,” I am interested in how Rastafari and Reggae Dancehall imaginaries offers local youth a “…sutur[ing] which allows the subject to embody [those] forms of subjectivity [that offer] access to the fruits of neoliberalism” (Teo Reference Teo2018:9). And while Rastafari is in itself a call to exit Babylon and to rebuff and repudiate its neoliberal “fruits,” I note the manner in which Rastafari-inspired musical industries have become anchored in and reliant on the very capitalist media markets they so steadfastly critique. Inspired by Dick Hebdige’s (Reference Hebdige1979) original research into subculture and Stuart Hall’s (Reference Hall, Slack and Grossberg2016) call to regard popular culture as a site of political contestation and his notion of diasporic re-articulations, I imagine myself as contributing to the body of work that has continued to fill in continental African gaps in Paul Gilroy’s (Reference Gilroy1993) Black Atlantic. Hall’s notion of articulation, like a kind of “suturing,” captures the nuanced means by which musical communities in Jamaica and Ghana strategically relink themselves to each other diasporically—westerners drawing on the trope of “Mama Africa” and Ghanaians drawing on Caribbean formulations of errant social posture and cosmopolitan savvy. According to Hall, these articulations, rather than being over-determined by race, are contingent on shifting socio-economic and political conditions and thus open to new articulations (Jarvenpaa Reference Jarvenpaa2015). Rather than suturing themselves to neoliberal capitalism, individuals re-articulate their diasporic identifications toward the symbols of Africa, Jamaica, Ghana, and those errant forms of modern blackness (Thomas Reference Thomas2005) channeled by Rastafari and Dancehall, however neoliberally embedded these symbols may remain.

The uptake and indigenization of Rastafari and Reggae Dancehall on the continent immediately invokes discourses about cultural dynamics between Africa and its diasporic other within the global matrix. Indeed, there is a tangible Africa anchored on the continent, but another hovering somewhere over the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Debates about roots, homeland, origin, source point, tradition, and claimed ownership as well as of diaspora, routes, circuits, innovation, and license abound as national communities draw on and lay claim to a set of collective aesthetics, some more immediately derived from the continent and others forged in Atlantic exile. Neoliberal structural adjustment, patron-clientelism, and state corruption follow histories of slavery and colonialism in both these spaces, priming subject populations for powerful affective identification with each other’s plights. Akan linguistic retentions in Jamaican Patois and Dread Talk for example, return to Ghana through Reggae Dancehall, further charging the diasporic intimacy among these groups. Cultural exchanges among these nodes recall such theoretical framings as the boomerang effect, the feedback loop, the Africanist aesthetic, the arc of mutual inspiration, stereo-modernism, and sonic-Afromodernity, among others; these are all lenses which attempt to elucidate historic and ongoing cultural transactions between the continent and its diaspora; between father and prodigal son, between Mama Africa and her world-weary progeny. Rather than reading Africa as premodern, locked in time, and Ghana as an impressionable tabula rasa for western aesthetics, or Jamaica as merely a repository of African retentions, its aesthetics thinly derivative of the continent, through the zongo, site of yet a third constituency, I prefer to read the processes above as rhizomatic, in continuous play, continuous reconfiguration: always in process; ever contested, ever becoming.

Rastafari & Reggae Dancehall

Rastafari is a socio-religious movement that emerged in 1930s rural Jamaica and coalesced in its fledgling 1950s and ’60s inner-city Kingstonian communities. Inspired by Garveyite pan-Africanist activism and the spectacular coronation of the deified Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, and internationally espoused by the music of Bob Marley, Tosh, Culture, Burning Spear, and other early Roots Reggae outfits, Rastafari is a black liberation theological rethinking of Christian revivalism, backed by strident anti-colonial politics and naturalist living—including vegan or Ital dietary prescriptions, marijuana consumption as sacrament, and the growing of dreadlocks. While for diasporans, Rastafari appears as a back-to-Africa movement, for those on the continent it is an incitement to rethink sovereignty and independence at the community level in postcolonial Africa. Founded on the politically mobilized tenets of reparations and (preferably physical) repatriation to the African continent, this livelihood or “levity” is practiced by Rastafarian sects or mansions such as the Nyabinghi, Twelve Tribes, and Boboshanti, among other subgroups. Given its inclinations toward repatriation, the uptake of Rastafari on the continent has become an object generative of anthropological study; researchers are inspired by the manner in which Rastafarian politics and prescriptions (Moyer Reference Moyer2005) have come to influence the livelihoods of mixed repatriate and convert communities from Ghana and Ethiopia to Tanzania, South Africa, and other spaces. The argument that Eileen Moyer (Reference Moyer2005), Tuomas Jarvenpaa (Reference Jarvenpaa2015), Carmen White (Reference White2007), Darren Middleton (Reference Middleton2006), Neil Savishinsky (Reference Savishinsky1994) and others have made is that, utopic in its formulation and strident in its pan-Africanist politics, Rastafari has added notable complexity to the relationship of its adopters to their nation states, encouraging openly vocal post-colonial critique of local regimes, protest cultures, novel entrepreneurial modalities, and a rethinking by subjects of their relationship to indigenous precolonial cultures, the modern nation-state, and the contemporary global space.

Dancehall is a hybrid urban musical form born in the late ’70s and early ’80s in Jamaica. Emergent of a sound system culture which dates back to 1950s Kingston, Dancehall today stands as a belated break-away subgenre of the broader Reggae umbrella. Additionally, Dancehall emerged as something of a response to an emergent 1980s US Hip Hop culture and has enjoyed circulation as something of an exotic Caribbean variant. Whereas the predominantly Rastafari-influenced Roots Reggae movement, globally popularized by Marley and his ilk had by the late ’70s risen to international prominence as a black counter-cultural protest music genre, Dancehall’s decidedly more rough-and-tumble, ragamuffin, or rude sonic and performative aesthetics (often detached from Rastafari) had by the early ’80s endeared this decidedly minimalist form to Kingston’s most impoverished and violence-stricken communities—those for whom Rastafari’s call to exit Babylon offered little respite from Jamaica’s violent garrison politics. It is through the Dancehall idiom that the social figures of the rudeboy, rudegyal, don, shotta, and ghetto youth, along with the Rastafarian, have been lionized. While Dancehall can be imagined as a breakaway subgenre of Roots Reggae and its decidedly Rastafarian orientation, it is important to note that although it is dominated by “slackness” and criminal discourses, several Rastafarian revivalist movements have emerged within it. Intermittently, Rastafari consciousness has emerged to momentarily hold sway over Dancehall production and performance.

The local Ghanaian portmanteau Reggae-Dancehall reflects the nation’s by-now generational engagement with the range of Jamaican-derived performance idioms. And while more live-oriented and Rastafari-espousing performance communities abound in Ghana, since the 2010s the Dancehall end of this range, fervently championed by zongo and other under-employed youth, has come to dominate urban cultural production and consumption in Ghana. The moment of Dancehall’s ascendancy, even insurgency, its outstripping of previously popular forms in Hiplife, Highlife, Gospel, and Afropop, was especially marked during my fieldwork in and around Accra. It is through their zealous if belated uptake of Dancehall culture that zongo youth and their affiliates have announced their arrival within the Ghanaian socio-cultural and political space. This is nowhere better noted than in the renaming of the Nima as Dancehall City by a coming-of-age generation of zongo youth. Norman Stolzoff (Reference Stolzoff2000) notes that is because of the lack of access of Kingston’s impoverished communities to the coastal tourist hotels and nightclubs as event sites in the early post-WWII decades that these groups informally commandeered public street space, temporarily transforming it with speaker boxes, reams of electrical cables, and stereo equipment, ringed by the pushcarts of street vendors, into Dancehall space. Indeed, the very term “Dancehall” as representative of this popular musical genre and broader culture, emerges from these transformations. I argue that, similar to the ways in which Jamaican lay-folk re-inscribed space through Dancehall production (Stolzoff Reference Stolzoff2000), Ghanaian youth have, through Reggae Dancehall and Rastafarian frames, begun to rethink the zongo space. In turn, I contend that the zongo, as the most closely related local iteration of ghetto, though distinct in its own cultural nuances, shapes the quality of Reggae Dancehall production in Ghana.

Zongo as Transformative Space

Anthropological literature on the zongo space is relatively thin. While there are similar social formations in southern Togo and Nigeria, the vast majority of research on the phenomenon focuses on zongo formation in southern Ghana, particularly in the cities of Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Accra. Enid Schildkrout (Reference Schildkrout1978) tracks the historical emergence of the zongo as a product of colonization—a purposeful engineering of populations by British administrators bent on engineering demographics and mobilizing ethnic differences among subject groups to colonial advantage. While early zongo studies such as Ansu Kumar Datta’s The Zongo Complex in Urban Ghana (Reference Datta1970) focus on the separateness, particularity, and distinctiveness of zongo demographics and occupational patterns (Williamson Reference Williamson2017), later studies began to render the zongo as a dynamic, responsive, flexible, and shifting space. Kelly Joanne Tucker’s A History of Accra’s Zongos (Reference Tucker2002) explores the heterogeneity and ongoing social change that takes place within this space. Benedict Pontzen’s Islam in a Zongo (Reference Pontzen2021) argues that Islamic practice must be read not as monolithic, but rather as heterogenous, multi-varied, and always in a state of inner contestation among its varied Sufi and Sunna groups. Emily Williamson’s Understanding the Zongo (Reference Williamson2017) follows in this tradition, foregrounding the flexibility, porousness, and interactivity of zongo boundaries in Cape Coast, Ghana. Giluila Cansentini, in her article “Migration, Networks and Narratives in Ghana,” argues that:

More relevant to my own work, Joseph Sarfoh’s article “The West African Zongo and the American Ghetto” (Reference Sarfoh1986) makes important connections between these similarly produced spaces, effectively rendering the zongo as a global rather than strictly local phenomenon. Sarfoh’s work also explores the ways in which Islam and Christianity structure life similarly and differently within these zones. Deborah Pellow (Reference Pellow2008) renders the Accra zongo of Sabon as a product of urbanizing forces, the drawing together of communities and networks of regional African Muslims to sell their labor as porters and hired fighters in Ghana’s capital—the indigenous Ga of Accra renting and leasing land to Muslim families, and British administrators parceling land to regional migrants. Pellow distills what she terms “zongoness” as an affective identification on the part of subjects and groups within the zongo, a performance of belonging to claimed space. This sense of zongo identity is for Pellow informed by the intertwining genealogies and corporate ties of kinship; the bonding created by Hausa ethnicity; and the affiliative and communal identity of Islam. Ultimately, zongoness, according to Pellow, is comprised of both exclusion, as in a strangeness or alienation on the basis of migrant status, and inclusion, on the basis of shared alienation mitigated by the uniting forces of Hausa language and Islamic identity. According to anthropologist Ann Cassiman (Reference Cassiman2019), zongoness amounts to the “specialist knowledge and skills to survive” with which zongo denizens navigate these “densely populated and ethnically heterogenous neighborhoods.” These skills, which include petty trading and developing online relationships with Euro-American clients (Cassiman Reference Cassiman2019), also find their analogues in the hustling ethos championed in Rastafari and rude discourses originating in Jamaica and faithfully broadcast through Dancehall music.

Pellow’s notion of zongoness, similarly observed by Cassiman, has its analogues in barrio, ghetto, favela, and hood identification in the West, particularly as this quality of subaltern solidarity is expressed through grassroots popular cultural idioms such as Hip Hop, Baile Funk, Reggaeton, and Dancehall, among others. And while Pellow theorizes zongoness within the predominantly Islamic contexts in which the zongos have emerged in Ghana, my observation is that a newly emergent notion of zongoness has by now been drawn into and influenced by those discursive worlds which straddle the entertainment industries (replete with market-driven hyperbolic performance) and the actual everyday lives of those living within and in proximity to zongo life in Accra. Reggae Dancehall artists in Ghana, particularly those without the social capital of international linkages to global hubs such as London, New York, Berlin, or Atlanta increasingly hail the zongo in their music, laying claim to this local ghetto formulation as an original site of authentic subaltern identification and musical production, a space from which to spin rags-to-riches speculations and coming-of-age narratives.

The fact that zongo constituencies appear somewhat resigned to their position as second-class to the dominant Christian ethos of the Ghanaian society faithfully reproduces the broader global hierarchies of geopolitical power vis à vis the West and the Rest. Mired in similar political economies of patron-clientelism as those of their Christian counterparts, zongo communities remain entangled in the familiar sensationalist discourses of nepotism, embezzlement, misappropriated government support, bribery, and the like—the pervasive discourses of big man politics and “chopping” endemic to West Africa. In addition, continental fundamentalist Islamist groups such as the northern Nigerian Boko Haram or the Somali Al Shabaab are entirely eschewed by Ghanaian society as running counter to the spirit of diversity and tolerance so conscientiously modeled by the “father of the nation” Kwame Nkrumah at independence. What Islam does contribute to emergent zongoness is, however, a kind of subaltern solidarity among its members and their close affiliates, the kind that binds together the ethnically diverse populations who seek refuge in Ghana’s southern globalizing cities. This zongoness is being performed by a new generation of largely male youth, and a new generation of youth perform this sense of zongoness through Reggae, Dancehall, Rastafari, and rude performativities drawn from the distant and yet related Caribbean ghetto, a similarly produced Third World space. Through these Reggae Dancehall imaginaries, zongo youth and other similarly constrained artists and purveyors across Accra make new places out of their own locations, reimagining these as sites from which to launch their regional and international aspirations.

The Nima Zongo

While much of the major infrastructure of Accra was established during the British colonial period of the late 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century, itinerant Muslim traders from the Sahelian hinterland either purchased or leased cattle-grazing land from the Ga chiefs of the indigenous Accra ethnic group. Acquired by patriarchs of northern Ghanaian Muslim families as well as by Muslim traders from beyond Ghana’s borders, “zongo” areas—or itinerant Muslim trading posts—sprung up on these lands (Pellow Reference Pellow2008). Through generational in-migration, these largely Muslim Hausa-speaking groups bonded together around the mosques they built. With the rapid urbanization of Accra since independence, however, migrants of all Ghanaian regions and other West African nations, Muslims and otherwise, have come to shelter in Nima, given the extremely low rent offered by its sometimes exploitive landlords, or to squat in between and among existing structures. While this kind of stranger-welcoming hastened the importation of labor to the city throughout the twentieth century, it also produced detrimental health conditions in spaces with little infrastructure capable of delivering running water and adequate plumbing and sewage. Among these areas, Nima has emerged as one of the iconic shantytown spaces that have become standard images of the African failed state—the trope of African malaise launched by the western media of the late twentieth century. It must be noted, however, that these images are today being challenged by sprouting Jozian and Lagosian skylines, as well as images of the Afrofuturist and now iconic, if only cinematic, Wakanda—the hidden, utopic, and aspirational African super-city—a decidedly fictive space launched by Disney’s (2017) globally-circulating Marvel epic (Coogler Reference Coogler2018). However fictitious, Wakanda has become an emergent symbol, an inversion of Joseph Conrad’s African Heart of Darkness (Reference Conrad1899), against which any contemporary pop culture renderings of the continent must now contend. Indeed, online media sources proudly announce the launching of a trade expo and the construction of a “Wakanda City of Return” in proximity to the nation’s slave castles by a consortium of local government and businesses entities.

Nima itself, however, with its winding, forty foot-wide often overflowing concrete sewage drain snaking through it—a condition over which residents have protested and clashed with police forces—stands in stark contradistinction to both the fictional Wakanda and the national monuments and edifices of lower Accra. Nima exists in contrast to the heritage-tourism sites of Ghana’s slave castles, the proudly African textile print-patterned buildings of the emerging Airport City skyline, and the growing suburban developments that have sprung up along Ghana’s George W. Bush Highway. Indeed, Nima’s stubborn persistence as slum, understood here as a sustained by-product of structural adjustment, faithfully reflects Ghana’s ongoing and uneven encounter with globalization. And while zongo areas and their rough-and-tumble populations are looked at askance by Accra’s economically far-removed middle-classes they have nonetheless come to be known as spaces of intense community bonding in the face of economic strife. This bonding is underpinned by a distinctly West African expression of Islamic camaraderie, a kind of ethnic and yet cosmopolitan sense of care for strangers—a willingness to harbor, shelter, and feed not only fellow Muslims, but strangers alike—dutifully fulfilling the semantic meaning of the term “zongo,” the Hausa-English translation of which is “stranger-quarters,” or a way-station for itinerant traders (Quayson Reference Quayson2014). And while such stranger-welcoming has indeed benefitted transient populations, it has unfortunately, however, hastened population compression in the mid-city space of Accra, severely taxing infrastructural as well as environmental resources.

Perhaps such welcoming was exaggerated to accommodate a westerner such as myself; someone who might be perceived as offering international linkages to the more immobile locals. Ghanaian education, media, and tourist institutions strongly inculcate community and individual openness toward North Americans and Europeans, with especial sensitivity toward members of the black diaspora. Ghana actively markets itself as a heritage tourist destination, a politically stable site for investors and “gateway to Africa.” Such openness is a national tradition, an expression of the strategic partnering born of Nkrumah’s deeply pan-Africanist vision and reaffirmed under J.J. Rawlings’ neoliberal re-opening of Ghana. This tradition of welcoming has been faithfully upheld by Ghanaian administrations ever since, culminating in current President Nana Akufo Addo’s 2019 “Year of Return”—a heritage tourist campaign explicitly marketed to attract the foreign investment of the Afro-diaspora. This national stranger-welcoming is reproduced and intensified in the zongo space, though heavily accented here by an Islamic identity already keenly orientated toward old-world accretions of communal life around mosques. Such a predisposition toward community in turn produces orbiting multi-family compounds, the property and rents of which are handled through extended family networks. In a national space in which the political and business elites are dominated by Protestant Evangelical culture and revivalist Pentecostal churches, Islamic identity, while accepted as longstanding and respectable, takes on a subaltern inflection and is imagined as largely inseparable from an othered zongo space. The zongo space, largely impoverished and detached from the backing of western power, is thus relegated to a kind of secondary status within Ghanaian socio-political space.

Zongo Youth

Compelled to further interrogate the zongo space as an especially fervent site of Dancehall production and performance by Rastafarian elder Daddy Bosco, I was encouraged to visit an inaugural launching of Ghana’s first Hausa Music Awards. Pioneered by former Hip Hop/Hiplife artist-turned entrepreneur Faroukh Khailann, the Hausa Music Awards was an effort to create exposure for the brewing talent within zongo communities and to instill a sense of pride in these communities. In a later interview, Khailann took pains to explain to me the problematic association of zongo and, by extension, Islamic identity with poverty and indolence in the predominantly Christian Ghanaian mainstream. According to Khailann, not all zongos were impoverished, and the stigma associated with these Islamic enclaves was produced in large part by their othered status as migrant, extra-national Muslims in Ghana’s predominantly Christian, western-oriented, southern coastal cities. Indeed, as one of my other Muslim interlocutors, Blakk Rasta, pointed out, as one traveled north in Ghana into its Sahelian regions, the shift in religious demographics was such that the notion of the poor, huddling, and old-world Islamic enclave fell away. Zongos are by definition produced by dominant Christian space. This led me to recall my first journey through Nima with an unknown taxi driver who, presumably noting my visitor status, provocatively decried Nima as “Al Qaeda people” as he offered his own unsolicited tour commentary. In my estimation, this statement was designed to jar my western sensibilities and to further exoticize the neighborhood through which we had detoured in order to escape Accra’s main-line traffic. And while I initially resisted this likely Christian taxi driver’s castigation of this space, I did note the radio-aired discourse in around 2016, which decried the clear human-rights violations of nearby Nigeria’s Kano state fundamentalist Islamicist group, the Boko Haram.

Khailann recalled his own experience as one of the first urban artists to actively promote and draw attention to his zongo identity in performance, albeit in the era just prior to the local Dancehall explosion. Enjoying support for this novel hailing, even as he shifted from underground performer to event producer, Khailann decided that his next contribution would be in the promulgation of an Award organization based on the Hausa language. The speaking of Hausa represents a unifying practice among this group of nationally diverse Islamic migrants and an outwardly performative sign of zongo identity in Accra. Ironically staged in East Legon, one of Ghana’s most upscale neighborhoods, this inaugural event opened with speeches by notable local zongo elders and featured short performances by upstart Hausa artists, many of them Dancehall performers. Upon arriving and being recognized by the small crowd as a westerner with some performance cachet, I was encouraged into an impromptu a cappella spoken word performance alongside the locals. Capturing the attention of the intimate crowd, I was drawn into the extended entourage of the notable Nima zongo Dancehall hero, Rudebwoy Ranking. For months thereafter, I was invited to radio station tours, bar hang-outs, live shows, and studio sessions as Rudebwoy Ranking, his manager, and entourage plotted their way across the expanding Ghanaian Dancehall touring circuits.

Mustapha Abdul Rahman—stage-name Rudebwoy Ranking—represents a second generation of Muslim, migrant, and hustling or “kubolor” youth, as they are referred to in Ga, the language of the indigenous Accra group. Emerging from among Nima’s current generation of “gameboys,” “browsers,” or youthful internet fraud artists, Rahman has through a growing regional touring and performing career been able to largely sidestep the pitfalls of Nima’s near total informal economy—particularly the “internet browsing” that has, since the inception of internet cafés, become the most readily available form of subsistence available to zongo and other classes of Ghanaian youth. “We come to take back what they took from us,” one Ghanaian Dancehall pioneer named Kojo Kombolo explained to me when discussing “chatting clients”—soliciting, sweet-talking, and swindling unsuspecting or otherwise enamored online Westerners for Western Union and Moneygram remittances of one sort or another. Significantly, as one of my interlocutors noted, the drop in violent crime in and around Nima in the past decade could be inversely related to the rise of internet chatting as a newly emergent income source for underemployed youth—the tiny class of Toyota Corolla-driving game boys; profiled and pulled over by police as they often are, a testament to this new source of income.

That Muslim zongo youth engage with Dancehall, or any music-making for that matter, is notable, given Sunni and Tijaniyyah proscriptions against the temptations associated with the cavorting of men and women through dance. My own taxi driver research assistant and guide Muhammed railed incessantly about the incommensurability between Dancehall and Islam—this while ironically being himself an avid purveyor and even amateur historian of the local Dancehall scene. Indeed, the tensions between Islam and the Rastafari spirituality that underpinned much Reggae Dancehall were replete. Rahman, Ghanaian northerner and Dancehall favorite Iwan, and a number of my other artist-interlocutors strove to clarify their own syncretic and hybrid positions as Muslims actively making music and engaging, however loosely, a competing spiritual system. Veteran Reggae radio host, producer, and practicing Muslim Prime Eye partially resolved this contradiction, pointing out that the first persecuted and banished followers of the Prophet, fleeing Mecca in the seventh century, found refuge in the ancient Abyssinian royal court. There, the African Christian king noted very little difference between the beliefs of the refugees and his own and offered the early Muslims indefinite shelter from their persecutors. For Prime Eye, the strict prescripts of Islam notwithstanding, there were clear linkages between Islam and ancient Abyssinia, between Muslims and Rastafari. Certainly, the dreadlocked, Sufi, Baye-Fall communities of Senegal would concur, with their beach-oriented lifestyles driven by music-making and artisanship intimately related to Caribbean Rastafarian culture. Male youth of the zongos, eager to project a public voice that a local conservative Islam fails to channel, engage Reggae Dancehall culture and the Rastafari politics that energizes it.

Dancehall King

During my fieldwork in Ghana, the singularly successful Dancehall artist Shatta Wale remained coyly unavailable for interview, my most ardent go-betweens being incapable of rousing his interest in my clearly unprofitable academic research. Nevertheless, the controversy which he both generated and seemingly encouraged dominated social news media feeds, talk radio debate, and everyday conversation within musical communities. The closest I could get to Shatta was a packed radio station lobby full of press people and mobs of street youth amassing outside the PLUZZ FM radio studios. The only original live footage that I could capture of the self-styled “peoples’ champion” was of a figure throwing wads of Ghanaian currency to street youth mobbing his pristine white Land Rover in the radio station lot. As his sustained dominance at the top of local and regional charts to this day would suggest, Shatta Wale remains the controversial Dancehall King that his omnipresent 2013 hit of the same name signified. He has been most recently sought out for his vocal collaboration and video appearance alongside Queen Bey for the single “Already,” which appears on the Disney-financed visual album Black Is King (2020); this collaboration is a testament to Shatta Wale’s regional-cum-international ascendancy. Indeed, Shatta Wale has successfully struck the ultimate neoliberal posture—that of a market-savvy individual able to appropriate, commodify, brand, and successfully market subaltern identity—a defiant rude boy-infused zongo persona with grass-roots appeal, a ghetto youth able, through self-assertion and defiance of local social mores of respectability, to lift himself “up from the mud.”

My ethnographic approach was thus to observe from afar, and to explore with other interlocutors, debates about what Shatta Wale’s successful modeling of a rudeboy Dancehall artist implied regarding the shifting moral ideas about what it meant to be Ghanaian. Charles Nii Mensah’s prefixal title of “shatta” is drawn directly from the globally circulating and long-bootlegged (Reference Silvera2007) Cess Silvera Jamaican cult-classic film Shottas. The Jamaican Patois term “shotta,” or in standard English, “shooter” (“active shooter” in US emergency police code) is the most extreme of the criminal references that include rudeboy, badman, and don. The shotta is the final executioner, the trigger man who is unafraid of police or gang retaliation in Jamaican criminal life-worlds—the dreaded figure whose comfort with killing terrorizes communities. According to Obika Gray (Reference Gray2006), the social figure of the Jamaican rudeboy, as poignantly captured by musician and actor Jimmy Cliff in Perry Henzell’s (Reference Henzell2015) The Harder They Come, bears elements of both criminality and romanticism—an adaptation of the rambling, rogue, and masculine figure of the cinematic US outlaw. While the term “don” similarly references the 1920s Chicago gangland world, this figure possesses very real armed power as political henchman and local area boss, one who delivers votes for his parliamentary patrons and provides for his community materially, but also disciplines them. The more recently emergent term “shotta,” however, directly references the most violent aspects of garrison warfare and narco-terrorism, which had by the early 1990s come to structure Kingstonian life and become celebrated in Jamaican Dancehall output. Mensah and his cohorts’ adoption of the term “shotta” speaks to a very sharp, if somewhat cavalier, appropriation of the term (in my reading)—an element of Ghanaian borrowings of Jamaican referents that many locals noted as problematic yo-yoisms (Shipley Reference Shipley2013). Nonetheless, Mensah and his cohort’s performances of “badness-honour” (Gray Reference Gray2006) in live performances and recordings speak to the similar economic and socio-political formations that link aspects of Ghanaian zongo life, particularly in Nima, to elements of garrison life in West Kingston. Mensah’s ascent as a pioneer of the explicitly local Dancehall genre, as exemplified in the omnipresence of his 2013 grassroots hit single “Dancehall King” across Accra, further demonstrates a quality of rude performance pertinent to this study.

Mensah initially achieved such infamy in part by relocating from his home neighborhood of Korle Gonno to the notorious Nima slums. Initially claiming allegiance to a group of young Nima hustlers who dubbed themselves the Shatta Movement, Mensah, in the tradition of his new cohort, took on the prefixal title of Shatta. Through mixtape releases such as Casket Bwoy and Free Kartel, Mensah likened himself to the controversial Jamaican Dancehall artist Vybz Kartel. Agitating in song for Kartel’s release from a life sentence for a murder conviction, Mensah presented himself as a local avatar of this highly polarizing Jamaican figure. Sidelined for Single of the Year by the long-established Ghana Music Awards, during a period when his music was indeed omnipresent on the streets, Mensah took to social media to publicly lambast the Nigerian business executive who had founded the awards. Openly flouting social mores that uphold elders as worthy of utmost respect—as individuals who should not be looked in the eye while being addressed—Mensah instead made a public mockery of the awards executive in song, additionally lyrically attacking the female artist Kaakie, who was chosen as winner. Appealing to the angst of tens of thousands of youth with his outlandish charisma, Mensah effectively cornered the market in Ghana, rapidly reconstructing himself into a local “big man,” as typified by his most recent escapade, the drawing of a gun on another rapidly ascending local rival, Stonebwoy, while on stage at a Ghana Reggae award ceremony.

In the course of my research, the hyper-masculinist discourse of shottas, shooters, Shatta Movements, and artist-feuding dominated Dancehall production across Accra, yet what I observed at local events represented instead a kind of heightened sociality among male zongo youth that struck me as distinct from their counterparts in Caribbean and North American contexts. Crowds at both outdoor staged and indoor night club Dancehall events were heavily dominated by male youth, far more so than equivalent Dancehall spaces in the Caribbean, North America, and the UK, as Donna Hope (Reference Hope2001), Carolyn Cooper (Reference Cooper2004), and others report, and which I have personally experienced. Indeed, it was in great part through the amassing of the unruly bodies of tens of thousands of male zongo youth at local Dancehall events in Nima between 2013 and 2017 that these groups eventually captured the attention of the largely conservative media and propelled the then-fledgling and marginal Dancehall movement ahead of Hiplife, Highlife, Afropop, Gospel, other local performance styles into becoming the most energetic cultural movement of the moment. Indeed, the manner in which zongo okada boys amassed and choked Accra’s thoroughfares during funeral processions and increasingly during live Dancehall shows was quite the public spectacle; one begging a reading as a fleeting expression of subaltern power.

Ghanaian communities exhibit nuanced expressions of male sociality and solidarity in their own traditional and everyday customs. These are practices that may include, for example, the public holding of hands, the linking of fingers and walking arm in arm as extended greetings among men (Fiaveh Reference Fiaveh2014). University of Cape Coast sociologist Karine Geoffrion (Reference Geoffrion2013) probes moments of local gender non-conformity that she calls “festive transvestism”—playful cross-dressing during celebratory occasions called “change over days”—among predominantly male students on the campuses of Ghana’s southern universities. These indigenous forms of Ghanaian male sociality fly in the face of the hyper-masculinist posturing and gender-policing germane to Jamaican Dancehall output. The contradiction between the received discourse from Jamaican musical output and everyday local Ghanaian habit was made clear to me when I was invited to open for a local zongo Dancehall artist at an album launch in Accra. At this event, wherein a number of extremely novice zongo youth performers opened for larger local acts, I witnessed one artist eagerly voicing the standard fare of “boom bye-bye”-type exhortations germane to Jamaican Dancehall, demonstrating what he believed was a mastery of authentic Jamaican Patois phrases. Ironically, while that artist performed, two of his most energetic male supporters engaged each other at the empty stage-front in the kind of dance that might raise eyebrows in heteronormative western Dancehall spaces—engaging each other playfully as their favored artist decried the very behavior they seemingly engaged in. None of this trio seemed at all aware of this irony.

Sociologist Nadia Ellis (Reference Ellis2011) cites the early 2000s practice of line-dancing in “tight pants” among young male Jamaican social dance adepts as ironically contravening the staunchly anti-gay lyrical discourse that pervades Dancehall culture. Ellis also cites mug shots of the now-extradited longtime Tivoli don Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in wig and make up disguise at his capture as similarly upending local hyper-masculine posture. Whatever is to be made of the variable decades-old clashes between select Jamaican Dancehall artists (Shabba Ranks, Buju Banton, Beenie Man, Sizzla, Capleton, and Queen Ifrica, among others) and international gay rights organizations who have in the past mobilized against these artists’ international tours (at times stymieing artists’ access to North American and European tour visas) these controversies have come home to roost. This is no better exemplified than in the recent alleged blackmail and preemptive self-outing of Rasta-inspired Jamaican woman-artist Lila Ike and the social media castigation of her top-charting Reggae Revival collective by factions within the Jamaican Dancehall community, who up until very recently embraced the young artist’s anthem “Where I’m Coming From” as proof positive of a reinvigorated Reggae resurgence on the island (Villanova Reference Villanova2019). Whereas Rasta purists have resisted international and local black LGBTQ movements as perceived double-agents of a necolonial Babylon and its declining moral values, equally energetic feminist movements decry elements of Dancehall content as inciting homophobic violence and of ironically upholding white patriarchy.

Both Rastafarian and Dancehall-oriented versions of nationalism, despite the clear counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial openings they offer to global youth, nonetheless remain as yet ambivalent at best toward the more intersectional patterns of liberation that have come to suffuse, inform, and catalyze, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement and other frameworks of Black resistance in the metropolitan West. As the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values” bill filed for deliberation in the Ghanaian Parliament in 2021 would seem to suggest, debates internal to Dancehall communities remain rife across broader Ghanaian and Jamaican societies. How emerging diasporic Dancehall communities continue to navigate the contentious terrain between Rastafarian orthodoxies—Dancehall culture’s fiercely policed gender and sexual codes—and the tastes of increasingly liberal international audiences remains to be seen. I nonetheless wonder whether the notion of zongo as stranger quarters and way-station for the transient might be broadened enough to accommodate all fugitives of Babylon.

Dancehall Queen

I invoke the term Dancehall Queen multiply here, first of all to recall the highly instructive Jamaican film of the same name (Reference Letts1998) directed by Don Letts—a film that captures the travails of a single mother and pushcart trader who, in a series of fateful twists, avoids overtures by lecherous and murderous men in Kingston’s treacherous nightlife to capture the title of Dancehall Queen. I also employ the term Dancehall Queen(s) to invoke the female artists engaging Dancehall in Ghana. Given the gendered position of these women at the margins of the local Rastafarian community, emerging Dancehall production, and an Islamic theology that theoretically requires that women refrain from public engagement outside of the privacy of family space or religious womens’ networks, I argue that these female artists operate from a position of zongoness, that is, they approach both Dancehall performance and broader Ghanaian society from a marginal position. I finally also invoke Dancehall Queen to refer most specifically to the artist Ebony Reigns—a young woman whose self-given moniker oddly invokes the film title, and who has posthumously been crowned a queen of sorts among artists within the Ghanaian scene.

Born Priscilla Opoku-Kwarteng, Ebony was of the Bono ethnic group. She hailed from the Brong Ahafo region and had recentlyt moved to Accra; she was of Christian, not Muslim, background and did not claim zongo identity, but I argue that she, like so many other young women artists—AK Sonsgstress, Kaakie, Star Gyal Denora, and others—reflected through her performance of Dancehall identity a kind of counter-hegemonic posture; which can be read as a kind of zongoness. Although in my time in the physical field I found it difficult to approach female artists, their male managers being hovering and protective, I did note the especial dearth of particularly women zongo artists. Among the broader group of women Dancehall artists who did cultivate notable public profiles, there seemed a pronounced leaning toward a self-assertive, provocatively sexual, and sometimes confrontational posture, as both AK Songstress and the self-proclaimed “Boss Chick” Star Gyal Denora displayed. Indeed, as the singularly self-identifying zongo female artist active during my physical fieldwork, Star Gyal’s Soundcloud discography during this period featured tracks with titles such as “Bad Bwoy Dem,” “Bad A$$,” “Make Money,” and the notable “Come Face Me,” a one-and-a-half-minute freestyle name-dropping diss to all the women artists mentioned above.

And this is perhaps where my theoretical application of zongo to this gendered group falls away. While the generally defiant sexual postures of these women, vis à vis the prevailing conservative Christian and Islamic mores, were notable, there was as yet little public display of solidarity among female artists, an issue that current zongo-woman Reggae Dancehall artist Queen Ruki echoed in her interview with me. Rather, in my observation, there was an increasingly confrontational posturing of marginal women figures seemingly alienated from one another, each vying to strike the most authentic among female Dancehall archetypal postures (the diva, the seductress, the bad gyal) in a male-dominated space.

The more current, albeit less confrontational zongo-identifying female Reggae Dancehall artist Queen Ruki nonetheless describes the challenges she faced in order to purse music-making full time. Asked how she came to embrace Reggae Dancehall performance, Ruki responded:

When asked how she reconciles her Muslim identity with Rastafari practice, Ruki explained:

Queen Ruki’s decidedly more community-conscious outlook resonates with the Rastafari end of the Reggae Dancehall continuum, invested as she is in bringing awareness to many of the most pressing issues for zongo and related communities in Ghana. Queen Ruki’s concerns are not without merit, evinced in the untimely passing of her fellow artist Ebony Reigns. Twenty-year-old Ebony rose to prominence only at the very close of my fieldwork in Ghana in 2016, which she enjoyed only briefly before dying in a fatal car accident on the Mankranso motorway—one of Ghana’s notoriously underserviced and precarious thoroughfares. Despite the brevity of Ebony’s career, her legacy has nonetheless had a national impact. Ebony’s song content and fashion sense—especially her thickly knotted untamed dreadlocks and provocative tattoos, extremely rare for women in Ghana—was so provocative as to generate at least one locally based scholarly conference, the first on contemporary Reggae Dancehall discourse of which I am aware. The Ashesi University call for papers titles the conference as “‘Bad Gal’ and ‘Madly Talented’: What’s at Stake in a Non-conformist Public Lifestyle.” The write-up highlights among Ebony’s lyrical themes “Sugar Daddies” and “Sponsors”—encouraging presenters to interrogate how the artist’s lyrics and media interviews openly celebrated a culture of young women eagerly taking on roles as mistresses to much older and married Ghanaian men and affirming these as calculable neoliberal career moves. Indeed, Ebony’s unabashed celebration of such gendered relations in popular song have contributed to a negative local Christian discourse of a declining moral economy in Ghana. Ebony’s output captures what sociologists of South Africa Tamara Shefer and Anna Strebel (Reference Shefer and Strebel2012) characterize as transactional and intergenerational sex—elements of a “sugar daddy” discourse which, initially castigated by research communities invested in advocating for vulnerable young women against HIV, has too simplistically been laid at the feet of “predatory” men. According to Shefer and Strebel, the transactional, intergenerational sex between these groups remains more complicated than the idea of simple exploitation implies. “Sugar daddy” relationships nonetheless remain publicly frowned upon in conservatively evangelical Ghana, and yet they persist among even college-educated young Ghanaian women.

Gruesome in many ways, however, were the privately snapped cell phone pictures of the bodies of Ebony and her two compatriots in the aftermath of the car accident—uncensored and unfiltered images that arrived on my own cell phone from interlocutors through social media. And while Ebony’s far-too-early passing was—unlike the death of iconic Jamaican Dancehall figures in the West—not triggered directly by narco-terrorism, cycles of inter-community conflict, or gun-related garrison warfare, as has been the unfortunate reality in Jamaica, something about the very public and unnecessary nature of Ebony’s passing speaks to a looming and entrenched precarity, here infrastructural, under which Ghanaian youth exist. Indeed, during the time I spent working among Dancehall artists in Ghana, I, too, lost an important interlocutor in then-chart-topping artist Vybrant Fyah, who met a similar fate a little more than a year earlier on another Ghanaian motorway. The image of this extremely young public counter-culture figure of Ebony Reigns, much like Ghanaian urban music artists Castro and Vybrant Fyah before her, has by now been inducted into a pantheon of memorialized and muralized young icons, whose passing, much like their diasporic counterparts in the examples of Tupac, Notorious B.I.G, Left Eye, XXXtentacion, Nipsey Hustle, Pop Smoke, and others, can only be made sense of through critical deconstructions of the problematic commingling of black bodies, state violence, state neglect, and communal violence. If the zongo is the space through which the sign of the Ghanaian subaltern is inflected, most recently through both everyday practice and commercially performative schemes, then the figure of Ebony Reigns must also be assigned to zongo space. And while across Ghana the term zongo carries with it powerful references to Islamic identity and solidarity, affiliations which Ebony Reigns did not identify as part of her upbringing, the zongo as a local ghetto-referent, as way-station for itinerant migrants, for transient and yet aspirant subjects, begs a more broadly counter-hegemonic reading.