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Lubricating Logistics

Inside of the newest terminal of Tema Port near Accra, Ghana, cranes, lifts, and trucks move containers through the network with speed and precision. Just beyond the terminal’s gates sits Glory Oil Filling station, whose lot is filled with parked trucks. Their drivers aren’t here for gasoline; they’re here waiting for permission to enter the port, pick up or drop off a container, and carry on. Tema is known to be one of the most active and reliable ports in the region, with the capacity to process over 2,000 containers daily (Ref. 1). But these drivers have been waiting all day. Many will continue to wait through the evening and into the following days and weeks (Fig.1).

How is it possible that these two temporal realities-- one in which containers are moved through a space with an engineered quickness, and another in which the human bodies partially responsible for their movement are stagnated-- both exist within a few hundred meters of one another? In her book Extrastatecraft: the Power of Infrastructure Space, Keller Easterling describes the market as a major lubricating force behind the proliferation of contemporary infrastructure space (Ref. 2). At Tema, that same lubricant seeps into the port and informs the creation of quick logistics fashioned of the same slick material. On the dusty road behind, market logic means indeterminant periods of latency between jobs for the truck drivers. Shrunk in lubrication and stretched in the dirt, time is a resource to be conserved and expended in accordance with the market. It has material consequences that take shape in the port and along the street behind it.

The role of time and the market in organizing material conditions at Tema Port is part of a larger process in which time became meticulously standardized to aid in capitalist globalization. As European powers scrambled to establish colonial outposts of trade and extraction in the rest of the world, technologies such as railroads and steam ships had expanded the scale and shrunk the speed at which trade took place. They also required a degree of standardization to work effectively. 26 nations convened at the 1884 Meridian Conference to determine a prime meridian, the first step to establishing global time. They selected Greenwich, England as the site of the new line, furthering the British Empire’s attempted control of world order. The line originated in Greenwich and extended North and South to girdle the globe, and it also happened to pass through Accra.

By this period, following decades of earlier land invasion and seizure, most of the present nation of Ghana had been established as an official British colony, the Gold Coast, for 17 years. Colonial authorities in the Gold Coast were soon synching Accra’s clock to Greenwich by telegraph every day with precise results (Ref. 3). Time was also experienced in an intimate way by Gold Coast locals. For missionaries, educators, and capitalists alike, enforcement of rational time on local laborers was a means of expressing supremacy and ensuring the highest wealth extraction possible (Ref. 4). Laboring bodies were expected to work according to the clock, a tool of the colonial regime opposed to all other understandings of work and leisure, at the threat of violence (Ref. 5). The mechanical clock was another tool used by British imperialists to enforce power over laborers, and it displaced those bodies from the rhythms around which life had previously been constituted.

British colonists during this time had become well aware that time is money, and that with standardization comes speed. By the 1920s, an accumulation of products for export had exposed the inadequacy of the existing port’s infrastructure speed (Ref. 6). Rather than retrofitting the old ports, colonial leadership determined that it was necessary to build a new one, Tema, to be created in the efficiency-informed, updated topology that had blossomed under global capitalism. When Ghana became an independent nation, those same standardized spatial logics used at Tema Port were still needed to play nice with international trade, but this time to bring security to the nation and its people, representing a “totalizing vision of national life and prosperity” under President Kwame Nkrumah (Ref. 7). Despite the port’s initial success after its 1961 opening (Ref. 8), agricultural crises and political instability in the nation caused it to be “marked by stagnation and inefficiency” in the decades that followed (Ref. 9). By the 1990s, the port had fallen into disrepair (Ref. 10).

During this lull, ports around the world were shaped by containerization, which extremified standardization and expanded its reach well beyond the confines of the port (Fig. 2). Containers create identical encasement for irregularly shaped and sized goods to be shipped and allow for the engineering of entire logistical systems and technologies that utilize their uniformity to maximize efficiency. In 2002, the Japan International Cooperation Agency revitalized Tema Port building warehouses, cranes, and the complete container infrastructure (Ref. 11). In the summer of 2019, a third, larger terminal was opened at Tema Port, operated by Meridian Port Services, which is primarily made up of Maersk, one of the world’s leading shipping companies, and Bollore, a French logistics company which operates 21 other ports in Africa alone as part of its “Port Terminal Network” (Ref. 12). Under a highly automated and surveilled process that mirrors other international ports operated by Bollore and a number of other similar companies, bodies of truck drivers, along with containers, are inscribed in automated efficiency flows.

Outside of the securitized gates the port, the relentlessness of speed and reconfiguration of space in its service seems to lose its grip (Fig. 3). Meridian Road connects the port facilities to the surrounding community, logistics offices, and the rest of the road network. It is also used for parking, permitted and illegal, as drivers wait to enter the port. Glory Oil filling station sits at one end of this street, characterized by a nearly ceaseless traffic jam of trucks. I arrive at the filling station in the morning and am promptly invited to sit with Frank, a truck driver in his early twenties. He has arrived hours earlier, responding to a call from the control agent he works with that there would be a load for him to pick up. He has come from home in northern Accra, about an hour’s commute. His container could be ready at any point between now and the next few days, but the expectation for him to enter the port within a small appointment window and confirm the pickup quickly with his boss means that he needs to stay near the truck. Regardless of when the call arrives, Frank will not be compensated for his time spent waiting, and will be paid only for completing the job.

Frank and I have been sitting on a wooden bench under the shade of the convenience store’s awning. His yellow truck is to our right, parked in the station’s grass and facing the street. From this position we can see about a dozen other parked trucks and many of their drivers chatting in small groups around the perimeter of the lot. Frank is certain that the others are napping inside of their vehicles. Without a smartphone, Frank he tells me, these hours and days of waiting are just that: waiting. Over and over, he uses the word “nothing,” with a tone much more neutral than frustrated or disheartened, to describe what he does here.

Even with all the waiting, Frank says his work “isn’t bad” (Ref. 13). In his book On Waiting, Harold Schweizer describes time as the world’s key “organizing principle” of the 20th century onwards (Ref. 14). He asserts that for the individual, waiting is an unpleasurable experience with lost opportunity cost: “what really matters is the cost of one’s waiting experience, not just in money but in frustration, anger and other stresses” (Ref. 15). Attempting to reconcile Schweizer’s understanding of waiting with Frank’s produces new tensions. It’s not, of course, as if Frank is unconcerned with or oblivious to the inconvenience of waiting. He tells me that he prefers picking up loads at Terminal Three because, despite the system’s privacy-invading security measures, he knows that when he does finally enter, he will be in and out within 30 minutes.

On the other end of Meridian Road sits Community 5000, an informal neighborhood encompassing self-built homes and the skeleton of a multi-story concrete building on a dirt lot. I am visiting with Paul, a logistics employee whose small company is suffering from lack of traffic in Tema Port’s older terminals. Paul tells me that the inhabitants of Community 5000 all come from the same Muslim tribe many hours away in the North. The waiting experience of Community 500’s truckers spans weeks. Truckers arrive from the North anticipating a job, and until that job materializes, they stay. Whether here in Tema or on the road, drivers and their mates sleep on the thinly-padded beds in their trucks (Fig. 4). Masud, who’s been driving for nine years, mentions his back pain and the Truckers Union’s refusal to contribute to his medication costs as he shows me the inside of his truck.

Masud focuses our conversation on the ways in which he and his colleagues struggle as they wait. Here on the dirt lot, a hard rain can flood the place for days. The trucks sink into the mud and mosquitoes multiply (Fig. 5). Our talk of waiting is steeped with a sense of economic decline and hardship. Masud explains that the new terminal, with its expensive technology and high-profile contractors, promised work, but its blazing success hasn’t translated to drivers. While time continues to speed up inside the port, its slowness for the truckers carries with it time spent far away from family, uncomfortable living conditions with negative health effects, lack of pay, and economic stagnation. Here, yet another type of time has spurred an economy. Community 5000 women make their home tribe’s cuisine and sell to the truckers next door, offering a taste of home at an affordable price.

Like Frank, Masud is not making any money, and he’s far away from his family, waiting for a job that may never come (Fig. 6). Unlike Frank, Masud expresses to me the disagreeable conditions of his waiting period. The understanding of time as a value commodity under capitalism is something that must be learned (Ref. 16). Laborers receive the marketing messages of the new port’s success, the jobs it has created, and the prosperity it brings to the nation, but don’t feel it themselves. They are asked to buy into the same moralizing understandings of work and development by which the port operates-- the laws that speed it up-- but until they enter the port to be processed alongside containers, the same temporal logics do not apply to them. The experience of time here is a temporal paradox caused by capitalist excess, in which laborers are expected to uphold the belief in standardized, universal, ever-quickening time for profit. They simultaneously live in a temporal zone where complacency, with entire stretches of life lived in waiting, is necessary for survival. This is what it means to inhabit spacetime plurality, to be part of an inconsistent modulation between worship of the clock’s incessant beat and faith that one day the dream it promises will be realized.



References:
(Ref. 1 Web) Meridian Port Services. “OPERATIONAL LAUNCHING OF MPS TERMINAL 3: DOCKING OF THE FIRST COMMERCIAL VESSEL,” July 3, 2019.
(Ref. 2 Book) Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, (New York, Verso, 2016).
(Ref. 3 Journal) John Milne, “Civil Time” The Geographical Journal 13, no. 2 (1899).
(Ref. 4 Book) Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 8.
(Ref. 5 Book) Ogle, 93-94.
(Ref 6 Journal) E.C. Kirchherr, “Tema 1951-1962: The Evolution of a Planned City in West Africa,” Urban Studies 5, no. 2 (1968): 208.
(Ref. 7 Journal) Chalfin, “Recasting Maritime Governance,” 576.
(Ref. 8 Journal) Hilling, “Tema,” 120.
(Ref. 9 Journal) Chalfin, “Recasting Maritime Governance,” 578.
(Ref. 10 Journal) Chalfin, 578.
(Ref. 11 Journal) Chalfin, 583.
(Ref. 12 Web) “Bolloré Ports Overview,” September 3, 2019.
(Ref. 13 Interview) Frank. Waiting at Glory Oil, November 8, 2019.
(Ref. 14 Book) Harold Schweizer, On Waiting, (London, Routledge, 2008), 4
(Ref. 15 Book) Schweizer, 4.
(Ref. 16 Journal) E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 86.

Images:
Fig.1: Glory Oil Filling Station, Tema, 2019
Fig. 2: Tema Port, 2019
Fig. 3: Frank at Glory Oil, Tema, 2019
Fig. 4: The bed in Masud’s truck, Tema, 2019
Fig. 5: Community 5000 Drivers with their Trucks, Tema, 2019
Fig. 6: A man walks towards trucks parked along Meridian Road, Tema, 2019


Copyright
All images copyright Isabella Baranyk

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