Item

Abstract

We here explore the temporalities and temptations of working in—yet at times beyond—bus stations in Ghana by focusing on the practices and strategies of two kinds of mobile entrepreneurs: bus drivers and hawkers. Expanding on the emic categories of drivers’ “overlapping” and hawkers’ “waka-waka,” both of which equate shrewd entrepreneurship with effort, movement, tactic, and timing, we show how drivers and hawkers accommodate the vicissitudes of “slow/fast business” by alternating between working inside the station and moving beyond it. Their mobile engagements with the temporalities of bus stations, we suggest, allow us to grasp stations as part of a more complex infrastructure in which stations and road/sides become linked with each other through different actors’ practices and movements.