Bus Station Hustle

Bus stations are among the most prominent sites of social and economic activity in Africa. Integral to transport, trade, and exchange over distance, they provide livelihoods for large numbers of people. Through a detailed ethnography of one of Ghana’s busiest long-distance bus stations, Michael Stasik explores the dialectical relationship between the ways in which people make the station work and how the station shapes popular economic engagement and social life. Drawing on a dual understanding of ‘hustle’ as a distinct mode of economic activity and organisation, and as a marker of complex and sometimes bewildering situations, Stasik challenges dominant views of transport work in urban Africa, especially those wedded to generic notions of ‘informality’. Bus Station Hustle offers a nuanced anthropological perspective on the hands-on work in and the institutional workings of an infrastructural hub of mobility and exchange.

This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Michael Stasik is a lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel. He is an anthropologist working on the intersection of urban cultures, economies, and mobilities in West Africa and author of DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Langaa, 2012).