Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on urban dwellers strategies to simultaneously avoid and put pressure within their own networks, intersecting family, generational, class and gender expectation during a sudden and rapid deadlock of Tamale’s urban economy.

Paper long abstract:

Facing a nationwide economic crisis, with its severe inflation and skyrocketed fuel’s prices as primary consequences, Tamale, capital of Ghana Northern Region, has been hit harder than southern Ghanaian cities due to its geographic position and economic structure. As major hub for Northern Ghana goods distribution and informal trading those outputs set an enormous amount of pressure on city dwellers and their incomes. That’s a specific scenario where social pressure among extended family members, wives and husbands, elders and youngsters, small boys and big men, is higher than usual due to frail economic situation. A young man can be pressured by his family to get a wife and ‘become respectable’ while he pressures a wealthy uncle to give him money to start his business or a big man he worked for to give him something to get by.

The anxiety to always have to look for somebody and to always be looked for makes the city a ‘minefield’ where everybody tries to hide and seek at the same time. Hiding money, spending it for vanishing goods like drugs or alcohol, ‘traveling’ without any notice, hiding and sitting in the forest for the day, hiding inside the compound are only few of the tactics used by people to face the social pressure during times of economic constrain. Drawing on ethnographic research I wish to explore how Tamale is lived by its inhabitant through the lens of pressure and its effects.