Zaby Sadhoe
Leiden University
Introduction
When we think of infrastructure, we often imagine bridges, highways, and grand visions of national progress. Yet, behind these structures lie quieter stories: of people whose lives unfold in their shadows and along their edges. In early 2025, I traveled to a small coastal community in Western Ghana to explore one such story. My research, part of Leiden University’s Sea-ing Africa project, focused on how large-scale infrastructure, such as the Ankobra Bridge, shapes the everyday experiences and future visions of local women.
My fascination for bridges stems from my childhood: they appear mysterious, visibly vulnerable to time and natural forces, yet remarkably strong in their ability to carry traffic and people. More than just physical structures, they are symbolic connectors across spaces, times, and lives.
I spent over two months living in the community, conducting ethnographic fieldwork through observing daily routines and engaging in conversations. The community lies near the bridge, where a handful of women sell food to travelers, and I began my research there. On the first day, they barely acknowledged my greetings. I returned daily, sitting quietly and observing, and by the third day, conversations began—marking the start of relationships built through shared time, stories, activities, and meals. My goal was to understand how women experience and respond to the bridge’s presence, and how this intertwines with ideas of time: progress, stagnation, and modernity.
1. The Bridge as a Symbol and a Site of Encounter
The Ankobra Bridge is more than concrete and steel; it is a symbol of Ghana’s development ambitions. It connects coastal communities to regional trade routes, signaling state presence and economic potential. Yet for the local women, it is also an unpredictable and ambivalent structure, simultaneously enabling and constraining their lives. My aim was to examine infrastructure from a gendered perspective.
Tsing et al. (2024), drawing on Le Guin (1989), argue that while dominant male discourses have historically centered on major events, women often emphasize the rhythms and continuity of daily life. Salih (2017) similarly points out that women act through their bodies in ways that sustain not only themselves but also their children, families, and the broader community. The matrilineal kinship system, in which lineage and inheritance are traced through the mother’s line, lends particular importance to how women’s agency emerges through time and lived experience of local infrastructure.
Women like Mercy sell fried fish and drinks to truck drivers and travelers at the bridge. The bridge is an important object in their lives: it is their material workplace, and a site where they meet potential customers, earning money that sustains their family and facilitates future dreams. Mercy is at the bridge every weekday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., carrying her lunch in a plastic container, despite living just 100 meters away in the village. Her informal trade depends on the flow and speed of passing traffic. The bridge is a space where time stretches and compresses according to the rhythm of vehicles and the promises of development. She treats her work with professionalism and pride, though it remains outside formal recognition or protection.
The scene of a woman seller reaching up to a truck driver with a bag of fried fish captures the intersection of large-scale infrastructure and the local economy, where macro visions of progress meet micro acts of survival. The bridge’s design may speak the language of modernity, but its lived meaning is produced through such everyday interactions.
2. Infrastructural Absence and the Politics of Time
While the Ankobra Bridge stands as a marker of state investment, essential infrastructures remain absent in the community, facing recurring floods, unreliable access to clean water, and limited sanitation. When tides rise and the Ankobra River overflows, homes and livelihoods are jeopardized. Yet, public spending continues to favor high-visibility projects like highways and bridges—investments that serve trade and mobility over local well-being.
This imbalance exposes what I call the politics of infrastructural time: the mismatch between state timelines of progress and the precarious temporalities of everyday life. For many women, development feels perpetually deferred—always arriving soon in state narratives, but never now. Promises of modernization circulate through political speeches, news headlines, and everyday social media, but the daily work of maintaining life in the community continues amid structural neglect.
Nevertheless, women adapt. They synchronize their routines with infrastructural rhythms: using traffic slowdowns to sell goods, waiting for floodwaters to recede before restarting their trade, or adjusting household chores to the erratic supply of electricity. Their temporal flexibility is a quiet form of resistance, a way of asserting agency within uncertain futures.
3. Gender, Everyday Lives, and Future Visions
Gender profoundly shapes how people experience these infrastructural dynamics. Women bear the brunt of infrastructural absence: caring for families when floods destroy property, managing limited water resources, and sustaining household economies. Yet, they also act as agents of adaptation and transformation. Through education, social media, and migration, these women are crafting new forms of belonging and envisioning alternative futures.
In conversations, many expressed aspirations to move to urban centers or abroad—not only for personal advancement but also to “bring something back” to their community. These ambitions reveal a double vision: hope for inclusion in the state’s narrative of progress, alongside a critique of its current exclusions. By prioritizing large-scale infrastructure projects over essential services, these narratives promise inclusive modernity and prosperity but fail to deliver locally. For the women, this gap shapes future imaginaries of modern life oriented toward migration—to craft their own politics of time. They embody an active engagement with what development means and who it should serve. Yet, paradoxically, the Ankobra Bridge also emerges as a site of economic possibility, reflecting both the constraints and potentials embedded in infrastructural time.
By foregrounding these women’s voices, my research contributes to a more inclusive understanding of infrastructure—one that recognizes bridges and roads not just as technical objects but as social and temporal landscapes. Women’s everyday negotiations expose how infrastructures shape, and are shaped by, uneven power relations in postcolonial contexts.
Conclusion: Rethinking Development
The story of the Ankobra Bridge and the local women offers a powerful reminder that development is never just about structures; it is about people. Large-scale projects often promise linear progress, yet on the ground, they generate complex and uneven effects. For women like Mercy, the bridge is both an opportunity and a challenge: a source of income and a reminder of unfulfilled promises.
If infrastructure is to foster equitable development, it must be planned and evaluated through the lived experiences of those most affected. Listening to women’s perspectives reveals the limitations of top-down visions of progress and points toward a more grounded, participatory approach—one that values not only connectivity and growth, but also care, resilience, and social justice.
In this sense, the politics of infrastructural time is not only about delays or dysfunction; it is about whose futures are prioritized, whose labor sustains progress, and whose voices are heard in shaping the path forward. The women remind us that even amid uncertainty, agency persists: in gestures of trade at the bridge, in aspirations for education and mobility, and in the collective hope for a more inclusive future.
Ultimately, their stories challenge us to rethink what infrastructural development looks like—and for whom it is built.
Acknowledgments
This blog post has been written in the context of discussions in the LDE PortCityFutures research community. It reflects the evolving thoughts of the authors and expresses the discussions between researchers on the socio-economic, spatial and cultural questions surrounding port city relationships. This blog was edited by the PortCityFutures editorial team: Yi Kwan Chan and Wenjin Feng.
References
Le Guin, U. K. (1989). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In Le Guin, U.K. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (pp. 165-170). Grove Press.
Salih, R. (2017). Bodies that Walk, Bodies that Talk, Bodies that Love: Palestinian Women Refugees, Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary. Antipode 49(3), 742-760.
Tsing, A. L., Deger J., Saxena A.K. & Zhou, F. (2024). Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature. Stanford University Press.