Paper short abstract:

In this paper I look into how friends organize themselves into ‘bases’, particular spots where friends meet daily in Nima (a zongo in Accra). The paper scrutinizes how bases inspire youth to think of another future, beyond their own neighbourhood, turning the zongo into a cosmopolitan hub.

Paper long abstract:

In Nima, one of the zongos of Accra, a densely populated migrant neighbourhood, groups of young men and women meet on a particular spots in the public space, to chat, play and wait, while dreaming together of a better elsewhere. In these so-called 'bases', that often have prolific names such as 'Chicago' or 'U2canfly', friendship alliances are forged which help youth to think of another future, outside the neighbourhood.

In the fourties and fifties, when Nima started to grow from a temporary settlement for Muslim migrants into the crowded locality it is today, 'bases' used to be places where competitive or conflictual relations of migrants - initially strangers to one another- were soothed. Gradually however, bases transformed into springboards of an intensive international -sometimes virtual- mobility. The paper brings the biographies of several young men and women and their ventures into new worlds beyond their own zongo: in transnational trade to Japan and Korea, in international (fake) marriages or transatlantic travels, and in the cyberworld. It is propounded that Nima youth are not only transnational in their (historical and kinship) biographies, but that they turned the zongo in a social, economic and cultural hub where new forms of city-ness are invented in very cosmopolitan, though sometimes imaginary or virtual, ways through what I call a 'Western-Union cosmopolitanism'.