Environmental Sanitation Management Techniques and the Politics of Filth in the Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), c. 1878–1950

Between 1878 and 1950, the British administration in the Gold Coast repeatedly acknowledged the dangers posed by filth but struggled to provide effective sanitation. This article examines that failure through the technologies used to manage refuse and stagnant water, including dustbins, incinerators, hand carts, conservancy lorries, drains, and reclamation works. Officials mischaracterised the exacting sanitary order of pre-colonial Gold Coast societies to justify an intervention they could not provide. Sanitary services expanded from the 1880s to the 1930s but remained largely confined to the principal towns and failed to keep pace with urban growth. Bins were too few, and many were badly placed or difficult to use. When the apparatus failed, officials blamed African misuse rather than their own under-provision. Labour, transport, drainage, and reclamation works suffered from uncertain funding and poor maintenance. By contrast, incinerators made locally from mud and swish were often more practical than the costly metropolitan equipment officials hoped to install. African petitioners and newspapers, for their part, traced these problems to official neglect. Sanitary intervention also served to appropriate land and control urban space, keeping filth from European quarters and reclaiming ground for building plots. The article contends that the colonial administration’s approach to managing sanitation in the Gold Coast was a technopolitics in which claims to govern African environments depended on material systems the administration could not sustain.