11. ‘Anyway!’: Lorry Inscriptions In Ghana

Abstract

Cars and Highlife2 in Ghana are connected in several ways.Highlife music is played in cars and cars run through Highlife songs.Highlife is mobile music; its artists travel the country and take the city to rural audiences.John Collins 3 (1994) wrote an extensive study about Highlife concert parties and devoted a full chapter to his numerous journeys with the band he chose to study.Back in 1985, Nana Ampadu, one of Ghana's most popular performers of Highlife, launched a number (in Twi) called Driverfo that became an instant hit. 4 An ode to lorry (public transport) drivers, it recounted the attractions and frustrations of their work.Ampadu sang about passengers' behaviour, the role of the police and solidarity among drivers.He ended it with a long list of inscriptions found on lorries that express both the bravura of the 1 This article has been published in a collection of essays on motor vehicles and people in Africa, published by Brill, Leiden (2009).That published version, however, contains many errors which is the reason that I prefer to place this corrected version on my website.Among the many people who helped me with the collection, transcription and translation of Akan Highlife songs, I am particularly grateful to Kwasi Asante-Darko, Kwasi Anim and Gifty Anim.They and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.